The NY team will be utilizing the most cutting-edge of forensic tools, inspired by their real New York City counterparts. The set includes a ''reconstruction room,'' a stark, round lab with plastic-sheeting-lined walls and closets full of axes, drills, and baseball bats. ''It's a mad-scientist room to reconstruct what might have happened at a scene,'' says Zuiker, who offers the example of stabbing dead pigs for blood-spatter analysis. He also wants to make this show as CGI-free as possible to tout CSI's actual technology: ''Instead of making a rubber trachea,'' he says, ''we're putting an endoscope camera down the trachea of an actual [deceased] pig to get that medical feeling.'' (Two things are clear about Zuiker: He is excited by forensics work. . . and man, does he hate pigs.)
But CSI: New Pork -- sorry, York -- differs from its predecessors in a more critical way than locale. Zuiker plans to explore his characters' lives more deeply than in the other CSIs: Sinise's detective, Mac Taylor, is a retired Marine who's still struggling with the death of his wife on Sept. 11; and Kanakaredes' detective, Stella Bonasera, is haunted by the unsolved murder of her father. However, everyone on NY is quick to point out the show will still primarily focus on the mysteries. ''We'd like to have more of a continuous through-line, but we don't want to alienate people who feel if they miss one episode they won't understand what's going on,'' says Lipsitz.
This character work was the key to luring Sinise, CSI's biggest star yet. The Emmy winner (for TNT's George Wallace) had never been interested in series TV, but he says that over the past couple of years ''the parts I've been playing in movies have not been that interesting, and the offers have not been of the quality that I'd like them to be.'' Zuiker's pledge to keep Taylor evolving wooed him. ''This is the movie that won't end!'' says the 49-year-old actor with a laugh. ''There's any number of possibilities for what we can do.''
While Sinise and Kanakaredes aren't native New Yorkers, Manhattitude comes naturally to their supporting investigators. Vanessa Ferlito (24), who plays investigator Aiden Burn, is from Red Hook, Brooklyn, and New York native Eddie Cahill is, in real life, a lot closer to his role as aggressive Det. Don Flack than he was to his part as Rachel's corn-fed boyfriend Tag on Friends. ''I didn't get a lot of scripts that said 'New York City detective,''' he says. ''This is my pulse.'' And the Staten Island-raised Carmine Giovinazzo (Black Hawk Down) is practically a DNA match for his cocky NYPD investigator Danny Messer: His dad, sister, and brother-in-law have all been cops.
But you've got to know more than the correct pronunciation of ''Screw youse!'' to be a CSI: NY member. There's much medical jargon to be learned, not to mention the correct way to poke a rotting skull. ''In the first script, the word putrefaction came up, and I made the mistake of looking it up on the Internet,'' says Cahill. ''It came with pictures. That was the most grossed out I've been.'' Kanakaredes has been more fascinated with absorbing the life of someone surrounded by death. ''I timed the electric bed that dead bodies raise up on in the morgue,'' says the 37-year-old actress. ''It takes 28 seconds -- which must feel like hours for people praying it's not their kid or mother. Understanding what an 'occipital petechia' is -- that's cool, but to me it's the humanity that's interesting.''
