Old Styles

hello everybody.
now don't get me wrong, i do love the show but lately i have been watching season 1 again, just to get the feel of what CSI NY was supposed to be like.. until evil president lady said to change it.

so i was wondering if anyone lese here misses the old gritty/blue filter that made it all dark etc, Dr Hawkes actucally being a M.E. other than a CSI, the old crime lab sets and of course, Det. Aiden Burn.

please dnt tell me i'm the only one who perfered CSI NY like those days rather than the new seasons.


..i posted this on IMDB too..

 

You're probably not the only person who misses it - in fact, I've heard people say they preferred it back then.

I despised the blue filter and the old set - too dark IMHO. I was glad when they stopped using the filter and created a set with better lighting. Though my reasons for that are more than just aesthetic...

I've actually really liked Sheldon in his role as a CSI and moreover I really like Sid as a character, and that wouldn't have happened if things had stayed as per S1 so I'm happy enough with that development.

I do agree with regards to Aiden though. I much prefer her to Lindsay. However, Vanessa Ferlito made the decision to leave because her interest was more in movies and theatre than doing TV.

 

I have to say, I do miss the more realistic slant that S1 had. The working class seem not to exist in New York anymore - almost every crime is against someone middle-class or above. It is quite obvious to me that CSI:NY's interpretation of crime in the Big Apple is a statistical impossibility...

 

Yes, I just posted in the spoiler thread that I miss those episodes from the mythical times. I fell in love with the show during Season 1 episodes (a Danny episode to be exact). I also miss some parts of the characters from Season 1. I liked that Danny better than this one, and I miss him, and I wonder if he threw away every single suit he owned and woke up one day and only wore t-shirts and jeans. I miss Hawkes and his witty remarks he made while he was an ME. Aiden, her leaving was a definite loss for the show. The blue filter disappeared I think when A Man A Mile aired.

I also miss the depth of the cases. Nowadays the cases are only about rich people, or stupid killers with the most crazy motives. I'm not saying that this isn't happening in reality, but I'm sure that it happens with a smaller frequency.

I keep wondering what happened to the smart killers. The ones that actually try to hide their tracks, wear gloves when they fire a gun or stab someone? I really want to see an episode with that kind of a killer. And the serial ones, they have been ignored. CSI:NY writers should have a sit down with the ones from Criminal Minds and get a few hints for a case.

However I don't miss Season 1 Stella, she was alright, but now she is more sympathetic. Sometimes when Stella needed to reach out and sympathize with the victim, or victim's family she didn't do it and that made her a tad less likeable. I definitely don't miss Season 1 Mac, although I fell the need from time to time to see that side of him, but I guess we are talking about two different people.

Flack is the one who was consistent, and I want to thank the right people for not messing with his character. The only things that changed with Flack are his hair (I like it a lot better now), the leather jacket was sucked in the CSI:NY black hole (which holds many many things), and his taste in ties became, let's just say inappropriate. In rest, Flack is 100% the Flack we saw in Blink. And that is a good sign. There is still hope.

If you ask me, I wouldn't want Season 1 back completely, but somethings that were there in those 2004-2005 years were perfect and needed no change.

 

It was the gritty and dark atmosphere that drew me to the show in the first place. (Well, that and Eddie Cahill's gorgeous face but that's for another thread. :lol I loved it. To me, it really brought out an intense and darker side of NYC as well as the CSI franchise. The other two series were much brighter in lighting and such, so it was also an interesting change for one of the CSI shows to be different in mood and atmosphere. I will say this though: the latter half of season one's lighting and such improved dramatically from the first half. If the show had stayed with it, it would have been terrific.

But no. TPTB just had to cave in to 'popular trends' and now the show is just another clone of so many mediocore crime shows out there and hardly depicts the real NYC. It's a damn shame. After the lighting and sets changed, it didn't really feel like NYC anymore. In fact, it was more like watching CSI: Random Big American City. The only times I'm reminded I'm watching CSI: NY is whenever Flack or Danny shows up on screen and speaks. Apart from that ... Yeah. I miss season one. Definitely. It had none of the cliched, contrived and shallow crap that the show's soaked with today. A damn shame.

 

Amen. Why write out my own post when Top's says it perfectly?

 

I think it's a shame that the change in set has become synonymous with the decline in quality of the storylines. I don't see why making the set lighter and brighter should have eradicated the intelligence of the criminal element of NYC. It just seems like lazy writing to me.

I'm actually wondering if this kind of rot setting in is synonymous with shows that started that year, because SGA started the same year as CSI:NY and suffers from many of the same afflictions in its writing - too much cliché and not enough intelligence...

 

I think I was watching "Summer in the City" with the commentary on and whoever was speaking basically said that the show was going to concentrate on Manhattan since Manhattan 'was' NYC. It seems to me they're concentrating on upper class Manhattan like that's the only part of the city that exists. NYC is all of it, all of the people and the boroughs, not just the rich and stupid of Manhattan's elite.

I miss some parts of S1--the blue filter from the first half of the season was fine as far as I was concerned, I don't have a preference for or against it. I felt like the first season was more gritty and real, as has been said. Only in NYC would you have a rat eat a bullet from a dead drug dealer's corpse--now it seems to be all about rich white people killing each other for stupid reasons. There was a time when you could sympathize with the characters--now I rarely feel that way.

I liked Hawkes as an ME, but I also like him as a CSI. I don't have a preference one way or the other with him. I miss Aiden and don't like Lindsay, but that's not to say that seasons 2-4 haven't had some good things that season 1 was lacking: namely Sid and Adam.

Some of the S1 episodes pulled in 18 or 19 million viewers, didn't they? Now we're lucky if the show breaks 13 million. Even if it's the second spin-off, that sucks.

 

i was under the impression that S1 had lower ratings, that is why they changed it...plus ratings for all tv shows have dropped significantly over the last couple of years.

When i started watching season 1...i found it too similar to Vegas and very formulaic. I couldn't stand Adien, she always had the same expression on her face...and was just a female version of Danny. It was by far my least fave CSI at that point, i only watched it for Gary Sinise. I do like some of the cases though...but overall i watch the later seasons way more. I didn't really get into New York until about half way through season 2. I just love the style of it, its more like a cop show, but still CSI. I have noticed they've changed the camera style, its more shaky now. I like the addition of the character story lines and of course Flacks hair.

And now New York is my fave show, over Vegas and Miami, plus seasons 2 and 3 are my most watched CSI seasons. I re-watch every eppy a lot.

 

I was a late comer to CSI and only started watching the series from midway of csiny season two! So for me when I bought the season 1 DVD it just a case of, 'So it used to be different,' and carried on watching it :lol:

That's right. I read or watched it somewhere but I have know idea..mayb the csi mag. Anyway, because of ratings that had to boost the colour and write more interesting story lines. Although I really miss those s1 episodes- when it was abot all areas of NY!

 

"Tanglewood" got something like 17.3 million viewers, "Til Death Do We Part" had 14 million, "Blood, Sweat and Tears" had 13.9 million, "Hush" had 14.1, "The Fall" had 13.5--"Tri-Borough" only had 12.2 million viewers, but that's pretty much typical ratings anymore. For all that people say NY almost got canceled in the first season, the ratings were nothing to sneeze at, even as everybody involved with the show was crying about how 'dark' it was and having to 'lighten' it up--which, by the way, happened midway through the first season. If you watch "Officer Blue", I believe, you won't see any dark filters. Maybe if the people involved in making the show hadn't talked about how much they screwed up, fans might not have echoed them so loudly. You wouldn't believe how many articles I scrolled past here on CSI Files looking for ratings info that said stuff about how the showrunners were disappointed with the show, it was too dark, blah blah--for all their whining, they still got decent ratings during that time. Funny, that.

If my calculations are correct, going back through the ratings reports I did for CSI Files, NY has had an average of 13.02 million viewers so far this season, and the highest rated episode so far was "One Wedding and a Funeral" with 14.49 million viewers. Yes, I know overall ratings are down, etc etc--but the first season didn't do badly. It didn't get CSI numbers, and a lot of people considered it a failure, but the fact is that the show wasn't shit in the first season. Everybody from Zuiker down was calling it too dark and depressing, but people were still tuning in. *shrug* Everybody says the show didn't do well in the first season, but then they say we can't trust the numbers to say how it did because they're wrong for whatever reason--so what are we trusting? Hearsay?

I'm not denying that overall numbers went up after S1, my point is that the first season wasn't shit.

Plus, of course, ratings don't automatically equal quality. I happen to think reality shows are total crap, but they get millions of viewers to tune in every week. And don't even get me started on some of these newer gameshows. *facepalm*

 

Good summary of my tl;dr post up there.

Personally, I think completely doing away with the sets and such from S1 got rid of some character. The juxtaposition of the dark, old building with pipes and whatnot next to the stark, bright, high-tech lab environment was striking. The tile and the gothic sort of arches in the morgue, for example, were really interesting--now don't they have random bright-blue or bright-pink lights down there and stuff? (Going from memory, I could be wrong.)

I think S2 could have been 'brighter' and such without moving to a high rise. They could, you know, put some more lights in or something, paint the walls--remodel the existing sets rather than tossing them to the wayside.

 

same for me!
when i saw ''MIA/NYC Non Stop'' I was so amazed at how there was finally a new style of CSI, a lot darker, grittier and bloodier.

for me personally I think 'Blink', 'Creatures Of The Night', 'American Dreamers' & 'Grand Master' are my all time favs. because they were just so catching so damn dark! i loved it.

the characters were more suited with eachother and with their roles. the whole DnA thing was great. Mac & Stella i think worked better together in S1 than in the other seasons. the old labs were perfect.

then it all changed, and for me it just dropped in style. i watched like the first 5 mins of 'Summer In The City' and really did not like it at all.


although it proberbly wont happen, i would love even one episode to be made the way it was done back in the first few episodes. I think it would be cool if they even did a back story episode on maybe 9/11, and showing Mac losing Claire, and the team just working through what signifigantly changed NY, from their labs, protocols, analysis, evidence programs etc.
who would like that too?