CSI: a beginner's guide

[Brian Damage]

This week the three CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) series will be linked in a trilogy of episodes. CSI: Las Vegas's Laurence Fishburne stars as Dr Raymond Langston, who travels to Miami and New York to hook up with the stars of the two spin-offs. So CSI New York's Detective Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) and Miami's Lieutenant Horatio Caine (David Caruso) will be on hand to help solve a series of interlinked crimes.

It will be a unique chance for CSI novices to see the juxtaposition of the three CSI leads. There's the professorial Langston, Taylor, whose fierce devotion to duty is fuelled by the loss of his wife in 9/11, and Caine, whose habit of hitching his sunglasses and delivering deadpan one-liners has attracted devotion and derision in equal measure.

The secret to watching CSI is to take it for what it is and enjoy. Hill Street Blues it ain't. The main characters have intriguing, turbulent back stories and occasional departmental romances blossom between the photogenic investigators, but it's the whodunnit plotlines that grip the attention. These are routinely outlandish – a Hollywood star murdered while partying with groupies, a mystery involving the mass suicide of a UFO cult, a half- naked woman found buried in the desert with her hair and right hand missing. The Wire it ain't either. There's no more attempt to depict the sociology of crime than in a Cluedo set. And, happily for the newcomer, episodes are mostly self-contained, requiring little previous knowledge of character or situation. You can leap straight in. No need to know the minor characters.

What CSI does so well is to combine the old-school values of dedicated crimefighting with a new school of state of the art televisual language, including reconstructions and CGI. Those with a weak stomach be warned, there are grisly scenes on the mortuary slab and graphic anatomical detail, but it's surprising how aesthetically pleasing an internal organ impacted by a bullet can be on screen. CSI is TV eye-candy at its finest, occasionally bordering on avant garde (as in the episode of CSI: Las Vegas in which a group of corpses strike up a conversation in a morgue).

Look out for the real-life city backdrops used to phantasmic effect – New York is as a Gotham-like, gritty dystopia, Miami a high-end, Versace-styled beach paradise fatally riven by vice, Vegas a mirage of glamour beneath which moral squalor constantly lurks. As for the interior scenes, you do wonder if they are on a lightbulb economy drive and the initial temptation might be to reach for the brightness control. But don't be fazed – this is key to the atmosphere, if not exactly realistic. Finally, check the admirably adventurous soundtrack. Radiohead, Mogwai, Rammstein and Antony & The Johnsons have all featured, adding a sombre, musically erudite, high gloss to what is, in essence, hi-tech Miss Marple.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-rad...s-guide-to-csi