Oh, CSI Miami-

My love for you grows with each passing week.

Well, not you, exactly. More your lazy, lazy, really hilariously bad writing.

This week we were without a 'glasses on/off' pose, but at least Caruso gave us a hilarious line to kick off the opening credits:

(The scene: A SWAT Team has just gunned down a man holding a knife, because they received a call saying that he was stabbing children. He wasn't.)

Frank: What happened here?
Horatio: Frank, it's called crime scene investigation.

Wow, that's harsh. I mean, seriously, Horatio, every week the guy feeds you straight lines, and now, just because you can't think of a witty quip you turn into a total dick? If I get murdered, I want William Petersen on the case.

Here's the incredibly convoluted plot this week: A guy hires a PI to find out if his wife his cheating on him. At the same time, the guy's business partner hires the same PI to murder the guy. So the PI goes to the man the wife is cheating with, and has him get into a car accident and argument with the guy, so he'll be angry when he gets home and get into a fight with his wife. Then the PI has the business partner's assistant phone in a fake 911 call about the guy's house so the swat team will show up, using a voice changer so people will think it was a man calling, and a cloned phone so the police will think the call is coming from next door. The idea is that after the fight with the man, the guy will be so angry that when he hears the door break down, he'll rush out to the front room with a weapon, thinking that it's the man come to continue their fight, and get shot by the SWAT Team. Oh, and then when it looks like the assistant is going to crack under the pressure, the business partner follows her down to the parking lot and shoots her with an unsilenced pistol in broad daylight.

And how does Horatio crack the case? Well, it's not with evidence. After the PI convinces a judge that every single member of Horatio's team is incapable of handling evidence (one of the drawbacks of having a soap-opera life while being a cop: you get torn apart on the stand) it's up to Horatio to just stare at someone until they confess. He does that a lot. Tonight it was the man that the wife was having an affair with, who explains how the PI approached him and gave him a small part to play in their little murder scheme/psychodrama. Then the man heads to a seaside cafe's patio where the PI and business partner are having lunch and tries to get them to admit that they arranged the guy's (preposterous) murder. The PI is onto him, though, and quickly realizes that he's wearing a wire, which is then disconnected. Despite the fact that he's a surveillance professional who knows that the police are actively trying to record him confessing to a crime here, in an outdoor cafe, the PI and business parter proceed to loudly confess to the two murders they teamed up to commit. Naturally, it turns out that there was another listening device nearby, and all the bad people can be safely removed to prison.

Thank god for the police the criminals are every bit as poorly written as they are.

Things that didn't make sense this week:

- How could the PI possibly know that the SWAT Team would shoot the guy? A team of six guys with guns would have to be acting pretty recklessly to shoot a guy with a knife who's standing fifteen feet away from them and not making any threatening movements. Well, a white guy, anyways.
- Why bother with the 'fake phone number' thing? Since you're using a voice changer it's going to be hard enough to prove who made the call, but by setting up some fake wiring to make it look like the call came from next door, when it's easy to prove that it didn't.
- Wouldn't just using an untraceable cell phone and voice changer be much easier and make more sense? That way, when the police realize what had happened they'd be more likely to think that it was a crank call gone horribly wrong, rather than elaborate premeditated murder, which is what the whole rewired phone thing looks like.
- Also, if you're using a voice changer anyways, why have your assistant make the phone call? Isn't that just bringing an additional person into the conspiracy for no reason than to reach the minimum number of murders for an episode of CSI (2)?
- I know that it's Miami, and literally dozens of people are gunned down every day, but seriously, no one heard a gunshot in an open parking lot in the middle of the afternoon?
- Wow are the criminals lucky that the crime scene investigators are so disreputable - after murdering his assistant, the business partner walked right back to his office and put the murder weapon in his desk drawer.

I wonder if there are other shows this bad on television? And if there are, are they fascinatingly, captivatingly awful the way CSI:M is, or just mediocre and depressing?