On the other hand, I love the spin-off, C.S.I.: Miami; however, my love is very shallow. I only love the show for two superficial reasons:
1. HDTV This is up there as the best-looking show on television right now if you own an HDTV. The sweeping helicopter shots of the Miami skyline, the ludicrous, saturated color scheme of the crime labs, the outlandishly bright outfits, the insistence on shooting every major scene at dawn or dusk, David Caruso's hair... this is the show to use to convince people that HDTV is worth investing in. (I might add some other worthy candidates for HDTV eye candy: basketball games, American Idol, 30 Rock, and 24.)
2. David Caruso's Overacting The best part of any day when A&E hosts a CSI: Miami marathon is the top of every hour. It's always the same: someone gets killed. Camera whip pans to the sky then comes back down to the same scene at a later time. Caruso is looking over the body with someone from his crew. For variety, if the dead person was shot, there's a 90% chance that you'll get a nice shot of Caruso through the bullet hole, as I've mocked up here:
Then comes the zinger. Another character asks Caruso something along the lines of, "What do you think we have here, Horatio?"
[Pause.]
[Dramatic application of sunglasses.]
"What we've got here... is a really bad pun!"
[Roger Daltrey SCREAMS as we go to title. I do admire the use of The Who here.]
Here are some completely fabricated examples:
"A dead parachutist? Looks like someone fell from grace!"
"Someone snapped this broom in half and hid it? Looks like someone tried to sweep the evidence under the table!"
"Someone stole the engine from this locomotive? Looks to me like someone wanted to make sure that this would be The Little Engine that Won't"
It's brilliant. Not good, mind you, but the overacting and the framing and the delivery all add up to high comedy. At the top of every hour of every episode. If you do nothing else at 10:00 on Monday nights—-you're not still hoping for Studio 60 to get better, are you?--tune in for the first few minutes of CSI: Miami. You won't regret it.
Don't believe me? Here's a "greatest hits" of the Caruso one-liners. It's epic. (This video was sent to me by my snickerdoodle, so thanks to her.)
And, god bless YouTube if it doesn't find ways to surprise me. I tracked the comments for that last clip and they led me to this:
If Jim Carrey agrees with me, how can I be wrong?
Oh... right...
3 comments:
oh man, that is amazing. I knew there was a reason I liked "CSI" better than "CSI: Miami" (even though I think the character of Gil Grissom does the same type of thing, sans sunglasses).
i don't know exactly why, but halfway through the Caruso highlight reel i just went into complete hysterics, anticipating the Daltrey scream and completely losing my marbles with a case of the man-giggles. CSI miami is JUST THAT GOOD
grissom's one-liners are obnoxious, but in one of the recent episodes (when the actor was doing a play in rhode island or something (that you didn't see because you were watching the ferry burn-out on Grey's (and i meant the CSI you didn't see, not the play (which you also didn't see)))) someone said "what would grissom say about this?" and the coroner guy david said, "something witty, i'm sure." oh, and, grissom says it knowing he's being a jackass, not trying-to-hard-to-be-taken-seriously.
what really is annoying about CSI Miami, though, is that every sentence starts or ends with caruso mentioning the name of the character he's talking to.
"look, they were playing a lot of video games, tom. and they got used to killing people, tom. don't you see, tom? tom, they were trained by video games to kill, tom. each time they pushed Triangle, they practiced robbing a car, tom. Tom, tom. TomTom, how do i get to panera, tom?"
sorry, no video to link
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