Any inaccuracies in the show?
The easier question might be if they have ever portrayed something accurately.
Try a Google search on something called the “CSI Effect”.
Seems to me that the lab rats inthe police department don’t question suspects, get involved in shoot-outs, nor have unlimited funding for all those neat toys.
I’ve already made this post, but I’ll repeat the essence of it.
William Peterson based his character, Grissom, on the real head of the Las VEgas crime lab. And the real person is a genuinely weird guy, some of whose quirks Peterson gave to Grissom (example: the real crime lab boss does keep a huge collection of insects at his home).
And this real boss told People magazine a few years ago (I’m paraphrasing), “The main thing that’s unrealistic is the time element. I mean, my staff really can do almost everything you see on “CSI,” but it would take us 6 to 8 months to run tests they complete in 5 or 10 minutes on the show.”
Bit of trivia. When I first moved to Las Vegas, I worked as a temp and the woman next to me told me she used to work full time for a local newspaper doing the crime report. She and one other guy used to call the police several times a day, get updates and stories and then write them up.
One day, the guy she was working with said, “gee - these stories would make a great tv show.”
She mumbled something like, “yeah…right” and went back to work.
The guy she was working with went to work at night and wrote a proposal and a few scripts.
He sent them off. Wonder of wonders…Hollywood called back.
And the show is called CSI.
The woman I was working with could still kick herself in the butt for not jumping on the idea with her co-worker.
So to answer your question, the show was at least created on the basis of facts gleaned from a lowly newspaper reporter who was mostly interested in the more intricate crimes that were solved here in Las Vegas.
How about I list the accuracies?
The city of Las Vegas is, indeed, located in the state of Nevada. In the desert. And there is a police department there.
And…we’re done!
Warning: I’m going to rant here.
While I don’t work in forensics, I do work in medical research and CSI drives me up a wall! :mad:
I watched an episode recently that involved two college students dying of asphixiation with carbon dioxide. The CSI investigator said something along the lines of “Carbon dioxide binds to hemoglobin in the blood.” Wrong! I just finished an intense physiology course. One thing that was drilled into our heads was that about 10% of CO2 binds to hemoglobin, the rest is made into carbonic acid by enzymes in the blood. :rolleyes:
I have seen to much TV fiction accepted as fact and dramas that include “science” draw my ire. Guess that’s why I don’t watch much on the boob tube.
I don’t see time compression as an “inaccuracy,” nor the role compression. You only have an hour to tell a story.
But once they started blowing up the reflection in someone’s eye from a surveillance video and making voices appear from a piece of pottery, I think we can safely say that they’ve strayed away from scientific credibility.
Last week, Grissom gave a bad etymology of the word werewolf. That did it; all credibility the show may have had is now gone.
There’s another thread on this subject in CS today: Is the show CSI technically accurate?