During the last couple of months I watched the first 4 seasons of CSI on DVD. Then I ordered the 5th season, but I had to import it from North America, as the DVD wasn't out in Europe yet. That took a while, so I started watching the first 2 seasons of CSI Miami in the meantime. Now being near the end of the second season, I've seen enough to make a comparison, and I do like the original CSI much more than CSI Miami.
The original CSI, playing in Las Vegas, has believable characters, cases that range from the mundane to the bizarre, but where the science used to solve the cases is always solid and interesting. It's a bit like Raph Koster's Theory of Fun, you always learn something when watching an episode of CSI, and that is fun. And while each episode is good entertainment by itself, watching a season in sequence is even more entertaining, as it shows the development of the characters in the CSI Las Vegas crime lab. Every character is unique, and is shown in a believable way how he balances his private problems with his job, like all of us do. The single mother, the ex-gambling addict, the elder supervisor in love with a younger employee being kept by propriety from acting on his feelings, different people having different degrees of dedication and ambition towards their job, they all seem very real, and thus sympathetic.
In comparison CSI Miami is a lot less good, although it still is quite watchable. But where CSI concentrates on the story, the science, and the characters, CSI Miami is a lot more about emotions, morals, and visual effects. The science is often a lot less solid, and sometimes even plain wrong. When an innocent man searching for his cat in an abandoned house is shown dying from nitric acid fumes from an illegal drug lab, that has more to do with wanting to show how drugs are bad than with science. Nitric acid fumes aren't toxic enough to kill a man on the spot, especially not in the ppm concentrations mentioned in the episode, otherwise I'd be long dead.
But even worse than bad science are the unbelievably heroic characters in CSI Miami. If one of them is ever shown to stray from the narrow path of perfect behavior, you can be sure that it is only to support some less perfect relative. The guy who in the line of work is shot into the eye with a nail gun has as only desire to get back to work as soon as possible (instead of sueing somebody for a multi-million dollar compensation for having sustained a work injury, as any real American would do). But worst is probably the main hero, Horatio Caine, who is unnaturally calm, always nice to the victims and the innocent, and only ever showing anger against the really bad guys, never being wrong in his estimation of somebodies guilt or innocence. He has no character flaw except for spending too much effort to repair the mistakes of his little brother, is never wrong, and only ever gets in trouble when his opponents are corrupt bad people in the police organization. Even Superman must be jealous of Horatio's perfect moral compass. Unfortunately perfect characters make for bad TV. I much prefer Gil Grissom from the Las Vegas CSI, who is a nerd, permanently late with his paperwork, and has problems communicating with less nerdy people.
I have seen a lot less of the third CSI series, CSI New York. But I'd place it somewhere between the two, not quite as good as CSI, a bit too dark for my tastes, but still better in both science and character depiction than CSI Miami.
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