Green Day’s Music Sets The Tempo For Tonight’s ‘CSI:NY’

The first half of this week’s episode of CSI: New York, “Unspoken”, does not feature dialogue. Instead, Executive Producer Pam Veasey used the music of Green Day to help tell the story.

Veasey knew the sort of story she wanted to write, but she waited to hear the music before she penned the actual scenes from the episode. “I called [CBS TV Studios’ SVP of Music] Amy Osler and told her that I wanted to only use music for the first half of an episode, but that I wanted only one band or solo artist who had an album coming out,” she told TV Line. However, Veasey added, she didn’t want the lyrics of the song to explain the plot. “I believe that visuals tell one part of the story, and the music tells the other; they don’t repeat each other.”

When she listened to Green Day’s music from ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tre!, everything “clicked” for Veasey. “But I didn’t listen to the lyrics and build a scene,” she said. “Rather, I used the mood of the music to tell me the tempo of the scene.”

Writing scenes for a procedural drama without dialogue was “definitely more of a challenge” than Veasey anticipated, and she needed to make sure the audience could see and feel what was happening in order to follow the plot. “That’s really what the [start of the episode] is all about, trying to figure out what [everyone] is thinking… And then when I moved to [writing] the second act, it was about what they were feeling,” she explained. “If I could get the audience to feel something, then they would take the ride with us.”

You can read the full interview on TV Line.