You may have not noticed but the fall television season has arrived, that time of the year the broadcast networks still make a production out of rolling out the new makes and models. CBS, which likes its new season to look a lot like its last, has added programs to its three ongoing lines of what I think of as Acronym Procedurals: “NCIS: Hawai’i,” which premiered Sept. 20; “FBI International” which bowed the following day; and “CSI: Vegas,” which is more or less a relaunch of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” the first of that brood (also including “CSI: NY,” “CSI: Miami” and “CSI: Cyber”) and debuted Wednesday.
The new shows offer some novel twists while coloring within the lines of the franchise. “NCIS: Hawai’i,” which announces its intention to be culturally proactive with an apostrophe, makes much use of the tropical beauty and local customs of the 50th state — already being exploited by the network’s reboots of “Magnum P.I.” and “Hawaii Five-0” — with a complement of “mahalos” and shaka signs, soju and lemongrass to keep things mellow between the chase scenes and firefights. And in Vanessa Lachey it has the first “NCIS” team leader who isn’t a white dude. In “FBI International,” the scenery is European — Hungary, that bastion of creeping autocracy, is where our heroes camp, but they’re a rapid response team that goes wherever they’re needed when Americans or “American interests” are involved. (There is a dog in it, who functions as a team member as well as a pet, which I think is new for any of these shows.)
And “CSI: Vegas,” though erected on old ground, does provide a fresh cast for returning players Jorja Fox, William Petersen, Paul Guilfoyle and Wallace Langham to join — under the command of another woman of color, Paula Newsome — in its upgraded laboratory full of cutting-edge gizmos that end in “oscope” or “ograph.” (Cops haven’t really struggled with budgets since, like, “Kojak.” Even the cotton swab budget on “CSI” must be substantial.)
Crossover episodes
Besides the basic business plan of taking something that has worked in the past and doing it again and again — the very definition of CBS, some would say, but certainly not unique to that network — franchising adds a sort of third dimension. It allows for crossover episodes, which brings these fictional worlds a hair closer to our own, breaking not the fourth wall, as it were, but the third: the one with a door in it, through which characters can travel into an entirely different show. Most of these series come into the world through “backdoor pilots,” where an episode of an established series introduces a coming spinoff; indeed, the opening episode of “FBI: International” concludes a sort of triple play that began on “FBI,” and ran through “FBI: Most Wanted.”