 |
Find out what William Petersen, the actor
who brings Grissom to life, thinks about the success of
CSI. |
What do you attribute the success of the show to?
CSI, obviously, is an entertainment. Our goal, first and foremost,
is to entertain people. But it also has this other thing that
I think is important. It opens a dialogue. I’m certain
it’s helped crime labs across the country, it’s raised
the profile, it’s helping, hopefully, raise money for these
labs so that they can get the technology that we use on the show.
And I know it’s helped high-school science kids have a
bit more of a grasp on things so that science might be fun for
them.
What does the way the public has embraced CSI mean to you?
Well, it’s just the power of television. I mean, the
show’s huge all over the world. I was in Italy last summer
and people everywhere were recognizing and loving CSI. Television
has a great capacity to reach people, for good or ill…In
fact, on any given night you have good television and bad television.
As long as we stay on the side of good television, hopefully
we’ll contribute as opposed to detract.
What has this ride been like to go
from the show’s debut – Jerry
Bruckheimer’s big show come to TV – to where it
is today?
Well, it’s just a lot of work. It’s a lot of work
to go from where we started to where we are, on the part of
a whole lot of people. And the work doesn’t ever get
easier: it gets harder. So, right after the first year we thought
we couldn’t work any harder, [but] we’ve had to
work harder, and you have to work harder to keep something
there. It’s like having a championship football team.
You’re not going to get back to the Super Bowl unless
you work harder than you did the year before, because everybody’s
after you. Everybody’s trying to duplicate our show.
Is it always a challenge going into a new series of the show?
Well, in terms of each season, I think they’re all different
and I don’t think that our job, as creators of the show,
is to try to top anything. I don’t think that we ever
approached the show that way in the first place, which is why
it was a surprise that we became so popular. I think our goal
is to make each week as important for ourselves as we possibly
can and if that works, if we do what we do and do it better
than we did it before we’ll be fine. I think the shows
don’t have to be bigger, I don’t think they have
to be smarter. I think that we have to make sure that we are
not lazy and that we do not bore ourselves. And if we do those
things then the show will always have something for somebody.
Is there any particular direction
you’d like to see
Grissom go in that we haven’t seen yet?
I’d like to see him teaching at Stanford University,
and just be sort of semi-retired. I’d like to see him
in retirement some day… obviously he’s going to
have to run the lab for a while. After that, I don’t
know. I would imagine he would like a nice fellowship somewhere! |
