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I Don’t Like CSI

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For some reason I’ve become addicted to CSI in its various forms. This troubles me, because I really, really don’t like CSI. It’s worse than the time last year when I found myself watching Everybody Loves Raymond and thinking about how, even though it was plenty bad and nearly unwatchable, it had some good points. As far as I can tell, none of the CSIs have any good points, and unlike ELR they’re on all the time. This is problematic.

What I hate most is the authoritarianism. The victim, perpetrator, or both are almost always engaging in some kind of deviant (for the 1950s) sexual behavior that gets one of them killed. I feel like I’m watching a 1980s horror film, just for the regularity with which deviance is punished by horrible events. Unspoken is that these kinds of things, for the most part, don’t happen to normal people. The CSI teams, or the delivery systems for punishment, make things even worse. Compare the behavior of Caruso’s Horatio Caine with either the detectives on Law and Order or NYPD Blue. Briscoe and company, while certainly willing to break procedure (this is why L&O has a second half) try to be polite and somewhat respectful even of their suspects. The interrogations are carried out as if there are human beings on either side of the table, and some effort is made to humanize the killers. On NYPD Blue, Sipowicz is violent and angry, but there remains an underlying sense of respect, as if he understood that the interrogation was, on some level, a game, and that what he was doing was playing a part. He beat suspects but he didn’t judge them, perhaps because he was himself so deeply flawed.

This kind of relationship is absent from CSI. Suspects and witnesses are less than human, as they’ve already demonstrated through their deviant behavior. Caine makes no apology for inconveniencing people, taking their stuff, or launching false accusations. Petersen’s Grissom is a little bit better (Petersen is so much less annoying than Caruso), but almost every interrogation is still viewed primarily as an opportunity for arrogance and contempt. Instead of wheedling confessions out of suspects through psychological torment, as D’onofrio’s Goren does and which at least grants the suspect some inner depth, cases in CSI are almost always resolved through deux ex machina forensic finding, meaning that even those suspects that resist interrogation are captured in the end.

I don’t care for it. No, I don’t like it one bit. Unfortunately, because having a CSI on in the background takes up less brainpower than a L&O permutation, I seem to be watching, at least casually, all the time. I was truly horrified the first time I said to myself “Oh, wait, I’ve seen this CSI:Miami”…

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