CSI: Miami – Season One

 

Picture: B-     Sound: B-     Extras: B-     Episodes: B-

 

 

There was a time when the CBS Television Network was a serious producer of Pop Culture, beginning in the 1950s with I Love Lucy and Twilight Zone, but into the early 1980s, they lost their way.  All In The Family became Archie Bunker’s Place, The Jeffersons and Alice ran far longer then they should have, and the last hurrah of the network’s Big Three Network-era legacy was The Equalizer.  The network became more interested in holding on to an older audience than taking risks, resulting in their unspoken status as the home of “old fuddy duddy” TV.

 

This dragged out for many years, leaving people wondering what the networks future would be.  After two mergers, the network finally began to come back to life when they debuted the hip action crime drama CSI.  It was not only the show that brought CBS out of a coma, but was also a long-overdue hit for male lead William Petersen, who appeared in two major motion picture classics in the 1980s that were remarkably not hits in their time.  One was Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1985, now out in a director’s cut from Anchor Bay’s Divimax DVD series), which was the first adaptation of a Thomas Harris/Hannibal Lecter story.  The other was William Friedkin’s To Live & Die In L.A. (1986, both reviewed elsewhere on this site), both of which Petersen excelled in.  Remarkably, his career stalled.  CSI gave him a chance to show off all he had to offer and had not been seen all those years later.  Along with a faster pace than most police procedurals and a more MTV-style of editing and surreal shots (i.e., internal organs), the show was a huge hit.

 

Huge enough in fact to spawn a few spin-offs, and the first in 2002 was CSI: Miami, which toned down some aspects of what made its predecessor work, but it also had to hold back so it did not look like that first MTV-styled series from that famous city in the 1980s, Miami Vice, a show produced by Manhunter director Mann.  The pilot also avoids sending Petersen to Miami so the new show got the chance to develop its own style without the referential luggage.  It does not have the nervous camera work of Homicide – Life On The Street and also avoids the other cliché of such shows by not trying to imitate the look from David Fincher’s Seven (1995), something that weighted far too heavily on Profiler.  And then there was another male lead who did not immediately reach the commercial success he attempted on the big screen.

 

David Caruso left the hit NYPD Blue after its first season, a move that was considered a fatal error akin to MacLean Stevenson leaving the hit TV version of  M*A*S*H when it was at its peak.  Usually, it is best to stay with a hit and play it safe, and maybe if Caruso had waited a second season, he would not have received as much scrutiny.  Instead, he got massive ridicule, immortalized for all the wrong reasons on South Park, attempted another TV show that did not work out, and tried some feature films that were at least interesting.  That included the William Friedkin film Jade (1995, initially from Joe Esterhas’ screenplay before production problems ensued beyond Caruso’s control).  Caruso took risks like all real; actors should and CSI: Miami is finally the hit he was long overdue for, and the show is not bad.

 

Essentially, the formula for the show and it spin-offs is to combine two types of Detective fiction, even walking the tightrope between the two.  The one is the hardcore gumshoe private eye approach, which offers the darker side of life and shows us the underbelly of the city.  None of the shows ever get that dark, and since these are all workers within the body of local authorities, the show always has a sense of protection outside of the expectation that none of the regular will get shot or nearly killed until the cliffhanger at the end of each season.  The other is the Sherlock Holmes/Agatha Christie school (maybe we can call this “old school” sense) of Detective fiction.  In all cases, actual science gets applied.  You follow the technology available and come to the best deductions of guilt possible.  CSI is maybe more technical-dependent than it ought to be, but part of the fun is learning a compendium of such gadgets, devices, and technologies that help get to the solution of the crime(s).

 

The limits include the unlikely idea that they will find al the clues and find closure by the end of each show, having the same kind of faith in technology that Tom Clancy tends to have in the smart weapons in his “Spy & War” novels.  Outside of that, this is always interesting to watch and proves why the networks are far too hasty in abandoning one-hour dramas for obnoxious reality TV shows.  The success of TV on DVD in general should give all networks second thoughts abut limiting themselves.

 

As is often the case, the pilot for CSI: Miami happened to be an episode of regular CSI, as is the tradition with spin-offs.  That show is the appropriately entitled Cross-Jurisdictions, which is one of four shows in this seven DVD set to offer commentaries.  The others are as follows, with the three other shows that have commentaries marked with an *:

 

101) Golden Parachute *

102) Losing Face

104) Wet Foot/Dry Foot

103) Just One Kiss

105) Ashes To Ashes

106) Broken

107) Breathless

108) Slaughterhouse

109) Kill Zone

110) A Horrible Mind

111) Camp Fear

112) Entrance Wound

113) Bunk

114) Forced Entry

115) Dead Woman Walking

116) Evidence Of Unseen Things

117) Simple Man

118) Dispo Day *

119) Double Crap

120) Grave Young Men

121) Spring Break

122) Tinder Box

123) Freaks & Tweaks *

124) Body Count

 

 

You did not read that number order incorrectly, as 104 does come before 103 in the set.  In all cases, the episodes are anamorphically enhanced at 1.78 X 1.  Many TV DVD sets have tried this and it often does not produce the results you would expect, but there is often still softness and secondary picture quality all over the place.  This is easily one of the best such boxes picture wise we have seen for a TV series yet, only limited by the desaturated images gone for in the cinematography.  This is sharp, clean and clear enough still to take on some recent feature films that have hit DVD.  The sound is available in Dolby Digital 2.0 Spanish Stereo with Pro Logic-type surrounds and the better 5.1 English mix, which is the original and more dynamic.  The Spanish dub is not bad, but has some limits.

 

The extras are not bad either, including the four commentaries that should absolutely be watched after the shows have been scene.  The results are mixed at times, but fans will particularly be happy with them.  The featurettes fair better, including Procedures Of Handling Evidence, which is split into multiple parts.  CSI: Miami Uncovered, Creating CSI: Miami, The Autopsy Theater Tour and The Gun Lab Tour added much more to the experience than the commentaries in the end.  All in all, CSI: Miami is a worthy spin-off to as series that broke the monotony of the police procedural that has been holding the genre back on TV far too long.  No wonder it’s a hit.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo