Word: network
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...guarding the coast. But when you've achieved CSI's level of success, everyone wants to give you a 21-gun salute. Your viewers do; they made CSI the most popular drama on TV and its two sequels, Miami and New York, instant Top 10 hits. Your network does; chairman Leslie Moonves of CBS approved the New York spin-off in a meeting that essentially consisted of his asking Zuiker to pick a city. "You can't overestimate how important the CSI franchise is to us," says Moonves. "It is the linchpin of the resurrection of this network." Your peers...
...cohort have taught TV new visual tricks, raised its production standards and perhaps shown the dinosaur networks a way to survive the swarm of nimble cable competitors. The CSIs have made network drama more consistent. But they have also--cop show after doctor-cop show after military-cop show--made it more homogeneous. They have taught TV to tell entertaining, simple stories without dumbing them down--and left the networks uninterested in much besides simple stories. The CSI effect has produced TV that looks 21st century but is as conventional as a rerun of Mannix. In some ways...
Within a few months in the year 2000, CBS debuted two series that not only turned around a limping network but also reshaped network TV. The effect of the first--Survivor--and of the dozens of reality shows that followed it was quick and obvious. But the second--CSI: Crime Scene Investigation--got little initial attention, even from CBS. CSI proved a dream marriage of the edgy and the safe: an old-fashioned whodunit, set in sexy Las Vegas, that wouldn't alienate CBS's Murder, She Wrote demographic but geeky enough--scientists wielding swabs, not guns--to attract...
...beat the veteran in its first outing and most weeks since. Even so, some within the CSI family have been worried about overextending; original CSI star William Petersen has publicly chided CBS for diluting the brand. (Petersen and co-star Marg Helgenberger refused interview requests for this article; a network representative explained that they don't do interviews for stories not exclusively about "their...
...have a laugh track, you say, What were they laughing at? It wasn't that funny," she says. The Comedy Central show forgoes a laugh track. "The people at home will do it for us. If you open your window, you will hear everyone laugh. It will be like Network. They might be watching Chappelle's Show, but still, listen to the laughter...