Grave Danger: The Best Example Of A Lost Writing Style

The two-part CSI episode was perhaps one of the most special moments in TV history

William Petersen photo by Shane Saunders enhanced with AI (Creative Commons 2.0 License)

I’ve written a bit about formats and tropes that have disappeared as the entertainment industry has evolved, but one I don’t think anyone else has written about is the multi-part TV detective case on an otherwise episodic program.

Episodic TV has been replaced with Sopranos clones, which try for a season-long story arc often badly, according to most reviewers. However, not even 15 years ago, the standard TV format was the case or monster of the week drama in which every episode was a standalone story.

Therefore, when writers really wanted to make a story special, it became the one story of the season, which happened over multiple weeks.

This can probably trace itself back to Steve McGarrett’s arch nemesis Wo Fat on Hawaii Five-0. Wo Fat, a cunning Chinese spymaster, escaped after every encounter, even though his underlings were often caught. Therefore, every time Wo Fat appeared, the audience hoped that this time he’d face justice.

Similar arch-nemesis characters remained popular at least into the 2010s. Paul Millander, the serial killer judge whom Gil Grissom hunts in the first season of CSI, and Australian femme fatale Nicole Wallace, who appeared throughout Law and Order Criminal Intent, were both, according to the writers, meant as Moriarty figures for their Holmesian heroes.

However, what was more fun than an arch nemesis was when a particularly huge case unfolded over the course of a couple of weeks. Unsurprisingly, this was also pioneered by Hawaii Five-0.

The three-part episode V For Vashon ran for three consecutive weeks, in which McGarett had to face the three generations of the Vashon crime family, culminating in Dominick, a criminal mastermind played with great menace by Broadway great Luther Adler. Dominick Vashon comes the closest to anyone besides Wo Fat to actually ever killing McGarett.

Law and Order was also fond of two-part episodes with Lynda Carter guest-starring as conwoman Lorraine Dillon, who attempts to get the better of both Detective Benson and Jack McCoy in the 2005 event episodes Design and Flaw. The event, which used SVU as the ‘law’ half and Law and Order as the ‘order’ half, played to the franchise’s love of sensationalism and to the casting of Carter as a villain to make something equally a gimmick and an actually well-written psychological thriller as far as TV went at the time.

Four years later, Law and Order Criminal Intent used the two-part event Loyalty to write out stars Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe and write in Jeff Goldblum as the new sole main character. Loyalty is notable for being a spy thriller in which the detectives are caught up in a case of international intrigue surrounding an African warlord in exile and a group of pirates fronted by American businessmen.

In such a two-part event episode, however, you can get away with this kind of format change. Because the very idea of the two-parter is that it breaks the format and conventions of the show to create event television where audiences will accept things that they absolutely wouldn’t in a normal episode.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Grave Danger the special 2005 two-part CSI episode written and directed by Quinton Tarantino. The idea of a Hollywood auteur suddenly slumming it to write for TV in 2005 was bonkers in ways that are almost incomprehensible in the modern age of streaming.

According to Marge Helgenberger, CSI was already known for a reliance on graphic violence, dark humor, and lots of close-up shots, so Tarantino’s filmmaking style and writing weren’t that different from a normal episode. While that’s certainly all true, for fans of both CSI and Tarantino, the difference was still noticeable.

Tarantino cranked the dark humor and medical gore up to the max and included a three-minute scene of Nick Stokes experiencing his own autopsy while his parents watched and laughed with the doctor. It’s a scene that’s so bizarre and so uncomfortable that you gotta wonder how this played on network TV.

The answer is almost entirely that Tarantino had the kind of connections that no other TV director has probably ever had in the history of the medium.

We will never see these kinds of stories again. The case of the week format being the default is entirely why the controlled breaking of the format led to such memorable episodes. At the same time, as fans become more and more dissatisfied with the continuing story format, it will be interesting to see how it gets spiced up.