CSI starts off with a bang (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Las Vegas - Season 1 Part 1 (DVD))

Member Name: pmcds

Product:	CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Las Vegas - Season 1 Part 1 (DVD)
Date:	02/10/08 (44 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great start to a new series

Disadvantages: Plots aren't enough to get teeth stuck into as characters are still in the introductory stage

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, first aired in 2000, and hit the niche on the market for the forensic drama that we were lacking on our screens. This is the original series and is set in Las Vegas. It has spawned CSI: New York and CSI: Miami and has set the benchmark for similar shows to follow, such as Bones and NCIS.

For the purposes of being released to the general public, teh first series was split into 2 DVDs, the first being released a good time before the second, to maintain interest with the public and also to boost sales for the show.

CSI teams in America are the forensic experts who attend the scene of a crime with the necessary tools and equipment to assess what happened. The lead character in this show is Gil Grissom, who heads the night team. We rarely see or meet the day team, but we do know that Grissom and the leader of the day team are constantly at loggerheads with each other. Grissom is ably played by William Peterson, and he gives the character a workaholic nature, but also respectable and a lot of screen presence.

Marg Helgenberger plays Catherine Willows, a senior on Grissom's team. She is a hard nosed single mum who balances her life (just) around her work and her daughter. Then come Nick Stokes and Warrick Brown, played ably by George Eads and Gary Dourdan. These characters are all introduced very early on, and this first half of the season spends a good amount of time developing their characters.

We also meet from time to time a couple of other characters, particularly Jim Brass, former CSI leader and current police chief, played by Paul Guilfoyle, and Greg Sanders, the lab technician who does the complicated lab work with the equipment they have. Every forensic or technical TV series also has its resident doctor, and this one has Dr Al Robbins, played by Robert David Hall. The majority of the acting is very good, and the show flows very well, but at times the acting of some of them is quite wooden. This is mainly Eads and Dourdan that I find this with, but I also find that it doesn't affect my enjoyment of it much.

What you find with nearly every episode is that the complicated stuff is very well explained, almost too much. I'll admit, a lot of it goes straight over my head, but it is clever the way the camera is used to zoom in on strands of DNA or particles of hair, to show us just how easy it is to leave traces. One of their favourite things to show is how blood stains show up easily even after cleaning just by using UV light.

This first half of the first season is generally spent introduces the main characters as they investigate, and as such the plots aren't really the main focus here. It is a good show, and they introduce everyone well, and by the end of this first half, you get a feel for the characters. The second half is where it starts getting more interesting as the CSI crew start getting their teeth into cases that are profiled in a bit more detail for us as viewers, and we are introduced so Sarah Sidle (Jorja Fox) as she joins their ranks full time.

Overall, this is an impressive start to a new series, made back in 2000. It examines the work of a CSI very closely, and apparently is quite accurate. Naturally, there will be elements that are inaccurate, and this will be down to artistic licence to a certain degree, but what we do have here is a successful start to a series, and well worth owning.

There are limited extras on the DVD itself, as the producers wanted to wait until the full season DVD came out to encourage more sales. The DVD for the first half of CSI: season 1 is available from amazon.co.uk for £16.97.

Summary: Great start to a new series