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Just in case NBC’s creative failure to effectively repopulate SVU this season weren’t already glaringly obvious, CBS continues to show how it’s supposed to be done with their recasting on CSI, where they’re making lemons into lemony champagne. (Let’s assume lemony champagne would actually be a good thing.) In the fall, they very effectively replaced Laurence Fishburne with Ted Danson, and today they announced that when Marg Helgenberger leaves the show early next year, her place will be taken by Elisabeth Shue, on paper a terrific piece of casting for the show.
Much like Madeleine Stowe on Revenge this season, Shue is a perfect candidate for a move to primetime TV: a movie star of the 1980s and 90s (most notably in 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas, which won her an Oscar nomination) who, Hollywood being what it is for actresses no longer in their first flush of youth, has more recently been slumming in pictures like Piranha 3D. If anything, the combination of Danson and Shue represents a challenge to CSI‘s writers to move beyond the basic procedural genre of the show and give them some material worth their (and our) while. That may or may not happen, but in any case CSI, now in its 12th season, certainly has a classy new lease on life.
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