There is no word yet on casting, although Entertainment Weekly’s Ausiello reports that the network may be considering Alex O’Loughlin for the show’s leading role. If the deal goes through, Five-O will be the actor’s third series for CBS. O’Loughlin originally appeared as vampire private investigator Mick St John in Moonlight. After it was cancelled, the actor moved on to star in the now-defunct medical drama Three Rivers.

The opportunity to join New York couldn’t have come at a better time for Buckley. “When I booked CSI, I had $32 to my name and was living out of my car,” the actor revealed. “To go from that to this, getting to travel around the world and meet different people – I’m completely grateful!”

The success of the CSI franchise over the past decade is no surprise to Buckley. “They’ve got great writers and they’ve cast great actors,” he said. “And it’s such an old tale; it’s Sherlock Holmes. Who did it, and how did they do it? They took that old theory, made science sexy and took this fresh look. People really respond to that.”

The New York edition of the franchise sets itself apart, the actor added. “New York is a character on the show,” he explained. “I don’t know many people that aren’t fascinated by it. It’s so film noir. Then you throw an actor like Gary Sinise (Mac Taylor) into the mix and it speaks for itself.” But is there any rivalry between the three CSI series? “I think every CSI wants to be the top,” Buckley said. “It’s a healthy rivalry. [Executive producer] Pam [Veasey] expects to be number one and be the top. You can’t get complacent in the sixth season.”

Being on the air for so many years does have its advantages. “Going into your sixth season, it allows the writers to go deeper within the characters,” Buckley said. “We can get into the intricacies of them and what makes them tick. The audience really feels for these characters. They’re so invested in them.”

Fans may be invested in Buckley’s character now, but there wasn’t always much for the actor to work with. “When I joined the cast, there was no description of who Adam was,” he explained. “Pam Veasey has always said that my character is kind of the comedy of the show. But over the years he’s started to understand who he is and show his strengths.” And the actor behind the quirky lab tech does get “a fair bit” of input into his character. “That’s the wonderful thing about working with Pam Veasey and [executive producer] Peter Lenkov,” Buckley said. “They really take the time to listen to anything you have to say about your character.”

The actor has the opportunity to share his opinions about Adam as a character, but Buckley is not the science expert he plays on TV. “You know what, when I was in high school, I was a horrific student,” he revealed. “I’m a poster child for ADD, and I’m terribly dyslexic. Growing up, learning for me was next to impossible. So Adam’s journey of education and my journey of education are night and day. I’m sure my science teachers back in high school that watch the show now have a good laugh.”

Luckily for Buckley, playing Adam isn’t all about pronouncing difficult scientific terms. Some episodes have given the actor the chance to delve into more emotional territory. “One of my favourites was the episode ‘The Party’s Over’,” he shared. “There’s a child that commits a murder and they send me into the interrogation room to talk with the kid. It was the first real episode where I got to sink my teeth into something – to get out of the lab and not be saying science words, and to emotionally connect to the dialogue.”

At the start of season six, Buckley was pleasantly surprised by his character’s romantic involvement with coworker Stella Bonasera (Melina Kanakaredes) in the premiere episode, “Epilogue”. “I remember showing up on the set and people asked me, ‘Have you seen the script yet?’ I took a look and I was like, ‘Oh, wow!’ I think it’s a great storyline,” he said. “Adam and Stella have always had a flirtatious thing back and forth. The guy needs some love! He’s in the lab all the time. Stella’s a sexy woman, so why not?”

Buckley enjoys working on CSI: NY, but he revealed that he has another ambition: to take his acting to the stage. “One of my dreams is to come to London and do a play,” he explained. “Not even one of the big shows – I would be happy doing a small theatre in a small town. Just to immerse myself in the work would be great!”

Source: Five.tv. Thanks to perlnoir on TalkCSI for the heads up.

The case of a missing Miami girl brings Vegas CSI Ray Langston from Horatio Caine’s city to Mac Taylor’s.

Synopsis:

After a car and a truck smash into each other head on, Flack finds a dead girl in a barrel that came from the truck. Inside the truck, Danny and Lindsay find evidence that the driver, who fled the scene after the collision, was keeping someone prisoner in the back. The CSIs recover a container of urine and notice the door was locked from the cab side of the truck. Back at the morgue, Sid shows Mac that the girl in the barrel bled to death–after her liver was removed. Mac realizes she was the victim of an illegal organ trafficker and goes to find out who in the city with the same blood type as the girl–AB–is receiving a liver. Lindsay gets a match to prints found on the steering wheel of the truck: an ex-con named Casey Steele. Flack finds a man Steele carjacked in the hospital: Joseph Winston stopped to help Steele after the accident and Steele pulled a gun on him, shoved a terrified girl in his car and forced him to drive ten miles before shooting him and leaving him for dead, taking his car, cell phone and wallet. Lindsay gets a DNA hit on the girl from the back of Steele’s truck, identifying her as Madeline Briggs, a girl who went missing in Miami. She discovered a sedative in Madeline’s urine–and the pregnancy hormone. Adam has found evidence of multiple women being held in the back of Steele’s truck, many of whom are in the missing person’s database. Adam pulls up the pictures of the women and Lindsay recognizes the dead girl among them–Debbie Menzel from Atlanta. Stella interrupts to tell them that Ray Langston is on the video phone. Mac takes the call and Ray tells him about his time in Miami and his vow to Madeline’s mother that he’d find her. Mac invites him to New York, and Ray rushes to join him.

Ray arrives by helicopter and discusses the case with Mac, telling him that the Zeta gang is behind the abduction of young women ages 19-25, who are then used as sex slaves, surrogates and eventually organ donors. The two bond in front of the World War II memorial, both remembering their fathers. Hawkes tracks down a patient with type AB blood who was waiting for a liver who was removed from the organ donation waiting list the day before. Flack goes to the clinic where he’s being operated on and catches the doctor, Harvey Fuller, right before he goes into surgery on the man. After the surgery, Flack arrests him and brings him to the station where Fuller tells him and Hawkes that he would make a call to a number and leave a message saying what organ he needed and it would show up. Hawkes lays into him, accusing him of betraying his Hippocratic Oath as a doctor. Fuller insists he’s never seen Casey Steele before. The team gets a hit on Joseph Winston’s stolen phone and traces Steele to a local pharmacy. Flack and Hawkes race to the scene, but Steele escapes. The team finds the car he’s been using and Lindsay recovers soil from the brake pedal, which the team compares to reference samples and matches the soil to Corona Scrap Junkyard. Mac, Langston and Flack race to the junkyard and find Steele, whom they apprehend after a chase. Langston urges him to take a deal, but Steele refuses to give them any information. Langston calls Madeline’s mother to tell her the girl is still missing. Mac reassures Langston that he will find Madeline, who as they speak is in the back of a truck headed to Las Vegas…

Analysis:

Following CSI: Miami’s “Bone Voyage”, the second entry of the big CSI crossover adds some depth to the ongoing story even while hampered a bit plot-wise by being the middle of the three episodes in the trilogy. If the overarching story isn’t advanced all that much–Madeline, the girl who is becoming the poster child for human trafficking is missing at the beginning of the story and remains missing at the end of it–the episode still manages to offer up an entertaining yarn for an hour, albeit one with a somber tone. The black market organ trafficking had me more intrigued than anything else has in this storyline thus far, in part because it’s so dark and inhumane, and in part because it adds another angle to the same old sex trafficking story we’ve seen done over and over again in the CSI shows.

CSI: New York is the most character-driven of the three CSI shows, and indeed, something about the conversation between Mac and Langston in front of the WWII memorial feels unique to the show. The conversation lasts several minutes and doesn’t serve to advance the plot in any real way; rather, it establishes an immediate bond between Mac and Langston, offering a rationale behind why the two take to each other straight away instead of just making it a given. Mac isn’t a man given to trusting outsiders right off the bat, but seeing Langston at the war memorial and hearing a bit about his father gets Mac to open up about his own father, and how he was the inspiration for going into the military. It breaks the ice between the two men, and brings Mac to comment on how burdened Langston feels. If there’s anyone who can relate to taking a case personally, it’s Mac Taylor. It’s nice that we get to see this moment between the two men, and that a bond is established between them before the action kicks into high gear. Like David Caruso in Miami, Gary Sinise shares a nice rapport with Laurence Fishburne, and it’s fun to see the two CSI leads interact. Like Barry O’Brien did in the Miami entry, scribe Peter Lenkov does a great job of keeping Langston in character throughout the episode.

The episode definitely deepens the arc in that it establishes that this case has become personal for Langston. He’s made a promise to Madeline’s mother that he’ll find her, and though this is a reason we often see motivating the CSIs–especially for Horatio in Miami–it’s a completely believable one. As Flack told Danny in “…Comes Around”, a lot of times the CSIs have to take their motivation from the occasional thanks they get for finding a loved one’s killer. And during their conversation by the war memorial, Mac shares a story about a mother who thanked him through tears for finding her child’s killer. It’s gut-wrenching business, and it’s clearly starting to wear on Langston. Mac reassures Langston that he’s doing everything he can, and the moment reminds the audience that Ray is still a relatively new CSI. He hasn’t been doing this for years the way Mac and Horatio have. Langston’s connection with Madeline’s mother, and his determination to find the girl alive give the case more of a personal hook than it had in the first outing.

Most of the New York team takes a backseat more to the plot than to Las Vegas visitor. Danny, Lindsay, Adam and Sid don’t have much to do aside from processing the evidence, though Danny is given an out of place, throwaway line to clue viewers tuning in for the crossover that he and Lindsay are married. When Lindsay asks what Danny is thinking about in the truck, he quips, “That you and I never had a honeymoon.” It feels like a complete non sequitur, one that wouldn’t be needed at all if these two generated an ounce of romantic chemistry together. Adam’s quirky behavior is sidelined as well, which unfortunate because he brings a unique element to the show. If the crossover did cause viewers of the other two shows to sample CSI: NY, it’s unfortunate that they weren’t treated to some of the more engaging character elements the show has, like Adam’s goofiness, Flack’s biting wit, Danny’s emotional outbursts and Sid’s off-beat stories.

Viewers who watch the show regularly know exactly why Flack is more somber than usual, and it fits into his arc this season: his grief over the death of his girlfriend and his pangs of guilt over killing the man who murdered her in cold blood. Indeed, for a guy who is usually quick with an off-the-cuff scathing remark or sarcastic retort, Flack is notably muted in this episode, though he does have one joke in the opener about “putting my Mac on this morning,” which, as he tells Stella, is better than Spidey-sense. Though he takes a backseat to Hawkes in the interrogation of Dr. Fuller, the look of disgust and revulsion on his face as Hawkes interrogates Fuller says it all. Though he’s a master of delivering those sharp lines of Flack’s, Eddie Cahill can also say a lot without uttering a word. Flack’s expression says it all.

Hawkes is equally horrified by Fuller’s actions, and really lays into the doctor, reminding him he took an oath to do no harm. What kind of doctor calls a phone number to request organs and sees them show up days later–and truly expects this could be in any way legitimate? Fuller doesn’t, of course, but because he has no contact with anyone directly, he’s able to avoid giving too much thought to where the organs he obtains came from. Hawkes, who in last week’s entry, “It Happened to Me”, was so riddled with guilt over not recognizing that a patient he saw in Central Park on volunteer duty had been poisoned, is a man who takes the oath he took very seriously. Hill Harper offers an impressive intensity in the scene where Hawkes goes after Fuller, making the interrogation a memorable one.

Michael Massee, who played the sinister Ira Gaines in 24’s first season, brings some swagger to his role as the villain of the piece, but in the end the character is no different from the villains of the other sex trafficking case–he’s just unrepentantly evil. And this is the problem with the sex trafficking stories–they fall into the helpless women/sniveling bad guys cliche all too easily. Indeed, all we see of Madeline in the episode is that she’s tied up and helpless. Steele is good at evading capture, but once the CSIs finally get him, all he has to say is that he doesn’t recognize any of the girls because there are so many of them. Evil, sure, but in a way that doesn’t really delve into his psyche. And Madeline is really just a representation of all of the helpless girls who are forced into the sex trade. Topical, perhaps, but worthy of being the subject of the first CSI crossover involving all three shows? So far, I can’t say I think it is.

November sweeps is here, and the big news in the CSI franchise is next week’s three show crossover, which brings Ray Langston (Laurence Fishburne) to Miami and then New York. In an exclusive interview with CSI Files, CSI: New York Executive Producer Peter Lenkov talks about the New York installment of the trilogy, as well as the big serial killer storyline and Detective Don Flack’s (Eddie Cahill) continued battle with depression.

CSI Files: The big CSI crossover is next week! What can you tell us about the CSI: NY entry?

Peter Lenkov: Well, obviously we’re the bridge between the beginning in Miami and the end in Vegas. And what we wanted to do in our installment was brand it in a certain way. Give it a true identity so you knew you were watching a NY episode. For that, we shot a lot of scenes in New York. We also ramped up the stakes and gave Ray a bit of an arc. It was also important for us to add a new dimension to the story, so we just didn’t continue what happened in Miami, but added something significant to the storyline. Another piece to the puzzle. But what makes me most proud of this ep is the action component. It’s CSI: NY on steroids. Lots of hero moments. Hope the fans enjoy it as much as we did making it.

CSI Files: What can we expect when CSI: NY lead Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) teams up with Ray Langston?

Lenkov: Besides the immediate bonding, there’s lots of action from this dynamic duo.

CSI Files: Sweeps will also see the return of the Compass Killer. What can you tease about his reappearance and the team’s pursuit of him?

Lenkov: All I can say is you won’t see the twist coming. This is a story where you might think you know the villain — but you don’t.

CSI Files: Last season ended with a bang, literally, when shots were fired into the bar where the team was toasting Angell’s (Emmanuelle Vaugier) life. When and how was it decided that Danny (Carmine Giovinazzo) would be the one who got shot?

Lenkov: About midway through last season, we discussed the idea of Danny getting shot, and perhaps learning to walk (again) at the same time as his daughter is taking her first steps. It just morphed from there.

CSI Files: Was there ever any talk of killing the character?

Lenkov: Danny? Never.

CSI Files: Danny went from a wheelchair to walking in four episodes, after being given a ten percent chance of walking again. Why did his recovery take place in such a short amount of time?

Lenkov: Four episodes don’t necessarily translate into four weeks, in the same way four episodes of 24 don’t translate into four weeks, but four hours. I think we did enough research on the injury and recovery to justify our storytelling.

CSI Files: Will there be any other ramifications of the shooting for Danny?

Lenkov: Absolutely. It’s something we’re addressing.

CSI Files: Lindsay (Anna Belknap) was back in action in “Dead Reckoning” in a way we haven’t seen her since season two. Can we expect more of that?

Lenkov: We love it when Lindsay gets to mix it up in the field… so yes, it’s something we want to continue with.

CSI Files: One of the most compelling stories this season has been Flack’s struggle with Angell’s death and his execution of her killer. It’s very clear he’s not okay–will his struggle continue to play out?

Lenkov: Absolutely. Eddie’s got a great arc this season with regard to his grief. You’ll see this come to a head in 608, a really powerful episode written by Zach Reiter and newcomer Aaron Thomas.

CSI Files: Up until this season, Flack has arguably been the show’s most grounded character. What factored into the decision to send him over the edge?

Lenkov: Exactly that… he was the most grounded and dealing with the situation this way felt very real. We all knew that seeing Flack in this condition would be a shock, but all that stems from the fact that Eddie has given so much to that character.

CSI Files: What was the reasoning behind the introduction of crime scene cleaner turned lab tech Haylen Becall (Sarah Carter)?

Lenkov: We have always looked to start new seasons with something fresh. That could be a new lab, new arc, or new recurring character.

CSI Files: We’ve heard Hawkes (Hill Harper) has a big storyline coming up–can you tease that a bit?

Lenkov: This is also the year of Hill Harper. He’s got multiple big stories ahead. I’d rather let the press department unveil those as they see fit… but we are very proud of his character development this season.

As CSI Files previously reported, Lenkov worked with Star Trek writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci to pitch the idea for the new version of Five-O. “[Peter] brought the idea to us,” Kurtzman said. “He pitched us an extraordinary pilot. We were really taken with it. It’s not what we expected. There’s a really emotional component to it.”

Kurtzman saw the series as an opportunity to “take something with a preconceived idea and turn it on its ear, and you have something really compelling.” For their take on the project, Orci said, “I think the idea is to update it in a way that is still the comfort food that it always was, but almost a little Miami Vice too.”

According to Orci, he and Kurtzman wanted Five-O to be a procedural series with “pure action”. However, they also wanted the show to have “some genuine character stuff in there.” He added, “We hope it’s a mix that you don’t see often.”

As CSI Files previously reported, all three members of the CSI franchise will take part in a crossover during November sweeps. The episodes will air the week of November 9. The story starts in Miami when Horatio Caine (David Caruso) and his team discover a severed leg that belongs to a girl that went missing from Las Vegas the week before. Langston travels to Miami to solve the case. He is soon on the way to New York City after a girl he interviewed turns up in the Big Apple. The girl was hidden inside a semi-trailer truck. After the girl disappears, Langston and Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) discover an interstate trucking ring that specializes in human trafficking and organ harvesting. The investigation then leads Langston back to Las Vegas, where the team discovers a prostitution ring that might be harboring the missing woman.

“The story is really a ticking clock story,” CSI: NY executive producer Peter Lenkov said of the New York portion of the storyline. “It is really a hunt for a suspect, but also saving a girl’s life. I think we put blinders on to get that done by the end of the episode. This [case] takes priority because it is real triage the way it lands in our lap. We realize soon after that time is of the essence. We elected in that episode to make it our sole focus.”

“They are all great episodes that blend together and lead you to the next,” New York executive producer Pam Veasey said. The challenge was to incorporate the crossover while still maintaining the integrity of each series. “Everyone stays true to their writing style,” Veasey explained. “What you fundamentally do is tell a CSI story, which is what we all have in common. Once it gets to your show, you will see each of the show’s take a different approach to a story that starts in Miami. We did all get together and talk about what the through-line would be. Obviously, Ray Langston travels through all of the shows. You have to find the consistencies with his character, how he would flow into each story.”