Entertainment Weekly – 2000
Entertainment Weekly, November 2000
(Photos from article in The Gallery)
Quincy certainly never had it this good. William Petersen and Marg Helgenberger, the stars of CBS’ new autopsy drama, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation-one of the few fledging hits of the fall season- are doing location shoots in many-splendored Las Vegas. Right now, Helgenberger’s sitting stageside in a topless joint, where her character, the fetching and brainy Catherine Willows, is investigating the rape of one of the club’s resident rump-shakers. Later on, Petersen (who plays forensic genius Gil Grissom) negotiates some curves of his own-shooting a scene on the heart-stopping roller coaster at the New York- New York Hotel & Casino
Strippers and roller coasters? No wonder that Fugitive dude is currently eating CSI’s fingerprint dust. That’s right: When CSI debuted on Oct. 6, it immediately hit the Nielsen jackpot. Attracting a staggering 17.3 million viewers, it won its 9 p.m. timeslot, outrated its highly touted , historically titled lead-in, The Fugitive, and quickly became the highest-ranked new drama of the season. (Need more perspective? The episode even outdrew The West Wing’s fall 1999 bow by a cool half-million viewers.) Numbers like those shocked everyone associated with the series. Well, almost everyone. “Don’t ask me why,” says Helgenberger, who won a 1990 supporting actress Emmy for China Beach and popped up in last year’s Erin Brockovich. “I just believed in the show. I knew it was innovative and different and provocative.”
She’s got a point. Take the pilot’s case of the poisonous prostitutes, which was based on a real-life scam perpetrated by a group of Vegas hookers who smeared their breasts with a powerful sedative in order to knock out -and then rip off-their unsuspecting johns. Another subplot saw a suspect collared thanks to some telltale striations on a dislodged toenail. And then there are the maggots. “We have an episode coming up where we find a guy dead, laying in the desert, and he’s been all bleached-everything’s been sucked out of him by the sun and the weather,” says Petersen, star of the 1986 film Manhunter and currently in The Contender. “But you can analyze the maggots living inside him, and they’ll retain whatever he had in his system. It’s fascinating-they’re like refrigerators.”
Says creator-coexecutive producer Anthony Zuiker: “The hero [of the show] is the evidence. A toenail, a hair follicle, a teardrop, those kinds of things. It’s very cool.” Adds Petersen: “The police chase the lie, the crime-scene analysts chase the truth. Ultimately, these are the guys who are going to give closure to the world. It’s not going to be the homicide guys; they’re going to be dinosaurs.”
Zuiker drew his inspiration for CSI from such basic-cable reality-TV potboilers as Discovery Channel’s evidence-obsessed The New Detectives and The FBI Files. His wife is a devoted fan of the shows and eventually got him enthralled with the state-of-the-art forensic procedures on display. For hands-on research, Zuiker, a Las Vegas native, spent five weeks riding along on the graveyard shift of the city’s CSI unit (“a fascinating group of characters who work in this very dark and gruesome industry,” he says). In fact, Petersen’s Grissom, the leader of the show’s rubber-gloved squad, is modeled after a real-life Vegas counterpart, one Daniel Holstein. “He keeps ant farms in his office, he has pig’s blood in Chinese to-go containers in his refrigerator, he goes home and practices blood-spatter analysis,” says Zuiker. “I was, like, who is this fascinating, crazy guy?”
That’s funny, we were just thinking the same thing about you. A mere three and a half years ago, Zuiker harbored showbiz dreams while making a living shuttling casino hoppers back and forth on the Mirage hotel tram. In 1998 he nabbed his first screenwriting credit for a straight-to-video actioner called The Runner. William Morris came calling after an actor friend of Zuiker’s used a monologue from the film as his audition script. That led Zuiker penning Wannabe, a Leonard DiCaprio vehicle about next-generation mobsters, currently in development. And then came CSI.
While writing the pilot, Zuiker received a call from Bruckheimer Films (producer of Coyote Ugly and Gone in 60 Seconds), which was in the market for a TV project. As luck would have it, the two went together like scalpels and cadavers. “Some films that I’ve made are called process movies,” says Jerry Bruckheimer. “[They] take you inside a world that you’ll never be a part of but would love to see how it works…Top Gun, Enemy of the State, Crimson Tide, that’s what they do, and that’s what this thing does.” Bruckheimer who has a development deal in place at ABC, brought the pilot to the Alphabet, which turned it down, as did NBC and Fox. Finally, it made its way to CBS senior VP of drama series development Nina Tassler, who bought it on the spot, hoping it could lure even more of the premenopausal demographic to the the Eye. “Survivor was just starting to bring that audience in, and they were looking for something younger and hipper,” says Zuiker. “So when I came in with this, it was just perfect timing.” Adds Tassler of the Survivor fortuitousness: “You couldn’t have asked for a better platform to promote this show, maggots and all.”
ALthough CBS had Zuiker tone down some of the gore in the pilot after squeamish test audiences gave it a thumbs-down (a particularly bloody bathtub scene and a shot that showed maggots oozing out of a gunshot wound were the chief offenders), the network thinks the show’s premise is, well, dead-on. “Forensics are just good mystery shows. If you deconstruct what forensics is, you’re just assembling clues and solving a crime,” Tassler says. “The good thing is that there are also gizmos and gadgets and procedures that enable you to visualize the accumulation of information.”
There are also some pretty captivating characters wielding those gizmos. “[Grissom’s] a guy who shut down his personal life in order to do what he does,” says Petersen of his alter ego. As a result, it takes a corpse to really get him jazzed. “He’s more aware of the glory of humanity in death than he is in life.” Providing the extroverted yin to Grissom’s antisocial yang is Helgenberger’s Willows, an ex-stripper/single mom fo whom the CSI gig is the centerpiece of a new, responsible life. Despite the pair’s good looks and breezy rapport, Zuiker has officially nixed the possibility of the two hooking up. Which is fine with Helgenberger. “I don’t think she really wants a relationship,” she says. “I think she would love to be able to just have casual sex on an as-needed basis.”
And, fainthearted test audiences not withwithstanding, Zuiker vows to use blood and guts on an as-needed basis as well. “There’ll be gore, but it’ll be gore in terms of science,” he says. “If we have to take a maggot and slice it in half-because maggots preserve what a body has ingested for two more weeks-that’s a science that I don’t want to not get into because I’m afraid of a maggot being cut in half.” In fact, Zuiker doesn’t plan to back down on any of the show’s edginess. Or, as he puts it, “We’re not afraid to do anal swabs in the first 25 minutes.”
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