CSI Miami, ER and Buffy

This article first appeared in the Saturday Age on July 12th 2003

The two most popular ways of knitting a television show together are Unresolved Sexual Tension and violence. And good violence, like good URST, can style itself in many ways. Shows like CSI, (Tuesday, Channel 9, 8.30pm) and the forthcoming CSI Miami (beginning July 23, Wednesday, 8.30pm, Channel 9) go for violence that has an ironic distance, effected by a combination of extreme close ups of mangled body parts and fast cuts. (And while we're on the subject, I think CSI Miami is better than the original. There is more characterisation and it's slowed down a fraction. Presumably so it works for older viewers like me.)

Lucky shows, like ER (Thursday, Channel 9, 8.30pm) and Buffy (Tuesday, channel 7, 10.30pm) get to do both at once. When Buffy got together with Spike they indulged in such dramatic rough 'n' tumble that even stalwart viewers like myself were shocked. S & M aside, the violence in Buffy is often fantastical, involving vampires and demons and super human strength.

ER goes for heavy-duty realism with its gore, as those who watched last week's 200th episode would know. The hapless Romano had his gangrenous and charred arm surgically removed by Corday, who then gingerly puts it in a garbage bag. Then he tells her he loves her. It's almost as kinky as Buffy and perfect punishment for the character we love to hate.

In ER's season finale this week Dr Carter gets a taste of unadulterated violence, as the show take him out of Chicago and into the Congo where death and guns are the rules not the exception. (Why ER has chosen to end it's last two seasons with African episodes I don't know, though both times Africa has been the place where everything we dread occurs - the continent of our nightmares.) The show has struggled this year, relying on the earnest Carter (Noah Wyle) to carry the series. I was a much bigger fan when it was a true ensemble cast. But despite the corniness of the African setting, this is a powerful episode, and it reminds us what a wonderful actor co-star Goran Visnjic (Luka) is. How do Luka and Carter cope when they are kneeling in the dust with a gun held to their heads? That's a moment of violence no amount of hospital disinfectant or medical training will protect them from.

And no amount of cultural theory or televisual literacy was going to protect me from a moment on television this week that caused me to burst into tears and feel sick for the rest of the evening. Perhaps it was because the victim was Xander, who I adore. The ordinary guy in Buffy; the one without any special powers, the one Joss Whedon, the show's creator, once described as the character most like himself. You know a show is winding up (there are only four episodes to go) when characters get knocked around like this: in a way which is human and true and can't be reversed by a bit of magic, black or white.

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