After 15 Seasons, ‘CSI’ Comes to an End

It’s not just nice stories that have an ending. The most morbid ones do too, and in this saga, death has always played the main role. The American television channel CBS recently announced the end of its cult series “CSI.” So, after 15 seasons and more than 330 episodes, “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” (its original name) will come to an end on Sept. 27 in the U.S. after the two-hour TV movie, which will conclude the epic story. “It’s great to give the series’ fans a real ending, it’s a gift,” rejoiced TF1, which will soon broadcast the final season. “It’s a way of saying goodbye.”

The Gun Replaced by the Cotton Bud

Launched in October 2000 in the U.S. — and in 2001 on France’s leading channel — “CSI” has been the world’s most watched series for several years. Some 63 million viewers across five continents — including almost 30 million Americans — have followed the weekly adventures of the enigmatic Gil Grissom (William Petersen) and his night-shift team made up of Las Vegas criminal identification technicians. “When ‘CSI’ started, it was an event because the hero wasn’t a police officer, lawyer or doctor, but a scientist,” William Peterson told Le Monde in 2010.

This series is nothing like a classic “made in the USA” crime story. The traces of a suspect’s DNA are much more important than an inspector’s innate hunch. For these “experts” (as the series is known in French-speaking countries), all that counts are the clues left at the crime scene, which may or may not corroborate the conclusions of the local police, who are more attached to older methods, like surveillance or slightly too-aggressive interrogations. For these white-overall-clad scientists, a confession is not a complete guarantee of truth since, as boss Gil Grissom hammers home, “human beings make mistakes. The evidence never lies.” You still need to know how to interpret it. Death always tells … the truth.

The most important scenes of the series play out in a laboratory over a range of wide and narrow work surfaces filmed predominantly in blue (for the Las Vegas version of “CSI;” it’s yellow in Miami and green in New York), where we watch the protagonists trying to make hidden clues on corpses or objects “speak.” “Crime literature normally takes the action route: high-speed chases, investigations, the relationship with evil. In ‘CSI,’ nothing of the sort happens,” laughs Gérard Wajcman, a psychoanalyst and author of “Les Experts: La Police des Morts” (“CSI: Policing the Dead”, ed. PUF, 2012). “The gun has been replaced by the cotton bud.”

And believe it or not, “CSI” almost never existed. In the late 1990s, its creator, Anthony E. Zuiker, who dreamed of writing for Hollywood, was a simple tram driver at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. One evening, while watching “The New Detective,” a program dealing with death and science, his wife asked him: “Why don’t you draw some inspiration from this?” recalls Gérard Wajcman. So, he wrote a script, which appealed straightaway to Jerry Bruckheimer, the great film producer, who was under contract with Walt Disney Pictures and was looking to conquer the small screen. “CSI was an ‘ill-fated’ series that Disney didn’t want, and which was then taken up by an unknown Canadian company,” he told TF1.

“When we pitched the series to CBS, they were a bit skeptical: ‘You want to make a series with a focus on people who analyze fingerprints?’” William Petersen, who acted in the series, as well as being its executive producer, explains. “But the interest was in showing what they saw through the microscope and their varied experiences in the lab, and popularizing forensic science. People like solving mysteries. We knew there would be an audience, but no one expected so much success.”

This worldwide success is above all due to the ultra-realistic scenes accurately depicting the work of police scientists. Proud of this triumph, CBS didn’t hesitate to create three more series, each of whose soundtracks have been written by the legendary rock band, The Who, for “CSI: New York” (which ended in 2013 after nine seasons), “CSI: Miami” (which ended in 2012 after 10 seasons), and most recently, “CSI: Cyber” (which launched in 2015 and has been renewed for a second season, and has not yet been aired in France).

These franchises have brought “billions of dollars to the business,”* acknowledges Nina Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment.

TF1 has been screening the series regularly since its first episode on Sunday, Nov. 25, 2001 at 3:15 p.m. It moved to an 8:55 p.m. slot four years later. The saga guaranteed its strong audience figures (between 4 million and 11.1 million viewers) and was a lot more lucrative than a major soccer match.

*Editor’s note: This quotation, although accurately translated, could not be independently verified.