Twenty-five years ago, CSI changed the way that TV viewers and the world looked at forensics.

Created by Anthony Zuiker, CSI turned the focus to using science to solve crimes, and after the premiere aired on October 6, 2000, well, the rest was history. Over its 15-year-run, the cast included William Petersen, Marg Helgenberger, Jorja Fox, George Eads, Gary Dourdan, Paul Guilfoyle, Eric Szmanda, and Robert David Hall, and included quite a few memorable guest stars and episodes.

Below, for the 25th anniversary, TV Insider spoke with Anthony Zuiker about the beginning of CSI, some of its more memorable early episodes, including Quentin Tarantino‘s “Grave Danger,” and much more.

Congratulations on the 25th anniversary!

Anthony Zuiker: I don’t know where the time went, but I’ll take it.

What do you remember about the critics and audience’s response to that first season?

I do remember that there was somebody from USA Today that was very skeptical about the possibility of that show doing well. There was somebody who had a pretty visceral response to it. I do remember Michael Edelstein, one of the executives at CBS, calling me up the day before October 6, and saying things like, “If you retain 70% of The Fugitive‘s ratings” — The Fugitive with Tim Daly — “then you would be considered a quasi-success.” As you know, we far surpassed The Fugitive ratings by 121%, and it was the number seven show for the week of October 6 of 2000. And very quickly the tide turned in terms of the critics. Then I think they really did applaud the sanctity of granular science and really did applaud the fact that these particular characters were real scientists and thinkers. William Petersen’s character, Gil Grissom, wasn’t going to jump out of a helicopter, wasn’t going to pull his gun, wasn’t going to swing some nunchuks, was a guy that was going to arm himself with the truth, based on the weaponization of evidence as a truth sayer. And I think that’s what was really fresh in the year 2000 in the era of O.J. Simpson.

Oh, I agree. I wanted to go back specifically to the pilot for a moment. How did you settle on the cases that opened the series?

I applied to the public information office at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department where they will allow you to visit the crime lab for three hours. Well, when I got there, I happened to bump into several people that I went to high school with, and I became very fast friends with Daniel Holstein, Yolanda McClary — you know her from Cold Justice — Monte Spoor. And I stayed there for three weeks, so, not three hours. In those ride-alongs, I picked up almost every case in the pilot.

There was a foot pursuit of a woman who lured another woman back to a motel with three men. When she got there, she was sexually assaulted. The men got away, and the victim got away. But the woman that lured the woman there could not be found. Well, I showed up with the police department, I was taking notes on day two, and I saw the bed move in the bedroom. Either A, it’s the exorcist or B, it’s the woman hiding under the bed. I lifted up the bed skirt, she jumped out, I screamed. They grabbed her, arrested her. And that’s where I got the idea in the pilot that Holly Gribbs [Chandra West] would be reapproached by the suspect because obviously the suspect wants to come back to the scene and stop the CSIs from grabbing evidence that can condemn that individual. So, when you see the Holly Gribbs do that in the pilot, that came from a real-life story of a ride-along on night two at Metro.

All of those cases — the scopolamine of the girl that got knocked out with the prostitute by putting scopolamine on her breasts, which knocks out the John — were a function of the three-week ride-alongs with the real CSI, called crime scene analysts back in those days, CSA, not CSI. We just took those stories and put them in the pilot.

Speaking of Holly, because you, from the start, showed that while the CSIs’ focus is on forensics, their job can get dangerous with what happens to her. How important was that to you to show the dangerous side from the beginning?

Well, it was important as a cautionary tale because the American audience doesn’t understand really how that works, including myself. I thought it was just police. The police are in charge of securing the crime scene with crime scene tape, but inside what’s called the red zone — the hot area of the crime — that’s where the CSIs would come in. So to show that a suspect could reemerge when Warrick Brown left the scene to go make his bet — there are opportunities where the suspects will come back. Look no further than Bryan Kohberger who left the seven-and-a-half inch Ka-Bar knife sheath in Maddie Mogen’s bed, and then returned to the crime scene around 9:15 in the morning and did three or four laps around the house saying, should I go back in and grab that or not? He was going to return to the crime scene post murder. So this does happen. So it’s important to frame for the audience, this is the police, this is CSIs, these are the dangers, this is the science, this is what makes this show tick. It’s not a cop show. It’s a forensic closed-ended procedural in Las Vegas in the midnight hour, and all that has to be accomplished in the pilot. And it was.

I noticed that some of the episode descriptions on Paramount+ have a blurb from you and for “Blood Drops” from Season 1, you say it’s by far the writer’s number one CSI show of all time. That is a fantastic episode. What stands out?

That particular episode was iconic for a few reasons. Number one — in no particular order — it was the first time we did a full A story. It was not an A and B [and sometimes C and D] story. It was just one crime. That set the tone for what’s possible. And that was done by the great Ann Donahue and co-written by Tish McCarthy, which is a code name for Liz Devine, who was a real-life CSI that worked the Linda Sobek case. Number two, there’s a famous actress in that show as a child called Dakota Fanning. So in my opinion, if you were to pick one out of 911 episodes of CSI, 9-1-1, ironically, it’s Episode 7 called “Blood Drops” in Season 1.

Speaking of, because it is the first time that you have a single crime episode, what did you learn about what worked and anything that didn’t — even though I can’t think of anything because it’s such a good episode — about doing single crime episodes from it?

Well, there’s nothing that doesn’t work about it. The challenge is to sustain enough twists and turns and emotional undercurrent inside a singular show that dabbles with most of your cast. So, you do run the risk of keeping your cast a bit thin because they all have to be on the case in some way, shape, or form. So that’s the challenge. When you do an A and b story, you’ve got Billy and Jorja and Marg on one case, and you’ve got Warwick Brown and Nick Stokes on another case, that’s easy. But you’ll see us say things like, there’s only one crime scene in Vegas tonight, as a caption logline that’ll come out of a character’s mouth, which tells the audience we’re all hands on deck on this one. So there’s very little downside, but there are some challenges to an A story.

Dakota Fanning is so good in it, and she’s so young. It’s one of her first roles, right?

I believe so. I also cast her sister, Elle Fanning, in CSI: NY, an episode called “Officer Blue.” And that was when the mounted horse was shot, the officer, and the bullet went inside the horse. And because most of the horses in Mounted of New York are donated by widows of 9/11, you don’t really want to start putting a horse down to get the bullet out to solve the crime and kill the horse and traumatize the widow twice — once, losing her husband to the Towers and then twice, losing the horse to a gunshot. So that was the sort of line of tension in that episode. Elle Fanning fed the horse in that show, too.

Then you capped the first season off with that finale that saw Sara bait the killer, put Grissom in trouble, has Catherine approached about taking over the night shift, and then the CSIs don’t get the credit they deserve at the end. What made that the right finale at the time?

We were wanting to go out with a bang. Ironically, as good as that episode was, we did something irresponsible on accident in that episode. We had the individual killer start to shave his arms and wear gloves and wear booties and try to forensically protect himself to not shed any evidence at the crime scene. And we got a pretty nasty letter back from the police department to not do that nationwide and give people hints. Now, at that time in the year 2000, we didn’t think that that was irresponsible, but we respected that and stopped doing that from that episode on. But if you think about Bryan Kohberger, who once again, him coming in fully dressed, the balaclava around his face, the gloves, trying to forensically cleanse himself in the crime scene, and killing four Idaho students on 1122 King Road on November 13, 2022, he was pretty much forensic proof. But he did leave the sheath in the bed and on that sheath was his touch DNA inside the clasp of the button, which ultimately led to genealogy reports that led back to the Kohberger name, which led back to Mr. Kohberger, the father leaving the Q-tip of ear wax in the trash of the next-door neighbor under surveillance. … That was a probable cause or arrest. My point being is he was doing the same thing we did in the finale, but he made one final mistake. He touched the sheath and left it behind.

I was going to ask you what you consider the quintessential CSI episode, but those Paramount+ blurbs have you calling Quentin Tarantino’s “Grave Danger” just that, and I agree.

A million percent. I bumped into him at the Lawrence Bender fundraiser around 9/11, and he was a big CSI fan. He was quoting things that I wrote without remembering me meeting him. He didn’t know I checked him in at The Mirage as a bellman. I checked him in, gave me 20 bucks. He forgot. So I was a nobody kid. And then when he came on, he walked in with a large latte in one hand and a little boombox music player under his armpit. He’s a rather tall gentleman, big personality. And he did something in front of our face that we haven’t seen before as writers. He literally started spitballing and blue-skying an idea for the finale, and he literally broke the finale, every beat with a marker over the course of four hours in our face. And we literally took pictures on the board. We all took an act — I wrote Act 2 of eight acts — and wrote a two-hour finale without CBS’s permission. They had no idea we were doing two-hour finale, but of course, Les Moonves couldn’t do anything about it because we had Quentin Tarantino in our back pocket on the biggest show we’d ever produce.

So, once upon a time, Quentin Tarantino said to me, in Act 2 that I wrote, “Anthony, could I rewrite a piece of dialogue for you?” I’m like, “Of course, Quentin. Not a problem.” He said, “OK, here’s what I want to do. I want to write these lines with Billy Petersen and the villain. I want to write this: Billy Peterson says, ‘Are you a terrorist?’ And then the villain says, ‘Why, you terrified?’” I’m like, brilliance. And to this day, it’s on film. We had Frank Gorshin, the late Joker, who passed away, we had a lot of stunts and stars on that, but it was the quintessential episode, so to speak, the biggest one we’ve ever done. I think it was like 40, 50 million people that opted into that at the buzzer. It was humongous, and it was the peak of our franchise’s existence. It was 2005, Episode 24 and 25, “Grave Danger.”

What about the story made it quintessential?

Well, it’s a play on words. It’s Quentin Tarantino, quint-essential, right? It’s because you have arguably one of our top five filmmakers of our era — [that includes] Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese — and you have Quentin Tarantino coming in to do television and putting his cinematic stamp on our franchise on one of the most iconic episodes of television ever produced. So, it really is the gold star of our franchise. If you’re to [look at] 911 episodes and choose the top three, it has to be in the conversation.

And then you put one of the CSIs’ own in such a life-threatening situation, and it just makes for great television.

I remember like it was yesterday. He said, “If we buried Nick Stokes, and he was underground, and we found out that his father used to call him Poncho, but nobody knows that, and he’s full of explosives, six feet under with ants crawling around, and then we find him buried and we wipe the glass with the dirt, and Nick Stokes is freaking out, and if he moves, he’s going to blow us to all sky high. And then William Petersen says Poncho, and then Nick freezes because he knows that’s the father nickname… If we did that, Anthony, that would be pretty f**king cool.” That’s what he’s telling me in the room. And literally it’s on film, but I’ll never forget it. But he was doing that off the top of his head and literally broke it like a savant. And then we went to Vegas to the UFC fights and had steaks. And the next thing you know it’s history, the rest is history.

Talk about the inspiration CSI had on forensics.

Well, the list is long and distinguished. I mean, look, like I said, CSA, crime analysts was the term, they received between seven to 10 applications in the year 1998. Currently today, they receive about 250,000 applications for Vegas. What the show has done for forensics as a discipline to make that a profession is absolutely profound, into the CSI effect that you’re very familiar with. So it just completely launched the discipline. Not only in academia, people majoring in criminal justice, but the employment, and by the way, if you go into the DNA lab for Vegas or Henderson, it’s all women. It’s all really, really smart, intellectually buttoned up women that are doing this amazing work. And I just met the crime lab director in Henderson last week and took a tour. They have very, very progressive machinery in there. And I got to tell you, Meredith, just taking a tour there for an hour and leaving, I said to myself, Bryan Kohberger never had a chance. Never had a chance to get away with it. There’s just so much great technology, it’s really impossible to get rid of murder. Impossible.

Have you heard from any showrunners or producers from any other shows about the inspiration that CSI has had on them?

Not necessarily because it’s a different type of show. I mean, the thing is, it’s a difficult show to showrun. It’s really detailed in science. It’s very research intensive, and not a lot of showrunners really understand and know how to tell stories with actors and evidence in the same frame. I’m sure it’s been inspirational for some showrunners, but the ones that I talk with are the ones that run our shows.

I went back and I revisited the pilot before this interview, and it’s so wild to think that Sara wasn’t in that first episode after seeing how much of a major part of the franchise she became,

She was born the second Chandra got fired. The whole Chandra of it all was challenging because we brought her in for casting for names that shall go unnamed who are making decisions. And this individual said, “What is this, Playboy? Is someone this good looking going to really be a CSI?” And that individual got their back up pretty bad. Anyway, we try to bring her back and we kind of try to dirty her up and not make her as attractive and brought her back again with our other actresses. And she still got hired, but it was still an ax to grind with who said yes for Chandra. So we brought her back for the pilot. She did a nice job, and then we got the direction, “Get rid of her.” So that’s why I had her killed in “Cool Change,” Episode 2. And that firing allowed us to hire Jorja Fox.

The character of Sara was amazing, but I think there was a place for Holly. 

She was the vehicle for the audience. She was the way into the show. She comes in first day of work, she goes, talks to Grissom, she eats the grasshopper. She was literally Screenwriting 101, Teleplay 101, “Audience, come with me. Let me introduce you to the world.” That’s what it was. And me being a new writer in television, I fell for that trope and it was a good mechanic. In the end, I felt like if she’s new and the audience is new to forensics, what a great matchup for the audience to play along with her. But she got caught up in the politics of casting, and it worked out for us in the end, but she kind of got a raw deal.

Is there anything else you want to say about CSI for the anniversary?

I will say this. I challenge anybody in this era to do the things we have done to sustain 25 years of television in a franchise that has an amazing impact on crime. We were the ones to unleash the powder keg of the crime tidal wave which is today. Because of CSI, there are podcasts, there are big true crime documentaries. There are streamers that still buy true crime because of its popularity. We are very popular with our female viewer, which is 60-40 female. And as we continue to see things get on the air and we see the emerging technologies champion true crime and really dissect it in every format, from podcast to radio to streaming to cable to broadcast, it’s because of CSI. CSI is a show that I tried to imagine so the world can understand that on the worst day of your life, there’s somebody out there that can scrutinize evidence, bring peace of mind to the survivor, and put the bad guy in jail. And that is a mantra that speaks every language in the globe and hopefully makes the world a better place because CSI is about one thing — justice for victims — and mission accomplished en route to 1000 episodes.

CSI, Complete Series, Streaming Now, Paramount+