CSI: Stupidi

It ought to be pretty obvious from the state of my blog, but I'm not a big fan of so-called adult television.


CSI: Iacon by ~Golden-Dragon-Girl (my sister) on deviantART

(If you can't read that [I can, but my eyesight is notoriously superior], follow that first link to the deviantArt page.)

I do and have frequently watched the huge flood of crime dramas that currently dominate the post-8:00 PM time slots on broadcast television, but I'm at my limit. (My breaking point was an episode of Criminal Minds where it turned out that the rather insane guy of the week who had been shooting other motorists had killed his entire family about the same time he snapped, and most of his family's appearances had been hallucinations. Way to be a downer, man.) While many of the Bruckheimer plague shows have been reasonably smart and clever (as adult television goes), there's a black sheep in every family. The black sheep in this family is CSI: Miami.

This show is stupid. And when I say that, I don't mean garden variety stupid, I mean borderline brain-damaged.

Aside from the gratuitous gore (part and parcel of all CSI shows) and the gratuitous and exploitative shots of women (both of these are alluded to by the little comic above), the show has Horatio Caine, the weirdest and most out of place of all of the CSI series team leads. In addition to his spectacle crunching, Caine is very creepy, and actively looks like he doesn't belong in the lab coat that he only occasionally dons. His creepiest moment comes when he tells a "pedophile" that the guy is "resisting arrest." When the guy says "No, I'm not," Caine says "Let's see how long that lasts," moves towards the guy, and the episode ends. So apparently, it's cool to beat the crud out of pedophiles? (The reason I put quote marks around pedophile earlier is because the girl he was after [this was a clear case of entrapment, by the way] was fourteen. While it's still illegal, there was no sign the guy was going to get violent as the other pedophiles involved in the episode had [the show's weird logic seems to indicate pedophiles are incapable of having sex with children without also killing them], and while it's still a problem, it's not like he was going to rape a five year old, which is the domain of the real creeps. My sister compares the "pedophiles" who go after fourteen-to-seventeen-year olds to losers who can't pick up a smarter, more mature woman. No offense if this describes you.)

Then there's the fact that every single episode, regardless of how appropriate it is, seems to work in a reference to extramarital affairs. In an episode that aired last night, the case involved an amnesiac who had apparently stabbed a man to death. It turned out, upon pulling records, that the guy's father had died from a stab wound inflicted by an angry ex-wife. How did the ex-wife get angry? They don't say, but you can bet it involved some nookie.

The "eyecandy" part of the series extends beyond merely distracting us with in-the-face shots of various pleasantly formed body parts, by the way. In one episode, a character is crouching over, getting into the nitty-gritty of the crime scene... and her hair suddenly goes WAFT WAFT WAFT all pretty-like. The fact that the big sweeping shots that all CSI shows do fly around over the bays and seem to take twice as long as other shows also adds to this feeling.

Then there was the episode where a "private investigator" orchestrated a murder and turned out to be involved in this horribly convoluted and silly plot involving a businessman named (IIRC) Peter Cullen (not that Peter Cullen) and his murdered partner and secretary and an affair (see?) and a SWAT team and... Okay, that's enough. Anyway, this "PI" did all sorts of really illegal things to discredit the CSI team, "effectively" foiling their efforts, until finally the CSIs sent the guy who had been having the affair with the wife of the dead partner who was killed by the SWAT team (and the PI had also been hired by the murdered partner to find out information on the affair, by the way) and who had been the PI's tool in orchestrating the SWAT murder with a wire in order to trick the PI into a confession so that the tool guy could get a plea bargain (this would also let them convict Peter Cullen, who had shot his murdered secretary personally [what happened to all the complicated plotting?]). The PI wasn't fooled, and yanked the wire off and wrecked it before he started saying all the incriminating stuff, which of course was stupid because he had forgotten that there was a thermos on the table that had a bug in it (because tool guy had brought it). And then, for no apparent reason, with no apparent explanation, Horatio freaking Caine was right there and he apparently had ninja skills, because they didn't see or hear him coming in the super-bright Miami sun.

If you look at that last paragraph and go, "WHAT THE HECK?!" well, I can't say I blame you.

If you don't, I'm wondering about you.

Oyah, they solve all their crimes within a single day. Explicitly. Apparently, they need to hurry because they're worried about the statute of limitations running out? Ha ha ha.

(Okay, if you didn't get that: Most crimes have limited durations where they can be punished. Murder is not one of these crimes. Just to be clear.)

-Signing off.