The Forensic Sciences of CSI: How to Know About Crime

CSI is one of the most popular television crime series worldwide. Its three series set in Los Angeles, Miami and New York have attracted global audiences for ten years and have helped change perceptions about what crime drama is about. The shift towards forensic sciences so brilliantly displayed in CSI has significant effects on what knowledge is made available about crime. This book presents an examination of the whole franchise: it analyzes how the shift away from an investigation that is focused on interviews and interrogations allows for truth to be more thoroughly located in the material world, and hence for it to become more absolute. The book draws attention to the increased importance of the victim to the crime narratives and to the fact that crime has increasingly come to be perceived to be messy and complicated, rather than planned and calculated. Whilst CSI is presented here as not the first series to allow such a shift, its visual excess in the display of the gore of the body makes it a particularly notable one in that it elicits a viewer engagement that relies as much on embodied experience as it does on rational thinking.

Elke Weissmann is lecturer in film and television at Edge Hill University. She is vice-chair of the Television Studies Section of the European Communication Research and Education Association, and has published on transnational television and CSI. The book is based on extensive research conducted at the University of Glasgow.