Televisual waiting: Images of time and waiting in CSI

The CSI effect and the absence of waiting

Carol Mendelsohn (executive producer): We do take a few liberties, and the biggest liberty is with time.

Sarah Goldfinger (writer): Our [forensic] tests take five minutes [and] thirty seconds when they would take thirty days … so that’s something you cheat.

(The Research of CSI: Maintaining the Accuracy)

From 2002 onward, journalists as well as academic scholars have been concerned with what has been called the CSI effect. Forensic television programs, such as CSI among others (e.g., Without a Trace, Numb3rs, Criminal Minds, NCIS, Crossing Jordan, and Bones), are assumed to have effects on their viewers. ² Since coining the term “CSI effect,” however, scholars have noted that it is more accurate to speak of multiple effects rather than a singular one (see Cole and Dioso-Villa, 2006, 2008 for a discussion of these numerous effects as they have impacted American law and criminal justice; see Byers and Johnson, 2009 for a discussion of the series’ sociopolitical effects). One of these effects is connected to the show’s visualization of waiting time—or more precisely, its absence of images of waiting. Members of the CSI team regularly do not need to wait for test results from their forensic evidence analysis. In fact, the turnaround time for forensic evidence analysis in the typical CSI episode is roughly between 5 to 10 minutes for DNA samples (Pratt et al., 2006: 43) and even less for non-DNA forms of evidence (see Table 1), even though the actual process can range from days to months of work. Most episodes do not feature any images of waiting because every case’s evidence is deemed a priority. As a result, there are rarely, if any, queues for evidence analysis in the CSI lab despite its reputation as “the busiest in the country” (episode Viva Las Vegas).

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Table 1.

The immediacy of capturing and processing forensic evidence in Grave Danger.

Scene	Start time	End time	Screen duration
Criminalist Sara Sidle tests suspect’s thumbprint	5:51 Sara runs the fingerprint through a fingerprint computer database	6:09 Computer database spits out “no match” result	18 seconds

Because waiting is such a ubiquitous, everyday experience in modern society, the absence of waiting becomes noteworthy, particularly to scholars who implicitly demand that screen duration bear some resemblance to the actual time duration associated with the processing of forensic evidence in real-life laboratories. For example, Ley et al. (2012) have argued that the series’ depictions of the forensic analysis process reinforce the message that DNA testing can be done swiftly and with relative ease. Consequently, the program may cultivate unrealistic expectations among viewers, which in turn have contributed to the backlog problem encountered by real-life forensic laboratories in America. Even though crime rates in the US have fallen since 1994, more than half a million cases were backlogged in understaffed American forensic labs at the end of 2002, a situation that has been exacerbated by the increasing amounts of evidence being sent to the labs for analysis (Houck, 2006). “[U]nrealistic expectations engendered by television” have exerted social, professional, and political pressures on police officers to bring in as evidence “bags filled with cigarette butts, fast-food wrappers and other trash” for forensic analysis (Houck, 2006). Further, Pratt et al. (2006) estimate that roughly 221,003 homicide and rape cases remain unsolved in the US because nearly half of all local crime labs in America report that they are unable to produce timely results due to backlogs. The authors also conclude that the public, in the absence of any informational alternative to television representations of case processing, might as well assume that forensic DNA evidence can be easily and speedily collected and analyzed. Thus, scholars, when writing about this temporally related CSI effect, tend to problematize the representational efficiency of the criminal justice system, even when such a representation aligns with the speed-centered temporal framework of present Western societies, which insists upon the reduction and potential elimination of waiting time (Gasparani, 1995). These critics implicitly acknowledge that television is a time-based medium capable of imposing its own temporality onto objects and narratives, all the while contesting the discrepancy between screen duration and the actual time duration of similar criminal justice processes in the “real world.”

However, these critics have failed to connect the relative absence of waiting to the series’ representation of criminalists as powerful figures of moral authority, where such a construction has served to (re)assert the moral authority of the police and science at a time when both institutions have become somewhat discredited (Cavender and Deutsch, 2007). CSI (re)assures viewers that science is capable of revealing the truth of the body, and the police are able to act with legitimacy on the grounds of infallible scientific evidence (Byers and Johnson, 2009). By combining the roles of forensic scientists and police detectives into what one CSI character calls the “copologist” (episode Grave Danger), the series additionally constructs the moral authority of criminalists by rarely representing them as waiters. To be kept waiting, as Schwartz (1975: 30) has argued, is “to be the subject of an assertion that one’s own time (and, therefore, one’s social worth) is less valuable than the time and worth of the one who imposes the wait.” Thus, the valuation of time is related to the distribution of power in society across individuals and institutions. If there are two classes into which people can be divided in modern society—those who wait and those who do not—then the class of criminalists is constructed as having power over others’ time. The “copologist” does not have to wait for forensic results to be processed, nor for suspects to confess, victims to describe in detail their suffering, or for witnesses to provide relevant clues to the criminal’s identity. Typically, police detectives and CSIs are shown entering various rooms and offices in the (fictional) Las Vegas Police Department where others have been kept waiting. For example, in the episode Grave Danger, a suspect and his lawyer wait uncomfortably for Detective Brass to enter the interrogation room, a site now turned into a waiting room where tapping feet signal the body’s restlessness and impatience, as well as provide a substitute sound for the (absent) ticking of the (ever-present but invisible) clock.

In addition to having power over others’ time, criminalists are represented as also having power over time itself. The criminalist’s scientific status is cemented by his or her ability to assert control over time, as time is represented as something that can be subjected to calculation and scientific control. Since CSI valorizes science and technology, it is not surprising that the series operates on the scientific hypothesis, which in turn supposes that time develops in a linear fashion and can be theorized as a line (Serres and Latour, 1995: 57). Configured as scientifically objective, the line implies that time is, as Newton (1846: 77) proposed in Principia, “absolute, true and mathematical.” Mathematical time can be counted, added, and multiplied (Durrande-Moreau and Usunier, 1999). The episode Grave Danger demonstrates how CSIs mathematically calculate time—in this case, the amount of time that Nick can wait in an air-tight coffin before dying from asphyxiation:

Gil Grissom (head of the CSI team): The space in that box looks like 2 × 2 × 6, which would be 24 cubic feet. [He punches the buttons on his hand-held calculator.] That would hold approximately 600 litres of air. If you figure half a litre per breath … [He checks his watch as he times his own breathing.] Slow breathing … Maybe twelve breaths per minute. Panic breathing would be […] twice that much. Well, if the math is right, [Nick’s] got about an hour and fifteen minutes of air left in that box.

Equipped with various clocks and chronometric measures, the CSI team is prepared to precisely record and measure mathematical time throughout the episode. For example, Nick’s potential demise in the coffin is discerned through the setting of a computer countdown clock. Time becomes a point of reference for the entire CSI team as they must save Nick before zero hour; for Nick, his life and eventual death are both set to and adjusted by the accurate measurement of the countdown clock. When time is conflated with its own measurement, the conceptual abstraction of time is privileged. Because CSI tends to typically represent time as a mathematical abstraction, such a representation lends itself to the generation of temporal ellipses, where time can be expanded and contracted so long as it remains conceptually linear. Working from the idea that time is thought rather than felt, these temporal contractions then give rise to critics’ charge of a CSI effect, precisely because they obscure the experience of time as duration.

Representations of waiting and conviction in Grave Danger

George Eads (actor who plays CSI Nick Stokes): We’ve provided a sense of conviction with our audience. (CSI Season 5: A Post-Mortem; author’s emphasis added)

In contrast to the more typical representation of time and waiting featured in most episodes of CSI, the episode Grave Danger not only includes representations of waiting but also transforms waiting into an experience that must be lived, felt, and endured. The experience of temporal duration is triggered in the episode through the notion of conviction. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines conviction as “the action of convicting or convincing.” In the first sense, conviction refers to proving or finding a person guilty of an offence for which he or she is charged before a court of law. A finding of guilt leads to the passing of a sentence. In the criminal justice context, a conviction becomes a cause for waiting, particularly in the case of prison sentences where inmates wait for release. On CSI, convictions are secured through the work of forensic scientists who provide the biological evidence and scientific truth of “whodunit.” Yet conviction can also refer to the mental state of being convinced, where individuals are made to believe on the grounds of reason or evidence. Here, conviction, additionally defined by the OED as “mental conviction,” is connected to belief. The believer, suffused with hope and faith, is fundamentally conditioned to wait (Gasparani, 1995). As a result, conviction can also be the reason for why some people continue to wait. In the episode Grave Danger, the “copologist” continues to wait in a buried coffin for rescue rather than immediately end his life with his own gun, because he believes in his team’s ability to put together the clues necessary for his release. Thus, waiting is triggered by and can trigger conviction, a condition that has been paired with the experience of imprisonment.

Notably, waiting in the episode is also visualized in terms of bodily containment and imprisonment, both akin to the experience of enduring “death.” Plot-wise, criminalist Nick Stokes is imprisoned in a coffin as part of Walter Gordon’s revenge against the CSI team for having produced evidence that led to the allegedly wrongful conviction of his daughter, Kelly Gordon. In the episode, Kelly talks about how she suffers rape in prison as a “hood rat’s lesbian sex slave,” while Nick is asked to bear the experience of being buried alive. These experiences of imprisonment are made analogous in the minds of those working on this particular CSI episode, as cast and crew debated on set the question of whether they would do “five years in prison or twelve hours underground” (actress Marg Helgenberger quoted from CSI: Tarantino Style). Both the coffin and the prison cell are visualized as terminal waiting rooms: those who are contained in the room wait for either a literal or figurative death, playing into the overarching theme of death that is foregrounded in the series (Tait, 2006). While the series routinely shows viewers dead bodies, tagged for autopsy and examined in queue and on cue, Grave Danger deviates from the formula of a typical CSI episode in which the CSI team investigates one or more homicide cases. Instead, Grave Danger does not represent death itself but the “living dead”—those whose bodies are prompted to remain inert in a temporary form of stasis in container spaces (Bissell, 2007). Both the prison and the coffin are evoked as containers of figurative death (a grave of sorts), introducing the idea of “dead time.” Here, such an idea is not an implicit reference to the productivist epistemologies that reduce waiting to empty or “dead” time. Rather, “dead time” is invoked through images that convey the experience of death itself. In the case of the prison sentence, Kelly Gordon explains her experience of imprisonment as a death: “You know what I used to do before this? Back when I was alive? I used to grow things. Outside. I was studying horticulture. Flowers.” While she had created and sustained life through horticulture (“I used to grow things”) outside the prison and before her imprisonment, Kelly now finds her life (i.e., the feeling of being “alive”) extinguished in prison. Working through the binary oppositions of inside/outside (container), before/after (the prison sentence) and alive/dead, CSI ties the experience of “dead time” to the bodily experience and performance of death. The body is made to perform death and “play dead” through waiting. As Bissell (2007: 285) has noted, waiting is a wholly performative event as the body is actively and intentionally configured through its posing and posturing. It is the body that marks the passing of time, especially when time is experienced as duration. In living and feeling time’s duration, we become time because our body cannot escape it (Schweizer, 2008: 17). Instead, “we must endure time, we are the time that endures” (Schweizer, 2005: 778). As a result, we, as waiters, come to embody time itself.

To further examine how duration is represented through the body, I analyze how Nick Stokes becomes the embodiment of time as he waits for rescue. As he lies in his cracked coffin, the passage of waiting time is marked by the amount of dirt and fire ants that accumulate in the space over time. With a stinging bite that can bring about hallucinations, the fire ants mark Nick’s body, slowly destroying it bite by bite. In addition to being a metaphor for the ravages of time’s passing, the fire ants’ destruction of an inert body also bring to mind the processes of bodily decomposition that accompany death. Thus, Nick can only feel time pass through his body as the coffin is a space without clocks. Outside the container space, the CSI team has access to precise chronometric measurements of time; however, inside the coffin, time is not something that can be precisely measured, only lived and endured. In particular, Nick’s waiting is associated with horizontality and femininity.

The feminized waiter

The action hero narrative in contemporary Hollywood cinema, in films such as Buried (2010), 127 Hours (2010), and Phone Booth (2002), would suggest that the representation of masculinity, as embodied by an imprisoned male protagonist, is linked to the stoic endurance of pain. Yet Nick’s waiting is curiously feminized, even though he is both stoic and physically constructed along the lines of the conventional “action hero” or the “usual TV stereotype of the white male cop” (Kompare, 2010: 74). Of all the criminalists that are featured on CSI, Nick’s distinguishing characteristic—the essence that makes him a “good cop”—is empathy (Kompare, 2010), allowing him to be described as “radiating crazy feminine energy” (episode Gum Drops). With his “sensitive and metrosexual traits” (Rajiva, 2009: 185), Nick is arguably the most feminized of the male criminalists on the CSI team. Consequently, it is not altogether surprising that Nick becomes emblematic of a feminized waiting experience through the following three representational moves.

First, Nick’s confinement is represented as analogous to a woman’s experience of imprisonment: his waiting is meant to be analogous to Kelly Gordon’s prison sentence. Further, his waiting is also conceived as a sign of impotence by Walter Gordon. Specifically, Walter asks the CSI team

What does Nick Stokes mean to you? How do you feel when you see him in that coffin? […] How do you feel, knowing that there's nothing you can do to get him out of that hell? Helpless … useless … impotent?

Walter’s inability to keep his daughter from being convicted—what he calls his impotence—is transferred onto Nick through the act of making him wait. Here, subordination is related to the act of making another person wait, because “to render oneself motionless for the sake of another has always been one of the most humiliatingly radical forms of subordination” (Schwartz, 1975: 171). While the CSI team is regularly represented as powerful by their ability to make victims and suspects wait, Walter attempts to render the team powerless and helpless by making its members wait.

Second, Nick-as-waiter plays a role often relegated to women in contemporary (Western) society, where females continue to play subordinate roles even on recent crime procedurals such as CSI (Cavender and Deutsch, 2007). Stories of waiting and helplessness remain gendered. Women wait, and they often wait for men to deliver them from the experience of waiting either through death or marriage. For example, horror (slasher) films continue to train viewers to wait for certain female victims to be killed, because the victim’s abject fear is gendered feminine. Female victims wait in what they think is a safe space only to learn that they have cornered themselves in a terrible place that can be penetrated by the male killer (Clover, 1987: 198). In Harlequin romance novels, the heroine spends her time waiting for the hero’s love and her first sexual experience. Although the heroine might fill her waiting time with tourism and consumption, she must passively wait for emotional and sexual intimacy to the point that “waiting, fearing, speculating” are part and parcel of the novel’s romantic intensity (Snitow, 1979: 157). In Homer’s The Odyssey, Penelope waits for the return of her husband Odysseus, where her story of waiting is spun by the threads of her daily weaving (Schweizer, 2008: 46).

Like Snow White who waits in her glass coffin, Nick Stokes is made to wait in his (Plexi)glas(s) coffin. Nick is thus placed in a role often reserved for women; he becomes akin to a damsel in distress awaiting male rescue. Conceived along the lines of a fairy tale, Grave Danger suggests—as Bettelheim did (1975/1989: 70)—that good outcomes only come to those who wait patiently. To wait patiently requires conviction. It requires the waiter to have faith in the idea that rescue is within the realm of possibility. As the fairy tale of Snow White features a male rescuer who can be viewed as an unconscious representation of the father (Bettelheim, 1975/1989: 204), Grave Danger features Gil Grissom as a “surrogate father” for Nick Stokes (Quentin Tarantino quoted in CSI: Tarantino Style). Thus, Nick is saved from waiting and eventual death by Grissom, a paternal personification of Science. Because he is so intensely waited for, Grissom’s appearance, like the appearance of the Messiah (Gasparani, 1995; Schwartz, 1975: 36), can make Nick as well as the viewer feel better, creating the impression that he can alleviate suffering. However, to have one’s suffering alleviated requires patience; after all, the Latin root of patience means suffering. Consequently, those who wait patiently in CSI will have their stress reduced by the appearance of Science. Science is the very thing around which CSI’s stories revolve, as well as the thing to wait for. Unsurprisingly, Grave Danger reaffirms the power of science as savior, and members of the CSI team as figures of moral authority.

Lastly, Nick serves as a diegetic placeholder for the CSI viewer who is also gendered feminine. Demographically, CSI is skewed toward an overwhelmingly female audience in the US (Gorman, 2010). Because CSI has become a metonym for American mass culture and its production (Kompare, 2010), it is noteworthy that critics of mass culture have often feminized television viewers and the medium of television itself. For example, the dangerous and potentially addictive appeal of mass culture has long been described through the metaphor of the feminine and its seductive allure (Devas, 2002: 251). As a vehicle for mass culture, television has been attributed “feminized” values (with their implicitly pejorative connotations) of passivity, consumption, and distraction, in contrast to the “masculine” values, such as production, activity, and attention, attributed to art by Anglo-American and German critics of mass culture (Petro, 1986: 6). Television viewers have also been described as occupying a particularly feminized spectator position. According to Dwight MacDonald (see Joyrich, 1996: 25), these viewers, lacking the proper “cultural equipment,” embody what he calls “Momism” because they are “childish, weak and impotent.”

As they watch the episode Grave Danger on television, the CSI viewer is placed in the same “impotent” (or feminized) position as Nick—that is, in the position of one who waits. Since the figure of Nick Stokes serves as a placeholder for the viewer as the episode cuts to and returns from commercial breaks, it is notable that at least half of the commercial breaks during the airing of both parts of Grave Danger begin immediately before and after a scene in which Nick is rendered inactive and helpless, awaiting his rescue or death (see Table 2). These scenes of Nick-as-waiter parallel the experience of the television viewer as waiter: during the commercial break, both Nick and the CSI viewer wait for the CSI team’s action to resume. Viewers fill the duration of their own time with the action of fictional characters, yet they, too, are made to wait as part of their television-viewing experience. As a television drama, CSI serves to mediate the viewer’s sense of time, and in doing so suggests that waiting (for the commercial break to end) is something to be lived, felt, and endured.

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Table 2.

Commercial breaks during Grave Danger.

Commercial break	Last scene before cutting to commercial break	First scene after program resumes from commercial break
Grave Danger, Part 1
1	Gil Grissom discovers that the evidence left at the crime scene is a symbolic message	Earlier that night: Grissom was doing some ballistic testing to discover the killer had murdered twins at close range
2	Nick Stokes is tied up in van, and is drugged into unconsciousness	Criminalists Catherine and Grissom investigate the scene from which Nick disappeared
3	Close-up shots of each criminalist’s face as they watch Nick in the coffin from their computer monitor (12 hours remaining)	Nick lies in the coffin
4	Catherine walks out of the CSI office after looking at Nick lying in the coffin. Close-up of countdown clock (4 hours remaining)	Exterior shot of the city during the day time
	Episode ends with the following white text on a black screen: “To be continued…”
Grave Danger, Part 2
Episode begins with voice-over: “Previously on CSI…”
1	Opening credit sequence	Exterior establishing shot of Las Vegas. Interior shot of one criminalist watching Nick on the monitor
2	Criminalist Sara Sidle and Detective Brass interview Kelly Gordon. Gordon says, “I hope your friend dies”	Nick lies in the darkness of the coffin, singing
3	Close-up shot of Nick in the coffin. Grissom says, “he’s being eaten alive [by fire ants]”	Camera follows fire ants as they crawl across Nick’s body
4	Fire ants bite Nick, and the camera zooms into his body to demonstrate that the ants’ bite has an effect on his blood and heart	Nick hallucinates his own autopsy

Note: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Waiting and television flow

In this last section, I briefly explore waiting as integral to the experience of watching television dramas. While waiting has been described as crucial to narrative, such that there is no story without waiting, these observations have been primarily made with regard to classic (single-unit) texts, such as novels, plays, and poetry (e.g., Gasparani, 1995; Schweizer, 2008), rather than to serialized televisual narratives. As Hagedorn (1995) has argued, serials—unlike classic narrative texts—cannot be consumed however, consumers wish, and instead place consumers at the whim of the medium that presents them. Consequently, the material basis of the medium’s narratives cannot be dismissed because it lies at the heart of what distinguishes a serial. Thus, in order to discuss CSI as a televisual narrative that depends on waiting, we need to discuss how its status as product (something to be sold) informs its production of narrative, a production that is highly dependent on the series’ position on prime-time American commercial “network television.” In contrast to the uninterrupted program narratives on cable television, the massively appealing narratives of “network television” continue to be cut up by commercial breaks (Banet-Weiser et al., 2007). These commercial breaks bring with them the possibility that waiting “is a ‘deep structure’ of television spectatorship regardless of where we watch TV” (McCarthy, 2001: 219). TV viewers wait for a better program, for an upcoming program, and for the resumption of a narrative interrupted by commercial breaks. Built into the flow of television, these breaks impact not only viewers’ experience of television but also the networks’ creation and maintenance of television programming.

On the one hand, commercial breaks are one means through which networks reap profit, which can then be used to fund the production of their television programming. On the other hand, commercial breaks allow for the commercialization of viewers’ waiting time, as advertisers buy units of time from networks. When advertisers purchase a specific unit of time on the network’s programming schedule, they are essentially buying access to a particular audience (Gitlin, 1983/2000). The price of time is determined by the quantity and quality of the audience being bought. For example, when CSI aired in 2005, it routinely averaged between 25 to nearly 31 million American viewers. Given the massive size of its audience, a 30-second commercial during the airing of CSI cost $478,000 USD in 2005 (Advertising Age, 2006: 28–29), one of the priciest advertising spots among all of the scripted prime time shows broadcast on major American networks at that time. In conceiving of the relationship between time and advertising, the networks hold an economic time style. The economicity of time can be summed up by the motto “time is money,” where time is not only commercialized but carefully scheduled in advance (Durrande-Moreau and Usunier, 1999). Top executives at networks are tasked with composing daily and weekly programming schedules (Gitlin, 1983/2000: 60), which are bound to notions of “clock time” as programs begin precisely on the hour or on the half-hour mark. To maximize their profits, broadcasters imagine their programming schedule as both discrete time slots as well as “flow.” The concept of “flow” as distinctive to the nature of television owes a debt to Raymond Williams. In Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974/1992: 80), Williams writes

In all developed broadcasting systems the characteristic organisation, and therefore the characteristic experience, is one of sequence or flow. This phenomenon of planned flow, is then perhaps the defining characteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form.

When it comes to television writing, CSI’s status as a product of network television is taken into account by writers as they plan its story production. They build an episode’s narrative around commercial breaks. When Grave Danger was written in 2005, the narrative of most television dramas broadcast on major North American networks was organized like a play, particularly through the use of a four-act or five-act structure (Douglas, 2005). As such, commercial breaks mark the end of one act and the beginning of the next, operating much like the experience of intermission at the theater. During the television intermission (i.e., the temporary interruption of narrative action), viewers may fill their interstitial waiting time (Gasparani, 1995) with substitute meanings by engaging in other activities, such as using the washroom and/or raiding the refrigerator. However, television writers need to ensure that these substitute meanings are not construed as far more interesting or compelling than the television program itself. In fact, the television writer’s task is to “pull [viewers] back from the refrigerator” (veteran television writer Madeline Dimaggio quoted in Thompson, 2003: 43).

What keeps viewers waiting (and watching) then is the expectation that the wait is ultimately meaningful. Not only conceived as interstitial time, waiting time for television viewers can also be construed as meaningful in and of itself, precisely because it is related to the creation of audience anticipation and narrative closure. According to veteran television writer Douglas (2005: 113), the basic television storytelling progression aims to evoke the following sequence of emotional engagement from viewers: anticipation–expectation–surprise, all affective elements that have been described as pertinent to waiting by Gasparani (1995). Viewers are first led to anticipate an event, where this sense of anticipation will hold them through both the plot setup as well as through the commercial breaks. To build audience anticipation, most how-to-write-television manuals advise that “[a]bsolutely everything in television builds to the act end” (quoted in Thompson, 2003: 43). Specifically, act ends tend to present viewers with a cliffhanger—a scene that places a main protagonist in such peril that his or her life “hangs” in the balance (see Table 2 for examples in Grave Danger). Viewers must wait through the commercial break to see how the desperate situation will be resolved. Because television dramas are also serialized narratives, they may—as Grave Danger did—also end the episode on a cliffhanger. In fact, Grave Danger concludes its first part with a “To be continued” caption on screen. The caption immediately follows a scene where Grissom has been placed in danger as explosions are set off after his meeting with Walter Gordon. The audience does not know whether Grissom survives, and whether there are any new or useful clues for saving Nick. To survive the delayed narrative closure, viewers need to be patient and wait through yet another commercial break for the story to resume, as both parts of Grave Danger were originally broadcast in sequence one right after the other. Consequently, the suspension of narrative has the effect of promoting viewers’ continued consumption of the serial by honing in on their experience of instrumental waiting. As a necessary part of narrative or dramatic development, instrumental waiting serves a purpose and is directed toward an end (Schweizer, 2008: 10), such as episodic closure, even if that end is inevitable and predictable. So despite many seasons of the same, CSI viewers continue to wait for and find meaning in suspenseful stories that end with Science’s triumph over life’s uncertainties.

Conclusion

Waiting is so ubiquitous in contemporary life that its absence in a massively popular crime drama becomes worthy of scholarly and criminal justice concern. In the case of CSI, such concern has manifested in a particular CSI effect—specifically, the program has created unrealistic expectations among viewers regarding the speed at which forensic evidence can be collected and analyzed in crime laboratories. Such an effect is associated with the series’ typical representations of time and nonwaiting: CSI typically represents time as mathematical and linear, and CSIs as exempt from the tedious experience of waiting. While most researchers have focused on the relative absence of representations of waiting in the series, this narrow focus seems to disregard the ways in which CSI, as a televisual narrative, relies not only on multiple representations of waiting but also on the experience of waiting.

To end, I want to connect the overlapping links between the different levels and meanings of waiting found in CSI. The series not only constructs and reinforces dominant conceptualizations of waiting but also provides viewers with the imaginative resources to better visualize these conceptualizations. While the typical episode might downplay images of waiting time, the episode Grave Danger highlights how waiting is triggered by and triggers conviction in not only those-who-await-rescue but also the television viewer. CSI viewers must have conviction that the program is worth watching and will provide them with satisfactory closure despite its inclusion of commercial breaks and cliffhangers. Viewers must also be convinced that science can resolve uncertainties and lead to the just conviction of criminals. The power of science, as embodied by the figure of the criminalist, is reaffirmed though an absence of images of waiting in the typical episode. Here, waiting becomes a morally loaded resource that can be used to legitimate particular power relations—in this case, the power and moral authority of the criminalist or “copologist”—as the powerful create schedules while the powerless are often put at the mercy of another’s schedule. When we turn to the specific representation of criminalist-as-waiter in Grave Danger, it is notable that this representation serves to mirror the waiting experience of television viewers. Waiting time, for both Nick Stokes and the television viewer, is experienced as something that must be endured. Nick is made to wait in the dark following Walter Gordon’s nefarious schedule of events; the viewer is made to wait through the flow of commercial breaks and programming segments according to the network executive’s schedule. Like Nick’s embodiment and performance of waiting time, television viewers have also been similarly imagined as feminized and horizontally inclined by both American network executives and some critics of mass culture. Ultimately, this analysis highlights how a consideration of televisual waiting is far more complex than simple notations about the relative absence or presence of waiting in a television series. Instead, a study of televisual waiting entails a recognition that images and narratives on network television emerge out of and depend on waiting as representation, experience, and performance.