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Hot drama makes the scene in Miami
By Bill Keveney, USA TODAY
An average of 23.4 million watch CSI every Thursday on CBS.

 

SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — In May 2000, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation eked out the last spot on CBS' fall schedule. This May, its spinoff will cause shock waves if it doesn't make the prime-time lineup, even getting a cushy preview tonight on the parent show, which has become TV's top-rated drama. Two years, two very different receptions, almost too hard to believe.

"It was always the last thing all the way down the line: the last script in the door, the last pilot ordered, the last show picked up as a series," says Peter Sussman of Alliance Atlantis, which produces CSI with CBS and Jerry Bruckheimer. "Now, amazingly, we have the hottest show in the marketplace, (and) we're doing a spinoff. The whole story feels quite remarkable," he says.

If the idea of franchising a series that hasn't even finished its second season seems a bit fast, CSI's creative team sees it simply as natural progression — organic, if you will, in the holistic Hollywood vernacular.

"It's really an episode of CSI," explains executive producer Carol Mendelsohn. It's also a spinoff that's all but guaranteed a fall time slot.

By now, millions of viewers — an average 23.4 million every Thursday — are familiar with the night-shift forensics squad that uses high-tech tools and old-fashioned brainpower to discover and dissect crime clues from the casinos, subdivisions and desert spaces of a garish Las Vegas netherworld.

Tonight, the audience will travel with the Vegas CSIs to an equally fascinating if climatically contrasting city, Miami, to witness a cross-country investigation and meet the forensics team at the center of the unnamed spinoff, aka "CSI: Miami." Besides a shift from dry heat to tropical humidity — and won't that make for some fascinating bodily decomposition — the Miami team, which includes DavidCaruso (NYPD Blue) as the lead investigator, The West Wing's Emily Procter as a ballistics specialist and ER's Khandi Alexander as a coroner, will be subtly different. For example, the Florida investigators are actual police officers, sworn to stop crimes as well as examine them.

However, as a CSI franchise, the Miami crew will still follow the first show's popular puzzle-solving formula, in which investigators scour a crime scene for clues, using each lead to knock down suspects' explanations and get to the real story. The spinoff episode, which Mendelsohn promises is "action-packed," was put together by the core team that launched the initial series, which trails only NBC's Friends as the season's most-watched program. Mendelsohn and fellow executive producer Ann Donahue, both TV veterans, wrote the episode with CSI creator Anthony Zuiker, who just a few years ago was working as a Las Vegas tram operator. Movie director Danny Cannon (I Still Know What You Did Last Summer), who directed the original Vegas pilot, was at the helm of the Miami pilot-within-anepisode as well.

In tonight's show, the murder of a former Las Vegas chief of detectives and the disappearance of his wife and daughter lead investigators to Florida's Dade County in search of the killer. As CSI leader Gil Grissom (William Petersen) and the rest of the squad look for clues in Vegas, colleagues Catherine Willows (Marg Helgenberger) and Warrick Brown (Gary Dourdan) travel to Miami after a motorist reports seeing the young girl.

The CSI producers are excited and proud about the spinoff, with scenes shot on location in Miami, but they seem to be avoiding one of the pitfalls of TV success: the tendency of writers and producers to leave for other projects. They will remain with what is still a very young parent show, saying they enjoy what they describe as an unusually collaborative experience.

 

(Stephen Zito, who worked on CBS' JAG, has been hired to run the spinoff.) "My theater experience was a communal experience. ... At some point, everybody trusts everybody. It's hard to do in TV and movies, which by and large are broken up into different departments," says Petersen, who also is a supervising producer. "Our show is certainly different than most. I feel we do more communal work, riffing with each other, working with designers, prop people and everyone else."

As with the weekly crime puzzles that challenge the investigators, the CSI behind the- scenes brain trust works like a puzzle, too, with disparate pieces that seem to fit together serendipitously. The producers, who do everything from writing scripts to managing the series staff to financing the operation, include:

The rookie. Zuiker, 33, came up with the hit formula, tapping into what has become a public fascination with forensics and matching it with the bright and bleak Las Vegas night. Zuiker, who also is writing a movie, says he plans to stay for five seasons with CSI, where he has learned about editing and production as well as honed his writing.

The pros. Mendelsohn, 51, and Donahue, 47, are helping provide that education to Zuiker. The two women, who worked at the same Washington, D.C., law firm but didn't know each other until they got to Hollywood, run the day-to-day operation, with Mendelsohn the final authority.

Mendelsohn worked on Midnight Caller, The Trials of Rosie O'Neill and the very un- CSI Melrose Place. Donahue's credits include Murder One and High Incident, a series produced by Steven Spielberg. Although more women are in charge of series today, it's still unusual to see them heading a gritty crime drama, traditionally a male domain.

The movie mogul. Leave it to blockbuster king Bruckheimer (Black Hawk Down, Top Gun), 56, to decide to go into series TV and strike gold with his first prime-time drama. Bruckheimer, busy with movies, isn't as involved in daily operations, but he reads scripts and watches dailies and has used his big-screen acumen to help CSI hone its look and sound.

The actor. Petersen, 49, also a TV newcomer, isn't one of those stars who take a producer's credit simply for prestige or extra money, colleagues say. On the set, he says he represents the actors' perspective, sometimes even approving small wording changes in the script. "I'd be involved whether I was a producer or not," he says with a laugh, taking a break during an interrogation scene in a hotel not far from CSI's main set in this town about an hour northwest of downtown Los Angeles.

CSI regularly goes on shoots in Las Vegas, but Petersen has pushed hard for more location scenes, such as the hotel, and to make Grissom more fallible than the average TV hero — he is, at least personally. He hasn't been as successful in seeking to have the investigators fail occasionally.

The film director. Cannon, 34, who is from England, has helped create the series' distinctive, noirish look. He came in at the last minute to direct the pilot, at the request of friends Petersen and Bruckheimer, and ended up staying on with the show, venturing into writing and producing. Although some series are identified by one name, such as Bochco, Kelley or Sorkin, the CSI producers say everyone's involved. "I've never been on a show with so many writers," says Mendelsohn, who likes the idea of producer as mentor, a relationship she found working on Stephen J. Cannell shows but which is rare today. Former criminalist Liz Devine, who started as a technical adviser, is now a staff writer. With an episode on workplace electrocution, "Our gaffer was the technical consultant. That's what is unusual about CSI," Mendelsohn says.

The mix of backgrounds, which also includes younger writers who have to develop instant expertise on everything from chemical detection to bus suspensions, has served the show well.

When Zuiker wrote the pilot for CSI, he included flashback scenes, a no-no for veteran writers. "As an experienced writer, flashbacks mean you're not telling the story right. Thank

God he didn't know," Donahue says with a laugh, now that the flashbacks have become one of CSI's signatures. Mendelsohn and Donahue, who praise Zuiker's talent and ideas, also were able to crystallize the elements of the pilot that have become CSI's winning formula.

 

"You've got two real pros in Carol and Ann, with Anthony the new kid on the block with very fascinating ideas," Bruckheimer says. Because the show is a little different on screen, Petersen says, it shouldn't be surprising that the same would be the case behind the camera. "It's a wild, sort of karmic thing in which a whole diverse group got together. I don't think it's a model of how TV shows are (usually) produced," he says, not seeming to mind that at all.