Interview
‘CSI’ Boss Talks Grissom & Sara’s Origin Story: Inside the Scene That Changed Everything
“There was no prefabricated love interest that was built in the show under my direction,” says CSI creator Anthony Zuiker while chatting for the show’s 25th anniversary. Yet, we still got Gil Grissom (William Petersen) and Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox) — aptly known as GSR (also gunshot residue) — whose relationship continued onscreen into the sequel CSI: Vegas.
(Fans did notice the chemistry between Marg Helgenberger‘s Catherine and Gary Dourdan‘s Warrick, but Zuiker admits he can’t remember any origin story there.)
“Here’s the origin story of GSR,” Zuiker tells us. “When we had the episode where a woman got raped and a guy was hiding in a wall, Jorja Fox’s character, Sara Sidle, was sledgehammering the drywall to look for this guy. She was incensed and so upset as a woman that another woman was raped and violated that she hit the drywall, and a speck of drywall chalk went on the cheek of Sara Sidle, Jorja Fox. Billy Petersen, unscripted, took his finger, touched the chalk, and wiped it off. And at that point, the love interest was born — organically, never written, and that was a single moment in the cutting room where, oh my God, there’s a relationship. That’s how that happened.”
In general, there weren’t any pairings Zuiker considered but never went there with since, “for the first 10 seasons of CSI, our general rule as a franchise was to not take the characters home.”
He explains, “We were going to pride ourselves to do great mysteries, twists and turns, good plot twists, character arcs, but we weren’t going to go home and start to play out a soap opera. That wasn’t in our DNA. So we really refrained from that.”
He adds, “I think we got more character-driven after Season 10 because we had to do a little bit more character. The audience was craving more character-driven stuff, like USA, ‘Characters welcome,’ that kind of thing. But we never ever abandoned our format of a close-ended procedural drama. But we may have opened up the aperture a little bit more in the relationships, post-Season 10.”
What did you think of the relationships on CSI? Let us know in the comments section below.
CSI, Complete Series, Streaming Now, Paramount+
