CSI: New York (Episode 3, "American Dreamers")




So that's what the fashion police look like.

I’m not a big fan of the CSI franchise. The ludicrous mysteries and science less realistic than that on Star Trek: Enterprise turn me off, but I saw a promo for last week’s episode of CSI: New York (CBS, Wednesdays at 10) that intrigued me. It showed a skeletal corpse being found on a double-decker tour bus, and that was enough for me to DVR it. As it turns out even my previous dislike for CSI didn’t prepare me for how bad CSI: New York is.

In the opening scene the partial skeleton is found on the tour bus, dressed in tourist clothes. The skeleton is discolored and has a bad head wound. Mack "Mac" Taylor (Gary Sinise) and Stella Bonasera (Melinda Kanakaredes) investigate the crime scene and process the evidence back at the cavernous CSI building. The New York CSI is so cash rich that even keep Aiden Burn (Vanessa Ferlito) around, a foxy woman who has no regularly assigned tasks. She’s been waiting for a skeleton to come in so she can do a reconstruction of what the person would have looked like in life. And judging from her cleavage, this is a woman who’s had personal experience with reconstructive surgery. It's almost enough to distract me from the fact that Mack's nickname is different from his real name only by the letter 'k'. How do you say "Mac" differently from "Mack"? From now on my nickname is "Scot"!

The evidence leads the CSI people to the bus station (ya think?) and they quickly find the person who admits to wiring the skeleton together and putting it on the bus to scare tourists. And then something so incredible happened that my jaw hit the floor. Even though this guy admits to having the skeleton he refuses to say where he got it – and the CSI people just shrug and walk away. WHAT?! Keep in mind that the skeleton shows evidence that the person died by trauma. Wouldn’t anybody who even admitted to possessing such a skeleton be a murder suspect? Wouldn’t it make much more sense to just sweat the guy with a threat of a murder charge and find out where the skeleton came from? Sure, but then the CSI wouldn’t be living up to their acronym. No fair actually using human interaction to solve crimes! Instead Mackk has to use his xtreme forensic skillz to find the rest of the skeleton.

That’s not the only example. When the rest of the body is found it has a monogrammed backpack with it. The parents of the runaway who owned the pack are located, but when it is determined that their missing son isn’t the skeleton, the CSI people lose all interest in them, and don’t ask a single question that might help connect the two missing persons. And because these two incidents weren’t unlikely enough, there’s a third. Our heroes find a pawn shop receipt with the skeleton. Just before they track down the object pawned someone else goes to the pawn shop and, without the ticket, retrieves the object by convincing the pawn shop owner it’s his. What pawn shop owner gives away items without a ticket? Why did the person who picked the item up just not buy it outright and therefore avoid all suspicion?

But I still haven’t gotten to the really unlikely part. The CSI guys know the person talked to the pawn shop broker, and long enough for the man to convince the broker the item was his, yet the CSI people don’t ask the broker for a description of the man!  Instead they use the “NTSC overscan” on a security camera to determine the man touched a guitar string and DNA match him from sweat or something. That's kind of like going to pick up milk at the corner store USING THE SPACE SHUTTLE.

The way the “mystery” (I pegged the killer the second he appeared on screen) proceeds is completely dependent on some of the laziest screenwriting I’ve ever seen, between the CSI people’s pointless reticence to get information from actual humans, and the magic technology they have back at the office. Add to that some impressively static non-acting by Gary Sinese and the rest of the cast and you have what has got to be the worst show of this season. At least I hope there isn’t a worse show on than this one.

Posted: Tue - October 12, 2004 at      

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