I just finished reading a book about serial killers, and they had an entry for CSI. Here it is:
Since it's premiere in the fall of 2000, the CBS TV Series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has become a bona fide cultural phenomenon. It has not only spawned two hit spin-offs - CSI: Miami and CSI: New York - but has also produced powerful reverberations in the real world of academics and law. Enrollment at Baylor University's forensic science program, for example, has increased tenfold since the show went on the air. Dozens of other colleges have created forensic science majors to meet the growing demands of young CSI-wannabes.
The impact of the show has also become evident in the courtroom - so much so that prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges now speak of the "CSI effect." Jurors who used to fall asleep when lawyers began talking about scientific evidence now look forward to the testimony of DNA technicians and other forensic specialists. While some legal experts applaud the program for creating a more scientifically informed jury pool, others criticize it for raising unrealistic expectations. After all, not every crime can be proved with hard scientific evidence. And in the real world, even DNA findings can be unreliable, particularly since - unlike Gil Grissom and his glamorous crew - actual human technicians have been known to make errors.
Grissom, the lead character in the original entry in the CSI franchise is played by William Petersen. This seems particularly apt, since Petersen started his film career matching wits with Hannibal Lector in Michael Mann's 1986 Manhunter, the first cinematic version of Thomas Harris's Red Dragon. In CSI, to, Petersen comes up against an assortment of highly creative serial killers: a sex murderer known as the "Blue Paint Killer," whose coed victims are all found with paint stains on their hands; a sadist called the "Strip Strangler", who deliberately plants misleading evidence; a madman who compulsively re-creates his father's murder (which he witnessed as a boy) by shooting victims in the bathtub; a maniac who snares married couples looking for sexual kicks, then kills the husband after forcing him to slit the wife's throat; and others.
Of course, for all its veneer of scientific hypersophistication, CSI is, at heart, a very traditional show. Strip away Gil Grissom's state-of-the-art gadgetry - the gas spectrometers and fiber-optic fluorometers, the electromagnetic dusting kits and ultraviolet flashlights - and you're left with a Las Vegas version of Sherlock Holmes: a solitary eccentric, his head stuffed with esoteric information, who solves crimes through close observation and a remarkable ability to draw clever deductions from the smallest scraps of physical evidence. In the end, the real message of the show seems to be that while technology is providing police with ever more useful tools, what ultimately counts when it comes to tracking down serial killers and other criminals is good old-fashioned detective work.
From: The A-Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers by Harold Schechter and David Everitt.
