CSI: Miami, now in its sixth season, returns with a new episode Monday night, the first one completed since the writers’ strike ended in February. CBS’s top-rated crime drama is the most popular TV show in the world according to international ratings, just as Baywatch was the world’s most popular show in the ’90s. (Here in the U.S., A&E leans on the syndicated reruns pretty hard, showing nine-hour marathons every Wednesday.) The two shows have their similarities: beachfront locales, lots of sun, pretty girls and muscular guys, and murder-mystery storylines for those who aren’t interested in the eye candy. But while Baywatch had beefcake mannequin David Hasselhoff as its lead actor, CSI: Miami has David Caruso, whose performance makes the show endlessly watchable. (Of course, Bruce Fretts of TV Guide said in January that Caruso is “rapidly turning into the new Hasselhoff.” Please, Bruce, don’t piss all over my thesis just yet, okay?)

I’m not trying to argue that there are hidden depths to the carrot-topped actor’s portrayal of Horatio Caine, the police detective who heads up the Miami-Dade County police department’s forensics team, but I am defending the method in his madness. (According to someone I know whose brother has appeared on the show in a guest-starring role, there may actually be some undiagnosed madness in Caruso’s method. Then again, ain’t we all a little crazy?) Many people think Caruso’s a terrible actor, which just isn’t so. Instead, he’s a good actor who’s gotten lazy, although I do think he’s keeping himself entertained as he goes through the motions week after week. He could still turn in a solid performance if he wanted to, but for now he’s content to deliver his stone-faced one-liners and throw a bunch of quirks into his role as “H,” like positioning his body at a 90-degree angle in relation to another character and only turning his head to address him or her, and adding lots of odd pauses into his dialogue, possibly as an homage to one of his idols, Christopher Walken, or, as a friend of mine has theorized, because he can only memorize five words of dialogue at a time and then has to look off-camera to locate the next cue card. Caruso’s character isn’t like any of the others on CSI: Miami, which helps set him and the show apart, but he’s so different that he almost seems like he’s on another show altogether.

CSI: Miami is a spin-off of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which began in 2000 and is set in Las Vegas; the second spin-off in the franchise is CSI: NY, which is in its fourth season. I’ve seen some bits and pieces of the original CSI in syndication and maybe 20 minutes of an episode of CSI: NY — they both seem to get the job done in terms of their genre, but they’re missing the Caruso factor, which is crucial for TV comfort food of this sort.

Yes, comfort food, not guilty pleasure. I doubt I’m alone in thinking that “guilty pleasure” is an offensive term: if something gives you pleasure, why should you feel guilty about it? I’m only referring to entertainment, of course — if you take pleasure in actual crimes you’ve committed rather than crime dramas you watch on TV, then you should feel guilty. (But, for the record, embezzlement is a victimless crime, so when I took pleasure in five counts of it back in 2003, there was no need to feel guilty, according to my lawyer/friend Dave-o’s riveting closing argument. You’ll have to stick around for the exciting conclusion of this post to find out the verdict.) And if you think that tickling an endangered species to extinction is either pleasurable or entertaining, well, you’re wrong. I’m not sure if it’s a crime, but it is wrong.

As I was saying, I think guilty pleasures of the televised, cinematic, staged, musical, or literary kind should be referred to as comfort food from here on out. I don’t feel guilty about watching CSI: Miami reruns on A&E, but I realize I’m gorging on empty calories. And like I said, I haven’t seen much of CSI or CSI: NY, but its lead actors — William L. Petersen and Gary Sinise, respectively — both got their start doing theatre in Chicago, so I assume that starring in a long-running TV series is more financially fulfilling for them than it is artistically fulfilling. Same goes for Caruso, but unlike Petersen and Sinise, his piece of the CSI franchise represents a successful comeback from a career plummet that once seemed permanent.

During the 1993-’94 season, Caruso was treated as a Very Big Deal because of his performance as Detective John Kelly on ABC’s NYPD Blue. For one thing, he had a slightly menacing, unpredictable screen presence, speaking to criminals and suspects with a quiet, tense voice that let them know Kelly wasn’t somebody they wanted to mess with. His sad eyes and complicated relationship with the ex-wife he still loved made Kelly a character you rooted for — a good guy who’d make mistakes and was therefore instantly recognizable as “one of us.” There aren’t a lot of red-headed male sex symbols in TV history, which was another reason Caruso stood out.

Soon after the conclusion of NYPD Blue’s first season in the spring of ‘94, there were rumblings that Caruso was beginning to bite the hand that fed him. He landed the lead role in Barbet Schroeder’s remake of Kiss of Death and shot it during Blue’s summer hiatus, but once he was offered the lead in the psychological thriller Jade (his character in the film is named David Corelli, ferchrissakes) later that summer, he quit the show that had made him a TV star so he could become a movie star. Or at least that’s how the story is usually told.

I remember that when Kiss of Death came out in the spring of ‘95, Caruso said in an Entertainment Weekly interview that he had asked NYPD Blue’s producers if he could take some time off to film Jade; he would’ve missed a few episodes, but the show did have a big cast, so it’s not like other characters, like Dennis Franz’s Andy Sipowicz, couldn’t have filled the void for, say, four or five weeks. Caruso said that ABC and the show’s producers, including Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues) and David Milch (Deadwood), refused to give him the time off — there were also salary demands on the negotiating table — so he left the show after the first four episodes of the second season and was replaced by Jimmy Smits, who stuck around for four years. (NYPD Blue went off the air in 2005 after 12 seasons.)

I don’t know why, but I believed Caruso. I don’t doubt that he started to believe his own hype to a certain extent, but he seemed sincere about wanting to stick with Blue. (In a 1995 New York Times article by Bernard Weinraub, Bochco was quoted as saying, “Of all the parties involved [in the negotiations], David may be the least knowledgeable. At the end of the day I know what happened.” Weinraub also wrote that Caruso “views television as a boot camp for films, and doesn’t see himself returning.”) And when, in 2002, CSI: Miami premiered and he said in interviews that he’d had almost a decade out of the spotlight to think about the mistake he made by leaving NYPD Blue to do Jade, which bombed in the fall of ‘95, he seemed just as sincere to me.

Some may argue that Caruso was young and naive when he left NYPD Blue after only 26 episodes, but he was already in his late 30s by that time, having appeared in films like An Officer and a Gentleman and First Blood as far back as 1982 as well as giving noteworthy performances in King of New York (costarring Christopher Walken … and Wesley Snipes!) in 1990 and Mad Dog and Glory in ‘93. I haven’t seen Mad Dog and Glory in a long time, but I do remember Caruso holding his own rather easily in a one-on-one scene with Robert De Niro. Like John Travolta on Welcome Back, Kotter or Bruce Willis on Moonlighting, I think Caruso’s star wattage was big enough for the big screen, but neither Travolta nor Willis left the shows that made them stars before they’d paid their dues. Similarly, Caruso didn’t have a Saturday Night Fever or a Die Hard waiting to launch him into a full-time career as a movie star. His career is more like that of Farrah Fawcett’s — she left Charlie’s Angels in 1977 after one season and watched her TV heat burn out quickly in films like Somebody Killed Her Husband (1978) and Sunburn (1979).

Maybe Caruso just listened to bad advice, but whatever the case, his career as a leading man in movies was over by the end of 1995. Many people forget that he returned to series television in the fall of ‘97 with Michael Hayes, a legal drama that supposedly had a great pilot that it didn’t live up to in subsequent episodes. It also failed to revive Caruso’s career and was canceled after one season.

He then appeared alongside Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan in Taylor Hackford’s 2000 film Proof of Life (Hackford had previously directed Caruso in An Officer and a Gentleman) and in the 2001 horror film Session 9, and finally in the fall of ‘02 he was playing a cop on the small screen again in CSI: Miami. Behold the second coming of the flame-haired lawman!

I don’t know whose idea it was to have Caruso anchor the spin-off of one of the most popular shows on TV, but it probably raised some eyebrows considering his lack of success in both TV and film after he left NYPD Blue. Maybe it was CSI executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who produced the 1984 film Thief of Hearts, which costarred Caruso; he’s made enough smart, money-making choices in his time that people should just nod their heads in agreement no matter what he says. Maybe he remembered that Caruso was a good actor who’d just made some bad decisions in a very public way and had unfairly paid the price for too many years. Or maybe a CBS janitor said “That red-headed dude from NYPD Blue was the best cop I ever saw on TV” and somebody actually listened. Whatever the case, the casting paid off, even if Caruso still has his detractors.

In the last few months I saw a rerun on A&E of one of CSI: Miami’s first episodes. Ever since I discovered the show last year and became obsessed with Caruso’s oddball performance as Horatio Caine, I wondered if he’d always been that way on the show. Actors’ performances obviously evolve on TV shows the longer they run, just as their characters evolve. As it turns out, Horatio in early episodes is similar to John Kelly on NYPD Blue, quiet and tense but not robotic (costar Eva LaRue said on E!’s Chelsea Lately that Caruso brings in the “Terminator audience” with his quips and signature sunglasses) or ghostlike as he is now. He even smiles occasionally, and in one scene I swear he almost laughed!

Caruso seems to make Horatio his own man and less like John Kelly around the second season, but then again, I haven’t seen a lot of the episodes — this is all guesswork on my part. (If you’re a CSI: Miami fan, feel free to fill in the blanks in the comments section below.) Then, around the third or fourth season, circa 2005-2006, Caruso begins showing his age: baggier eyes, a heavier frame, more noticeable jowls, etc. I’m not saying the change in appearance isn’t natural — Caruso turned 50 in 2006 — but he definitely looks different. And once he started looking older, he started making his character weirder — Horatio talks to everyone, even love interests, while standing at that 90-degree angle and lowering his head when speaking, almost as if he’s trying to make them concentrate on his posture so much that they’ll let slip some crucial piece of information they should be keeping to themselves. Foiled again by a cop who looks like he’s slowly recovering from back surgery!

CSI: Miami started out as a fairly normal-looking crime drama, but over the years the set design, costume design, and lighting design have gotten out of hand. It’s almost like a live-action cartoon now, with crime lab equipment straight out of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, cinematography that makes the interrogation-room scenes look like they’ve been filtered “through a pack of LifeSavers,” as a friend of mine said, and detectives who are supposed to be taken seriously even when they’re wearing orange sweaters and beige sport coats. I realize Miami Vice introduced cops wearing pastels in the ’80s, but it had nothing on CSI: Miami’s fashion sense.

The last new episode aired back in January and introduced Elizabeth Berkley as the mother of Horatio’s long-lost son. Interesting casting once again, as it paired up the star of Jade with the star of Showgirls, another big-screen bomb from the fall of ‘95, though that film’s reputation has been salvaged in the last few years by Paul Verhoeven enthusiasts. Berkley’s career, unfortunately, never recovered. To be honest, she’s terrible in Showgirls, but unlike Caruso when he did Jade, she really was young and (seemingly) naive at the time. On CSI: Miami, however, she blends into the overall cartoonish atmosphere with ease.

And that’s the thing — since the show has become more and more garish and absurd in order to keep its particular brand of comfort food from going stale, it follows that Caruso would decide at a certain point to join the fun, albeit in his own peculiar style. I have a feeling he’s in on the joke all the way, and anyone who thinks he’s a terrible actor just doesn’t understand the punchline.

This isn’t to say, however, that I prefer Caruso 2.0 over the original model. As Horatio Caine, all the energy and danger and unpredictability he had as John Kelly is long gone, which is kind of sad. (Think of CSI: Miami as the “fat Elvis” portion of Caruso’s career: still entertaining, but harder to defend.) In fact, he’s the 21st century’s answer to Jack Lord, the star of Hawaii Five-O, another long-running CBS crime drama that featured lots of sun, sand, murder, and wonderfully bad dialogue like “I’ve got a hunch that what we’ve uncovered so far is just the tip of a very dirty iceberg” and “You know, your husband’s a great big beautiful dude, but they don’t play the same game. They’re little-bitty snakes, but they run around with big guns that go bang-bang and they kill people.”

Like NYPD Blue, Hawaii Five-O ran for 12 seasons (1968-1980), and like Dennis Franz, Jack Lord remained with the show for its entire run, playing impressively coiffed police officer Steve McGarrett. But like Caruso, once Lord started doing Hawaii Five-O, he didn’t appear in any movies on the side. Maybe Caruso hasn’t been offered any films since CSI: Miami became a hit, or maybe he feels he learned his lesson with Jade and NYPD Blue and doesn’t want to do anything to screw up his second chance. I can’t say I blame him.

Like Caruso, Lord often appears to be reading from cue cards, and in the final few seasons of Five-O he doesn’t cover his tracks very well — if you watch his eyes in the 1978 episode “Small Potatoes,” you can see them moving from left to right as he reads his lines and looks beyond the actors who are right in front of him. Very lazy of you, Jack, but the punishing schedule of TV production — shooting, say, eight pages of a script per day for a one-hour episode as opposed to two pages for a two-hour movie — must make dialogue memorization a constant burden. Before he became a star in movies like Dr. No (1962), the first James Bond film, Lord studied acting at the Actors Studio in New York City with Marlon Brando, who was famous for not memorizing his lines. Brando’s excuse was that he wanted his line readings to be as fresh as possible, and you can’t get much fresher than reading your lines for the first time off of cue cards, index cards, and even baby Superman’s diaper after the director has yelled “Action!”

Caruso has a home in Miami, where exterior shots of CSI: Miami are filmed; Lord lived in Hawaii during and after Hawaii Five-O’s dozen years on the air (he died in 1998). Maybe Caruso’s content to be able to live and work, at least part-time, in a city by the sea, earning a healthy paycheck and saving up for his kids’ college fund. Or maybe he’s just happy that he was able to make any kind of comeback in his profession, if not in movies then at least in a successful TV series that people around the world have come to love, even if it’s merely comfort food. The flame-haired lawman’s acting flame may be almost out, but he entertains me nonetheless. In the end, the second coming of the Lord — the Jack Lord — has been worth the wait.

(Okay, in case you’re wondering and in case you’re still with me at this point, the verdict of my embezzlement trial was … “not guilty”! I got off scot-free! Hells yeah! I bought red-headed sluts for everyone at D’Angelo’s Tavern that night. I’d like to think David Caruso would’ve approved.)

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Current Events, Film/TV/Theatre, Movies, Sugar Water, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.