Noted by Deadline earlier today, CBS will be spinning off another version of CSI for the 2014-2015 television season that focuses specifically on the rise of cyber crime in modern day society. Anchored by Medium star Patricia Arquette, CSI: Cyber will shift away from forensic analysis and capture criminals using analysis conducted on the computer. Arquette will be playing the leader of the FBI’s Cyber Crime Division in Quantico and has already been introduced within the main show during a late April episode.
Speaking about the new show, CSI star Ted Danson said “I think it’s what CSI was fourteen years ago. People were not aware of forensic mysteries and how DNA and all that stuff plays into solving crimes.” In clips from the CSI episode where Arquette was introduced, she uses references to technical terms such as “computer-animated avatar,” “deep Web,” “chat-bot,” “machine learning,” “artificial intelligence,” and “social network vulnerability.” Arquette is also playing a behavioral specialist in the show, thus will also be interacting with suspects.
Of course, the difficulty of attempting this type of show is that it can easily get picked apart by knowledgeable viewers if the tech lingo and virtual interfaces aren’t authentic. Another CBS show, NCIS, is a repeat offender for a lack of technical expertise. For instance, this scene shows two NCIS actors somehow simultaneously fighting off a hacking attempt using the same keyboard. Another scene tosses out enough buzz words to confuse the audience while a fog machine pumps out a ridiculous amount of smoke when a hacking attempt fails.
Even the producers of CSI have issues with tech lingo. In this clip of CSI: New York, one of the characters says “I’ll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic. See if I can track an IP address.” Of course, that line was nonsense as you wouldn’t need to build a graphical user interface, like Windows or OS X, to track down an IP address. In fact, it would take all of about a couple seconds to Google the IP address location.
