Think Tank Daily: “CSI: Cyberjunk”

CSI: Cyber proves overextending a franchise isn’t a good idea 

Wednesday night saw the underwhelming premiere of CSI: Cyber, and it goes to show you even in a so-called “Golden Age Of Drama”, how banal some of these programs still are.

The “new” CBS drama featured “Academy Award Winner” Patricia Arquette as a FBI “agent” who heads a task force dealing with cyber crime, including hackers, sex offenders, and cybertheft. In the debut episode, we see the agents take on a baby-napping ring with oddball results. One scene showed a guy breaking in and stealing a kid by hacking into… a family’s baby monitor (made by Microsoft, no less.)

In looking for the perps, the agents act like a bunch of lost tech geeks who are better off working for CNET. The team looked so inept, you’d think they were led by Jay Cutler.

And if you thought the tech talk was nauseating, the transition between scenes were even worse. And what’s with Shad Moss (Bow Wow) rapping diolague?

In the final act, we saw a car chase and a car plowing into a lake. They rescued the stolen baby inside (Patricia performing mouth-to-mouth on an infant!) while the thieves drown. So much for the trial.

The program is your standard procedural… then again, it does come from the CSI family, as the original (which is still on the air…somehow) spawned two other editions, Miami and NY.

There’s nothing groundbreaking about CSI: Cyber: the writing is below average at best, the acting is…well, even more below average, and unlike Fox’s hit Empire, CSI: Cyber has characters who are not memorable or give less than a crap about. By the end of the show, you still don’t know who they’re names are.

And you wonder how many shows you can crank out on the subject of cyber terrorism? Not exactly a subject rich with material.

If you thought the show was scary, consider this: Wednesday night, Cyber drew 10.3 million viewers. Judging by all the hate for the show on social media (Twitter preview searches showed up as “CSI Cyber bad” and “CSI Cyber awful”), it won’t be long before someone deactivates this program.

CSI: Cyber

Metacritic score: 45 (1.6 user score)
Rotten Tomatoes percentile: 38 (18 user percentile)
T Dog Media grade: F
T Dog Media TV Hall Of Shame chances: Likely at best