WARNING: VERY MILD SPOILERS AHEAD!
Okay, I confess. I can’t live a lie any more. I was, until very recently, a CSI virgin. Weird, I know, but I’d never even flipped over the channel and accidentally stumbled upon an episode of CSI or one of its many spin-offs: CSI: NY, CSI: Miami, CSI: Darlington. I can’t even be 100 per cent sure if I’ve made that last one up or not.
Sick of being an outcast in tellyland, I decided to pop my CSI cherry once and for all. The sixth series of the massively popular CSI: Miami starts on Five next week, giving me the perfect opportunity to see what all the fuss is about. I stuck on a preview copy of the first episode and prepared for the inevitable disappointment.
But you know what? CSI: Miami is a rollockingly entertaining show. I absolutely can see what all the fuss is about. Yes, it’s a little bit silly. The cast are all implausibly attractive, the CGI is laid on with a trowel, and the Hollywood director clearly has the obligatory gun fetish, but that’s why we love watching American crime dramas (take a bow Without a Trace, Law & Order, and Criminal Minds).
CSI: Miami has killer intro music, dialogue as steamy as the Florida climate and gung-ho action that is shot with style, making the whole shebang oddly addictive viewing. About halfway through the opening episode, Dangerous Son, I found myself excitedly thinking ‘Horatio Caine has a son! A dangerous son!’, despite knowing precisely nothing about this Horatio fellow only 20 minutes earlier.
And it’s definitely David Caruso’s Horatio who makes the show, with the suave detective stealing every scene he’s in. He’s so laidback he can even solve cases while doing a spot-on Barry White impression and reeling off über-efficient one-liners. I mean, who else on telly could sniff out the bad guy using only three-word-or-less sentences, usually an ice-cool ‘That’s correct’ or ‘That’s exactly right’? What a top guy. Hats off to him.
So will I be watching another episode of CSI: Miami any time soon? To paraphrase Horatio Caine, that’s exactly correct.
I like CSI Miami more because I think it has more action to it.