How can one show be so bad? So bad that you, and everyone you know who watches it, only do so to make fun of it? No, I am not talking about Thursday night’s
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the excellent
William Peterson/
Marg Helgenberger show that started the flood of forensics shows which now dominate the TV landscape. I am referring to its first sibling,
CSI: Miami, the train wreck masquerading as a cop show; you know, the most watched show on Monday nights?
I'm not going to mince words or beat around the bush here, I'm going to be upfront and perfectly candid about by opinion of this show; in a nutshell, CSI: Miami is one of the worst shows on TV. That said, I never miss it.
From the absolutely cheesy unrealistic pastel-lit sets, to the golden-orange filter they shoot most of the exterior scenes with, to the wooden acting, the "my aren't we so hip you want to puke" bogus plot devices,
David Caruso's refusal to look at anyone he is talking with and his OCD-like glasses on-glasses off routine and "chop it in half" reading of sentences ("And Frank, divorce...can be murder", "It's a drive-by...Miami style", etc.), to the horrid excuse for writing, this show is a disaster from beginning to end.
Well, from shortly after beginning to end, 'cause the show does have one thing going for it, and that's a dynamite credits sequence complements of
The Who. Every episode starts out with a crime being committed and David Caruso as Lieutenant Horatio Kane and one or more members of his posse (Emily Procter as Calleigh Duquesne, Adam Rodriguez as Eric Delko, Khandi Alexander as Dr. Alexx Woods,Jonathan Togo as Ryan Wolfe or Rex Linn as Detective Frank Tripp) showing up at the scene to supposedly investigate it. I say supposedly, because there is never much real investigation happening on this show. As the opening sequence comes to a close, Caruso will stare off into space as he talks to one of his people, then turn to the camera and either put his sunglasses on or take them off. This is usually done in the pause he inserts into his sentences. Like, "It's not an accident..." (puts on glasses), "...It's murder." And then Roger Daltry screams! It's his scream from near the end of "Won't Get Fooled Again" and it is the beginning of a killer montage sequence that contains the credits. It ends with Pete Townshend slamming out one of the most famous guitar riffs in rock history, the song's end.
Masterful credits on a masterless show.
I've already hit on most of Caruso's odd antics, but he also sports one of the creepiest smiles I've ever seen. Another Caruso quirk is he has this strange way of standing in profile so that it looks like he is falling over when he isn't, like in the bizarre picture to my left. He also likes to stand in a three-quarter view with his hands on his hips, pushing his coat back and then switch forward legs and do it again; it's hard to explain but even harder to watch with a straight face. Once every show he seems compelled to say to someone, "Here's what were going to do, were going to..." whatever. It is all so annoying.
Emily Procter's Calleigh is about as wooden as they come. Her emotions show only as quick snapping barbs. It's almost as if she has removed herself from the show emotionally and is only there for the paycheck. Given the quality of writing, that might be a smart move on her part. She plays a charmless southern belle with an alcoholic father and zero love life, who some seasons comes off as a gun nut and others as just a soulless, sexless automaton.
Adam Rodriquez used to not bother me so much. In the early seasons he was always paired with the excellent
Rory Cochrane as Tim "Speed" Speedle and he worked well as the straight man for Cochrane's droll humor. Rodriquez is a strange one; it's hard to tell sometimes what emotion he is trying to project. This might be just bad acting, or it might be that he is as confused by what his character is asked to do as the rest of us are. His main function in the show seems to be getting laid by women who end up dead, getting busted for drugs, providing a sister for Horatio to sleep with, and getting pissed off at the other team members.
If any member of the Miami team is going to drive you up a wall it's Dr. Alexx Wood played by
Khandi Alexander (who I remember liking in
News Radio). Every CSI has to have someone chopping up the bodies and that's Khandi's role here. Actually her real purpose seems to be to add "heart" to the show. She calls nearly every body on her slab "baby girl" or "baby boy" and whines and moans over their loss of life. The first writer to add this to her personality must have thought they were adding some much needed compassion to the show, but now, like Caruso's OCD-antics, it seems like something tacked on to a one-dimensional character; it sounds phony and trite and it's just annoying as hell.
Jonathan Togo as Ryan Wolfe was added to the show when Rory Cochrane smartly begged to be cut loose (The departure of Rory, to my left, may have been when the series "jumped the shark," or it may have been that Rory saw the shark before any of the rest of us did). Wolfe was a patrolman who used CSI to get off the street, only, like most of the characters here, he still carries a gun and uses it. On the real CSI, the one in Las Vegas, there is always a clear distinction between police and CSI; CSI are not cops, they are scientific investigators. In Miami, with the exception of Dr. Wood, everyone carries a gun and acts exactly like a cop. I have a feeling the writers don't really know what CSI stands for.
Rex Linn plays Detective Frank Tripp and is not really a permanent member of the cast (he doesn't appear in the show's splashy intro), though his part is getting bigger each season. He at least is supposed to be a cop, so I don't mind seeing him with a gun. Tripp is one of those right-wing, law and order types, who live in a black and white world. The writers seem to be mellowing him this season, smoothing off some of his rougher edges and it's helped, but not much. I still wince at most of the lines he reads.
As annoying as the cast of characters is, the real problem with this show is the writing. It sucks. No, really!
On the real CSI people sometimes confess at the end of the show, or they don't. Sometimes after gathering evidence throughout the hour the suspect is told something to the effect of, "You don't have to tell us you did it, the evidence tells us you did." On Miami, they rarely have any real evidence.
I remember one episode where a woman was questioned about a dead body on a boat. She was connected through phone records and when confronted said something like, "Well sure we called the guy. We are looking to buy a boat and we answered his boat ad in the paper. He was asking too much so we dropped it." Calleigh then mentions that they found lipstick on a glass on the boat and the color looks the same as the lipstick the woman is wearing. This is pretty thin stuff folks, the color seems to be the same? Does the woman tell the CSI to stuff it? Does she ask for a lawyer? Does she say there are thousands of different colors of lipstick on the market? No, she says, "OK, we went to the boat and my boyfriend killed the guy." Say what????
If this were an isolated incident I might, might I say, let it pass, but it isn't an isolated incident. Week after week the suspects confess at the drop of a hat. The writers have to have them do this because this group of CSIs is completely lacking in any skill at crime investigation and if people don't just admit they did it, no one is ever going to get caught.
All of this said, I never miss it because when the train begins to crash, I can't help but watch it!
One of the greats of comics died over the weekend, supposedly while sitting at his drawing board. For an artist, that's a pretty awesome way to leave this world, but awesome is a word that always described Alexander Toth.
