CSI Miami. Whaddayathink? (spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

I watched the first episode with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation.

Anticipation because i really like the original CSI, and i thought that the cool forensic geek stuff and the interesting stories might carry over to the new series.

Trepidation because i’ve always thought David Caruso was a wanker and a pretty poor actor. Also, the blonde woman from the West Wing is annoying. And although i really liked Kim Delaney on NYPD Blue, i wasn’t that impressed with her performances on Philly.

Well, i must say that the first episode left me rather cold. It wasn’t so much that the scientific stuff was bad - although i don’t think it was as good as the original usually is - but more that the characters were vaguely annoying and the acting performances all seemed pretty wooden.

The woman who examines the dead bodies was extremely irritating with her habit of talking to the corpses as if they were still alive - it struck me as way too contrived in a hopeless attempt to be quirky and interesting.

The fact that Kim Delaney’s character lost her husband (in unknown circumstances - at least unknown to the audience) is going to be an excuse to introduce mindless pathos at various stages of the season, i’ll bet. And the ridiculous workplace/sexual tension between her character and Caruso’s character (especially in the airplane door fingerprint scene) was a bit too much to bear.

I have a few more gripes, but i’ll leave it at that and let others give their opinions.

2

I’m not a big fan of the CSI:Las Vegas show, but I agree that last nights Miami verson didn’t hold up to the promises.

Apparently in Miami there are no real police officers. The CSI folks interview witnesses and all that procedural stuff.

3

I thought it was awful.
Unlike other people, I like the storylines of CSI: Vegas, and the forensic stuff (possibly because I know nothing about forensics, so this seems really interesting) but I find the actual dialogue horrid and the acting so/so.

Miami had even worse dialogue, which I hadn’t thought possible, even worse acting (I can’t stand Kim Delaney, squinting randomly is not acting - Caruso was awful and I did expect more from him, the lesser characters simply not very good (btw, does this mean Ainsley isn’t coming back this year?)), and I could not have cared less about the plot. Not worth watching, but I’m sure it’ll pick up it’s own hardcore following soon.

4

Like mhendo here, I really enjoy the original CSI and so was looking forward to this one. And, like mhendo, I came away from it feeling a bit cold.

Several things bothered me. I don’t like the characters as much. The CSI:LV team all come across as extremely competent and focused and as scientists first and detectives second. In this one, both Caruso and Delaney came across as detectives and not forensics specialists.

And what is with the sexual tension between those two? Delaney’s character had to take several months off to recover from the death of her husband and still has his picture on her desk, but we’re already getting tension?

Also, why is the Miami PD Forensics Department doing the crash investigation anyway? Doesn’t the NTSB do that sort of thing? (Yeah, there is a thowaway line in the episode about the NTSB using local resources, but still…) After all, wouldn’t you want the investigation done by experts? Especially in the post 9/11 world where any mysterious plane crash is likely to come under suspicion as a terrorist act?

The plane crashed just after takeoff, which means it should have been fully fueled. There should have been a huge fire.

Then, two people survive the crash? Of a plane with one engine and a dead pilot? One dies at the scene, but the other not only survives but is also uninjured enough that they can check themselves out of the hospital?

Speaking of which, you have a single survivor of a flight that has crashed under mysterious circumstances, including evidence of a murder on board and no one thought to have someone watching him at the hospital?

Who are these two poachers who know enough about aircraft that they are able to find and retreive both “black boxes” before anyone can get to where they are, despite the fact that the plane crashes only a few minutes after takeoff and therefore should be very close by? (OTOH, apparently no one knew where the plane was until the poachers got to a phone and called 911.)

I could go on, but I’ll stop and just add that the scenes where we saw the plane’s tail looked like bad blue-screen shots and it looked like a lot of the scenes were filmed with a yellow filter for some reason.

Oh, to GaryM’s point, our local CBS news (Atlanta) made a few brief comments about the show and said that, unlike the CSI:LV characters, the characters from CSI:Miami are full police officers with corresponding authority. (The characters in the original CSI are civilian employees of the police department and not police officers themselves.)

I’ll also point out that the city of Miami and the city of Miami Beach are two different cities and I am curious as to which one these people have authority in.

I guess I’ll give it another week or two, but I’m not expecting too much out of it right now. Oh well, the real CSI starts back Thursday…

5

  1. they found all sorts of fingerprints and hand prints on the door and door frame. and it took role playing for them to notice that the woman’s prints were in a position which meant her back was to the open space??

  2. The fire extinguisher survives the impact, is found in the swamp with fingerprints intact??? (of course, since it didn’t appear to be bagged as evidence, they may have had some problems, eh?)

yea, acutely awful.

6

tanstaafl wrote:

I also thought that their ability to find the black boxes was pretty unlikely. Also, in one of the earlier scenes when the CSI crew were looking for bodies, there was quite a bit of money (literally) floating around. Sure the black box thieves would also have made off with the Benjamins?

And i was pretty amazed that anyone survived the crash.

Also, when they were listening to the cockpit voice recorder, they listened to a bit of the pilots pre-flight banter, and then the tech guy said that the next three or four minutes (IIRC) were pretty routine, and then all hell broke loose. But earlier in the show, the Miami radar people had informed CSI that the jet had never got above 4,000ft. Now, i’m no pilot, but i would have thought that a small, powerful jet like that would climb further than 4,000 feet in the first four minutes of flight. Did i hear wrong? Or am i hopelessly misinformed about the climb rate of jets?

7

My folks live in Broward County, which is just North of Dade County. I often hear the Miami law enforcement folks referred to as “Miami-Dade”. It could be that they have police powers over Dade Count as well as the city of Miami.

I don’t know how tht affects any other cities or towns in Dade County.

8

I pretty much agree with the previous posters- the story was okay, but the characters had no real personality. I didn’t HATE any of the characters or the actors, but they were all so underwritten, it’s hard to know what to make of any of them.
And none of the actors had the talent or force of personality to MAKE his/her underwritten character interesting or compelling.

Even if a mystery is decent (as the plot of this episode was), a program isn’t much fun to watch if you don’t care about (let alone like) any of the characters.

9

The opener was rather flat, mostly because the characters were pretty vague (in CSI:LV, the personalities are clearer). Also, they spent too much time showing the details; again, CSI:LV uses more personality – you have that wacked out hippie doing all the analysis, which is more entertaining than just watching someone run the tests.

10

For the love of God, lose the yellow filter. I hated that. I suppose it was supposed to give it that gritty, raw feeling, but it annoyed me.

I was unimpressed with this one. I might give next week another shot, but I am NOT impressed at all.
I’ll stick with Las Vegas.

11

I too was not very impressed. But I admit that it is hard to write a first episode for a series like this. The writers were attempting to do a little too much explanation of the characters. Every remark made by a character was trying to explain too much about their personalities. Just have some normal dialogue and let time develop the viewer’s knowledge of the different personalities.

Plus I want to know what police department in the country has that much gadgetry in a forensics lab. The zoom in on the dead body feature was a little much for me.

I think this will be a good series, but it will take a little time to let the plot take control and not character descriptions.

12

Now that i think about it, another reason i was looking forward to the first episode was that the “teaser” episode from last year, where CSI-LV came to Miami, was a good one. But maybe that was because most of the cast etc. was still the Las Vegas crowd rather than the new Miami group.

13

I’ll keep giving it a shot. I did wonder why they were listening to the black box recording…surely the FBI and NTSB would have whisked those puppies up to Washington?

14

I think it’s funny that everyone’s saying the characters don’t compare to the characters of the other CSI. After one episode, what do you expect? Delaney’s widow-back-from-mourning is no hokier of a device than the single-mom-who’s-an-ex-stripper set-up. It took ages for Grissom to be anything more than the wise, straight-shooting, weird-bug-loving guy that he was from Day 1 (and that goes with most of the supporting characters, who stayed thin as cardboard for many months after the show began and who still can’t be accused of being particularly complex).

I think the show’s biggest problem was that it wanted to start things off with a bang (ptp), which meant less diligence in the logistics, but there’s little reason to think that won’t change when they start doing the multiple-case threads. I always liked Caruso on NYPD Blue and any role in fact where he’s a character in control. I thought Khandi Alexander (NewsRadio, ER) was funny and am looking forward to getting to know her better. The sexual tension w/Delaney seemed unnecessary, but you got the feeling there might be some history there already, so time will tell.

Given that the show it’s spun-off from is fun but no great shakes, I found very little difference between the two if you eliminate the convenience of hindsight.