The Dead Zone

A View To A Kill: Actor William Petersen, left, shows an appropriate amount of concern in a scene from the CBS hit show, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. AP Photo.

While working the TV beat for the National Post, I once stood behind CSI lead William Petersen. It was in the margarita line at the 2000 CBS launch party in Pasadena, Calif.

Petersen needed a drink more than I did. CBS had just spent $7 million on the pilot for a remake of The Fugitive. The photographic image of Tim Daly running from the fuzz was everywhere at the CBS publicity fest. Happy cast members, meanwhile, moved about the garden party in a cocoon of front-running executives.

CSI, by comparison, seemed just another oddly named TV series. (What was it, crop spray?) Petersen was fending for himself that night, glum as a stag at a prom.

Ah, but when Nielsen called, CSI delivered 17 million Americans, first episode – five million more than showed up for the heavily promoted West Wing season-ender months earlier. Within 20 months the show was number 1. Then came CSI-Miami in 2002, and last fall, CSI-New York.

Today CSI is king of the TV world, a hit in 175 countries. Nowhere is the forensic crime franchise bigger than in Canada, where the 100th episode of the Vegas installment drew 4.1 million viewers to CTV late last fall.

Why so big so fast? Well, first off, dead was (and continues to be) in. Patricia Cornwell’s forensic sleuthing is credited with saving the mystery book genre in the 1990s. Montreal forensic anthropologist, Kathy Reichs launched her mystery career with Deja Dead in 1997. Da Vinci’s Inquest (CBC) began in ’98. The Sixth Sense created a sensation a year later. Soon the HBO funeral home drama, Six Feet Under, along with TV serializations of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dead Zone hit. Followed by Alice Sebold’s surprise bestseller, The Lovely Bones, which opens with, “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was 14 when I was murdered …”

Fast forward to 2005. TV’s hottest rookie show, Desperate Housewives, is narrated by a corpse, while New York fireman Denis Leary drinks every night with ghosts in the post-9/11 drama, Rescue Me. And Bravo recently launched Dead Famous – séances with coffin-dwelling celebrities. (Brace yourself, Ol’ Blue Eyes is back again!)

Yes, the world was clearly ready for a broad range of Ouija-board mysteries in 2000. Possible explanations for the phenomenon include advances in DNA research, which made forensics sexy. Also, baby boomers were suddenly contemplating not only their parents’ exits, but also their own mortality.

The success of CSI specifically is more than a simple case of right show, right time, however. For one thing, no American city photographs better after dark than Las Vegas. More important still, with its canny blend of conservative moralizing and tabloid dramatics, the series seemed to anticipate what would become the George W. Bush era.

Just as the famous New York Post headline, “Headless Body in Topless Bar” commands our attention, so CSI grabs viewers with macabre set-ups. Sample storylines – a dwarf comes up short and hangs himself at a Little People’s convention … a body is found drowned in the desert … a woman runs over a raccoon-suited man on the highway.

Inevitably, sex brings these victims to ruin. The Vegas CSI team, led by Gil Grissom (Petersen), Catherine Willows (Marg Helgenberger) and four well-scrubbed juniors, investigate. Their response to every mess is always a disapproving shrug – What a world!

In last fall’s opener, Grissom shows up at a nightclub after a shoot out. An investigator explains the killing happened during a rave – flashing lights, crashing drums “… the whole World War II experience.”

Grissom’s grey eyes turn to steel. “When exactly did war become a party?” he grumbles. In the spectacularly lurid 100th episode, Grissom and Willows turn up on a lonesome stretch of highway outside Vegas. A dead woman in a party dress decorates a crashed convertible. Willows notes her slashed throat.

“She was cut south of the border as well,” Grissom says.

“Women in convertibles are low-hanging fruit,” his partner comments.

The exchange is classic CSI – wiseass detective patter that fondly recalls the forlorn wisdom of Phillip Marlowe. (“She was the kind of blonde who could make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”)

But not even Raymond Chandler, who always needed a drink around women, was more uneasy about sex than the CSI gang. Let’s take it again – “She was cut south of the border.” Imagine considering genitalia to be the forbidden zone, a lawless Mexico governed by unmanageable heat and corrupt police officials?

In fact, the woman in question is a transvestite. And the show’s wig-out denouement takes place in a crowded tranny bar (the Cockpit Lounge!). Grissom and Nick (George Eads) wander through the neon-lit hellhole, buttocks clenched, until they find the head she-male, who intimates the investigators are really there to satisfy some secret desire.

Grissom’s response is unequivocal. “I’m really not interested in your ass,” he says.

Critics have suggested that the biggest problem with CSI is that not one character in the Vegas, Miami, or New York series seems remotely interested in anybody else’s ass. The fresh-faced CSI investigative crews, the complaint goes, are so many Ken and Barbie dolls.

Maybe so, but it is also possible that the reason for CSI’s worldwide success is that the show doesn’t focus on the back-stories of the characters. The shows are crime dramas, not human dramas. And delinquency, murder, ghost stories, not to mention lurid American morality tales, are universal – exportable everywhere, it seems.

The original Vegas series is the best of the CSI lot because star-executive producer Petersen understands that, despite all the helicopter tracking shots and hell-bound showgirls, he’s really in a splashy update of the classic ’50s era police procedural, Dragnet. Like Joe Friday, his professional code can be summed up in four words, “Just the facts, ma’am.”

By comparison, the Miami series suffers from hambone David Caruso’s showboating – the shameless way he slips into action hero poses, doffing his sunglasses to brush aside a pesky forelock when jumping from a car. Gary Sinise is far better in the promising New York series, which shows a flair for noir-soaked dialogue. (“GHB is dead as disco. Fry sticks are the new date rape drug of New York – three puffs and down goes Frazier.”)

Gil Grissom remains the best name in crime investigation, however. That William Petersen picked the name confirms how well he understood what would become this decade’s most popular drama.

Originally his character was Gil Scheinbaum. Petersen changed it to honour Texas flight instructor-astronaut-hero, Gus Grissom (who died in the 1967 Apollo fire). He also thought, given the nature of his character’s mission, it would be both appropriate and funny to make a pun on gruesome.

And that’s CSI: every week a wisecracking, morally upright crusader invades Gomorrah, intent on interrupting the devil’s work while helping folks reestablish traditional values.

Hmn, sound familiar?

Stephen Cole writes about television for CBC.ca.