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It may be hard to remember (or believe) now, but there was a time when the letters “CBS” did not immediately summon the image of some square-jawed protagonist or other fighting crime. In the ’90s, a CBS hour-long drama could be about anything: angels; a regular family driving around the country helping strangers because angels told them to; newlyweds; a guy who gets the next day’s newspaper delivered each morning. The fact that today’s CBS is now home to NCIS and its two spinoffs; FBI and its two spinoffs; SEAL Team; Bull; and Blue Bloods is not only because of William Petersen, but…largely because of him? Perhaps.
In 2000, the network premiered CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, created by Anthony E. Zuiker; Petersen was its star and, with his producing partner Cynthia Chvatal, one of its executive producers. Two years later, we got Without A Trace; the year after that, the military-justice procedural JAG spun off the first NCIS; two years after that came Criminal Minds. Over the next couple of decades, remakes of Hawaii Five-O, Magnum, P.I., The Equalizer, SWAT, and MacGyver and a Silence Of The Lambs prequel would follow. As Petersen returns to CBS in the sequel CSI: Vegas, we must ask: is this what we want for him now?
Before landing his two earliest (and, arguably, most indelible) film roles, Petersen was a stalwart of the Chicago theatre scene, at Steppenwolf and elsewhere. First landing the role of Richard Chance opposite Willem Dafoe in William Friedkin’s To Love And Die In L.A., he followed it up with Michael Mann’s Manhunter, in which he originated the role of profiler Will Graham opposite Brian Cox’s Hannibal Lecter. But after that, other than projects that were of particular interest to horny teens — Young Guns II (in which he played Pat Garrett), Fear (beleaguered father Steve Walker), The Skulls (secret-society scumbag Ames Levritt) — Petersen remained a character actor. He’d pop up in TV movies or miniseries — he played both Joseph Kennedy Jr. and John F. Kennedy in two different projects! — and on stage, staying booked and busy.
We often hear from actors who, after having children, appreciate the regular hours and comfortable rhythms of a TV role; given the bombast Petersen brought to many of his pre-series regular roles, one can imagine the appeal of a character like CSI‘s Gil Grissom. No one would mistake Grissom for Stanley Kowalski (whom Petersen played on stage in a 1984 production of A Streetcar Named Desire): though Grissom can be intense, his work as a Las Vegas crime scene investigator generally finds him quietly observing rather than loudly declaiming. (With few exceptions, taking a case Very Personally falls to Grissom’s more showily emotional subordinates.) Anchored by veteran character actors Petersen, Marg Helgenberger as exotic dancer-turned-criminalist Catherine Willows, and Paul Guilfoyle as Det. Jim Brass, CSI also boosted the careers of its less-seasoned performers: Jorja Fox (Sara Sidle), Gary Dourdan (Warrick Brown), and George Eads (Nick Stokes). Originally scheduled as a lead-out for CBS’s 2000 remake of The Fugitive, starring Tim Daly, CSI quickly proved to be too big a hit to languish in its original Friday-night time slot; midway through its first season, it moved to Thursday nights after ratings juggernaut Survivor, and remained there for a decade.
Petersen left the original series halfway through its ninth season, after which he notched only four non-CSI screen credits. And why not? Being an EP on a long-running TV series gets you some of the most passive passive income you can earn. (No one’s calling Petersen down to the studio to fix a broken window or leaky faucet. Landlords wish!) Even so, the few gigs Petersen chose — a trucker in Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World from writer-director Lorene Scafaria, pre-Hustlers; a colonel in Manhattan, the wildly under-appreciated drama about the Manhattan Project — were a lot more interesting than the shows his former co-stars landed. No offense to George Eads, but when you’re the second banana on the MacGyver remake, this is the kind of assessment people are going to make!
The CSI franchise spawned not just ancillary tie-in products like books and video games but also two successful spinoff series…and two-season wonder CSI: Cyber. So given our current climate of nostalgic TV remakes and revivals, the franchise is ripe for resurrection. Just six years after the finale of the original series, CSI is back — and back in its original setting — as CSI: Vegas. Though many of the characters we knew have left the crime lab, an assassination attempt against one of her old colleagues brings Sara Sidle back to investigate, only to discover that there’s much more to the case than anyone could have foreseen. And since the original series ended with Sara and Grissom reconciling after their divorce, it’s not much of a surprise when Grissom suspends his ecological work in South America to join her.
Fans of the old show (me) might have expected Vegas to be a limited series focusing on the case involving the characters we know, with new investigators rarely appearing to remind us that, of course, there have been staffing changes at the LVPD in the past half-decade. But in the first three episodes provided to critics to screen, we actually see quite a lot of the new team, working on one-and-done crimes. Paula Newsome (Barry) is supervisor/geneticist Maxine Roby; she’s assisted by British-Indian transplant Allie Rajan, played by Mandeep Dhillon (After Life); Allie’s workplace crush Joshua Folsom (Matt Lauria, formerly of Friday Night Lights); and coroner Hugo Ramirez (The Last Man On Earth alumnus Mel Rodriguez). It sure seems like the familiar faces are only here to entice us to check out the show, and that they will all return to their lives once the case is solved, leaving the new characters to carry on in a wholly new spinoff.
So back to our original question: is this what we want Petersen to be doing? If it’s only going to be a short run — and it sure seems like it is — then yes: why not help revive his old show and then quietly slip out the back? CSI was never the best showcase for Petersen’s talents; pleasant and predictable, probably, but not especially challenging. And though it probably moved all the actors who worked on it into very nice homes, they were really just supporting characters to the show’s true stars: the cases, and the wonky science and tech that cracked them. Better far for Petersen to find his next Manhattan, or his next Pulitzer Prize-nominated play. He’s reunited with his old CSI pals now, and gotten it out of his system: why not hit up his former film daughter Reese Witherspoon and join her on The Morning Show? Or what if he once again faced off against Brian Cox — this time on Succession? CBS is not the same place it was when William Petersen was its king of procedurals; I hope he looks up from the microscope long enough to see the whole TV landscape and heads out in the right direction.
Writer, editor, and snack enthusiast Tara Ariano was the co-founder of Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great and Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), and the co-author with Sarah D. Bunting of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She has also contributed to New York, the New YorkTimes Magazine, Collider, Vanity Fair, Slate, Mel Magazine, Vulture, Salon, and The Awl, among many others. She lives in Austin.
