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With networks moving back towards giving their schedules over to franchises, it seemed inevitable that CBS would revive the CSI franchise that has been dormant since CSI: Cyber was canceled in 2016. But instead of starting in a new city, Jerry Bruckheimer and Anthony E. Zuiker went back to where it all started, Las Vegas. And guess what? A bunch of old friends are back. Read on for more…
CSI: VEGAS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Various zoom-arounds of various buildings in Las Vegas. Then we zoom in on some sort of microscopic being in water; we zoom out to see the water being drunk by a parrot.
The Gist: The parrot belongs to retired LVPD detective Jim Brass (Paul Guilfoyle), who used to work closely with the departments’ Crime Lab, especially the night shift, back in the day. Brass, who can’t quite see the way he used to, hears an intruder, and somehow manages to fatally shoot the guy, despite his age and vision problems.
Maxine Roby (Paula Newsome), the current head of CSI’s night team, shows up at the scene; she gives her young investigator, Mandeep Dhillon (Allie Rajan), the scoop on who Brass is; Brass thinks that an old foe sent the guy he killed over to eliminate him, and a wad of old $100 bills with certain cereal numbers on them is the tip off.
Meanwhile, two other CSI investigators, Joshua Folsom (Matt Lauria) and Chris Park (Jay Lee), look into a pawn shop that was burned down, with the shop owner’s son already dead inside before it was set on fire. Folsom manages to recreate the physical layout of the shop before it burned down, but still can’t figure out why a pile of melted guns was at the scene.
Brass, who relocated to a hotel for his protection, brings in old friend Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox) to see if she can look into who he thinks paid the hitman to get him. Roby gladly accepts the help — despite being out of the forensics game for years, Sidle is still licensed to do the work in Nevada, she just can’t carry a gun yet. She shows Sidle around CSI’s new digs, and talks to her about some of the new methods they use to gather evidence. She also shows Sidle the decomposed head that she was sent, supposedly belonging to a woman that was abducted by the person Brass thinks tried to kill him.
The evidence, and the trail of these old Franklins, takes the team to a storage unit that contains a lab; the unit is in the name of Sara’s former colleague David Hodges (Wallace Langham), and there are old case files among the equipment. If he’s involved in this, all of the cases that the department investigated during his tenure could be thrown into question. So Brass and Sidle call in another old friend — Sidle’s husband, Gil Grissom (William Petersen).
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? CSI and all of its offshoots. Fox and Peterson are both 21 years older, but they immediately make their presence known on the show when they first show up.
Our Take: Here’s what you’re going to get with CSI: Vegas: More of the same quippy banter and closeup forensic grossness you got with the original and its spinoffs over the past two decades. You’ll get new faces interacting with old friends. There will be lots of one-off cases.
But what we’re seeing in this first season of the new Vegas edition that we might not have seen much of during the original’s 2000-2015 run: A continuing storyline. That’s the storyline that Petersen, Fox and Langham will be involved with, about trying to make sure that Hodges isn’t involved in something that will make all the cases they worked on in the aughts and teens open again.
Is it fun to see some of the old gang back together, especially in the context of helping out the new guys? Sure. Peterson may look like he should be wearing a captain’s hat and smoking a pipe these days, but his quiet intensity is always welcome in this format, as is Fox’s more aggressive Sidle.
Having this combo of old and new is clever on its face, but we’ve seen this before, like when Scrubs had much of its old cast float in and out of the first half of the medical school season. Their presence pretty much suffocated the ability for the new characters to connect with the audience, and by the time they faded into the background, it was too late. We can see this happening with CSI: Vegas, so we hope that showrunner Jason Tracey can give the new crew enough screen time to make an impression and not just lean on the old crew for most of the drama.
Sex and Skin: None, unless you count seeing people on the table of medical examiner Hugo Ramirez (Mel Rodriguez).
Parting Shot: Sidle states the case against Hodges to Brass, who turns to someone else and says, “What do we do now?” “What we always do,” says Gil Grissom, seen for the first time. “Follow the evidence.”
Sleeper Star: We’re Mel Rodriguez fans, and we think his artistically-oriented, handlebar-mustachioed ME, Dr. Ramirez, will be the character with the most personality quirks among the new group.
Most Pilot-y Line: For some reason, the new crew seems to be obsessed with the fact that Dhillon has no idea who Drew Carey is.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The presence of the old guard will keep fans interested in CSI: Vegas. But the new crew hasn’t distinguished themselves for the most part just yet, and they’ll need to do that soon before the presence of Petersen, Fox and company overwhelms the show.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
