Introduction

The year that CSI: Crime Scene Investigation was born, the most popular ¹ television drama in North America was a medical procedural named ER. Inside a season of its airing in 2000, CSI – a fictional crime drama that follows a team of Las Vegas forensic scientists and police detectives as they solve criminal cases and determine an individual’s guilt through the use of presumably infallible forensic evidence – became the tenth most highly watched television program by (North) American viewers, although it was still over-shadowed by the novelty of a reality TV program that placed ordinary people on an island where they battled for survival. The year CSI turned two, it became the second most-watched television series in North America, eclipsed only by a situational comedy about a group of six coffee-loving friends living in New York City. In its third season, CSI was not only named the most highly watched television program in North America, but also able to spawn its first spin-off series CSI: Miami. In 2012 CSI received the International Television Audience Award in honour of being named the most-watched television drama series in 2011 across five continents. As crime dramas have come and gone in the last decade, CSI is notable for its staying power as an exemplar of popular television in the twenty-first century, especially since audience fragmentation has turned popularity into an increasingly ambiguous concept (Kompare 2010).