TV Script/ Critical Evaluation
Posted on: March 26, 2010
For my Professional Writing Unit, we were assigned to write the opening scenes of an original radio or television rehearsal script. The genre I chose to write for is television crime drama. A copy of the full script can be found in my pages or by clicking here. In addition, we were asked to write about any other programme in the same medium and genre as our script, so here is my short critical evaluation of the US TV show.
Critical Evaluation
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (also known as CSI Las Vegas) is an American crime drama television series which premiered on CBS in October 2000. Currently on its tenth season, CBS, one of the big three American broadcast television networks, have capitalised the show with two spin-offs: CSI Miami and CSI New York. The target audience for this programme is typically 18-50 year olds and demographically groups A-C2. This is established by the sometimes gruesome murders and a dynamic range of characters which are represented in CSI.
Something which CSI does so well is to combine the old-school values of dedicated crime-fighting with new televisual language, appealing to a broader audience. A strong sense of professionalism is shown by the use of set reconstructions and CGI. The three different areas for the location of the show enable an impressive and real-life city atmosphere which can create different moods for the action; New York is portrayed as a Gotham-like, rough area, Miami is a high-end beach paradise and Las Vegas is depicted as glamorous with constant squalor below the surface.
The main characters have intriguing back stories and occasional departmental romances blossom between the investigators, but it’s the ‘who did it?’ plotlines that grip the attention of the audience. Some examples of these plots include a Hollywood star murdered while partying with fans, a mystery involving the mass suicide of a UFO cult, a half- naked woman found buried in the desert with her hair and right hand missing. It is evident from watching a few of these episodes that the storylines could be seen as far-fetched but when considering the fact that the show is set in Las Vegas and New York etc., the majority of storylines are carried off in a believable way. This is mainly because of the knowledge they possess of investigating crimes.
The episodes are mostly self-contained, requiring little previous knowledge of character or situation so a new audience member could watch with no need to know the minor characters. Because of the separate stories of the personal lives of main characters there is a strong sense of characterisation and we are able to relate to them. For example, one of the main character Catherine Willows, a night shift supervisor, worked as an exotic dancer to support her boyfriends job before she was talked convinced to go back to school where she gained her interest in crime. The shows follows typical conventions of the crime drama genre as there tends to be a general structure to the action which opens with a crime and ends with some sort of resolution.
When comparing CSI to British TV crime dramas it is portrayed that in America the audience perceive the police as the good guys and the criminals are the bad guys. In Comparison with shows such as Wire in the Blood in the UK, it is sometimes suggested that policemen & criminals are a lot alike. Therefore when writing a script for TV crime drama, a main consideration is how the audience will interpret what they are being showed.
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