Sunday, September 24, 2006

TV Review: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (Original)

Genre: Drama
Channel: CBS
Season: 7

The Premise: Crime Scene Investigation. Heck, if you don’t know what CSI is by now, you’ve been living in a cave, under a rock, encased in 12 yards of bubble wrap.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

This season opener pissed me off to no end. Over the years I’ve put up with William Petersen shaving his beard, with George Eads messing with his hair and making himself less pretty, and with the characters generally doing dumb things in their personal lives, but this one takes the cake.

There must be some unwritten rule in Hollywood that if a show is on over 6 years a principle character must be raped. WTF? Seriously, I know the rape statistics, but is the only way to avoid them in any outlet in the world to stop watching a show after season 6? Is that the rule?

And if that isn’t bad enough, the woman is a CSI, and she violates all the rules of collecting evidence, so nothing she gathers is admissible in court, which means that she, an officer of the law, thinks that the law is of no use to her in resolving this. She’s going vigilante.

So, we’re supposed to believe that this ex-exotic dancer, street-wise, and now law-enforcement savvy tough intelligent woman falls prey to a date-rape drugged drink. That it takes only 2 sips, and then the next thing you know she wakes up naked in a hotel room.

Even if I buy all of that, I am supposed to buy that her humiliation trumps her common sense and her desire for justice? I am supposed to buy that all her years as a CSI, counseling rape victims on the importance of gathering evidence and facing their accusers, is now going to perform her own rape kit with a tampon?

And if the character hypocrisy isn’t bad enough, I’m sickened at the thought of how many women watched that, and if god forbid they are raped, they will walk into a police department with a tampon, nail scrapings, and the stuff the combed out of their pubes and say, “I was raped and here is the proof”. No, you’ve just erased the proof. This is not admisibile in court.

How the hell did this episode get written and shot? I mean, did they send all the real-world CSI consultants and all the female writers out of town for a week and then not let them see this till it aired? Because seriously, if I was a writer on this show, and someone told me we were going to totally violate the CSI cannon – the CSI evidence gathering rules (not to mention an actual CSI tech) there’s no way I’d play along.

Not only is this the worst CSI episode ever – it may be the one that turns me off for good.

AV Rating: 0/5 Stars. Shame on you, CBS.

2 Comments:

Blogger Chris said...

Yeah. Our reaction to the show was "Wilco Tango Foxtrot?"

(WTF?)

Not only was it in poor taste, dismissive of the show's own internal logic, and just plain SKEEVY, it made zero sense whatsoever.

(I'll even admit that I just figured she woke up from a drunken one-night stand, no big deal, until she went all... um.... invasive.)

When will procedural shows figure out that the more you involve the characters' personal lives the worse the show gets? I believe Law and Order tried this (the season where Jerry Orbach's daughter was a druggie), and it was damn near unwatchable.

Pilot to co-pilot...we're at 30,000 feet over the shark and are beginning our descent...

9:42 AM  
Blogger Sara J said...

So I decided to give it a second episode to see how it played out, and I have to say it was flat and predicatable. The best part was Danny Bonaduce as the corpse. Seriously - that was enough to fill an entire episode.

This show has pretty much lost all crediblity (Warrick, with no gloves, evidence bag, etc. tells Catherine to let him remove the tape from her daughter, otherwise it won't be admissable evidence. Um, Warrick, you touching it with your bare hands and putting it on the floor? In your pocket? Yeah, that's not admissable). That's what I loved about this show, and now I'm just rolling my eyes.

1:54 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home