Essay on the CSI franchise
Back when I was a young girl I did A-level media studies. One sixth of this A-level was made of writing a three thousand word essay on a topic of your choice. Here is my essay.
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is America’s highest audience rating series. Ratings for the 2002 / 2003 season made CSI: Miami America’s top new drama. With CSI: New York starting this year, has the CSI franchise reached its saturation point, or has it evolved sufficiently to retain existing audiences whilst also attracting new viewers?
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation was first aired on June 10, 2000, and since then, it has spawned two spin-offs, CSI: Miami and CSI: New York; and whilst regularly attracting audiences of 26 million viewers in the United States alone, this programme airs in every country in the world except seven.
What CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has done is fill a niche in the television market. Whilst it is a TV show typical of the crime genre, in that crimes happen each week, and by the end of each episode, the crime is solved, CSI has put a new spin on the crime-solving, featuring the concept of forensics very heavily. But the new innovation that CSI has created is to present the narrative in a visually unique way. “It was like we woke television up,” says Anthony Zuiker, the creator of CSI. “We altered the visual style, the pace, the energy and the direction of drama.”
“One of the things we did from the start that was unique was that we didn’t go big, we went small,” says Carol Mendelsohn, one of the writers for the CSI franchise. “We took a fibre and made it look like a redwood forest. The audience understood it and knew it mattered and learned something from it.” Going small on CSI has actually made the show very big, and creating spin-offs has only added to the size of the popularity.
The immense number of hours on television in America devoted to crime dramas reflects the current ideologies within the United States. Today, people see a lot of information in the news about a huge number of crimes being committed but not very many criminals being brought to justice. This is one of the reasons that makes crime shows so popular. Crime shows reflect the bad things that people do to each other in real life, like murder, but they show the perpetrators being sent to jail, which is not always the case in real life. These shows’ conclusions also bring a sense of audience satisfaction. “There are so many chaotic situations in life today that go on and on,” says Joe Saltzman, associate dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California. “It is very satisfying to sit there for an hour and see something get resolved.” Saltzman also says that people watch crime shows for the same reason they slow down to look at traffic accidents. “There is a fascination with accidents and people in trouble.” With crime shows, people can watch all these accidents and see all these people in trouble from their own living room, and if they don’t like it, they can change the channel whenever they want.
The audience of these shows is safe in their own living room, and the TV creates a sense of escapism. People love to watch death from the safety of their own living room, and hence will watch crime shows. Eric Szmanda, an actor on CSI, said, “I think that people are pretty much fascinated by death, and murder. It’s a really sick, perverse, twisted quality that we all share, but it is what’s keeping me employed.”
Why do television audiences love these CSI shows? They clearly do, as each spin-off only adds to the viewer figures of the franchise. What the CSI shows have done is offer television audiences something that they haven’t been offered before. The CSI shows not only entertain their viewers, they educate them as well. According to Anthony Zuiker, the creator of CSI, “If you’re watching, and you’re learning, you’ll definitely keep watching.”
Another way the CSI shows educate their viewers is by using unusual camera shots, such as ‘snap-zooms’ which is when the camera suddenly goes from a mid-shot of the actor to an extreme close-up of the piece of evidence that they’ve just found. CSI was the first TV show to use camera shots in this way, so now these shots have become known as ‘the CSI shot’. These shots have now also been copied by other TV shows, including House, a drama about a doctor. The cameras on CSI have been to places that not many other cameras have been. The cameras on CSI have been up noses, down windpipes, through jet engines, but what they’re most famous for is following the paths of bullets. The cameras on CSI are famous for their ‘snap-zooms’, which help to explain complicated ideas to the audience. They also make scenes more interesting, and help to move the story along. “What’s the best way to tell that story?” asks Danny Cannon, a director on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. “If you were in an autopsy room, is the best way to just stand there and point, or get some pictures out? Or do we actually use the camera and dive inside that body, and let that tell the story for us?” This technique not only helps to educate the audience about human anatomy, but it helps to bring the audience up to date with what the CSIs on the screen know.
One of the reasons why the CSI franchise is so popular is the production quality. CSI is executive produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who has made the jump from movies to become the most successful television producer of all time. Jerry Bruckheimer is most famous for his large scale productions, such as Con Air, Pearl Harbor, and Armageddon. His most famous trademarks, however, are the explosions, which have showed up in the CSI shows as well as his movies. In CSI: Miami, there was a large barn explosion, and in the original CSI, they even blew up the DNA lab. Anthony Zuiker says “We’re not making television. We’re making feature television. We’re making mini-Bruckheimer movies every week.”
This new sub-genre of “feature television” that CSI belongs to also extends to the directors. One of the main directors on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is Danny Cannon, who made his name by directing the horror movie I Know What You Did Last Summer, and has brought his movie-making experience to the television screen. This experience of Hollywood allows Cannon to understand how to make something on a vast scale, and so keep CSI as immense as it is.
When CSI: Crime Scene Investigation started, it was a unique crime drama, so why erase this uniqueness by making a spin-off? “Extending a show that is already a hit brings a built-in audience to the new product,” says Bill Brioux of the Calgary Sun. “It’s why NBC wanted Joey after Friends and also why a fourth Law & Order series will be introduced later this season.” CSI fans would agree with this. In a recent survey on one fan site, when asked whether or not they would watch the spin-offs, one fan replied “I tune in because it is CSI”. When a spin-off is made of a successful TV show, the audiences are already familiar with the original, and like the original, and have expectations of what they will get in the spin-off. CSI: Miami and CSI: New York fulfil these expectations in that they offer audiences the same things that the original do. They give audiences the science, the famous ‘snap-zooms’, and the memorable characters, which is what they expect.
According to Ed Robertson, of Media Life Magazine, there are four key elements a spin-off needs in order to be successful. They are strength of character, a strong production team, strength of the genre, and strength of the network.
With the CSI franchise, because it is the concept that is being spun-off, not one of the characters, then the strength of character is not needed. However, there is a very strong production team that works on the original CSI as well as the two spin-offs, which is one of the elements needed. Bruckheimer television has been very successful with its crime procedural dramas, which include, as well as the CSI shows, Without a Trace, and Cold Case. All of these shows do well in the Nielsen ratings, and generate lots of revenue.
Also, the writers, who are a big part of the production team, have lots of experience in writing successful scripts. Carol Mendelsohn and Ann Donahue have many years experience between them, working on Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210 respectively. “It’s the only group of writers who look like they’re going home to do homework, with the books under their arms,” says head of Bruckheimer Television, Jonathan Littman. This helps to make the CSI shows more accurate in their crime solving, though not all forensics experts would agree. “CSI has as much to do with criminalistics as Baywatch has to do with being a lifeguard,” says John House, a board-certified criminalist. However, this lack of credibility has not affected the audiences opinions of the CSI shows, because they just keep becoming stronger and stronger in terms of viewer figures.
The third element needed for a successful spin-off is strength of the genre. This is one of the strongest reasons to spin-off a CSI show. CSI shows are part of the crime genre. Crime shows are very strong, with there being numerous hours of airtime given over to this genre each week on television. On CBS, the channel that airs all three CSI incarnations, there’s over nine hours of prime-time crime shows each week, which shows just how strong they are.
The final element needed for a spin-off to be successful is strength of the network, and CSI definitely has this. CBS is the number one television channel in America, in terms of viewer numbers. In the past, it was NBC, who were unstoppable with their ‘Must-See-TV’ Thursday line-up, Friends and ER. This all changed, though, when Friends finished. With the season 5 première of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which aired on September 23, 2004, CBS managed to beat NBC by an average of 7.1 million viewers for the night, though CSI beat off its direct competition by nearly 15 million viewers. Friends has finished, ER is in its eleventh season, and so audiences may be getting bored with NBC. Either that, or the love of crime dramas is so high that CBS was sure to win with the CSI / Without A Trace line-up.
Although the CSI shows have all the elements needed to spawn a successful spin-off, the ultimate decision to create a spin-off lies with two people: Anthony Zuiker, the creator of the CSI franchise, and Les Moonves the chairman and CEO of CBS. But with these two people, their motives behind creating more spin-offs have to be questioned. For Zuiker, it appears that his motive is not financial gain, it’s the ability for him to get creative. Anthony Zuiker is a writer, and he likes writing for CSI. He likes crime shows, and he dreamed that one day he would write his own. He thinks the story is very important, not the fact that his shows generate millions of dollars in revenue. “We’re doing a procedural drama infested with science,” he says about his shows. “We always start with a good story, but with this kind of show, it matters how you tell it.” The narrative of a show such as CSI is very important, and all three CSI shows follow the pattern of Todorov’s equilibrium. At the start, the scene is peaceful, but then a crime is committed, and the CSIs spend the next 50 minutes solving this crime, and at the end, all is peaceful again. Cannon also says that they “never walk in with a cool piece of forensics technology and say let’s build a story around it. Everything starts with the story.”
Whereas with Moonves, it’s obvious one of his major motives in ordering more CSI shows is television ratings, which means financial gain for him. “When we put CSI: Miami on Monday night and Without a Trace on Thursday,” he says, “the rise in our stations at the 10 o’clock news has been tremendous. Having another CSI there at 9 o’clock will clearly help that.” This shows that his ratings are clearly important to him. Also, CSI: New York airs at the exact same time as the original Law & Order, a crime show now in its fifteenth year. “We finally think we’ve got something we can challenge Law & Order with,” he told reporters recently. “We finally have the goods.” When he says this, his motives have to be questioned. Does he want another CSI because he thinks his audiences want another CSI? Or does he want another CSI because it will help him take viewers away from the other networks, such as NBC, which airs all four Law & Order incarnations?
When talking about making the first spin-off (CSI: Miami), executive producer Ann Donahue sais “Leslie [Moonves] told us he wanted a clone. We knew we couldn’t do a clone, because everything has its own beauty.” When talking about making the second spin-off (CSI: New York), Anthony Zuiker said “the chairman [Moonves] looked over at me and said, ‘We all know why we’re here, Anthony.’ And I said, ‘CSI: NY, sir.’”
With there being three CSI shows per week, on three different days, the television audience may become confused as to which CSI is which. Jerry Bruckheimer, the executive producer of all three shows in the CSI franchise, noted that, “people watch TV with their remote”, meaning that when people flick through their channels, if they come across something that catches their eye, they will tune in. The visually distinctive style of the CSI shows is sure to attract attention, but how will the audience know which version of CSI they’re watching?
One way to tell the three CSI shows apart is the on-screen atmosphere. Each show has a different “energy” to it, says Anthony Zuiker. In Las Vegas, the atmosphere is “upbeat – you never sleep. Miami is sultry and sexy, with an international pulse. And New York is the centre of the universe.” Zuiker also says that each CSI “shows how they are different – between actors, backdrops and writers, they all feel very different.”
But if the television audience is flicking through the channels, one of the most obvious differences between the shows is the colour scheme. The original CSI is set in Las Vegas, which is in the desert, but it takes place in the graveyard shift, so it’s dark. The colour scheme reflects this. The camera shots are dark, with outdoor scenes often depicting the Las Vegas Strip. Miami is in Florida, which is affectionately known as ‘The Sunshine State’, and therefore the CSI: Miami colour scheme consists lots of oranges and other sunny colours. New York is a city, and will therefore have “a crushed-blue, crushed-black, guttural, gritty, street-real look,” according to Anthony Zuiker.
A third important difference among the three CSI shows is the characters. In CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the characters are not the most important factor in the story telling. The evidence is. So much so that the evidence is often described as ‘one of the characters’.
In terms of cast, all three of the CSI shows follow the same formula. Each show has a male lead, and this lead is an actor who is well known, and recognised for their talent. Barry Garron, of Reuters.com says Gary Sinise (CSI: NY), “is capable of more expression with his face than many actors can muster with a Shakespearean soliloquy. And it’s a good thing, too, because CSI ground rules allow for enormous range only where evidence is concerned, not emotions.” With CSI, the evidence is considered to be “another character on the show”, and so the way in which the actors interact with the evidence is key, if the story is to be believed and accepted by the audience.
However, each of the lead characters is very different from the leads on the other two shows, so this helps to keep the audience interested. Each show also has a main female character, who is represented to be very strong, and independent. Also on each cast, there are several other characters, though they are not common to all three shows.
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation clearly isn’t being harmed by its spin-offs in terms of viewer numbers, it attracted 30.8 millions to its season five premiere, and the week after, still managed to get a 17.1 rating (26% share). CSI: Miami and CSI: New York, on the other hand, whilst both being in the top 10 in the Nielsen ratings each week, don’t attract audiences as large as the original. Even reruns of the original CSI have large audiences. “A CSI rerun topped the season première of NBC’s reality hit The Apprentice, once again demonstrating the original’s strength and staying power”, notes Carol Cling of reviewjournal.com. The original’s 100th episode Ch-Ch-Changes was the most-watched television program of last year, with an audience of 31.6 million viewers. Why are people watching the original more than they’re watching the spin-offs?
One of the reasons is surely the fact that CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is the original CSI, the one that started it all, the one that people saw first. So there is a lot of audience loyalty towards the original. Some fans feel that the spin-offs are just rip-offs of the original, and so will not break their allegiance towards the original by watching the spin-offs.
The original CSI also offers plots that the other two can’t offer, because of the location in which it is set. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is set in Las Vegas, so there are plots which can’t happen in Miami or New York. “Vegas is broader, just weirder. I don’t think you’ll see a dominatrix on CSI: Miami,” says Ann Donahue, one of the show’s writers.
The original CSI is more graphic than its spin-offs, so much so that the Parent’s Television Council voted the it “the worst show on primetime broadcast TV”, in terms of its suitability for a family audience. CSI: Miami did not even make it into the top ten, because the PTC consider it “not as bad as it’s sister show”.
Although the original CSI is more graphic, and has more disturbing story lines, some of the characters do manage to lighten up the story where possible. For example, the character of Greg Sanders, who works the DNA lab, brings an air of comic relief to the show in the way that he delivers his DNA results. He is often seen in various different outfits, from a turban, to a showgirl’s head-dress. The spin-offs, however, have characters that are always very serious, which can put off viewers, because viewers need something to lighten up what they’re watching, as TV shows can get too heavy sometimes, especially when dealing with subjects that the CSI shows often deal with, like murder, and rape.
Because millions of people around the world watch the three CSI incarnations each week, it can be assumed that they would watch a fourth CSI, but there are those that have their doubts. Bill Koenigsberg, president and CEO of Horizon Media, said that in setting a new CSI in a new city, “CSI will start to cannibalise itself. There comes a point of diminishing returns.” Anthony Zuiker would agree with this. When asked how many CSI shows there could be, he stated “we’re doing three. That’s it.” So Zuiker doesn’t want any more CSIs, but Les Moonves thinks there may be room for another one in the future. When asked about the possibility of having a fourth CSI incarnation, he replied “we’re not there yet,” which indicates he thinks they could be there some time in the future. Jonathan Littman, president of Bruckheimer Television, added “as long as people find inventive ways to kill each other, we can keep writing stories.”
3295 words
