Miami so uninterested in, uh, forensic science? – reality blurred

CBS’s The Real CSI: Miami is the second major fictional crime franchise to be turned into an unscripted series this year.

Netflix’s Homicide: New York premiered in March and will be joined by Homicide: Los Angeles next month.

I had quite a relaxed and calm reaction to Homicide: New York; while it was well made, I did not understand why these stories were being retold and rehashed on yet another show, except just to make Netflix more money.

The Real CSI: Miami interested me because it had the chance not just to start every episode with a delightfully cheesy line and a wail, but to approach these kinds of well-worn true-crime stories from a completely different angle: science.

That’s interesting because the CSI franchise’s popularity and visual storytelling led to the fascinating “CSI Effect,” which means the show “influences jurors to have unrealistic expectations of forensic science during a criminal trial and affect jurors’ decisions in the conviction or acquittal process,” according to one researcher. But there’s also debate over how substantial that effect is.

Even when the science on CSI was real, it was oversimplified and condensed, of course. “The inaccuracies in these shows have to do with stretching the science beyond what normally occurs,” the director of Penn State’s forensic science program said.

I love Wikipedia’s summary of this: the CSI shows “wildly distort the nature of crime scene investigators’ work, exaggerating the ease, speed, effectiveness, drama, glamour, influence, scope, and comfort level of the profession, which they describe as tending to be mundane, tedious, limited, and boring, and very commonly failing to solve a crime.”

Could The Real CSI: Miami (CBS, Wednesdays at 10) show us what the science can and cannot do? Could it inform us about the how mundane yet important the work of crime scene investigators and forensic scientists is? Could it help us learn the truth behind the show? Alas, no. Not even close.

The Real CSI: Miami comes from Magical Elves, producers of Top Chef and Cold Justice, and also the creator of CSI, Anthony Zuiker, who went on to create ABC’s Whodunnit, a murder mystery series that mock murdered its eliminated players, leading people to think ABC was actually killing them.

The first episode opens with a 911 call: two people are dead—not in Maimi, but Key Largo, about a 90-minute drive south.

None of the first three episodes take place in Miami, or even in Miami-Dade County, though all in South Florida. Episode three focuses on the murder of XXXTentacion, who was killed in Deerfield Beach, for example.

As a detective talks us through the case, and we see actual crime scene photos (blurred) and recreations (including of a theoretical murder-suicides, ugh), The Real CSI: Miami reveals it exists just to be an ordinary.

Oh, sure, there are lens flares, and some heavily saturated images. But it’s not as stylized as CSI: Miami, and worse, far less interested in the science than CSI was.

The evidence does get some attention. Cutouts of objects fly into the air and a text in a geometric typeface helpfully labels them: “iPhone charger. Location: wall outlet.”

Meanwhile, the concept of bullets being traced to a single gun because of unique marks left by the barrel is breezed past. What I hoped for, I suppose, was a thorough explanation of rifling, and why gun barrels are all unique. Later, there’s a quick graphic of marks on bullet casings, and a mention of firing the same gun to compare, but this is not detailed attention.

Instead, we get a generic retelling of the case and the usual nonsense, with at least some attention to the victims. “We have our first suspect!” a detective declares before the commercial of someone who is actually innocent.

We see an ex-husbands interrogation, with a cop asking if he’d be willing to do a polygraph—which, of course, don’t actually work. The Real CSI is not interested in that, so it lets bad science just come and go.

There are two people identified as CSI experts, but for some reason, the producers leave them to just narrate beats of the case, or give the most inane revelations. Two people are dead in a bedroom, and the police cannot find a gun. “That tells me there was someone else in the room,” one says. No shit! Unless the gun walked itself away?

When the experts do get to talk about forensic science, it’s as if they’re talking to children. Metal, we learn, “will ultimately rust when exposed to air. How we mediate it is collecting a sample of that water” and leaving the gun in it.

We learn deleted surveillance footage is recovered from a DVD. How? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I kept waiting for forensic science to solve the case; I assumed all this was building up to a big, amazing reveal, with all this setup paying off. The episode description says “Florida’s most tech-savvy crime scene investigators utilized cutting-edge data forensic techniques to retrieve deleted, buried, and drowned evidence and bring this community justice.”

The big reveal is CSI expert Mary’s Martinez saying, “The forensic information that was acquired through testing and just all the tools we have available made the case—that’s what helped tie everything together.”

It’s difficult to tell a full story in less than 43 minutes, but this first case had more twists and turns—like the fact that another person died.

I planned on watching another episode, but at the end of the first episode is a title card that says one person’s “conviction was reversed on appeal after judges rules that evidence had been incorrectly excluded.” So a reality TV show about evidence—excluded the exclusion of evidence?

I cannot think of a better example of how The Real CSI: Miami just doesn’t care about the evidence and forensic science, and completely misses this perfect opportunity to differentiate itself from all the other shows that just rehash murder cases.