Monday, June 27, 2005

The CSI Phenomenon; or, why JG Ballard isn't watching the same programme as me

Was I the only CSI watcher who felt there were substantial errors / misunderstandings in JG Ballard's fluff piece on CSI this weekend in the Guardian Review?

Claims made:
  • no cars
  • no interesting characters / character information
  • invisible daughter of Catherine Willows
  • night-time only sets
  • no location referents
Wrong on pretty much all counts (even if both the Vegas original and Miami both shoot principle photography in LA rather than their locales). In the end I felt like a cranky obsessive going "but in episode 8 of season 3...", which is never good. I had to let it go.

Wish I could go and see the stuff at the NFT though (scroll).

2 comments:

Martin said...

Spot on Lisa. i got hte impression he'd seen one or two episodes and just noted the similarities. Did he not also say that all the murders took place in hotels or strip joints or somesuch. Bizarre.But then he only watches it for the autopsies from what I could gather.

Casyn said...

Go the cranky obsessive people! :-)

Sounds like a very narrow and unresearched opinion.

You mean there's other things than hotels, casinos, wedding chappels and strip joints in Las Vegas!