Anyone feel like the writer's lost originality after season 11? Personally it seemed like a waste of episodes when they brought mckeen back. Some episodes were enjoyable but sheesh if they were going to bring back villains let it be sqweegel or hannah west.
shareHell, they started loosing interest around season 6 - just look at the ratings, that's when they started going down. By season 11 it was a pretty much a whole different crop of writers and these writers had no idea how to write already established characters.
(& please not Hannah West. She was nothing more than a spoiled brat used for a storyline that should have ended when her first episode ended.)
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Honestly, I always had a time understanding why this show ever had such a huge audience to begin with. IMHO, the storylines generally came across as rather contrived and sloppy compared to shows like "Quincy M.E." and "Law & Order". It also always came across as having rather cheap production design and photography, not unlike 1990s television shows like "Nikita", but obviously this was not the case as it consistently had a sufficiently decent budget.
The other major problem with the show was the difficulty in maintaining a reasonable level of suspension of disbelief, especially if you know anything about law enforcement and forensics. With "Law & Order" and more recent shows like "The Night Of", while they never were anywhere close to truly being a completely realistic simulation of real life procedures, they were still a million times more accurate than "CSI" -- I mean, CSI folks actually interrogating suspects, analyzing samples or watching over the shoulders of the actual scientists charged with analysis, getting results in mere minutes when in reality it could take many hours, even days? I'm sure most everyone here who is a dedicated fan is familiar with the myths versus reality.
And while it seems like many fans hated Sara Sidle, by far the worst offender in terms of maintaining suspension of disbelief was Marg Helgenberger. From the way her character talks, dresses, behaves, and her excruciatingly annoying habit of referring to herself as a "scientist" (granted, the other CSIs did call themselves scientists, but I believe she did this far more often than any other character) just made it made more difficult to enjoy the show for what it is, total fiction. The thing about Helgenberger's character having once been an exotic dancer was also very stupid, quite similar to the old "hooker with a heart of gold" trope -- in general, no competent law enforcement or government agency of any kind would ever hire someone for vital posts in their forensics departments who has had such a background. I'm not saying it never happens, and I can see it being possible if she'd be applying for a purely civilian post in low level administration, but forensics, and in a major city like Las Vegas? We're not talking about some hick department in Podunk, Iowa or some other boondocks.
At least they didn't make Nick or Warrick ex-strippers or street hustlers, or even worse have one of them show up to work one day in drag and announce to Grissom that they've decided to undergo a sex change. A friend of mine who once worked as an editorial assistant to the writing staff told me that in the early seasons they actually and quite seriously considered having one of the secondary male characters (specifically Greg Sanders, if I'm not mistaken) start showing up to work dressed as a woman and having to convince Grissom to help him get the department that he was not just a crossdresser or transvestite, but a genuine transsexual who desperately needed sex reassignment surgery, and creating this huge conflict with the Sheriff (played by the guy who played a Secret Service agent on "24") and so on.
This was apparently proposed by Jerry Stahl during the time he was working as an occasional writer/consultant and when Bruckheimer caught wind of this, he went into a screaming frenzy and told Stahl that as punishment for making such a suggestion, that he would have to start showing up to meetings dressed in full drag (wig, nylons, bra, etc) and prostitute-style makeup, otherwise he would have Stahl permanently blacklisted and unable to ever work on anything halfway decent in Hollywood. After Stahl refused, Bruckheimer had a bunch of security guards literally physically throw him out of the office building, with one of the guards throwing a blonde wig and used condom on his head as a final insult.
Granted, like most industry apocrypha and legends this is based on gossip and hearsay, but there it is.
It was actually quite enjoyable the first few seasons. I always felt it was a darker show than the newer seasons that just felt like a joke. I couldn't stand them.
shareStoryline's dropped in quality
That already happened after the third season.
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