Gawd, I find that show hilarious. It’s so bad, in so many different ways, that it’s very fun to watch. Plus it seems to be the only thing remotely entertaining in that time slot.
We’re working on a CSI drinking game. Only two rules so far:
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Drink whenever someone says, “But I’m a scientist” or “But you’re a scientist!” or “But we’re scientists!” I dissolve into uncontrollable sniggering whenever they say this. If you have to say it, it isn’t true, kids.
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Drink whenever one of the FORENSIC INVESTIGATORS who DO THIS AS THEIR JOBS ask a question that WE can answer because we watch Law & Order.
The Mad Scientist’s Daughter is a great convention–an ignorant character (often the daughter of the mad scientist in venerable pulp scifi) asks basic questions, allowing the knowledgable characters explain what’s going in in small words that the audience can understand. But you can’t have knowledgable characters pull double-duty as the MSDs! It’s just not plausible!
Gil Grissom is hilarious. He’s so delightfully self-righteous with his whole “I am rational, intelligent, and well-educated and I never show my emotions” thing. Every line he delivers is weighty, weighty, weighty.
I nearly died when he imbued a first-grader’s riddle with
the profundity of a zen koan:
“Say silk three times.”
“Silk, silk, silk.”
“What does a cow, drink, Nick?”
“Uh, milk.”
“No, Nick, a cow drinks water.”
You have to imagine this last line delivered without a trace of levity, deadly serious.
Precious.
Catherine also slays me. She so totally looks like she accidently wandered off a soap opera set into the middle of an action movie. Her body language, from head-to-toe, says, “I cannot believe my agent talked me into this gig. I actually have to get dirty!” It’s obvious what they’re trying to do with the character, and it totally flops on its face. We’re supposed to think, A classy broad like that, a forensic investigator? How surprising! Nooo, not surprising, unbelievable, because she doesn’t sell it.
I really love Gary Dourdan and Jorja Fox (who was the original reason we started watching the show, 'cause she was Zoe’s bodyguard on "The West Wing) but they contribute to the show’s major plausiblity problem: a bunch of attractive, fashionable folks running around delivering ignorant, contrived, unthoughtful dialog and saying, “We’re scientists!” all the time doesn’t lead to a good show about scientific inquiry. The other half of their lack of plausibility is that every damn murder has to be weird. Why don’t have enough straight-up bread-and-butter guy shoots guy, match the bullets to the murder weapon, yadda yadda things. The forensics behind a normal can be very interetsing, too. You need to have a solid base to make the show seem real, and then you can actually sell the strange cases.
The forensics stuff is fascinating, but I think it’s done better on Law & Order (where they have proper MSDs in the form of the detectives) or even better on some of the nonfiction shows on, e.g. TLC.
But, man, do I love the gutcam, where they show a weapon’s eye view as something rips through the body. Even better when it’s an ingested poison, slivering down the digestive tract, rushing through the blood stream . . . Woo hoo! Gimme more of that! It’s like the Visible Man, on acid!
