Reviewers: 'Addiction' Too Boring, But 'No Humans' Moving
By ChristianDecember 16, 2004 - 11:35 AM
In the court of public opinion, CSI won big the past week, with both new episodes attracting over 20 million viewers. But online critics weren't quite as enthusiastic about some of the episodes.
- Writing for Entertainment Weekly, Ann Hodgman criticised Monday's new CSI: Miami episode, "Addiction." Hodgman awarded the show only a C+, and commented that "Miami continued its in-depth coverage of why CSI work is not as interesting as we used to think a few seasons ago." Here's a snippet from her full review:
I rest my case Oh, well. There have to be boring episodes once in a while, or we'd all die of excitement. Alexx's impassioned show-closing speech about drunk driving, however, is 100 percent perfect.
The full Entertainment Weekly review can be found here. - TV Guide's Robin Honig had the complete opposite reaction to "Addiction:" she found Alexx's drunk driving story far from perfect, and instead said it was yet another example of CSI: Miami wasting time on unnecessary story lines. "Alexx rails against drunk driving," Honig wrote in her Watercooler column, "Then takes a former addict under her wing. And finally turns in Glenn Monroe for stealing a flask from a corpse. All very noble causes, but they didn't mesh with the murder investigation of the creepy Coleman brothers."
- Going back a week to last Thursday, reviewers were a lot more impressed by the original CSI's "No Humans Involved." "This is exactly the way emotional issues should be treated on the CSI shows: by letting us see how the investigators react to their jobs, not by dosing us with meaningless little dollops about their personal lives," wrote Hodgman in the same EW weekly review, along with awarding the Vegas-based CSI a full A grade. "Watching Sara and Greg process the murdered child's body in anguished silence -- their only dialogue an occasional sentence about the evidence -- is worth a million hours of soapish office politics and smoldering maybe one day we'll hook up looks. Even Captain Brass, who's usually so bossy and Dragnet-ish, looks genuinely stricken. You feel sorry for the actors as well as the characters they play: Doing this episode must have been torture." More here.
- Over at TV Guide, Rochell Thomas agreed, even though she only watched the final half hour of the show. [It's] a good way to reveal that Sara's a product of The System," Thomas wrote. "Her being a foster child explains so much." In her full Watercooler column, Thomas also writes about how the episode reminder her of "that awful child-neglect incident that happened earlier this year" in which a women left her kids with a relative so she could work, after which the relative proceded to let the children starve to death.
- It was this element that Sobell at Television Without Pity also focused on. Even though she awarded the episode a B-, she still sharply criticised it for being "offensive and hypocritical" by only making use of a child's gruesome death to shock the viewer, and not bothering to provide some background on the real-life problems facing the foster care system that explain why children can slip through the cracks. Here's Sobell's final conclusion:
This episode exploited the sensationalistic nature of a child's death without taking a moment to examine why kids like this slip through the cracks, or what viewers could do if the episode moved them to action. I think that's immoral, and the people who make this show don't get the "it's only entertainment" pass on what basically amounts to being gruesome because they can.
More thoughts from Sobell on the episode, as well as her full 13-page recap, can be found by going here. - Finally, Ann Hodgman also devoted some attention to last week's repeat of the CSI: New York pilot, "Blink." "This episode -- genuinely horrifying and beautifully shot -- set a standard that has so far been unmet by any subsequent NY episodes. It also introduced one of the major flaws of the series: the attempt to make us care about its characters' personal lives by giving them random snatches of 'revealing' dialogue. What do the producers think this is -- Judging Amy? The cases are supposed to be the point on this show, not the CSIs' problems!" In the full review, "Blink" was awarded a B+.
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