This solo exit was a group effort.
When it was time for Jorja Fox (Sara Sidle) to leave CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, executive producers Carol Mendelsohn and Naren Shankar worked closely with the writers and the actress herself. "We wanted her exit to be dignified and appropriate and satisfying both for the actress, for the character, and always for the fans, and I think we accomplished that," Mendelsohn explained to the official UK website. "And it was really sad."
"Caring so much about Sara Sidle and the character that she created, it was important to do it right and do it with as much grace as possible," William Petersen (Gil Grissom) said. He and the rest of the group discussed how they wanted her to leave the show. "We were sitting and talking to Billy and Jorja about it, and Jorja told this story about a friend of hers who had been in a relationship with a guy and she had just left him a note and said, 'I can't deal with it anymore. I have to leave,'" Shankar explained. Fox felt that Sara would do something similar. "It felt like that would be the way that she would let it go," Shankar continued, "and it really turned out beautifully, I thought."
Castmate George Eads (Nick Stokes) liked Sara's final episode, "Goodbye and Good Luck", and felt that Fox wanted her exit to be special. However, there wasn't much time for the other characters to say farewell. "I read the script and I said, 'Boy, we're not long on goodbyes around here,'" Eads explained. "I almost wanted to have a scene where Nick tells her how much he cares about her and all that stuff, but that's just not really the way CSI is set up, I guess. So in the end, in keeping with our style, I think it was appropriate that she just go."
Fox discussed her character's relationship with Grissom. "For a show that's not really about romance at all--it's almost the antithesis of what our show's about--that such a huge love story could exist in and out of that is something that was extraordinarily sort of exciting and amazing to get to play," she explained, adding that it was probably her favorite part of the show. She and Petersen played up the feelings between the two characters for several episodes in the first season before the writers told them they had decided to put the romance on the shelf for the time being.
"I think in their inherent wisdom they decided that to really break that story too quickly or too fast might paint these two characters into a corner forever, like it would be very difficult to spin them out of that storyline," Fox said. "So it was, I think, a conscious thing on their part to save it." The actress added that, when the writers "decided to bring it out of the dusty closet of CSI story ideas, it was a complete surprise and shock to Billy and myself."
The original video is from the official UK website for CSI (registration required).
