Sunday, September 17, 2006
Convington: Mumblin' CSI
By Gary Covington
Looking In
HAUGTY Horatio Caine -- the man of few words and only one suit -- together with his team, are now on season two; Grissom and his crowd, although rearranged by a pernickety head of department, are into season five. Saturday last a new bunch debuted, this time in New York, and that makes three CSIs per week. Thing is -- can I handle it?
Second thing is -- will I make head or tail of what the characters of CSI New York are saying? The current craze on television is for reality. Even obvious fiction has to be made as real as possible and it turns out that the makers of CSI New York believe that out there, on the streets, everybody mumbles.
Granted it was raining and a Filipino-style downpour battering at the tin roof does tend to drown out just about everything. I turned up the volume, crouched closer to the box. The characters were communicating -- lips were moving, arms waving -- but for most of the show all I caught was a sort of background rumbling with the odd word popping out daring to be recognized. It didn't help that the bad guy was a Russian. All Russians -- including the womenfolk -- speak from somewhere about breastbone level, the words having to dodge years of bortsch, homemade vodka and potato dumplings. Remember all those James Bond villains? East Europeans to a man speaking from their boots.
The show? Considering that the writers are now producing three scripts a week, thirty-nine per season, I'm not complaining. The cast is headed by Gary Sinise (the guy who was Tom Hank's legless companion in Forrest Gump. I still haven't figured out how they did that) or, should I say, mumbling Gary Sinise, backed by a crew of (to me) unknowns and unremarkables but it's early days yet. Being a CSI junkie I'll carry on watching.
CSI Miami I watch -- anything has to an improvement on the screeching of gameshow hosts -- with a certain amount of reluctance. Horatio, the bossman, is just too good. Horatio it'll be who spots a tiny, tiny shard of blood-tinged glass lurking in the thick, thick pile of a carpet. Horatio it'll be who sees the speck of blood binding criminal to crime. Horatio it'll be who deduces. The rest of the cast are scene-fillers although the ladies are scrumptious.
The original CSI, Grissom and Co., Channel 23 tells us, is now in its fifth season, a statistic I'm having trouble with. Four seasons past -- by reckoning 13 shows to a season -- means 52 episodes. Have Channel 23 screened 52 different shows? I think not, I think we're lacking a couple or three seasons. Channel 23; let's have the missing episodes.
Grissom -- pigeon-toed Grissom -- in the latest series sports a beard, still races cockroaches, but is now relegated to an office, his place taken by former 2nd i/c Catherine Willows. The show's plots are occasionally outrageous, the pathologist (my favorite character) cantankerous in the nicest possible way, the show the best of the three (Covington's third law of television: spin-offs are never, ever as good as the original) and nobody mumbles.
But -- three CSIs a week, the Amazing race and Survivor coming up soon. Couch potato-dom here I come.
For Bisaya stories from Davao. Click here. (September 17, 2006 issue)
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