This October marks the 20th anniversary of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (when did you get so old?), and so CBS is planning to celebrate the show—which has been gone for a while, along with all of its spin-offs—by digging up its corpse, taking it down to some high-tech lab, and having William Petersen poke at it for a bit while that Who song plays. In other words, the network is planning some kind of limited series revival with Petersen’s Gil Grissom hopefully making some sort of appearance. Elementary’s Jason Tracey is reportedly writing the script, with producer Jerry Bruckheimer specifically choosing him for the gig based on his experience with other procedural shows like Cold Case.
This comes from The Hollywood Reporter, which has an interesting little story about how and why this is happening now. Apparently, CBS started tossing around the idea of a CSI revival a few years ago for its CBS All Access streaming service, at least until “executives at Bruckheimer’s company reminded the studio” that 2020 would be the show’s two-decade anniversary. THR notes that the only real question is whether this will purposefully be a “closed-ended one-off series” or a more open-ended story that could kick off a potential new series, but the answer to that seems pretty obvious (they’ll say it’s a one-off unless it’s a massive success, in which case it’ll miraculously find a way to continue).
Now, assuming CBS treats this limited series as a celebration of the entire CSI franchise and not just the original show, will they find excuses to bring in the stars of the spin-offs? We honestly couldn’t care less about David Caruso, unless that meme of him putting on his sunglasses comes back, but we’d love to find out what’s been going on with James Van Der Beek’s Agent Elijah Mundo, the TV character with the best name in the history of TV. That’s right: It’s been almost four goddamn long years, but we finally got a chance to reference CSI: Cyber again. Yeaaaaahhhhhhh!