Sinise: It’s Time To Do This Episode

In addition to his blog post on the Gary Sinise Foundation website, CSI: New York’s leading man Gary Sinise (Mac Taylor) wrote a piece for the Daily Beast about 9/11 and the upcoming season eight premiere of CSI: NY. (Minor spoilers and embedded video after the jump!)

Sinise described his character’s connection to September 11th, as well as the planning that went into the first episode of New York’s eighth season, which will honor the tenth anniversary of that day:

…I’d been pitching an idea to the writers and our showrunner about doing an episode that would focus on the 9/11 anniversary and feature the Brooklyn Wall of Remembrance. At the end of last season, we weren’t sure if we were going to be coming back or not, but when we left each other we said, “If we do come back, our season premiere has to be this episode since it’s the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. It’s time to do this episode.”

Sure enough, we came back for an eighth season and [Executive Producer] Zachary Reiter and [Supervising Producer] John Dove, both former New Yorkers, were assigned to write this particular episode based on the memorial. There’s an interesting crossover between fact and fiction here, because Mac Taylor is featured as a participant in helping to create this memorial. In this episode, our audience is reminded that Mac Taylor is somebody who lost a loved one in the collapse of the Towers, and for the first time we get to meet her because this episode takes place 10 years ago on the day, and 10 years later on the 10-year anniversary. It’s a very personal episode and it’s our way of paying tribute and honoring the men and women who sacrificed that day in service of the city of New York.

You can read the full article here. You can also watch the video below, which features a news story from CBS 2 in Los Angeles, California. In the video, Sinise discusses the premiere, and you can see several clips from the episode: