I watched the original “CSI” for the first season or two, and loved it – but then one day it occurred to me, yanno, crime scene techs don’t questions suspects. It turns out that was a dealbreaker for me on that show – I just can’t watch it. David Caruso looks like Howdy Doody, so you know I’ve never seen “CSI: Miami.” Last night, however, I was over at a friend’s and we ended up watching “CSI:NY,” which neither of us had seen before.
Yikes.
Is the show always this dreadful?
They were solving two cases – one a guy whose body was found in the tiger pit at the zoo. Blah blah, fine, whatever (though they never did explain what those big rolls of tape at the meatpacking plant were used for).
The other case was a debutante found dead on the carousel in “the park” (Central Park, I assume, I didn’t catch that particular detail). Turns out she’d died of … spider venom. Her ditched working class bf has poisonous spiders! Woo! No, wait – this was artificial spider venom. As used by … (let’s go to the spoiler box, in case anyone possibly gives a shit)
…cosmetics companies. Such as the one run by the mother of one of the other debutantes. This other woman came out the same year as the dead girl’s mother. Who, it turns out in the last 45 seconds of the show, had stolen the cosmetics lady’s bf during their mutual debut, and so she plotted for 20 years to destroy her life. By killing her daughter with fake spider venom.
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
This is absolutely the lamest fucking thing I have ever seen on a crime show – and I have decades – decades – of watching bad TV under my belt. I used to watch “Murder, She Wrote,” for crying out loud – the “Love Boat” of crime shows – and never saw anything this stupid.
I would love to hear a detailed analysis of how specifically CSI’s science is so bad. I keep meaning to start a thread on the subject, so if the OP thinks this is too much of a hijack of her thread, I can start a new one.
I still enjoy the original CSI, but have also been bugged by the fact that all the techs act like detectives, questioning suspects and finally, of course, solving the crime and even arresting the perp. Pretty silly. Evidently Las Vegas has only one policeman, Capt Brass, so no wonder they have to do all this.
I’m with you re Caruso, so never watched that, and after about two episodes of CSI:NY gave up on that. From what you wrote, have not missed much.
In each CSI series, someone was able to produce a photograph of someone by magnifying the reflection on the eyeball or eyeglasses on a photograph—one of them was a grainy surveillance video.
In another CSI, a lab technician was able to reproduce a voice recording from a piece of pottery that the person was making.
I don’t have a problem with the bad science. To me it’s just a TV show, and the idea is to be entertained.
Seconded; just check w/ The Straight Dope techs first and make sure they’ve got a LOT of disk space available.
Seriously, twickster, I happened to see that very same show. By way of full disclosure, I don’t watch any of the 3 CSI’s much any more for the basic reasons you gave, but IMHO, they are not usually as bad as this particular episode.
Yes, but this bothers me because it shows the writers aren’t even trying. They just go along, and when things get too difficult they invoke magic to resolve the plot. Law and Order does so as well, but usually in a much less blatant or unbelievable fashion.
Me either, usually. One thing thing that bugs me a little is the laziness of the writers when they find a trace amount of something and immediately know precisely where it’s from and start looking in that direction, ignoring all the other possibilities. (Like last night’s ammonium nitrate put them onto the landscaper. The case was related to organized crime and they immediately ruled out explosives or methamphetamine manufacture?)
This kind of stuff is easy enough to ignore, though. Sometimes the things that make CSI incredibly cheesy just make it even more fun, in a MST2K kinda way. (Like Miami, where Kane puts his sunglasses on as he enters a building where they’re expecting gunplay – because it’s important to look bad-ass. Or when they use their mag-lites to find powdered sugar on the upholstery of an SUV, outside, at noon, on a clear day in Miami.)
Last night’s episode was, I think, the worst episode of any flavour of CSI that I’ve ever seen. Why? Not the fake science or usual improbable deductions – the writers introduced a level of hackishness never before seen on CSI.
I’m talking about the fairy-tale theme, and the awkward and false-sounding dialogue used to conform to it. It would have been one thing if just the CSI team kept bringing up fairy-tales as a running joke between themselves, but everybody did it, consistently.
Having everyone and their dog pepper their dialogue with jarring Cinderella references for no good reason was just annoying. Half the time it didn’t even make sense. What middle-class urban kid is going to say “I guess I’m just not a pumpkin-coach kind of guy” in the context of an interview about his murdered girlfriend? What does that even mean? The victim’s adoptive sister is a “real wicked stepmother type”? You can’t do any better than that? A woman’s just confessed to murder and she sums up with “Not every fairy-tale has a happy ending”?
I am not a regular watcher of CSI, but I do like the original. Better actors and seems to be a little better writing. The slow motion “dusting for prints and testing blood spatters” is getting a little old, however.
Anyhoo, my 2 main gripes about CSI:
The aforementioned interrogation by the technicians, usually without any lawyer present any many times said interrogation brings about immediate confession. A good example of it was last night’s CSI: NY where the debutante mom was confronted with the “fake spider venom” scenario and admitted on the spot she did it. Hello??!!!
Second gripe: TURN ON THE FREAKING LIGHTS PEOPLE!!!
