CSI (review)

In this volume, part of the Wiley-Blackwell Studies in Film and Television series, Derek Kompare refers to CSI: Crime Scene Investigation as an “engrossing, classic and popular (yet still relatively overlooked) series.” While Kompare summarizes the reasons for CSI’s enduring popularity, he also attempts to explain why a show as successful and, as Kompare seeks to prove, complex as CSI has been so little studied by media scholars, especially compared to other series such as Lost and The Sopranos, which emerged around the same time.

It seems an important question, as the procedural drama has achieved pariah status within contemporary critical communities. Either dismissed or ignored entirely, procedurals like CSI, NCIS, and Criminal Minds demonstrate a significant gap between critical and casual audiences. Critics point to the episodic nature of procedurals—as compared to the long-running narrative strands of Lost—as failing to exhibit the criteria of “complexity” and typically describe shows like CSI as workmanlike rather than innovative.

In this succinct monograph, Kompare seeks to answer the critical and scholarly neglect of CSI by demonstrating how the series’ popularity and cultural impact are achieved through a complex relation to issues of genre, place, character, and even science. In his introduction, titled “Why CSI Matters,” Kompare seeks to recuperate the various descriptive terms that critics often use to dismiss the series. Conceding that the series is “formulaic,” Kompare argues that “that formula is itself a rich, deep text, built upon a long history of spectacle, crime fiction, and melodrama, and a more contemporary tableau of high technology, excessive style, and professional ethics” (2).

The richness of such a “formula” is the subject of the book’s first chapter, where Kompare explores the relation between the series’ representation of science with its crime-drama foundation. Kompare specifically focuses on the way scientific analysis of evidence is itself the series’ driving activity and how scientists (not law enforcement) are positioned as the series protagonists. The mix of science and crime drama is presented in a style Kompare calls “heightened verisimilitude,” wherein overt visual spectacle is mixed with elements of a “realist” aesthetic. The chapter poses that this style distinguishes CSI from the crime dramas that preceded it as well as from the others that would emerge in the series’ decade-long run.

In the second and third chapters, Kompare looks at how narrative elements that critics take for granted contribute to the series’ complexity. While an outside observer might dismiss the series’ focus on Las Vegas as an attempt to exploit the debauchery of Sin City, the second chapter argues that CSI’s Vegas is actually an unusually diverse and specific setting for a crime drama. While Las Vegas’s high media profile offers viewers a certain familiarity, the series travels beyond the familiar “strip” to the city’s suburbs and surrounding wilderness as well as poking into its history in order to find inspiration for storylines. In the third chapter, Kompare analyzes the series’ characters, offering a detailed rundown of the broader character arcs, which were drawn across the series’ first nine seasons, in order to understand how each character (and the series itself) negotiates the personal and the professional.

In the final chapter, Kompare considers the series’ broader cultural impact, paying particular attention to what has been termed the “CSI Effect.” While this phrase is typically used to describe the purported effect that the series’ focus on DNA evidence has had on the expectations of juries at criminal trials, Kompare pluralizes the term to encompass the way CSI acknowledges this phenomenon through storylines that seem to comment directly on media attention to the series.

In some ways, Kompare’s book is similar to CSI itself. It is concise and clearly organized, setting up a clear premise and executing it with intelligence and precision. But there are certain limitations to the book’s form. While Kompare’s analysis is accessible without seeming overly simplified for a general audience, there is always a sense that elements of his larger argument...