Cohan Article-About CSI

Now that we've ventured away from talking about Lost for now, I feel sad that I'll be blogging about another show now.  I have to say I never thought I would be hooked on watching Lost, but it got me.  I'm still watching the seasons on Hulu and as of right now I'm almost finished with season 2...so far so good! :) But now it's time to turn our direction to our next case study, which is the very famous show on CBS...CSI!  The one thing about this show that I like, is the mystery to it all for most of the hour, until the crime gets resolved 15 minutes before the program ends.  What really bugs me about this shows, and other shows like this is that once I catch the first 5 minutes of what happens in the murder, I automatically have to sit and watch the other 55 minutes of it just because I need to know what happens at the end, and how they solved the mystery.  The Cohan article that we had to read for class has pretty much 3 distinct parts to it: the introduction, chapter 1 "It's all about the evidence" and Chaper 2 "The CSI Effect". 

The introduction in this article basically gives you a little background history of how CSI came to be on television.  It first aired in October of 2000 on CBS Friday nights, and to be honest, not many people thought it was going to be a hit television series, because their was a director who was a no-name from Las Vegas, and they didn't have well known actors playing the main characters in the series.  However, it became so big for their first season, by the second season they moved it to Thursday night to compete with NBC's popular Thursday night prime time TV and succeeded to be popular.  In the introduction, Cohan talks about the type of drama that CSI is by stating that

"CSI resists the trends in serialised drama and strong continuing character arcs that help to stimulate appointment television" (4).

In the first chapter, "It's all about the evidence" Cohan goes into explaining how well the shows works, by introducing them to the two main characters who are known as Gil Grissom, and Catherine Willows.  I will say that there are more than one version of CSI.  They have the original series, which is set in Las Vegas, and then they have knockoffs in Miami, and New York.  I personally like the New York series better, just because I don't feel like the characters in the New York program are as cheesy with the puns and jokes as the other ones of the Las Vegas and Miami.  This program gets you with the teaser in the begginning of each episode.  The way that they make everything with the murder so dramatic, it clinches you to want to keep watching.  What Lost does in their drama series is to get you with a teaser and help clinch you at the end of every episode to continue watching.  CSI, however, teases you right in the beginning to keep watching the rest of the episode.  I feel like this kind of drama series works so well because its more about how these crime scenes are solved, by technique in labs, rather than good cop, bad cop running around chasing criminals down. 

In the final chapter of the article, "The CSI Effect," Cohan talks about how shows like CSI are really affecting the way that people view crimes.  They are mixing reality with television.  In Chapter 2, Cohan says that

"The CSI Effect has resulted in real life juries unrealistically expecting definitive DNA and similar trace evidence at every trial" (25) and that there are more college courses about CSI type stuff being taught at different universities around the US (24). 

People should be aware that this isn't exactly how scientists figure out how a murder is solved.  What the writers are doing for this show is abandoning realism for the sake of good television (24).  If people don't seem to get that through their head, than I think that the writers have done a very good job at getting people to love watching this show, because they make it seem so realistic.  I like these shows not only for the realism to it, but because I just love crimes shows that solves mysteries, and CSI makes sure to hook you with how they show their story.