I’ve never been a huge fan of CSI: Miami. First, I’m a Law and Order fan. There are three things I like about Law and Order: 1) the characters are entertaining and seem real; 2) there isn’t so much drama in the personal lives of the characters, the drama is about the crimes and the cases, not the people (for the most part); and 3) they often make me think, at least a little, about social issues and how justice is carried out in the US.

The CSI franchise, in general, doesn’t have any of this. It seems to me to be more brain candy than Law and Order, with the point being just to show how cool forensics can be. But, then they don’t even do the forensics right. They never wear hair nets, for example. The same people do every single task in the lab, which, for such a large lab, seems unlikely. And, there is lots of personal drama; half the stories are about the characters, not about the crime.

But, CSI: Miami has been my least favorite. Partially, because I think David Caruso’s Horatio Caine is just down right annoying. His one-liners, the attitude with which he gives them, just annoy me. And I think they have even more filler than the other versions. They spend a lot more time showing multiple angles of the crew taking tires off a car for analysis with some high-powered sound track than the others do. Much more fluff. Much more annoying. And I especially hate that nothing gets done in the lab until Caine is there to tell the supposed-expert on whatever technique du jour is going to solve the case how to do their job. Shouldn’t they be going to him with answers, not waiting for his play-by-play on what to do?

But, I wonder if they finally jumped the shark. The last episode Lisa and I watched had these “bullet points”. I’m not sure if they are a permanent feature, but they were sure damn annoying. Little pop-ups, inspired by VH1, complete with sound effects (of a firing gun). And the pop-ups contained facts that didn’t seem to add to the story. Lost is doing something similar with their repeated episodes, but without the sound effects and they are actually informing you on the story. And, it seems that the latest episode of CSI: Miami had even more of the filler I was complaining about above. If you took out all of the filler that just showed the characters pretending to do analysis and just had the bits that actually advance the plot, I bet you could squeeze the episode to a half or third of the total running time.

So, I’ve never been much of a fan, but it seems like CSI: Miami is getting even worse. I just don’t understand why it is the most popular of the three CSIs.