The Women Of 'CSI'

Carol Mendelsohn, Ann Donahue and Pam Veasey, the showrunners of the CSI franchise, talk about being women in their field.

All three shows in the CSI franchise are overseen by women. Mendelsohn, the showrunner of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, wasn't always involved in show business. "I became a lawyer because my dad was a lawyer," she told CBS Watch Magazine. Ultimately, practicing law wasn't what she wanted to do. As "an only child who grew up sitting way too close to the TV," Mendelsohn said that she dreamed of working in Hollywood. She enrolled in a TV script-writing course at the American Film Institute and eventually made her way to Los Angeles. After working on various television series, Mendelsohn found that she "ended up stuck only in the realm of male, action-oriented TV." She was able to break away from this mold later on by working on Melrose Place for five years--only to end up being labeled again, this time as a soap opera writer. She created a soap opera pilot for CBS that did not get picked up, but Nina Tassler, then the director of development for CBS, asked Mendelsohn to work on another show which was going to be developed: CSI.

"It was a real learning curve, because at first we didn't know what we were doing," Mendelsohn said, thinking of when she and CSI-creator Anthony Zuiker started to run the show together. "Anthony found a pot of gold with CSI," she said, "because all of us like to think we're armchair detectives. But women in particular love mysteries, and a lot of women watch our show. And so it's great that with all three CSIs, we have women writing for women."

Ann Donahue never dreamed of working in TV. "My goal had always been to write film or books," she said. "I wasn't thinking about television at all." She got married after she dropped out of college, despite being gay. Together, she and her husband moved to California because the weather was more conducive to his profession as a baseball player. She got divorced and took a job as a secretary at a law firm, where she would alternate between typing up legal contracts and her own scripts. Donahue eventually began working in television and ultimately became the showrunner for the ABC police drama High Incident. "I kept thinking, 'Well obviously someone else should get the title of executive producer!'" She explained. "It's probably a female way of thinking. But any showrunner who tells you the first time he or she is not scared is either not really showrunning or is lying."

When Donahue was offered the chance to work with Mendelsohn on CSI, she said that "the stars aligned." The success of the show caused CBS President Les Moonves to request a spinoff. "He said, 'Pick a city,'" Donahue said. "I leaned over to Anthony and said, 'This never happens. Usually you're in here begging them to take your idea.'" The creative team chose Miami as the location for the first CSI spinoff, and Donahue was put in charge of the show. "I truly love what I'm doing," she said. "I've had more success and reward than I ever thought possible." Donahue said that having a woman's touch on the CSI shows is good for the franchise. "CSI goes big by going small," she said. "And women are good at noticing the small details that can turn the course of an entire investigation."

Pam Veasey started out as a receptionist for the NBC sitcom Gimme a Break. Arthur Julian, a showrunner for the series, knew about Veasey's aspirations to be a writer and asked to read a sample of her work. He and the other showrunners quickly told her that she could no longer be their receptionist--because they wanted her to be a writer instead. Veasey moved around after that show ended, and she eventually ended up landing a spot on In Living Color's writing team and, ultimately, the position of showrunner. To this day she is one of only a handful of African-American women to have been in charge of primetime shows.

Veasey eventually lost interest with writing comedy, feeling that it was all the same old thing. "I felt like there wasn't anything out there that I really wanted to write," she said. So she left Hollywood and reinvented herself as a drama writer. "[D]rama was the one place where I thought it wouldn't be about color--because there was nobody like me," she said. Although she had been at the top as a comedy writer, she was forced to start back from the bottom as a drama writer. She eventually worked her way back up to showrunner, this time for The District. The show was set in Washington, D.C., but was based on a real-life deputy commissioner from New York City. "And so in the process of writing the show, we all fell in love with New York--the way it moved, its attitudes," she said.

Veasey was interested to join CSI: New York when she learned that it was being created, and Zuiker specifically requested her. For Veasey, "it seemed like kismet." By the second season, Veasey was running New York. "What you find out about showrunning," she said, "is that it really is all about the people. Being able to hear their concerns--your actors, crew, set designer, wardrobe, casting--and getting all these people to invest in one singular style of a tv show."

You can read the full article in the August 2007 edition of CBS Watch Magazine. Thanks to ricker23 from Your Tax Dollars at Work.

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