Csi Arts On Tour

CSI Roseville: Not Like the TV Show

In a secluded wing of the Roseville Police Department ’s fortress-like headquarters, Scott Koll is explaining why his work as a crime scene investigator is nothing like a certain procedural drama.

“We help solve crimes, but one - we don’t look like Hollywood; two - we don’t drive Hollywood vehicles; and three - we don’t have stunt doubles,” the affable forensic investigator said in distancing his profession from the popular CSI franchise on CBS .

More pressingly, the state-of-the-art crime lab Koll offered a rare tour of on a recent afternoon does not crack increasingly elaborate cases in 44 minutes using an overwhelming onslaught of dazzling forensic equipment, despite what a growing number of people might think.

On this particular day, Koll is eyeballing elongated fingerprint samples taken from the scene of a bank robbery for potential points of comparison. It’s painstaking work, requiring Koll to go back and forth from one imperfect sample to the next, using nothing but a magnifying glass and his increasingly strained vision to search for that elusive match.

“Science is about facts. It doesn’t give you what you hope for,” Koll explained, before joking, “So basically I’m a huge disappointment to people is what I’m saying.”

That’s because the evidence Koll and his fellow CSIs collect sometimes force detectives to rework their theories about a particular crime.

“The fun part of our job is we’re that unbiased scientific side,” Koll said. “We’re not trying to actually put the pieces together. We’re just showing what evidence is there.”

And they’re doing it with an assortment of high-tech lab equipment that look surprisingly like household appliances: something resembling a refrigerator is where hot glue prints are made of evidentiary items; a contraption similar to a clothes dryer is where evidence is, well, dried so that DNA samples and other biological materials can be safely preserved.

Ted Danson Joins CSI | Suite101.com

Danson Joins CSI as D.B. Russell

On those other shows he mentioned, Danson was not a regular character appearing in every episode. As D.B. Russell, he will have a much larger role. “I went from a gentleman actor to this,” he joked. He said he was in Cape Cod at Martha’s Vineyard and simply enjoying the quiet and relaxing time before being thrust into the hectic world of weekly series TV. “Within a week I went to my first autopsy, [a] real one, in Las Vegas.”

When CSI premiered in 1998, William Petersen played the man in charge. When he left Laurence Fishburne slid into the group. Now Ted Danson takes the helm. “I was thrilled, happy, [and] surprised.” As far as his character is concerned, Danson described him as a kind of Phil Jackson (former Lakers coach) “coming in to handle a group of incredibly bright people that were on a slippery slope because of things that happened in the last season and that [my character is] a family man and [he’s] being brought in to make the team work as well as possible.”