TV ramblings are in order today, because recent reality has been pretty dull. With the demise of Buffy there’s really not much on TV that I regularly watch anymore. I still can’t tolerate reality shows and dislike most sitcoms, and don’t have the patience to follow a story arc from episode to episode. This pretty much leaves me with just crime shows that wrap up within an hour, which means Law and Order, CSI, and its first offspring, CSI:Miami, which had its season premiere yesterday. If you actually watch this last show and don’t want the plot spoiled, stop reading now.

CSI:Miami is in that class of television entertainment which is so bad, it’s good. In particular, it’s the lead character, Horatio Caine, played by David Caruso, which makes the show like watching a car wreck; you know it’s wrong, but you just can’t turn away. I’ve never watched more than a few minutes of NYPD Blue (the camera jitter makes me want to puke instantly), and the only other thing I’ve seen him in is First Blood, where he has a small role as a small town sheriff^*, so I don’t know if he’s always been this way; but judging just by CSI, Caruso seems to be a student of the William Shatner school of acting. Where. Everyone. Talks like this. With pointless gaps. In the middle of sentences.

Compared to the original series, plots on CSI:Miami are a joke. While the former at least tries to demonstrate an ensemble approach to crime solving, in Miami-Dade county Horatio (what a name!) is uber-CSI who, with barely any help from his fellow officer, can solve crimes by leaps of intuition which defy any sort of logic or reason. Yesterday’s episode just scratched the surface of this - a paraphrased, only slightly exaggerated exchange maybe fifteen minutes into the hour:

Man: I saw him push the kid into a S-Class mercedes right here.
Horatio: (gets out measuring tape) The S-Class mercedes has a 66 inch wheelbase. This is 63 inches. You’re lying and are obviously in on the kidnapping scheme. And because this bit of sap on your storeroom floor, judging by its taste, comes only from a type of mangrove tree which only grows in this one place in the Everglades, it’s obvious that your fellow conspirators have driven a truck with a 66 inch wheelbase along this only access road to that same location and have left him for the sharks and alligators. Officers, you’ll find the kid sitting on a piece of lumber there asking for his mom. What, I have forty five minutes left in this show? But I’ve already solved the case! Guess we’ll just have to cut to commercial now.

(SPOILER!) In the same season premiere, they’ve killed off one of the cooler supporting characters. This means even more Horatio time in the future, which means more of that annoying, oozing (in?)sincerity, his distasteful lust after his brother’s widow, and that idiotic phrase he seems to deliver in every bloody episode - “she’s someone daughter, and that’s all that counts”. Ugh. Ok, maybe there’s only just so much of him I can take, and I need a new show to watch. CSI:NY starts this week with Gary Sinise and it’ll be interesting to see where that goes, he’s not an actor I’m terribly fond of either.

^*Trivia: that small town is actually played by Hope, British Columbia, which is right in between Vancouver and the Okanagan where my sister lives. There’s a prominent sign in that movie which reads “Gateway to Holidayland”, and I’ve been under that stupid sign too many times to count (Hope used to be the main Greyhound transfer station in the Fraser Valley). Apparently, you can actually do the Rambo walking tour. I’m sure that’s one of the main attractions, because I’ve always found Hope to be a terribly ugly place.

Wow, I take television too seriously sometimes.