Tonight at 10PM, CBS brings out its latest CSI spin-off series: CSI: Cyber, starring a selection of familiar faces including Academy Award winner Patricia Arquette, Ally McBeal’s Peter MacNicol, Shad “formerly known as Bow Wow” Moss, and James “you knew him as Dawson” Van Der Beek. Rather than confining itself to one city or location, Cyber deals with crimes all throughout the computerized world.
“Every crime is amplified,” Executive Producer Anthony Zuiker explained at this year’s Television Critics Association press tour. “Everything is dealt 2.0. The bank robbery of yesterday was going into a bank, breaking in, taking a lot of money. The bank robbery of tomorrow is taking 3 cents out of your account. The arson of yesterday is burning down a forest because you’re burning love letters for a loved one. The arson of tomorrow is hacking into your smart house and having all the megahertz be rerouted to your appliance to burn your house down in the middle of the night. That is cybercrime 2.0 by an eclectic cast and the same dream team that brought you the franchise back in 2000,” he promised.
The notion that CSI is such a large global franchise and the ability to connect with audiences everywhere was part of what drew Patricia Arquette to the series, but it was also the notion that Cyber explores the dawn of a new time. “This is like the Industrial Revolution,” she said. “This is an explosion of the way that we’re going to be living our lives. And they are so beautiful in entertaining. They know how to write things that are entertaining, teams that are doing things, moving, that it excites audiences. And yet they’re also introducing all this information about these new technologies and the ways that we’re living now, moving forward, the way that crime is developing. First of all, we’ve been seeing cops with guns, law enforcement with guns, that were men for over 50 years. So to be a woman in law enforcement on television, I think, is sort of important. It’s a powerful position for a woman to be in, but also to be looking at these new technologies, exploring these new technologies. And the interesting thing about cybercrime and the whole cyber world is that many of the people that are most proficient in it are young people, really young people. So this particular show has a real mixture of people that have a little more history with conventional crime solving and young people that are geniuses,” she continued.
Arquette’s character of Avery Ryan is based on Mary Aiken, who is a professor of cyber analytics at Pacific University, and she says that Aiken’s input “helps us so much” before adding that the show “is its own creature as well.”
“There’s a little bit of a division,” she explained. “So the way I sort of looked at this character is she’s really developed a strong survival mechanism of her mind, profiling people. It’s a survival mechanism. And she can have empathy for victims, for other people. When it starts getting too close to her, it’s a little uncomfortable territory to be ‑‑ not have survival skills, not have a mechanism, not be able to see what the next move is because your emotions override your mind.”
Does the show succeed? From the episodes we’ve seen, it’s an interesting mixture: Some character names are silly, but it feels more accessible than Scorpion, which has similar themes. Also surprising is that the show seems more character-driven than what we have seen in previous CSI series; perhaps that has to do with the influx of younger characters and name actors that we knew “before” this show was a thing. If people sample it – and in this day and age with TV that’s never a guarantee – this could be a hit that could revive the CSI franchise.
In any event, CSI: Cyber premieres Wednesday night, March 4 on CBS, and you can see some images from tonight’s premiere episode below. Enjoy:
CSI: Cyber
"Kidnapping 2.0" -- Special agent Avery Ryan and her team of FBI cyber analysts investigate a case of hacked baby monitors, on the series premiere of CSI: CYBER, Wednesday, March 4 (10:00-11:00, ET/PT), on the CBS Television Network. Pictured: Patricia Arquette and James Van Der Beek Photo: Monty Brinton/ CBS ©2015 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved
