Thursday, December 11, 2008

Sepinwall on TV: Petersen prepares to exit 'CSI'

In today's column, I preview tonight's "CSI," which introduces Laurence Fishburne to the cast but is really all about saying goodbye to William Petersen. It's a really good hour, one of the better "CSI"s I've seen in a long time.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Grissom's been such a great, weird character. I hate to see him go. I hope his absence doesn't ruin the heart of the show, but I'm keeping my mind open about Fishburn's character.

Thanks, Alan, for giving CSI some respect. Originally considered edgy and unique, it's come under fire of late for being a useless, old war horse - just another boring, unhip procedural. And yeah, it is a procedural, but it's one of the best.

I'm glad we won't find out where he's going, because I would rather not know for sure that he's off to chase Sarah. That would make me sad.

dark tyler said...

'CSI' has been consistently amazing during the last three years. It's been a breath of fresh air in the midst of all this mythology crap like 'Prison Break' or 'Heroes' that just grab you from the neck and demand that you be there next week or you'll miss a bazillion twists.

'CSI' is amazing, old-school television. And season 7 is simply essential TV. Unforgettable and shocking and emotional. Simply amazing.

Gonna miss Bill.

Anonymous said...

It will be interesting to see if Laurence Fishburne's character will have any substance or will he subjugated under the MOTW and become as flat and as uninteresting as everyone else. Where shows like HOUSE fall prey to the pitfalls of character development and serialized plots, CSI is on the extreme opposite end. Warrick's sendoff should have had much more of an emotional impact than it did, but I can hardly blame the actors who have been a backdrop for 9+ seasons.

Anonymous said...

Have never seen a second of any CSI show. Have no urge to, either.

Anonymous said...

Have a cookie, Anon@1:54.

Anonymous said...

CSI the original is amazingly underrated in terms of quality week in and week out. the show sadly is prob lumped in most people's minds as being one and the same as the spin-offs and that's a real shame (and funny enough what William Petersen feared would happen waay back when they originally announced they were making a spin-off)

CSI really is week in week out an involving show usually with some neat plotwists, or kinks along the way.

ALso---if you think the characters on this show are flat, the charaacters on Miami and NY are like stick figures comparitively.

I do wonder how the show can stand up without Gil Grissom---the execs at cbs might have forgotten but the show originally started out as Grissom's show. he was like the mulder of this show's world...and we all saw what happened to the x files when mulder opted out. (not that robert patrick wasn't a surprisingly decent replacement---it was the writing went really flat)

lets hope that doesn't happen here...i don't think it will---by the time mulder left the x files the writing had already been flat for a good year or two....writing has yet to really slow down here...good sign.