Quincy certainly never had it this good. William Petersen and Marg Helgenberger, the stars of CBS' new autopsy drama, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - one of the few fledgling hits of the fall season - are doing location shoots in many-splendored Las Vegas. Right now, Helgenberger's sitting stageside in a topless joint, where her chracter, the fetching and brainy Catherine Willos, is investigating the rape of one of the club's resident rump-shakers. Later on, Petersen (who plays forensic genius Gil Grissom) negotiates some curves of his own - shooting a scene on the heart-stopping roller coaster at the New York-New York Hotel & Casino.
Strippers and roller coasters? No wonder that Fugitive dude is currently eating CSI's fingerprint dust. That's right: When CSI debuted on October 6, it immediately hit the Nielsen jackpot. Attracting a staggering 17.3 million viewers, it won its 9 p.m. time slot, outrated its highly touted lead-in, The Fugitive, and quickly became the highest-ranked new drama of the season. (Need more perspective? The episode even outdrew The West Wing's fall 1999 bow by a cool half million viewers.) Numbers like those shocked everyone associated with the series. Well, almost everyone. "Don't ask me why," says Helgenberger, who won a 1990 supporting actress Emmy for China Beach and popped up in last year's Erin Brockovich. "I just believed in the show. I knew it was innovative and different and provocative."
She's got a point. Take the pilot's case of the poisonous prostitutes, which was based on a real-life scame perpetrated by a group of Vegas hookers who smeared their breasts with a powerful sedative in order to knock out - and then rip off - their unsuspecting johns. Another subplot saw a suspect collared thanks to some telltale striations on a dislodged toenail. And then there are the maggots. "We have an episode coming up where we find a guy dead, laying in the desert, and he's been all bleached - everything's been sucked out of him by the sun and the weather," says Petersen, star of the 1986 film Manhunter and currently in The Contender. "But you can analyze the maggots living inside him, and they'll retain whatever he had in his system. It's fascinating - they're like refrigerators."
Says creator-coexecutive producer Anthony Zuiker: "The hero [of the show] is the evidence. A toenail, a hair follicle, a teardrop, these kinds of things. It's very cool." Adds Petersen: "The police chase the lie, the crime-scene analysts chase the truth. Ultimately, these are the guys who are going to give closure to the world. It's not going to be the homicide guys; they're going to be the dinosaurs." |
