Welcome to Miami, which exists for television purposes inside a hangar-like studio in this industrial city south of Los Angeles.
It is here that, 20-some weeks a year during the TV season, the newly likable David Caruso, the ever-charming Emily Procter and the rest of the cast of the first-year series “CSI: Miami” pretend to use hair fibers, bullet casings and the like to nail bad guys.
Theirs is the only new series of the television season to crack the top 10 in ratings, at No. 9. It’s also providing proof that the oft-deried trend of ‘McTelevision’ — cloning your own hit before somebody else does — can be effective.
Even as “Miami,” set in that city’s gritty daytime world, strikes a chord with viewers, its predecessor “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” set in the more surreal, more nighttime milieu of Las Vegas, has jumped this year to the top spot in the Nielsen ratings, surpassing “Friends” and destroying the television article of faith that NBC was invincible on Thursday nights.
Viewers not only watch, but they believe. On a recent trip to New York, says Gary Dourdan, who plays “CSI’s” Las Vegas insider Warrick Brown, “the cops . . . were saying stuff like, ‘It’s really difficult. Everyone that gets his car broken into now wants the whole crime scene done to get his radio back.’ “
But the greatest mystery of the “CSIs,” which follow forensics detectives as they solve crimes based on often scant evidence, may be in why they have caught on in such a big way.
Part of it is surely in the elaborate artifice. “CSI: Miami’s” crime-lab set, for instance, is detailed and shiny, turning the gritty work of criminal forensics into something cool and high-tech. Indeed, one of the show’s technical advisers, Elizabeth Devine, standing before a persuasive corpse and a less convincing horde of visiting television critics in the slab room, is the first to admit to the heightened reality.
“This is a Jerry Bruckheimer show,” Devine says with a shrug, referring to the executive producer known for his way with a glossy surface and an action-movie explosion. “It’s all pretty. You don’t need plasma screens and computer screens and things like that in here.
“It would be much brighter,” she adds later. “We light in order that the actors look good. We don’t light to see evidence.”
By the same token, on the original “CSI,” you don’t need to continually explain to colleagues things they already know about evidence collection and analysis. Nor does a real forensics detective need to spend nearly so much time in the field. Yet the masquerades are, in fairness, backed up with much struggle to be realistic about the shows’ real stars, the evidence, and what it can accomplish. It’s such a distinguishing element of the original series that “CSI” star and co-executive producer William Petersen was openly concerned about being cannibalized by the spin-off show. He spoke out against the idea over the summer, and he still, despite both shows’ success, doesn’t sound overly thrilled.
“We don’t have any time to see that show,” he says of “Miami.” “We don’t have any time to really understand it. . . . Once somebody finds something worthwhile or something that works, I think everybody jumps on it.”
And his co-star Paul Guilfoyle slides in a reference to the interaction of the specific actors being “the difference between `CSI’ and `CSI: Miami’ or `CSI: South Boston’ or whatever other `CSI’ is going to show up.”
What goes around . . .
The “Miami” cast, for their part, gives just a little of it back. While sounding respectful, even envious, of the writing quality on the original, they do tend to refer to that series as “Las Vegas.”
“I don’t really feel an animosity coming from the other show,” Caruso says. “We work very, very closely with `Las Vegas,’ and, I mean, they’re so essential to what we do down here.”
In the realm of McTelevision, CBS’ “CSIs” are outperforming the “Dateline NBCs,” obviously, and they are even outperforming NBC’s “Law & Orders,” no ratings slouches with the Nos. 4 (the original), 14 (“L&O: Special Victims Unit”) and 22 (“L&O: Criminal Intent”) series.
Yet ask the actors to explain the “CSI” phenomenon, and they’re nearly as hazy as critics who attempt it.
You look at the two series and see that they’re well-made, with a rich, big-screen look and the trademark extreme closeups that literally take you inside a piece of evidence.
You see, too, that in their best moments, especially on the older series, they consist of intricately crafted mazes in which, say, a tool left on a job site can tell an entire murder story.
“They’re puzzles and I think people want to participate in the puzzle solving,” Petersen says.
You see that the series are educating viewers in evidence technology with a level of detail that “Quincy, M.E.” could only dream of, and, no small achievement, are crediting the audience with the intelligence to want to explore this realm.
In a way, it’s an expansion of the “ER” theory of tossing in enough realistic jargon and medical procedures to make the characters believable. In the “CSIs,” though, the jargon and procedures become primary.
Yet none of that screams “No. 1 show” or “instant hit.” There is obviously something more at play.
The leading actors from both series fielded questions during the recent Television Critics Association winter press tour, and perhaps the best explanation for the success came from Caruso, in talking about the other series.
“It’s a very modern show and, in my opinion, a new genre of show, where this is process first, but laced into the process, little [character] gems tumble out. . . . It’s very fresh,” he says.
“In the midst of the magnetism of the case, the story, or the specific process, a character moment will happen. And the combination of those things is, I think, pretty magnetic.”
Or as executive producer Anthony Zuiker has put it, “We release our character dynamics in dropperfuls.”
The challenge, actors from both series say, is to try to express those dynamics within the show’s focus on procedure.
“Procedure is kind of what the characters do,” says Guilfoyle, “but how they feel, it’s still the province of the actor.”
How the actors feel about their success is obviously pretty good.
Procter, who plays “Miami’s” “bullet girl,” a specialist in firearms evidence, initially saw her female lead status usurped, when the producers brought in former “NYPD Blue” star Kim Delaney at the last minute.
But Delaney is now gone, the victim of what the cast and a producer cryptically call bad chemistry. And Procter, like the rest of the cast, is no longer sweating the small stuff. “I bought a pair of shoes today that didn’t quite fit, and I felt OK with it,” she says.
But she admits to some initial trepidation about what TV tends to do to programs that are labeled as “can’t-miss” hits.
“The night before we aired, we were sort of walking around saying, `Well, we’ve been a hit all summer.’ And then we aired, and people watched. . . . Now, it’s like, `OK, people are watching. How do we really put our stamp on it?'”
There’s work to be done
She has a point. While “CSI,” is a fairly well-oiled machine, even branching out into such areas as the recent show that let a cunning defense lawyer have a go at the evidence team, “CSI: Miami,” which airs Mondays, has some work to do.
There has been a tendency to be a touch shrill, both in the selection of cases, which the producers sort of acknowledge have leaned too heavily on child victims in the early going, and in the writing, which attempts some of the snappy comebacks and sly puns of the parent show but doesn’t pull them off with the same panache.
Still, for both “CSIs,” there is no question that the impact of all those detailed sets and runs of technical dialogue is strong.
“I was stopped in the airport once,” Guilfoyle says, “by someone who said, `You guys should get on the JonBenet Ramsey case. You could definitely figure that out.’
“And I looked at the person to see if they were going to actually laugh and smile like it was a joke. And they didn’t.”
