Zuiker: The Future Of Crime Is Cyber Crime

The latest addition to the CSI franchise, CSI: Cyber, premieres this Wednesday, March 4 at 10:00pm ET/PT. Instead of setting the new spinoff in a specific city, CSI creator Anthony Zuiker wanted to take the franchise in a new direction. “We knew the future of crime is cyber crime,” he told HuffPost Live, “so what better to set a show in Washington, DC and deal with crime of today and tomorrow and really do a 2.0 version of our franchise.” You can watch the full interview below:

Check out more interview links and quotes after the jump!

“The truth is technology is really changing crime. This is the cutting edge of criminal activity,” series star Patricia Arquette (Avery Ryan) told USA Today. “This is as new as forensic science was when CSI started.”

Arquette is joined in the Cyber cast by James Van Der Beek (Elijah Mundo), Shad Moss (Brody Nelson), Charley Koontz (Daniel Krumitz), Hayley Kiyoko (Raven Ramirez) and Peter MacNicol (Simon Sifter). “I mean the first episode that we all did with each other, I felt like – there’s some really cool chemistry going on here,” Arquette told KCOY-12. As for the show’s premise, Arquette admitted that she’s “kind of a low tech person,” which makes her Cyber character different than herself:

It’s funny, when I grew up, we had this idea of what the future was gonna be like – someday we’ll be able to walk around and talk on the phone at the same time. We’ve caught up with the future, we’ve met it. Now we’re in the unknown next future.

During a recent set visit, Zuiker told Newsweek, “Our core CSI viewer will see a level of familiarity from the franchise that will comfort them.” Executive Producer Pam Veasey added, “I want people to want to educate themselves. From a fax to a computer…to signals sent over towers, the [criminal] possibilities are endless.”

Finally, Koontz recently spoke to Durtti, and here’s an excerpt from his interview:

CSI: Cyber, as its name suggests, tackles the thorny issue of cybercrime. What sort of research did you have to do for your role as FBI Agent Daniel Grummitz and what shocked you most about the true horror of this new and largely unchartered underworld?

Before we started filming I met with our technical consultants about the actual work of the job and what exactly the Deep Web or Dark Net is. What I found most interesting is that the nature of the Deep Web doesn’t necessarily make it only a place for lascivious actions but rather an unregulated space altogether.

For example, on CSI:Cyber we investigate our suspects through the same Deep Web and it can be an incredibly useful tool. What I love most about the show is that we bask in amazing advantages technology gives us in our work and daily lives and it’s only when those tools fall into the wrong hands that chaos ensues and crimes are committed.

I was most shocked about how incredibly smart someone has to be to navigate the Deep Web at all and when that intellect matches with an impulse to harm others and commit crimes it can be incredibly destructive and hard to trace.