South Beach Riot
"CSI: Miami" is now the world's most watched television program according to both the BBC and Reuters. That in itself was enough to pique my interest about a show that had never particularly interested me mainly because I loathed the original, pre-spinoff production, "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," a cold, creepy show that seemed to revolve around bodily fluids and good-looking women who were dead.
But recently, in the New York Observer, Ron Rosenbaum managed to make me curious about "CSI: Miami" beyond the fact of its simple demographic appeal. To do so, he had to take a rather grand approach, not only dwelling on the show's lush visuals, but also sketching a theory about light (good) emerging from darkness (evil), and the ancient, fire-based Persian religion of Zoroastrianism and how it might relate to a crime show set in Miami but shot mostly in Los Angeles and appealing to a worldwide audience. An improbable mix, but somehow it made the fiery glow of David Caruso's hair appear to be part of some vast cosmic scheme rather than a mere fact of nature he was probably teased about in school.
Skip the big theories about "CSI: Miami," however, and you're apt to run into a different kind of reaction. This is a show, like its star, David Caruso, that sharply divides critics. Last month, Vanity Fair's James Wolcott took a swipe at Mr. Caruso's "macho-moron empath perversion of the Dirty Harry mystique," along with his "overstated understated acting" a judgment with which I had to concur based on the number of times I'd walked into the living room and heard Mr. Caruso's voice (my wife recently became addicted to the show) delivering line readings as if he were suffering through a supremely boring script read-through.
However, at that point I was only hearing Mr. Caruso; I wasn't watching him. His body language, abetted by baroque Leading Man camera angles he's often photographed from somewhere around his ankles, as if he were a human lighthouse is as mannered as his delivery. Combine the two, and the result is unique. Mr. Caruso moves slower and talks slower than anyone on television. He cocks his head in ways that would give most people a crick in their neck. Everything he does or says and he seems to say less and less with each episode, doling out words as if they were freshly minted $100 bills is a Statement. When he sits down, he does so with such deliberation it's like a slow-motion master class in the art of placing one's posterior on a seat. When he comforts a crime victim, it's another master class this time in terse, masculine empathy.
There's also something strangely phantom-like or vampiric about Mr. Caruso he's like the undead law man channeling the spirits of all the laconic American law men who preceded him, including his own stint as the stoical Detective John Kelly during the first two seasons of "NYPD Blue." Back then, Mr. Caruso's measured steeliness stood out even in the cold, unfeeling grid of New York City, and it stands out that much more in warm, sultry Miami. I suspect this is a big part of why the series wows people worldwide. They may object to a "cowboy" in the White House, but they're all for a subliminal cowboy on TV. As far as that goes, neither William Petersen of the original "CSI," nor Gary Sinise of the New York version, can cut it. Compared to them, Mr. Caruso is John Wayne.
On the other hand, a lot of other, very uncowboy-like things are going on in "CSI: Miami," too. Mainly visual things. What is on display, captured with all the fetishistic fervor of a modern camera team besotted with interior decoration, is the opulence of America's staggering material wealth, at least in those neighborhoods not marked by its complete absence. This begins with the (fictional) Miami Dade police headquarters. With its eerie blue light and flickering screens, it looks like a high-tech Sheikh-funded airport, hotel, and showboat museum in Dubai.
But it also extends to the beauty of the actors, the palatial splendor of the homes and luminous swimming pools (even the Miami-Dade interrogation room looks like a room in a five-star hotel), the perfection of the lightly clad bodies, the flawless skin, firm bellies, expertly trimmed three-day beards. There's never a hair out of place, unless it's been found at a crime scene, in which case it will soon be placed under a drumsized magnifying glass. It seems less a question of Zoroastrian light versus dark than of America's ability to sell its free-market allure.
Think, also, of some of the countries in which "CSI: Miami" is shown. For instance, European countries that share similar weather tend not to share similar wealth, while the richer ones spend half the year under gray, dripping skies. What they're looking at on their televisions is the orange glow of an American paradise a myth as much as a locale. And it's that mythic element that would make an actor like Mr. Caruso utterly absurd on a British cop show. He's so self-consciously iconic that viewers would think he had a screw loose. But in the vast American setting, he seems unnaturally natural, so to speak, and his "overstated understated" delivery becomes the voice of inexorable, puritanical, sometimes bullying, justice.
Watch enough episodes, and Mr. Caruso's mannerisms become less annoying than soothing as they melt into all those hypnotic patterns of shadow and light, and your critical faculties melt along with them. It's like a real estate show with characters and a plot, and it can hook you. The pristine settings, the stunning aerial views of harbors and yachts, the gorgeous homes and burnished floors, and then a flash of anger, a gush of blood. At which point, enter Miami-Dade Head Investigator, Lieutenant Horatio Caine, world's most popular cop. And not by chance, an American.
