Now, for a spot of television! I was thinking about TV shows that I enjoy, when I realized something weird. A very large percentage of the shows that I enjoy are crime dramas. I'm using this term to refer to any show that involves murder and the solving of it CSI (I like the original, or CSI Las Vegas), Cold Case, Criminal Minds, Castle, The Mentalist, Numbers and Law and Order are a pretty good sampling. I haven't seen the new Criminal Minds, NCIS, Bones or Monk but I have heard Bones is really good and the new Criminal Minds should be fairly good. And frankly, Monk sounds amazing.
I don't know what it is about crime dramas, law shows and that type of TV that I enjoy, but I think that part of it is the detective aspect. I love piecing together the crime, and part what I love is the unrealistic nature, that oftentimes (in most of these) the bad guy is caught and justice is served. Even if he/she almost gets away with it, rarely are they allowed to go. Even if the case lasts for an entire season. So, I am going to talk about these here and why I like them.
-CSI: Crime Scene Investigations (2000-NOW,CSI-NY 2004-NOW, Miami 2002-NOW)Created by Ann Donahue and Anthony E. Zuiker, Carol Mendelsohn joined for the spin-offs.
While I don't think this was the first crime drama ever, it was the first one that I remember loving that I saw (after Law & Order), and might have been one of the first to get going. CSI started in 2000 and is still running, we're up to Season 11. Are the cases getting weirder? Well, yes. But there was a case with death by animatronic dinosaur. Win. Have characters left? Yeah, Grissom's leaving was quite sad, but the new head-guy, Dr. Raymond Langston, is pretty awesome. The IMDB page describes CSI as "taking place at "the second busiest crime lab in America," and that the "CSI officers use the best scientific and technical methods to solve puzzles and catch criminals." Not only do you get to follow along and try to figure out with the CSI's (thank you commercial breaks and the 15 minutes til the end plot twist!) but each episode opens with part of the chorus of Who Are You? performed by The Who. As if the show didn't already rock...CSI also spawned two spin-offs, CSI: New York (2004-present) and CSI:Miami (2002-present). I never got into CSI: New York, because my dad and I thought the characters were too whinny to watch. And I never did get into CSI:Miami, the episodes had too much of a plot, by which I mean, you couldn't miss an episode without getting lost. But the thing that I love about CSI is what I love about most crime dramas and Sherlock Holmes, trying to figure out the case with/before the characters, as well as watching the characters interact. And the CSIs are pretty neat.
-Cold Case: (2003-2010)Created by Meredith Stiehm
Cold Case ran for 7 seasons and follows a female detective in Philadelphia who has been assigned to solve "cold cases," cases that had never been solved. The detective and her team have to think outside the box and solve cases that are years old, reaching back to the Roaring Twenties at one point. I think I liked this one because it took the typical crime drama format and threw in the old cases that had never been solved and solving them. The detective says at one point, "People shouldn't be forgotten. They matter. They should get justice, too." At the end, when a case is solved, she sees the avenged murdered one as the killer is walked away (and they flash back to what they were at the time of the crime). The most powerful part of the episode though, is the end. They write "CLOSED" on the box with the case notes inside and go put it back on the shelf. There is something about watching justice, even fake justice to imaginary people, being served that gives me immense satisfaction. Also, the show is really well put together, seaming the past and present together in a believable way.
-Criminal Minds (2005-NOW)Created by Jeff Davis
Criminal Minds is on their Sixth Season. This show takes a different spin then the other shows I've mentioned. This show follows a team of FBI profilers, all with different skills (the hacker, the genius, the one who is good with the press, the academic brain and the by-the-book guy, to name a few). The characters are all fleshed out, they relate to each other and alone none of them could solve the case(s), but all together they figure it out. Teamwork. Yay! The cases take them all over and there are some truly disturbing things/cases/people on criminal minds. I think this is because the point of the show is to try to think like the criminal in order to catch them. The episode with the pigs. The episode with the cell phone. Creepy. I don't know much about profiling, but I read in a review that this is actually fairly accurate. And again, I know that they don't always catch the bad guys, but I like it when that happens in television. And while most of the villains are straight-up bad, there have been some that were not cookie-cutter. And they did it well.
-The Mentalist (2008-NOW)Created by Bruno Heller
I haven't watched these next two nearly as much as the last two on both ends, but basically this is about a "well-known psychic becomes a consultant for the California Bureau of Investigation to help solve crimes and to find "Red John," the madman who killed his wife and daughter," his insights are a little annoying to the officers and they are skeptical, but it works and really is quite a great show. It started in 2008 (about a year before Castle) and gets into the idea of someone with a different perspective helping to solve crimes by thinking outside the box, the Mentalist (Patrick Jane) also occasionally breaks the law in his pursuit of justice. And it's still running. I'll have to catch up on it someday.
-Numb3rs (2005-2010) Created by Nicolas Falacci and Cheryl Heuton
Numb3ers ran for 5 years and is about a math genius who works for the FBI, using math (really complex math) to solve crimes. Again, I haven't seen enough of this show, but it really is great. The episodes are mostly stand alone (like CSI and Criminal Minds) but at the same time there are common threads that tie the episodes together. The cases are kooky and fun (can you call crime dramas fun? I think I mean suspenseful).
-Law and Order(1990-2010, SVU 1999-NOW, CI 2001-NOW, TBJ 2005-2006)Created by Dick Wolf
I don't recall much of the characters, any of the individual cases or really many details of any of these shows, except that A) I loved this show for some reason B) when I was toying with the idea of becoming a lawyer, this show both inspired me and changed my mind. I was still very young (about 3) when this show started, so I didn't actually start watching it until later, but once I was older if I was doing my homework late enough, I would hear snippets of the show and I was intrigued. The cases were usually adapted from current headlines (according to IMDB) and the first half is the investigation and evidence gathering, the second half is the prosecution in court. Three spin-offs resulted, Special Victims Unit which began in 1999 and is still running (the SVU investigate sexually related crimes), Criminal Intent which began in 2001 and is still running (this looks at crimes from the viewpoint of the criminal), and Trial By Jury which ran from 2005-2006 (and looked at the justice system and the investigating, preparing witnesses and defendants for trial, ect).
-Castle (2009-NOW)Created by Andrew W. Marlowe
This is probably my favorite show currently on TV. I love Castle. It's got the detective aspect of CSI plus the sarcasm of Stargate (and Firefly, to some extent). Rick Castle starts out the show in the first few episodes of season one as a spoiled rotten entitled jerk-face ala Captain Hammer. But as the show progresses, you start to see another side of him. This comes out in Castle's relationship with his mother and teenage daughter. He also has an ability to think outside the box, often drawing the same conclusions as Beckett (but earlier, because his hunches inspire them to look for the evidence needed). The cases seem original, and I love the relationships between not only Castle and Detective Kate Beckett, but his relationships with his mother, daughter and the other members of the NYPD Crime Solving Unit. The characters have personal lives, but that's not the driving focus; any time something reappears, it is talked about during a "Previously On" segment, and again, I love the outside of the box approach to crime solving (my brother told me I should watch Monk). But, the cases are intriguing (I'm getting better at guessing the culprit) and there is enough humor and wit to make Castle, to me at least, different than other crime dramas (Castle also has a balance between making fun of itself, but still being able to make me believe it).
So, I don't mean to give too much credit to Law and Order, but it was the show that inspired me to get into crime dramas (it also started in 1990, while most of the other shows didn't get going until around 2000) and while I love CSI more today, and Castle wins the "favorite show award" for me hands-down, there is something about all of these shows that I enjoy. I love mysteries, and so it's enjoyable to try to figure out who-done-it. Plus, there is the added bonus of knowing that the bad guy Almost Always Gets What He/She Has Coming. And I, as unrealistic as I am sure that is, love that.
Thanks crime drama, for showing depraved and sadistic people who commit terrible crimes getting caught and being unable to hurt people again, as justice is served.
This is a web address for an interesting article; Law and Order is more realistic than CSI. Well, duh. But it is a good article:
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2010/0/while_tv_crime_dramas_are_larg.html
Info that is not my opinion comes from the Internet Movie Data Base.
