The Graveyard Shift

Surprise hit CSI is a dead-on who-dunit

By Robin Roberts
Canadian TV Week – February 10, 2001

Who knew maggots could be so intriguing? Or that a toenail clipping could contain case-closing evidence? This is the macro world of crime scene investigators, those fascinating folks of forensics who sweep into a crime scene and fall to the floor to study carpet fibres, hair follicles and blood spatters that will ultimately lead them to whodunit. This is also the surprise hit of the fall season. Starring Marg Helgenberger (Erin Brockovich, China Beach) and William Petersen (Manhunter, The Contender), CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has outrated its louder-touted lead-in The Fugitive since its debut last October to become the highest-rated new drama of the year.

The series’ success was no surprise, however, to those involved with it. “Part of me thought that it had a good chance, because I thought it was great, provocative, but you never know if the audience is going to embrace it just because you happen to like it,” says Helgenberger, who plays ex-stripper and single mom-turned-CSI Catherine Willows. “What surprised me was the broad appeal the show has. I’ve had teenagers come up to me and tell me they really enjoy the show. One mother told me her teenage son has made a decision about what he wants to do because of the show. I never anticipated that because there are no teenagers on our show, unless there’s a story about a teen. But men, women, old, young, black, white — it really cuts across all lines and I love the fact that it has such appeal.”

Despite its sometimes gruesome subject matter — CBS had producers tone down a couple of particularly gory scenes in the pilot when test audiences couldn’t stomach maggots oozing out of an open wound — the show appeals to women as much as men. “I think women love puzzles,” says Petersen, who plays forensic freak Gil Grissom. “I think men do too. I think it’s involving. I think it’s interactive on some level, where you get to challenge stuff with the guys on the show, and I think that women appreciate that. Women appreciate smart shows.”

Petersen also believes crime scene investigators will, as technology gets more and more sophisticated, render detectives obsolete. “This is the new world of crime solving,” he says. “These are the guys who are going to put people away and get people off over the course of the next 25 years. The criminalist is completely different than what we are used to in terms of homicide detectives. We’ve known they’ve existed in the old homicide shows. It’s just that they were never covered because nobody thought that a fingerprint would be interesting.”

Executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer, the mind behind some of film’s biggest blockbusters such as Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop and the soon-to-be-released Pearl Harbor, says he switched his sights to television mainly because of the turnaround time. “I love the speed of it,” he says. “I mean, it took us eight years to get Beverly Hills Cop made. It took us almost five years to get Top Gun made. I’m working on a project now [Black Sheep] that I think we’ve been working on for 15 years. But TV is so wonderful. You read a script, you get notes, and two weeks later it’s on the air. It’s fantastic. I love the process. And this [CSI] is a process that is best, taking you inside a world that you’ll never be a part of, yet showing how it works and entertaining an audience at the same time.”

The lure for Petersen, who was a big Basil Rathbone fan as a kid, was the chance to redeem himself from all those lousy test scores in high school. “I was terrible at science, terrible at math, so it’s a real opportunity for me to live another life. I figured if! could learn stuff then I would be thrilled by the show each week. And that’s been the most remarkable thing about it is getting to deal with these real life CSls who work on the show with us, getting to deal with their stories and with the kinds of knowledge that they have that I never had.”

Some of that knowledge includes the polysyllabic scientific terms the actors have to wrap their tongues around. “Epidelious,” says Helgenberger when asked about the challenges of the terminology. “It’s the first layer of skin cells. I had a scene where a person was strangled and I had to take an item to the lab and get the epidelious taken off. That’s how we nailed the killer. It’s hard to connect the words with anything because it’s so scientific, it’s just practice, practice. And it helps to know the meaning and context. You can’t really paraphrase.”

Helgenberger, dressed in tight black pants and a turquoise leather bomber jacket, sips a drink at an Old Town Pasadena bar as she talks about her good fortune at landing the role on CSI, as well as her experiences with the star of a similarly themed Canadian show. Although she’s never watched either Da Vinci’s Inquest or Cold Squad, she’s aware of those Canadian series and recalls shooting Happy Face Murders in Toronto for the U.S. cable channel Showtime with Da Vinci star Nicholas Campbell. “He’s a real character,” she laughs. “And totally nuts” about the racetrack, but a “great actor”.

Although Helgenberger’s Willows and Petersen’s Grissom have clicked with the onscreen chemistry of Mulder and Scully, producers insist there will be no hanky-panky on the autopsy table. Grissom will, however, eventually be seduced by the glitz of Las Vegas. “His work is what his focus is,” says Petersen. “It’s what’s fascinating to him. The other stuff interferes with that on some level for him.”

Bruckheimer concurs that the Vegas veneer is essential to the show’s unique look and feel. “Anthony Zuiker, who created the show, lives in Las Vegas, so he felt it was a great backdrop. And I’ve always tried to do a show in Vegas. It’s like a melting pot of so many interesting characters. So you can draw on so many more stories because of that. There’s people from all over the world that come to make their fortune. Plus, it’s a community where people live and work, even though they might work in casinos. It’s like any normal town, but underneath it there’s this kind of underbelly that’s very interesting.”

And while that underbelly has proven fascinating to Friday-night viewers, the cast and producers have no fears about CBS’s decision to move them to the ultra-competitive Thursday night. “I’ve always loved playing in the big leagues, and now we’re in the big leagues,” shrugs Bruckheimer. “We’re on the biggest night you can be on, which is very exciting for us. There are a lot more eyeballs available on Thursday night.”

Helgenberger concurs. “I think it’s a good thing, actually. My husband [actor Alan Rosenberg, Chicago Hope, Cybill] is a blackjack player and he always says, ‘If you want to win big, you gotta play big,’ and that’s kinda how I feel about this. If you don’t take that chance of going up against a monopoly, you’ll never know if you can compete with the big boys.”     ♦