Post by DNA on Feb 13, 2006 9:39:30 GMT -5
Chicago Tribune
Murder, they wrote
Police TV shows are all the rage, and here's why
By Sid Smith Tribune arts critic Published February 12, 2006[/i]
"Just look at the shelves of any bookstore in any airport, and you see how much people love crime and mysteries, how much they love solving puzzles," notes Jan Nash, an executive producer on the CBS hit "Without a Trace."
"There's something about all the crime shows on TV that depict the police and other people in a search for the truth," she adds. "They let you believe that, in a world where bad things happen, justice will prevail."
"It's a measure of how complicated the world has gotten since 9/11, when thousands were wiped out," says novelist Michael Connelly, author of the Harry Bosch novels and the recent best seller "The Lincoln Lawyer." "Just because statistics tell us that violent crime is actually down, that doesn't mean that people aren't scared."
Prime-time programming is certainly scary. In otherwise peaceful Wilmington, Del., an 11-year-old is kidnapped in a park on a break from soccer practice. At a swank Miami private club, a young man is hacked to death with an ice pick, the bloody letter "L" carved into the skin of his chest. Members of a racist militia in Indianapolis are abducting African-American men, torturing them and then stringing them up until they bleed to death.
These are only a few highlights of a report that logged events which occurred during viewing of the bulk of crime and legal procedurals airing on the major networks during a single week in January: all the "CSI" and "Law & Order" entries, along with "Criminal Minds," "Without a Trace," "Numb3rs," "Close to Home," "In Justice," "Cold Case" and "NCIS."
My unscientific count came to four murders, three abductions, one serial hate-crime streak and a poisoning by LSD. Thanks to "Cold Case," a 1994 suicide got reclassified as a homicide.
Murder, they wrote. And keep on writing. And the viewing public stays tuned. The original "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" has been the No.1 show in Nielsen ratings 12 weeks out of the season so far, followed closely by the increasingly popular "Without a Trace" and regularly accompanied in the top 20 by the Miami and New York "CSI" spinoffs, "NCIS," "Cold Case," "Criminal Minds," and the "Criminal Intent" and "SVU" versions of "Law & Order."
For the latest complete week of ratings available, ending Feb. 5, skewered by the Super Bowl, whose offerings snagged the top three spots, "CSI" managed to come in at No. 6, followed by "Without a Trace" at No. 8, "CSI: Miami" at No. 9, "CSI: NY" at No. 11, "Criminal Minds" at No. 16, "Numb3rs" in a tie at No. 17, "NCIS" in a tie at No. 19, followed by a tie of "Bones" and "Close to Home." Nearly half of the top 20 were procedurals.
Like many observers, William Petersen, the veteran Chicago stage actor whose lead role in the original "CSI" has won him TV superstardom, cites the trial of O.J. Simpson.
`O.J. hit'
"People were beginning to get interested in forensics, and then O.J. hit for a year, and everybody got swept up in it," he argues. "The more they watched, they got the feeling these scientists and witnesses were speaking this DNA language they didn't get, a whole vernacular they didn't understand. When he was found not guilty, they were confused. And they wanted more information."
But "the O.J. factor" might well win a not guilty verdict. The "Law & Order" franchise, while not as steeped in forensic detail as the "CSI" trio, nevertheless deals with criminal investigation and justice. "People forget," notes Dick Wolf, executive producer of the "Law & Order" lineup, "that `Law & Order' goes back to 1990. We were around a lot earlier than O.J."
Indeed, as early as 1990, with the arrival of the Kay Scarpetta novels of Patricia Cornwell, set in a Richmond, Va., coroner's office, forensic fascination found its way into fiction.
The "CSI" forensic emphasis has helped make microscopic, anatomical photography and geeky, scientific lingo omnipresent on TV, part of what Cornwell refers to as a `Star Trekian' age. But, Petersen, who was a producer and artistic director here as well as an actor, says that, ironically, the first "CSI" came about as something original, unlike any other TV crime show to date. Now widely imitated, it began as one of a kind.
"People at the network wanted nothing to do with a TV show about fingerprint dusters," Petersen says. "But this kid named Anthony Zuiker, who was running the tram at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, had a friend in CSI-type investigations in Las Vegas, and he came up with this idea."
Little interest
Petersen had been talking with CBS for some time about a possible series, but every script he was sent seemed cut from the same cookie-cutter mold, formulaic echoes of hits already on TV. "That's how television works, you find something that hits and you mass produce it," Petersen says. "I understand that. I just didn't want to do it myself."
Instead, as Petersen sees it, "CSI" broke with TV crime in a number of ways. "Zuiker had stumbled onto this `Rashomon'-like idea to show the crime scene from different perspectives. We met with these real CSI guys, and they were kids just out of college, who could literally spend a week studying a car in detail and eventually find only a partial fingerprint. We realized if we could get their excitement of that discovery across, it would be sensational."
Timing helped. "The culture had just been through this postmodern period of green tea and Buddhism, with everybody asking the big questions," Petersen believes. "People were lost. These guys had answers. You see a close-up of a broken toenail inside a shoe, and that becomes an important clue. Instead of the big things, it's about the littlest things. And they become the most important things. It's a new way of perceiving, and I think that spiritual aspect of the show is why people keep watching."
`No stakes are higher'
Wolf has another view. "There have been three staples of TV drama for the last 60 years, the western, the medical show and the crime drama," Wolf says. "The western has disappeared. In TV drama, the higher the stakes, the more dramatic, and no stakes are higher than life or death." In explaining the success of "Law & Order," he says, "sending people to prison is no joke, and how people do that is interesting."
He refuses to see "CSI" or even "Law & Order" as anything but new clothing on an old dress form. "TV is not about ideas," Wolf says bluntly. "It's about execution. And writing and casting. That's why most of TV drama's biggest stars have been character actors, not romantic leads. Peter Falk. Telly Savalas. Angela Lansbury. They can inhabit a role for years, and that's the TV challenge. I like to say a successful movie lasts 110 minutes. A successful TV series lasts 110 hours."
"I think the public has always been fascinated by crime," says Mark Gordon, the enterprising producer behind "Criminal Minds" and "Grey's Anatomy," the ABC medical soap opera many see as a crime-streak antidote. "Crime in American fiction dates from the '20s, '30s and '40s in potboiler novels and film noir, not to mention tabloid journalism. In the past few years, TV just figured out a way to capitalize on that in a different manner."
Lately, others raise more serious issues, in particular questioning the growing public assumption that "CSI" is pure reality, not part scientific fantasy.
"Lawyers ask would-be jurors whether they watch the shows and then change strategies depending on the answers," Linda Deutsch recently wrote in a story for the Associated Press.
"Which side benefits the most -- prosecutors or defense attorneys -- is debatable. While `Law & Order' glamorizes prosecutors, `CSI' can set standards for the infallibility of forensic evidence that prosecutors can't often meet -- a science-solves-all formula that millions of viewers may bring to jury service. The justice system is now facing what legal experts call, `the CSI effect,' a TV-bred demand by jurors for high-tech, indisputable forensic evidence before they will convict."
That bothers novelist Cornwell tremendously. "We have a really serious problem on our hands, and TV has made it so much worse. `CSI' is fun to watch and entertaining.
"But, more and more, jury members believe that police and scientists work every case with this huge bag of tricks, and if they don't, the victim and jurors feel the case has not been adequately investigated."
"Unfortunately, for many lawyers, judges and prosecutors, people expect to see `CSI' in the courtroom," Petersen agrees. "They can't always provide that. Not every case is all about DNA."
Despite that heady concern and this season's ratings bonanza for crime shows, there are signs the inevitable shift in the wind is stirring. After resting at the top of the heap all fall, "CSI" actually lost the No. 1 ratings spot in recent weeks to the return of "American Idol." Tassler also says the success of the crime series helps finance more adventurous programming, such as pilots planned this fall about a young man who falls for a woman who's a member of a cult, and another about the professional and private lives of a community of government agents
Focus on characters
Wolf is monkeying with his formula with his latest, "Conviction," premiering in March on NBC and set in a district attorney's office. But the focus is on the regular characters, not the procedure, and we learn all about the personal lives and career worries of these twentysomething attorneys on the job.
"`Trial By Jury' skewed too old in its audience last season, frankly, and we'd spent $2 million on the sets," Wolf noted wryly. "Younger audiences are showing an interest in ensemble dramas, where you learn a lot about the characters, as evidenced in `Grey's Anatomy,' `House,' `My Name Is Earl' and `The Office.' I wanted a show about young prosecutors. It's not so much an admission as a reality check."
"I honestly don't try to do shows based on what I think the public wants, but what I like," says Gordon. "I was fascinated by the pitch that came to us with `Criminal Minds,' and I loved the stories and characters in `Grey's Anatomy.' The market place will expand for good material. I've never done a spinoff, but it's hard to resist franchising a successful idea. CBS is in the business of pleasing its viewers, and if the public wants to see seven procedurals, why not provide them?"
"Crime is a constantly renewable resource," says Wolf. "Every day people continue to kill each other in bizarre and unfathomable ways. Even if murder goes down by double digits, there are still thousands of people killed in this country every year and killers who warrant prosecution."
"It's part of our evolutionary wiring, evidence of it found in our oldest skeletal remains," Cornwell says.
"We were inflicting violence on each other from the beginning. We're all wired for self-defense. Because, deep in our genes, we know we're all going to die."
----------
sismith@tribune.com
Murder, they wrote
Police TV shows are all the rage, and here's why
By Sid Smith Tribune arts critic Published February 12, 2006[/i]
"Just look at the shelves of any bookstore in any airport, and you see how much people love crime and mysteries, how much they love solving puzzles," notes Jan Nash, an executive producer on the CBS hit "Without a Trace."
"There's something about all the crime shows on TV that depict the police and other people in a search for the truth," she adds. "They let you believe that, in a world where bad things happen, justice will prevail."
"It's a measure of how complicated the world has gotten since 9/11, when thousands were wiped out," says novelist Michael Connelly, author of the Harry Bosch novels and the recent best seller "The Lincoln Lawyer." "Just because statistics tell us that violent crime is actually down, that doesn't mean that people aren't scared."
Prime-time programming is certainly scary. In otherwise peaceful Wilmington, Del., an 11-year-old is kidnapped in a park on a break from soccer practice. At a swank Miami private club, a young man is hacked to death with an ice pick, the bloody letter "L" carved into the skin of his chest. Members of a racist militia in Indianapolis are abducting African-American men, torturing them and then stringing them up until they bleed to death.
These are only a few highlights of a report that logged events which occurred during viewing of the bulk of crime and legal procedurals airing on the major networks during a single week in January: all the "CSI" and "Law & Order" entries, along with "Criminal Minds," "Without a Trace," "Numb3rs," "Close to Home," "In Justice," "Cold Case" and "NCIS."
My unscientific count came to four murders, three abductions, one serial hate-crime streak and a poisoning by LSD. Thanks to "Cold Case," a 1994 suicide got reclassified as a homicide.
Murder, they wrote. And keep on writing. And the viewing public stays tuned. The original "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" has been the No.1 show in Nielsen ratings 12 weeks out of the season so far, followed closely by the increasingly popular "Without a Trace" and regularly accompanied in the top 20 by the Miami and New York "CSI" spinoffs, "NCIS," "Cold Case," "Criminal Minds," and the "Criminal Intent" and "SVU" versions of "Law & Order."
For the latest complete week of ratings available, ending Feb. 5, skewered by the Super Bowl, whose offerings snagged the top three spots, "CSI" managed to come in at No. 6, followed by "Without a Trace" at No. 8, "CSI: Miami" at No. 9, "CSI: NY" at No. 11, "Criminal Minds" at No. 16, "Numb3rs" in a tie at No. 17, "NCIS" in a tie at No. 19, followed by a tie of "Bones" and "Close to Home." Nearly half of the top 20 were procedurals.
Like many observers, William Petersen, the veteran Chicago stage actor whose lead role in the original "CSI" has won him TV superstardom, cites the trial of O.J. Simpson.
`O.J. hit'
"People were beginning to get interested in forensics, and then O.J. hit for a year, and everybody got swept up in it," he argues. "The more they watched, they got the feeling these scientists and witnesses were speaking this DNA language they didn't get, a whole vernacular they didn't understand. When he was found not guilty, they were confused. And they wanted more information."
But "the O.J. factor" might well win a not guilty verdict. The "Law & Order" franchise, while not as steeped in forensic detail as the "CSI" trio, nevertheless deals with criminal investigation and justice. "People forget," notes Dick Wolf, executive producer of the "Law & Order" lineup, "that `Law & Order' goes back to 1990. We were around a lot earlier than O.J."
Indeed, as early as 1990, with the arrival of the Kay Scarpetta novels of Patricia Cornwell, set in a Richmond, Va., coroner's office, forensic fascination found its way into fiction.
The "CSI" forensic emphasis has helped make microscopic, anatomical photography and geeky, scientific lingo omnipresent on TV, part of what Cornwell refers to as a `Star Trekian' age. But, Petersen, who was a producer and artistic director here as well as an actor, says that, ironically, the first "CSI" came about as something original, unlike any other TV crime show to date. Now widely imitated, it began as one of a kind.
"People at the network wanted nothing to do with a TV show about fingerprint dusters," Petersen says. "But this kid named Anthony Zuiker, who was running the tram at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, had a friend in CSI-type investigations in Las Vegas, and he came up with this idea."
Little interest
Petersen had been talking with CBS for some time about a possible series, but every script he was sent seemed cut from the same cookie-cutter mold, formulaic echoes of hits already on TV. "That's how television works, you find something that hits and you mass produce it," Petersen says. "I understand that. I just didn't want to do it myself."
Instead, as Petersen sees it, "CSI" broke with TV crime in a number of ways. "Zuiker had stumbled onto this `Rashomon'-like idea to show the crime scene from different perspectives. We met with these real CSI guys, and they were kids just out of college, who could literally spend a week studying a car in detail and eventually find only a partial fingerprint. We realized if we could get their excitement of that discovery across, it would be sensational."
Timing helped. "The culture had just been through this postmodern period of green tea and Buddhism, with everybody asking the big questions," Petersen believes. "People were lost. These guys had answers. You see a close-up of a broken toenail inside a shoe, and that becomes an important clue. Instead of the big things, it's about the littlest things. And they become the most important things. It's a new way of perceiving, and I think that spiritual aspect of the show is why people keep watching."
`No stakes are higher'
Wolf has another view. "There have been three staples of TV drama for the last 60 years, the western, the medical show and the crime drama," Wolf says. "The western has disappeared. In TV drama, the higher the stakes, the more dramatic, and no stakes are higher than life or death." In explaining the success of "Law & Order," he says, "sending people to prison is no joke, and how people do that is interesting."
He refuses to see "CSI" or even "Law & Order" as anything but new clothing on an old dress form. "TV is not about ideas," Wolf says bluntly. "It's about execution. And writing and casting. That's why most of TV drama's biggest stars have been character actors, not romantic leads. Peter Falk. Telly Savalas. Angela Lansbury. They can inhabit a role for years, and that's the TV challenge. I like to say a successful movie lasts 110 minutes. A successful TV series lasts 110 hours."
"I think the public has always been fascinated by crime," says Mark Gordon, the enterprising producer behind "Criminal Minds" and "Grey's Anatomy," the ABC medical soap opera many see as a crime-streak antidote. "Crime in American fiction dates from the '20s, '30s and '40s in potboiler novels and film noir, not to mention tabloid journalism. In the past few years, TV just figured out a way to capitalize on that in a different manner."
Lately, others raise more serious issues, in particular questioning the growing public assumption that "CSI" is pure reality, not part scientific fantasy.
"Lawyers ask would-be jurors whether they watch the shows and then change strategies depending on the answers," Linda Deutsch recently wrote in a story for the Associated Press.
"Which side benefits the most -- prosecutors or defense attorneys -- is debatable. While `Law & Order' glamorizes prosecutors, `CSI' can set standards for the infallibility of forensic evidence that prosecutors can't often meet -- a science-solves-all formula that millions of viewers may bring to jury service. The justice system is now facing what legal experts call, `the CSI effect,' a TV-bred demand by jurors for high-tech, indisputable forensic evidence before they will convict."
That bothers novelist Cornwell tremendously. "We have a really serious problem on our hands, and TV has made it so much worse. `CSI' is fun to watch and entertaining.
"But, more and more, jury members believe that police and scientists work every case with this huge bag of tricks, and if they don't, the victim and jurors feel the case has not been adequately investigated."
"Unfortunately, for many lawyers, judges and prosecutors, people expect to see `CSI' in the courtroom," Petersen agrees. "They can't always provide that. Not every case is all about DNA."
Despite that heady concern and this season's ratings bonanza for crime shows, there are signs the inevitable shift in the wind is stirring. After resting at the top of the heap all fall, "CSI" actually lost the No. 1 ratings spot in recent weeks to the return of "American Idol." Tassler also says the success of the crime series helps finance more adventurous programming, such as pilots planned this fall about a young man who falls for a woman who's a member of a cult, and another about the professional and private lives of a community of government agents
Focus on characters
Wolf is monkeying with his formula with his latest, "Conviction," premiering in March on NBC and set in a district attorney's office. But the focus is on the regular characters, not the procedure, and we learn all about the personal lives and career worries of these twentysomething attorneys on the job.
"`Trial By Jury' skewed too old in its audience last season, frankly, and we'd spent $2 million on the sets," Wolf noted wryly. "Younger audiences are showing an interest in ensemble dramas, where you learn a lot about the characters, as evidenced in `Grey's Anatomy,' `House,' `My Name Is Earl' and `The Office.' I wanted a show about young prosecutors. It's not so much an admission as a reality check."
"I honestly don't try to do shows based on what I think the public wants, but what I like," says Gordon. "I was fascinated by the pitch that came to us with `Criminal Minds,' and I loved the stories and characters in `Grey's Anatomy.' The market place will expand for good material. I've never done a spinoff, but it's hard to resist franchising a successful idea. CBS is in the business of pleasing its viewers, and if the public wants to see seven procedurals, why not provide them?"
"Crime is a constantly renewable resource," says Wolf. "Every day people continue to kill each other in bizarre and unfathomable ways. Even if murder goes down by double digits, there are still thousands of people killed in this country every year and killers who warrant prosecution."
"It's part of our evolutionary wiring, evidence of it found in our oldest skeletal remains," Cornwell says.
"We were inflicting violence on each other from the beginning. We're all wired for self-defense. Because, deep in our genes, we know we're all going to die."
----------
sismith@tribune.com
