I watched CSI: Old School for the first time last night in quite a while, and found myself rather perplexed by my lack of enjoyment. I mean, the reason I stopped watching in the first place wasn't that I didn't like CSI anymore--it was that I simply liked Scrubs and Grey's Anatomy more. I used to look forward to CSI every week--the grim mysteries, the joyfully morbid tone, the bountiful schadenfreude...it was completely my cup of tea. The show hasn't changed at all since I stopped watching--same old gory crime scenes, same old morbid quips, same old annoying Catherine. It hasn't, like some other long-in-the-tooth dramas, gone perceptibly downhill until it's a pale shadow of its old self. It's just...not that interesting to me anymore. It's gone stale.
Why has the bloom faded? Is it possible that without any obvious decline in quality, the show has simply become boring? Repetitive? Do most dramas, even procedurals, have an expiration date, regardless of maintained quality? I've always felt sorry for the poor folks in England, with their abbreviated series format, but maybe they have the right idea. Keeping it fresh is much more interesting.
P.S. What the hell did they do to Greg?
Friday, March 30, 2007
CSI: Autopsy of a Show
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2 comments:
Liz, this is an easy answer. Look at the cast picture. Now look at the cast picture from the pilot. Yeaaaah.
CSI is afraid to change. At all. Yeah, they promoted Greg and got William Peterson and Jorja Fox together (p.s. eww), but none of those characters have really developed. The core of the show is totally, well, stale.
Even procedurals have to be brave sometimes and mess with a working formula. My suggestion: kill Grissom, Katherine, and George Eads (the actor _and_ the character). Replace with: Richard Lewis (love to see him in a drama), Tatum O'Neal, and, um, Mos Def.
When I was writing this post I was thinking how amazing it is that the whole cast was still together (unlike ER, for example, which has gone way too far in the other direction). I would totally watch a show with Richard Lewis! And I would happily kill Catherine with my bare hands, if I could just get them inside my TV screen. If anyone deserves to be slapped to death, it's her.
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