Five letters and one punctuation sign: CSI:NY. I love it. Everything about it (well, almost, but more on that later).I used to look down on the CSI franchise. It was Law and Order's airheaded cousin. However, after realising that I'd pretty much watched every single episode of L&O:SVU (several times), I grudgingly decided to try and branch out. That's when I discovered CSI:NY.
It is, arguably, the least often played CSI series of the three American versions (ok, my own personal observation, probably influenced by the fact that I always crave more than I can find on television, thus emphasising its scarcity in comparison to the other series. But I digress). Up till that point, I'd mostly watched CSI:Crime Scene Investigation and a bit of CSI:Miami. Both of those shows didn't agree with my finely-honed crime-show tastes, so I'd concluded that CSI:NY couldn't be any different. However, most of the stuff that really gets under my skin about the other two franchises is not part of CSI:NY: The crimes are freakier than CSI:Miami's, nothing gets solved in a day's work, the characters are a bit more harsh and rough around the edges than CSI:CSI (seriously, what's with the name?), and, most important of all, there's no Horatio Caine!
CSI:NY has that one quality that I seek out desperately in almost any movie or television show: grit. It's dirty, bloody, freaky, jaded, and a little bit mean. Even the visuals appeal to me. All the clean light -- when there is light, as a lot of the scenes are shot in a night-time setting -- are a lot more pleasant to watch, for me at least, than the other two series' yellow-tinted light.
Not to mention that the characters are way more fun to watch. Most of them are typical, mean, world-weary New Yorkers. And they're hot! Total babes! Danny, Flack, Mac, Stella! Even Lindsey's growing on me.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, there are elements to the show that I don't like. For starters, most of the victims are sexy, young, white, middle-class women and often they are sexualized in death. It's not like there are never feministy messages in there (Stella!), but a lot of the time, the show does present a hegemonous version of femininity, ignoring women who don't fall within that version, and then disempowers it. Also, in the cases where the perpetrator is female, she'll have some pretty awful reasons for killing her victim. One example that comes to mind is a woman who completely remakes herself, becomes a cheerleader for the Knicks, and then throws it all away by killing a guy in a very conspicuous way, because he mocked her for being fat. Also, the episode that starred Nelly Furtado as a dental-hygienist-turned-personal-shoplifter was a HUGE mistake and a horrible blight on CSI:NY's history and it should be destroyed and never mentioned again.
That being said, CSI:NY is designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and that just happens to be freaky, sexy crimes and not-always-progressive characters. If I only watched shows that mirrored my personal politics 100%, I would probably just have to give up on television until the big tv execs have a feminist epiphany, and honestly, I'm not holding my breath.
That being said, CSI:NY is designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and that just happens to be freaky, sexy crimes and not-always-progressive characters. If I only watched shows that mirrored my personal politics 100%, I would probably just have to give up on television until the big tv execs have a feminist epiphany, and honestly, I'm not holding my breath.
