Most influential crime drama


Pretty much every network crime drama of the last 20 years has been some variation of CSI it seems like.

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THATS INTERESTING...I HAVENT WATCHED A NETWORK CRIME DRAMA IN OVER 20 YEARS.

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I've been rewatching and am up to S6, what made the show good was the realism of the science (which I didn't know at the time), being inspired by real life cases, and the amped drama. Some shows inspired by CSI amped the drama too much and went beyond the science into fantasy, not cool with me, although some were successful.

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what made the show good was the realism of the science

really? are you serious? I guess that must only be in some areas , or earlier seasons , or specific spinoffs , becasue in certain circles (computer science) "CSI" is a synonym / watchword / meme for: "The most ridiculous bullshit ever seen"


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I used to assume it was sci-fi until I watched Forensic Files. The stuff about CSIs acting like cops and solving crimes in 60 minutes is of course bullshit, but the science wasn't.

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How about the "Lets enhance this image ... ok ... ok ..more ... see that reflection in the car side mirror? zoom in on that , ok .... more ....heres our guy across the street , zoom in on his face ...."

I've heard thats a staple technique
edit:
found on youtube:
https://youtu.be/3uoM5kfZIQ0
its stupider than the thing i just made up!

Although i have just found out that the
"two idiots banging on the same keyboard" NCIS video is a parody / hoax

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The FBI once identified a Nazi by getting his fingerprints from a photo of a 40 year old post card, and that wasn't terribly recent. His prints weren't visible to the naked eye and only showed up under special light, but it was only a photograph of the postcard, not the original. There are phone apps that will rebuild a person's face in a blurry photo, so you can imagine what is available to law enforcement. You might be surprised at what's possible. Having watched hundreds of true-crime shows, the murders that go unsolved are the ones that no one wants to spend the time and money to solve, or that happened in a place with an overwhelming amount of evidence so that no one suspect can be proven beyond reasonable doubt, that are random and leave no trace, or sometimes murderers get really lucky.

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Interesting thing about CSI: The scientific methods they demonstrated on the show were mostly real.
What was unrealistic was the time frame. Some of the tests they show being done in minutes or hours actually take days, weeks, sometimes even months.
Also no department has all the equipment shown on the series. They couldn't afford it. It's still quite common for departments to farm out their work to others that have the necessary equipment.

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Definitely. Our state has years worth of DNA samples they haven't processed. Part of the problem is cops grab dna from anyone and everyone hoping that someone will refuse and become their prime suspect, but then have hundreds of samples and no suspects and the state won't process them.

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