Out and In

Here’s some surprising news: CBS-TV has cancelled CSI: Miami. That series premiered in September 2002 as a spin-off from the two-years-older crime-drama, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and represented a long-awaited return to small-screen success by its star, David Caruso, who’d ditched NYPD Blue in the early 1990s to pursue a film career, but never won the success in that arena he’d craved.

The Los Angeles Times’ Show Tracker blog quotes from a network statement on the fate of Caruso’s series:

CSI: Miami leaves an amazing television legacy--a signature look and style, global popularity and as a key player in CBS’ rise to the top over the past decade. We thank all the producers--led by Jerry Bruckheimer, Jonathan Littman and Ann Donahue--and its talented cast, led by David Caruso, for 10 outstanding seasons. Viewers around the world will continue to enjoy rebroadcasts of CSI: Miami in syndication and on key digital platforms for many years to come.

That same blog post reassures viewers that both the original CSI and another, later-born spin-off, CSI: New York, will remain on the air this coming fall. Yet it calls CBS’ move “the beginning of the end for one of TV's most successful franchises of the past decade.”

Meanwhile, there’s word that CBS has greenlighted Elementary as part of its new fall schedule. That series will star Jonny Lee Miller (previously of Eli Stone) as a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, though the action will be moved from the traditional London to New York City. Lucy Liu has been signed to play Holmes’ new cohort, Joan (not John) Watson, and Aiden Quinn will appear as NYPD Captain Gregson.

Count me among the skeptics here. While BBC-TV’s Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, fetches Holmes and Watson out of the Victorian era into the 21st century, it at least maintains the British setting of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s justly famous tales. Elementary might be risking its possible appeal to Conan Doyle enthusiasts by making Watson a woman (albeit a pretty and tempting one) and moving the mysteries to Manhattan. We shall see.

By the way, the second (of three) episodes of this year’s Sherlock series, “The Hounds of Baskerville,” will be broadcast tonight on PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery!, beginning at 9 p.m.