Sherlocks on screen

December 30, 2004
William Petersen as Gil Grissom in CSI.

William Petersen as Gil Grissom in CSI.
Photo: Supplied

Where once we would have buried our nose in a mystery novel, today's amateur detectives simply have to turn on their TV, writes Charles McGrath.

Like some rapidly mutating virus, a different kind of television detective is spreading over prime time - the white-coated forensic scientist, with his rubber gloves, his flashlight, his evidence-collecting cotton-wool buds.

First, there was stolid and impassive Gil Grissom on the original CSI. Two years later, Grissom morphed into the craggier, more hyper Horatio Caine on CSI: Miami; and the Horatio Caine model has this season been refined into the sleeker, more mysterious Mack Taylor on CSI: New York, to screen on Nine this year.

All three share the same DNA, however: At heart, they're lab rats. They solve crimes, but not in the old-fashioned way of rounding up suspects, checking with informants and extracting confessions before the perps can lawyer up.

They spend much of their time in the morgue, probing cadavers, or else they're peering at fingerprints and clothing scraps. They're always spraying Luminol and putting on coloured goggles that enable them to see in a carpet sample or a strand of hair something that ordinary police work has missed. And they dominate the airwaves in a way that no previous TV detectives have: All three of these nerdy, splatter and fibre-obsessed men dominate their respective timeslots.

There's something cult-like about the CSI investigators. They worship rationality in a way that gets results but that may not be entirely healthy.

About all three team leaders, Grissom especially, there's a certain Sherlock Holmes quality - a hint of arrogance and a kind of intuitive brilliance that depends not just on the scientific method but also on sudden flashes of insight.

And like Holmes, all three are loners, damaged goods. Even by the constricting standards of the one-hour, self-contained police procedural, where the case comes first and personal details are doled out sparingly, if at all, these characters have no lives to speak of; human interaction, in fact, makes them faintly uneasy.

All three shows love the dramatic, Mr Wizard aspect of lab work, and each is punctuated by eerie, slow-mo close-ups of DNA strands unravelling, say, or corpuscles shooting through the bloodstream and projectiles penetrating brain tissue.

But the shows also implicitly subscribe to the Dr Frankenstein philosophy shared by struggling students in high-school chem class: that to get an A in this stuff, you have to be a little, well, weird.

Anthony Zuiker, who originally dreamed up CSI, got the idea while watching a program about forensic detectives on the Discovery Channel. At the time, he was working as a tram operator, driving the route between the Mirage and Treasure Island hotels in Las Vegas, and he researched the show by hanging out with Daniel Holstein, who in real life is the senior crime-scene analyst.

Holstein was a high-school friend of Zuiker's, and he's famous for three things, Zuiker said recently: He's phenomenal at picking winners in football, he's fascinated by maggots and he's always wheedling people for blood samples.

Grissom, described in an early prospectus for the show as a cross between "Mr Rogers and Bill Gates, but has the intelligence of Albert Einstein", was endowed with two of these three traits (and he's not interested in sport).

Some of his other traits have come from the actor who plays him, William Petersen, who, by all accounts, has taken an unusually proprietary interest in the character.

Carol Mendelsohn, who, along with Zuiker and Ann Donahue, runs the CSI franchise, says it was Petersen who insisted that Grissom be empathetic but aloof, a listener, and that he shouldn't always be right. And it is Petersen, presumably, who is most responsible for Grissom's detachment and singleness of focus.

"Grissom is a Hannibal who found a different outlet," Petersen said in an interview, implying that under different circumstances the character might have become a Lecter-like serial killer.

The same is true, one feels, about the Caine character in the Miami version; his interest in the crimes he solves is so passionate and so cynical - he expects the worst of everyone - that he seems slightly deranged at times.

It's too soon to tell about the new guy in New York, Mack Taylor. He seems too good, too sweet-natured to be, like the others, the flip side of a criminal or a monster. But like Grissom and Caine, he enjoys his time in the morgue.

These guys love cadavers, especially ones with exit wounds or lividity slats (after death, discolouration of the skin by gravitation of the blood); and, indeed, all three shows manifest a kind of interest in, and even reverence for, the deceased that's unusual on TV, where the discovery of a corpse is typically just a starting point.

On the CSI shows, finding out what caused the death and how - completing the victim's story and putting it to rest - is more important than apprehending whoever was responsible.

As soon as David Caruso was hired to play the lead in CSI: Miami, it became a given that Caine, in his dark suits and dark glasses, would smoulder more than Grissom. "You can just feel his kinetic energy," Donahue says of Caruso, and viewers may also recognise some carryover intensity from Caruso's days on NYPD Blue.

Caine is actually a kind of noirish character - "a brokenhearted cynic," Donahue calls him - who may owe as much to Philip Marlowe as he does to Einstein or Holmes. His investigations frequently take on a kind of moral urgency as he whips off the shades and says, "Something's not right here", and he's as apt to act on a hunch as on a hypothesis.

Much more than the rest of the CSI team, he takes it upon himself to deliver bad news and to comfort the bereaved. He openly grieved over the death of a colleague - something one suspects that Grissom would have done in private. We don't know much about Caine's background, but he could well have come from a family of undertakers.

About the new guy Taylor, whom Zuiker calls "a work in progress", we don't know much either - only that he was a Marine, that he lost his wife in the 9/11 attacks and that he's a world-class insomniac. ("What's sleep?" he said in the first episode of CSI: New York.) Taylor is so nocturnal, and spends so much time in scenes so underlighted they're practically black and white, that the show at times takes on a kind of vampiric tinge.

On the other hand, Gary Sinise, who plays Taylor, is by far the best and most subtle actor of the three CSI leading men, and while seeming to remain impassive, in classic CSI fashion, can actually register a fair range of emotion.

So far, he's been the opposite of noirish; he's sort of priestly and almost chivalric - which is perhaps another way of saying that he's a noir hero who hasn't been sufficiently bruised and knocked around yet. More than the others, when he looks into his microscope, he has an expression that's one of pleasure and even wonderment at times. The job is new to him, we sense, and even his melancholy has a kind of freshness about it.

He also has the most advanced computer system of all the CSI investigators - one that, in the first episode, enabled him to triangulate the location of a crime scene from a snapshot and, later, picked up a videotaped glimpse of a suspect in the reflection from a pawnbroker's eyeglasses.

What's possible on the CSI shows frequently goes way beyond the capabilities of real-life forensics, which is actually slow, painstaking and frequently inconclusive. The labs here have been sanitised (the corpses don't smell) and glamorised, and some of that glamour and strangeness has rubbed off on the people who work there.

There's something Orwellian about them, in fact. Where old-school detectives such as Andy Sipowicz of NYPD Blue and Joe Fontana (the new Dennis Farina character on Law & Order) are like just ourselves, or even a little worse perhaps, this new breed seems not quite of this world. They're smarter than we are and, in a not unpleasing way, a little creepier.

- New York Times