Dead Heat

Dissecting the genius of CBS’ scalpel-sharp forensics sensation ‘CSI: Crime Scene Investigation’

By Mike Flaherty
Entertainment Weekly – March 30, 2001

IT’S A BRISK LATE-WINTER AFTERNOON ON THE SUBURBAN L.A. side street that’s serving as the set for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation — CBS’ little forensics drama that could — and for once it’s not just the silver-slabbed corpses that are dead on their feet. “We’re tired,” says William Petersen, who not only plays hyper, eccentric crime-scene investigator Gil Grissom but also produces the series. Cause of exhaustion: After getting a delayed go-ahead during pilot pickup time, the show has been playing catch-up ever since and is currently racing to crank out the season’s last few episodes. “The crew is killed,” says Petersen, 48. “All we do is go to work and try to [tape] these stories as fast as we can. That’s the pressure of it once you become something.” For costar George Eads, 34, who plays Texas-bred clue sniffer Nick Stokes, “it’s like the Tour de France where you just kind of keep your head down and keep pedaling. Every now and then you dart out of the place you’re in, but you don’t look up.”

Meanwhile, deep inside a windowless room at the show’s Santa Clarita, Calif., headquarters is where you’ll find the creepy epicenter of the show’s dark brilliance: A group of seven writer-producers hunker down around a fluorescent-lit conference table determined to “break” (i.e., flesh out) the season’s remaining story lines. There’s talk of a fast-food massacre reminiscent of a 2000 New York City bloodletting, and a new truth-telling technology called brain fingerprinting that could come in handy as a narrative launchpad. But the most twisted plot proposal of the day involves feral hounds, a devious fitness expert, and a particularly grisly protein drink (hint: The Donner Party would be whipping out their straws).

The crew goes on to discuss another scenario in which Marg Helgenberger’s character, Catherine Willows, will be assigned to determine the cause of a building collapse. Turns out she’ll be placing a chunk of the structure inside a tank filled with rubber Superballs and then bombarding it with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (and you thought all that myocardial mumbo jumbo on ER was confusing), only to discover that — thanks to an array of physical principles way too complicated to get into here — 50 years’ worth of high-decibel sound from a nearby airport was one of the culprits. Geeky and arcane? You bet, but that’s just the kind of minutiae CSI — and its fans — revels in. Says Helgenberger, 42: “I think the fact that the science became much more the star of the show than anyone anticipated was a big surprise.”

Not to CSI creator (and amateur science buff) Anthony E. Zuiker; who’s currently sitting at the far end of the writers’ room, flanked by an edition of Primate Anatomy (for an upcoming gorilla assault episode, don’t you know), while a staffer across the table holds a well-worn copy of Practical Homicide Investigation, a seminal forensic-science text. ”What makes me so proud is that these are the kind of books you need on your table in the third year; not on episode 18,” says Zuiker. ”We’ve really come a long way in terms of our twistedness and our coolness.”

Provocative but not salacious, violence-based but not violent, visually stunning and disturbingly graphic, CSI is the perfect show for the new younger-demo-hungry but still geezercentric CBS — it’s ”Welcome home” and “Holy crap!” rolled into one hip, Nielsen-dominating package (earlier this month it whomped NBC’s Will & Grace and Just Shoot Me with an awesome 23 million viewers). One minute a poker-faced sleuth can be found intoning “We chase the lie till it leads to the truth”; the next they’ll be gesturing to an anatomical sketch, cracking “This is the vagina, and it does tell a monologue.”

That kind of edginess, says CBS president Leslie Moonves, makes for a nice complement to the Eye’s middle-America-friendly heritage. Recalling one recent episode, Moonves says, “It’s a very traditional story of a kidnapped girl who is reunited with her parents when she’s 25 years old, so it’s a real, heartland CBS story. Then there’s a B story about [the CSIs] roasting a pig to try to duplicate spontaneous human combustion, and you say, ‘Wow, where the hell did they get this from?”

Good question. “I’ve become addicted to the L.A. Times Metro section,” explains writer and coproducer Josh Berman of his hometown paper’s font of bizarro felonies. The writers also scour crime-themed Internet sites, receive anecdotes from real-life CSIs, and forage through various law-enforcement archives. Believe it or not, the show has occasionally had to take a pass on a few true stories because they were just too fantastic for viewers to believe. (Berman cites the case of a recent fatal dog attack in which one of the pooches’ owners suggested that the aggression may have been provoked by the victim’s pheromone-based cosmetics.) “People would have thought that we’re smoking dope in here,” he says. One of this season’s most impressive hours, however, did take its inspiration from recent real-life air-rage incidents, which CSI turned into a “howdunit” that was equal parts Murder on the Orient Express and Rashomon.

Despite hitting upon the formula for concocting such eerily captivating tales, CSI initially came this close to being shipped off to the great TV morgue in the sky. Zuiker’s pilot script — which Hollywood heavyweight Jerry Bruckheimer had a hand in producing — was rejected by ABC, NBC, and Fox before landing at CBS, where Petersen (Manhunter, The Contender), who had a development deal with the net, quickly jumped on it. Luckily, at the same time, Helgenberger, who hadn’t starred in a series since her three-year tour of duty on China Beach, was in the market for a steady gig. Nevertheless, CSI was the last script purchased by the Eye for the 2000-01 season, the last pilot shot, and the last show added to the schedule.

But the show’s dark-horse origins certainly haven’t affected the current can-do vibe on the set. “It is an amazingly collaborative environment, which I don’t think is the norm,” says Petersen. “You have Steven Bochco or David Chase or David Kelley and they’re saying ‘Look, this is the way it’s going to be, kids, and that’s it,’ and I don’t know if I could’ve survived in that environment.” Adds Berman: “The communication on this show is like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s very free-flowing. I think the actors are like that too — because the science is new for everybody on the show, people aren’t scared to admit what they don’t know.”

But sometimes things get a little too free-flowing for network tastes. “We had a big argument about the word prick,” recalls Petersen. “It was important to a speech — the guy was a drug seller who was [dealing to] kids — and Les [Moonves] is vetoing it. He said to me, ‘Next year, you can say prick… maybe,’ and I said, ‘Well, next year I may not have to say prick.” (Ultimately, the episode ran prick-less.)

A more potentially divisive CBS judgment call was the decision to uproot CSI from its slam-dunk Friday slot to arguably the single hottest hour of the programming week, Thursday at 9 p.m. According to Zuiker, the cast and crew were split over the wisdom of the move. “My reaction was simple: This is what you get into this business for — not for the money, not for the fame, but to be in a position where you go against the very best with a show that works.” When it appeared that some needed convincing, recalls Zuiker, “I walked into everybody’s office, every single person, and I shut the door and talked to them for 20 minutes, gave them my speech as to why it’s the best move, why we’re going to kick ass, and why we cannot lose because the show is that good.”

“It was a big vote of confidence from CBS to say, essentially, ‘We think you guys can take on an institution,”’ says Helgenberger. As for speculation that failure on Thursday could mean a wholesale loss of momentum for the show, “I never looked at it as the glass being half empty,” she says. ”’If it doesn’t work, we’ll be the tainted show… blah, blah, blah.’ I never focused on that, and I don’t think anyone else did either.”

Even soft-spoken costar Gary Dourdan, 34 — who plays gambling-addicted CSI Warrick Brown — has now learned to rise above modesty. “I’ve got a great deal of respect for Friends, ER, and all of those other shows,” he says. “And, going up against these people who I’ve watched all of these years and putting a serious dent in their lineup… I’ve got brass ones right about now.”

Cold ones too, most likely, considering he and the rest of the crew are spending this nippy March night outdoors — lensing the opener to an upcoming episode in which a couple is found stabbed to death outside a restaurant. “These are the nights when I get a little freaked out…. The crime scenes [are] always just a little spooky and sad,” says costar Jorja Fox, 31, who plays Grissom protégé Sara Sidle, of tonight’s bloody scenario. But it’s the chillingly real, ripped-from-the-headlines tales that creep Fox out the most. “If something just falls out of the sky into someone’s imagination, it’s easier to just be like ‘Wow, this is cool,”’ she says. “But when you know that this is based on something that happened to somebody somewhere, there’s a weight to that that’s very real. I hope I don’t lose that.”

The other thing about re-creating real-life murders — they seem to require a lot of night shoots, which is why the CSI folks have to endure a grueling filming schedule filled with lots of wee-hour call times. Combine that with the show’s flashback-heavy story lines, which demand lensing multiple what-if scenarios, and you don’t need a centrifuge to spin out the reasons why everyone on the set is so doggone tired.

“I would say that most shows working at this breakneck pace would have hit the wall a long time ago,” says executive producer Carol Mendelsohn (Melrose Place, Murder One). “But, and I don’t mean to sugarcoat it, there’s something about being on a show where there’s magic.”

And the producers sure do use all the trickery they can muster to tackle CSI‘s uniquely quirky production challenges. “We’re doing an episode now where we find a severed head,” explains Berman. “The script hasn’t been written but we’ve already begun to cast, because we need to make a mold of the actor’s head that’s going to be chopped off.”

Given that kind of taxing, stay-on-your-toes work environment, it helps that CBS is doing everything it can to keep the troops stay focused. When CSI catapulted into fourth place in the Nielsens in its first Thursday-night outing, Moonves had a special token of his affection delivered to the set. “Les sent us a coffee truck,” says Petersen, who is clearly looking forward to the day when he and his crime-scene colleagues can settle into a pace that doesn’t require quite so much caffeine. “I just hope they don’t decide to put us on a different night next fall.”

The ABCs of ‘CSI’

Terms you can put your ulnar loop on

  • AFIS (automated fingerprint identification systems) A database used to scan and store fingerprints.
  • ALLIGATORING A blistering pattern on wood burned at extremely high temperatures that resembles the skin of an alligator.
  • ALS (alternate light source) High-intensity light that can enhance or discover the presence of fluids, fibers, fingerprints, and trace materials.
  • “CALL SOMEONE WHO CARES” The humiliating message sent by a hitman who inserted a quarter in his victim’s head wound.
  • CODIS Short for Combined DNA Index System, the FBI-operated database of genetic samples.
  • DENTAL SOCIETY Organization that oversees the nation’s dental-print databases.
  • DISCO PLACID A Vegas-area jazz producer who hears in perfect pitch. Grissom consults him in order to analyze a sound recording.
  • ELECTROTHERMAL ATOMIZER A device Willows used to detect art forgery by identifying modem-day substances in paints.
  • EQUIVOCAL EVIDENCE Guideline quoted by Capt. Brass thusly: “When faced with evidence that could equally exonerate or implicate a suspect, we must, as objective interpreters of that evidence, side with the defendant”.
  • FIRST WITNESS, FIRST SUSPECT A self-explanatory investigative rule of thumb.
  • FORENS-L An e-mail discussion group frequented by forensics professionals.
  • GLASS FLOTATION A method of determining the density of a piece of glass by immersing it in various liquids.
  • GRIBBS, HOLLY New recruit to Grissom’s staff who dies — in episode 2! Her case is investigated by Sara Sidle.
  • HAECKEL MARKS Fracture marks on broken glass which indicate whether it was broken from the inside or the outside.
  • HEMORRHAGIC TISSUE The presence of this blood-nourished tissue on bone indicates that a dismemberment victim was alive at the time of the injury.
  • ION DETECTOR Used by Brown to determine the presence of fire accelerants in the air.
  • LINEAR REGRESSION Process in which Grissom calculates the time of death by determining the age of insects on a corpse and figuring backward.
  • MARLOWE, MELISSA The kidnap victim who resurfaces 21 years later, under a new identity, and murders her “father.” She runs away after Willows sees through her insanity plea.
  • MALANDER, PAUL The eccentric proprietor of a costume store that manufactured prosthetic hands (one of which featured Grissom’s fingerprints) which he used to get away with murder.
  • MO Law-enforcement slang for moron.
  • PAGER NEST A device that identifies numbers called to a pager.
  • PETECHIAL HEMORRHAGES Pinpoint red dots in the eyes of a victim indicating strangulation.
  • PHENOLPHTHALEIN A chemical that, when combined with hydrogen peroxide, will reveal the presence of blood by reacting with its hemoglobin and turning a cotton swab pink. (Also known as the Kastle-Meyer color test.)
  • PRECIPITIN TEST An antibody test used to determine whether a bloodstain is human.
  • RED CREEPER Grissom’s “serious” homemade print-dusting powder, it provides superior ease of application and adhesion for clearer identification of prints.
  • SPALLING Chipping or pitting of concrete or masonry surfaces.
  • STRING METHOD A procedure used in crime-scene reconstruction which approximates bloodspatter paths.
  • SUPER GLUE When heated in the lab, its cyanoacrylate fumes will adhere to latent prints thus making them visible.
  • ULNAR LOOP A fingerprint loop that opens in the direction of the little finger (as opposed to a radial loop, which opens toward the thumb).
  • VICAP (VIOLENT CRIMINAL APPREHENSION PROGRAM) A national database of violent criminals.

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