Word: csi
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...also had executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who as producer of Top Gun and Pirates of the Caribbean knows how well American audiences like a spectacle. CSI looks like high-quality TV, which is to say, it looks expensive. Bruckheimer and his associates talk about creating "feature television"--delivering a movie experience on the small screen. And when Bruckheimer talks about the movie experience, he ain't talking about Lost in Translation. "It has to do with engaging your senses," he says. "It's not only titillating you with the visuals and the design and the cinematography, which...
...follows business, and CSI--and its descendants, like CBS's Bruckheimer-produced Without a Trace and Cold Case-- are above all damn fine business. The shows follow the procedural format pioneered by Dragnet 50 years ago: crime stories, completely wrapped up in one episode, with minimal attention to the inner lives of any of the characters. A serial drama--say, Six Feet Under or 24--requires that you watch every week and pay close attention. That's a tall order given the competition from cable to the Internet to plain old busy work schedules, and networks are increasingly afraid that...
...reruns and syndication. This is especially important when sitcoms are in a years-long slump and reality shows usually don't rerun at all. Also, because viewers are drawn more by the crimes than the characters, the shows are less vulnerable to Friends-style salary hijackings. Last summer, when CSI co-stars George Eads and Jorja Fox held out for raises, they were quickly fired. (They later settled and were rehired...
...revival of the just-the-facts procedural began with NBC's powerhouse Law & Order (L&O) in 1990, but it took nine years for creator Dick Wolf to spin off Special Victims Unit, and the series was never widely imitated before the CSI explosion. Now the schedule is so crowded with procedurals that CSI: NY had to debut against the original L&O. To the surprise of TV analysts, it beat the veteran in its first outing and most weeks since. Even so, some within the CSI family have been worried about overextending; original CSI star William Petersen has publicly...
...CSI's DNA is in more than cop shows. Even new medical series--such as NBC's hit Medical Investigation and Fox's upcoming House, in which doctors hunt down disease outbreaks abetted by the latest medical, and special-effects, technology--are structured like cop procedurals. You can see the influence in a show like NBC's Las Vegas, the sophomore hit about casino security that like CSI combines frisky visual effects and over-in-an-hour stories. What goes around, comes right back to Vegas...