Media Criticism, Popular Culture, Space

CSI: Suborbit

17 Comments

Dwayne Day has an amusing review of what seems to have been a particularly stupid episode of CSI: Miami. I’ve never actually sat through an entire show (the only reason I’ve ever been able to see for watching it is Emily Procter, and that’s not enough, particularly since she doesn’t have anywhere near the southern accent that much of the hype about her would lead you to believe). Are they all this dumb?

17 thoughts on “CSI: Suborbit”

  2. …Survivor: Low Earth Orbit: every week someone gets tossed out the airlock.

    I like it. Can we start with politicians?

  3. Are they all this dumb?

    Well, first of all, in the real world, Crime Scene Investigators collect physical evidence and perform laboratory tests. Period. They don’t interrogate suspects, interview witnesses, perform autopsies, make arrests, or do any of the other things they do on that show.

    The show also invents a lot of technology that does not exist in the real world. This was even parodied on one episode of “Monk” where the star of a CSI-like show committed a murder. It was amusing to watch Monk as “real” police detective commenting on the various devices.

    Even when CSI shows real technology, they grossly distort the way it works. Tests that take days or weeks to perform, in the real world, produce instant results. They take such liberties that prosecutors now talk about the “CSI effect” and try to exclude people who watch the show from juries.

    Add to that plotlines that are sensationalistic, sleezy, and scatological (one sweeps week episode dealt with adult diapers), and you have Hollywood at its finest.

  4. Yes, they’re all that dumb. My wife loves trashy crime procedural shows, but CSI:Miami is cheezy enough to trigger her gag reflex. That said, it’s kind of like Baywatch for the HD era: you’re not really watching the show for the plot, writing, or acting, you’re watching it for the gorgeous setting and set designs. You know, I’d love to see an engineering office re-envisioned by those designers…

  6. Can’t stand any of the CSI shows, they’re pretty to look at but hack writing. There usually seems to be some kind of anti-gun message too.

  7. Ha. I saw that episode. It’s hard to say whether the technical, political, or economic errors were the most egregious. I tried to keep track of the regulatory-legal errors as t went along (staring with the obvious one that once you start looking at things that happen on airplanes in flight, not to mention space, it becomes a federal jurisdiction only) but I had to give up, eventually.

    My rule of thumb is that when a sow or publication says something about a field I know well, and it seems particularly stupid, I can pretty much assume what they’re saying about other fields is full of crap as well.

    Hollywood cop shows have interesting effects. Not only do they give juries really wrong ideas about forensic evidence or lack thereof, but now thanks to foreign syndication, criminals in England and even France have started to take the Fifth, or claim their Miranda rights. Or try to.

  8. “Burn Notice” just had Bruce Campbell’s character give “CSI: Miami” a couple of digs with the sunglasses shtick. Not being a “CSI” viewer I just thought he was being cheesy — until my wife asked me if he was “doing a Caruso.”

  9. The minute I saw the commercial for this episode, I knew it was pure jump the shark time. I imagine it sounded like a really cool hip idea in the writers room, but from a viewer’s point of view, it looked lame.

  10. My rule of thumb is that when a sow or publication says something about a field I know well, and it seems particularly stupid, I can pretty much assume what they’re saying about other fields is full of crap as well.

    Works for newspaper articles where I’ve had first hand knowledge. It’s amazing how wrong they can get it.

  11. “Works for newspaper articles where I’ve had first hand knowledge. It’s amazing how wrong they can get it.”

    Richard Feynman had dubbed this the “Gell-Mann” effect after his Caltech colleague Murray Gell-Mann who “believed what he read in the papers” until the papers wrote about high-energy physics. Wish I could find the link

  13. I’ve been in Forensics as a latent print examiner for nearly 20 years. I’ve been in love with space exploration for over 40 years. I’ll excerpt a response I posted on the link:

    The TRULY sad thing, IMHO, is not only the abject nonsense attributed to Forensics (both pro- and con-), but also that the CSI shows misuse and abuse the pseudoscientific nonsense that they themselves propound for the basis of what is frankly a smear campaign against private enterprise in space exploration. They see no one but a government entity as capable of doing it safely, so they slander and libel everyone who is NOT a government entity by means of a “bovine-endproduct” strawman argument based upon fraudulent forensic pseudoscience.

    Were I not an adherent to the “cock-up before conspiracy” theory of government, I’d applaud the bastards for discrediting two scientific fields for the price of one…

    Open question whether or not it survives comment moderation…

  14. Richard Feynman had dubbed this the “Gell-Mann” effect after his Caltech colleague Murray Gell-Mann who “believed what he read in the papers” until the papers wrote about high-energy physics.

    Cool story. I hadn’t heard it before. Feynman was quite the guy.

    Smartest programmer (by IQ) I ever worked under read that every function should have an error trap so he demanded we all do so. That didn’t last long (although we did waste a lot of time adding and removing such.) Experience shows that error traps only go in certain places and other places add problems rather than reduce them as well as hiding the source of the error somewhat. I was already a crusty old fart by the time I worked for this young guy. It’s a rare smart young guy that will listen to a crusty old fart. Usually, and especially when they’re your boss, you have to let them figure it out for themselves (and go about your own business as best you can.)

  16. Wow, that episode sounds mind-boggling bad. Among the many, many things wrong with it, how do you get two guys (in space long enough to have bone loss, or does minutes of weightlessness cause bone loss? Maybe we should regulate trampolines) from Miami without the Feds finding out about it? Did the lunar nazis hide them? And wouldn’t it be a wee bit suspicious when one of the most famous people (private astronauts should be good publicity for a bit of time) in the world is never seen after a certain point in the space vehicle? Even the regular police would think it a bit odd that nobody outside of the company would claim to have ever seen this guy alive.

  17. It’s a rare smart young guy that will listen to a crusty old fart.

    Sounds like this guy might have been smart smart not just IQ smart.

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