Zuiker Discusses His Approach To ‘CSI’

CSI creator Anthony Zuiker attended the “Creative Masters” panel at the 2011 TV Summit, where he spoke about the “voice” of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and the philosophy behind the creation of each episode.

One of the most important things Zuiker discovered as a television producer was “character over concept”, and it was a difficult lesson to learn. “I think I really approached CSI from the position of [Gil] Grissom (William Petersen),” Zuiker explained, as reported by Collider.com. “That character wasn’t going to do karate chops or jump off airplanes and carry a bunch a weapons and stuff like that. He was really going to be a person who was introspective and study insects and keeps quiet… I think that approach really began to educate the voice of what CSI was going to be.”

While approaching CSI from a commercial standpoint, Zuiker continued, “we want to make sure that we hit the necessity of character development, build elements of surprise, our forensic journey drives the narrative, [and] we try to hide the one whodunit until the very end.” He added, “At the same time you don’t want to get so formulaic to where the audience is onto you, where they know where you’re going. The worst thing I can ever hear from a CSI fan is ‘oh it’s the first suspect from act one’. That’s a script problem. So I think there’s an element of benchmarks you have to hit from basic blocks of storytelling. At the same time making sure your storytelling has an element of surprise.”

The original transcript of the panel is available from Collider.com.