Ace deftly rips on Caruso (see here, here, and here), though he fails to mention the one thing that drives me nuts: The corny delivery.
For example this week, the great Horatio Caine is interrogating a suspect, and fixes him with that criminal-intimidating baby blue gaze and says:
“That . . . [mind-numbingly dramatic Caruso pause] . . .
is what . . . [mind-numbingly dramatic Caruso pause] . . .
I do.”
But ripping on Caruso isn’t the point. Ace says:
I’m not sure why the other two CSI shows so completely fail to capture the giddily-macabre magic of the original.
It’s partly Caruso, but not all — Caruso doesn’t explain CSI:NY. The question isn’t why aren’t the spinoffs nearly as good as the original; the question is why is the original so much better than the spinoffs.
So what are the differences between them?
The original is an ensemble show. It does not, and never has, revolved around any one character or characters. The original is all about the plot.
The spinoffs are “star” shows (Caruso for CSI: Miami and Sinise for CSI: New York, which conceptually is a spinoff of CSI: Miami, and not the original show). Sure, we get plots every episode, but we also get a lot of extraneous, boring, irrelevant crap about the characters — who cares about Delko’s latest trauma, and please tell me they’re killing off that useless character.
Sure, we get personal information about the characters on the original, but rarely in more than little flashes, and the personal information is always presented within the context of the crime. We just had Keppler, a guest character while Grissom was away for a few weeks, and his personal story was the crime. That’s how you do it.
We care about the characters on the original because we know so little about their private lives. We get little glimpses here and there, just enough to make them intriguing.
For example, CSI: New York wasted our time, probably over two hours of it total across several episodes, on a meaningless, boring relationship between Sinise and that Brit coroner — and none of it had anything to do with the crime or the plot. On the original, we suspect Grissom and Sidle are living together — but we don’t know. There has been no verbal or visual acknoledgment. The writers have held informtion back, just giving us enough to suspect, and keeping the focus of the show on solving the crime.
The only intriguing character on CSI: Miami is Calleigh Duquesne — only because we know so very little about her. Delko has five personal traumas per season. Speedle’s replacement character is a moron who screws something up at least six times per season. And the nicest thing that can be said for Alexx Woods is that she’s mostly stopped that idiotic talking to the corpse thing; otherwise, she’s got that deer in the headlights expression on her face, no matter what her line is. If it weren’t for Calleigh Duquesne, I wouldn’t bother to watch the show at all. Ever.
The characters on CSI: New York aren’t much better. Therein lies the problem: If you’re going to create a character-driven show, the characters have to be interesting. And the characters aren’t.
I can only deduce that the writers of the spinoffs are idiots. They had a formula, and they rejected it. They instead created first a spinoff about Caruso, and second, a spinoff about Sinise. The only thing that makes CSI: New York a better show than CSI: Miami is that Sinise isn’t the hammy hack excuse for an actor Caruso is.
