Last October marked the 20th anniversary of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, an occasion that CBS apparently didn’t even realize was coming up until somebody at Jerry Bruckheimer’s production company gently reminded the network that it was sitting on a potential revival gold mine. And now, just six months or so too late (apparently there’s been some kind of global pandemic going on), CBS has announced that it’s giving a series order to CSI: Vegas, a follow-up to the original series that will involve old stars William Peterson and Jorja Fox returning to the Las Vegas Police Department’s high-tech crime lab to stop some kind of “existential threat” and “preserve and serve justice in Sin City.”
That comes from a press release that CBS put out, and while it kind of sounds like some kind of interesting high-concept take on the cookie-cutter procedural trend that CSI largely kicked off, we’re going to guess that it just means there’s some kind of politician who thinks crime scene investigators are bad and that murders should be solved by an algorithm or whatever. Even that sounds a little high-concept for CSI, but we’ll see. The classic formula of these shows is kind of played out, since the whole CSI franchise has been off the air for years now, but maybe an old-fashioned procedural will still be palatable to audience simply by virtue of the CSI name being on it. People still watch NCIS, certainly, but this won’t have the added hook of being… somehow associated with the Navy.
Joining Peterson and Fox are newcomers Paula Newsome, Matt Lauria, Mel Rodriguez, and Mandeep Dhillon, with Deadline offering some character details if you want to know which of them is a Level III CSI and which of them is a Level II CSI. (You unlock the double-jump at Level IV CSI, but very few people have ever gotten that far.)