It’s been a while since I’ve been on the air, but I have a good explanation.

Our office was burglarized.

In the wee hours of Monday morning two guys broke into our offices and stole stuff. Most of the swag they got were, what I called later, “unintentional decoys:” A busted laptop, a camcorder on it’s last legs, and a gold ring belonging to my business partner, one with very bad associations for him. They did snag our newest, fastest computer, however, and that hurt.

As our office had become a crime scene, we were soon visited by a team of SFPD crime scene investigators. I actually got a little giddy about that– after all, I watch “CSI” now and then, at least the original one set in Vegas. I had no idea what to expect, but if the initial cops on the scene were any indication I predicted the evidence gathering would be a fairly mundane affair, a couple of beefy cops with brushy moustaches (think Daniel Roebuck from The Fugitive) getting magna dust all over everything.

Life Imitated Art that morning: There were three CSIs, and they were all young and very attractive. Two women, adorable smiles, hair back in serious yet perky ponytails. The young man was tall, Asian-American, and had the damndest dimples when he smiled. They all smiled, in fact, as they dusted cabinets and lifted prints. They laughed and joked. I asked if they were in such a good mood because there was not a moldering corpse in the room, and they admitted that was part of it. “The last place we worked had bags of feces in it,” said the attractive brunette CSI with a sigh, and the attractive blonde CSI and the handsome Asian-American CSI agreed.

Alright, they weren’t exactly William Peterson and Marg Helgenberger– they were more like the rotating supporting cast of hot young lab techs on the show: Jorga Fox, Gary Dourdan and the like.

Life does indeed imitate Art quite often, and I think what I witnessed was a strange side-effect of the amazingly successful “CSI” franchise and the popularity of procedurals in general. A well-produced TV show populated with attractive actors becomes an international hit, and highlights an unusual profession. The young, attractive and upwardly-mobile are drawn to glamorized professions. So now the often ghastly profession of forensic investigation is populated by Alphas.

A decade ago, when I was working with a lot of dot-coms in the Bay Area, each humongous (and ultimately doomed) start-up employed a cadre of attractive undergrads. “Marketing Bunnies,” they were called. Later, when the financial markets attracted a lot of popular attention, along came the “Money Honey,” which originally applied to CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo but later other financial reporters who were easy on the eyes.

This might be a half-baked idea, because ultimately, forensic investigation– well, it’s can often be a really gross and grim business, and it’s frankly the dissonance between the hotness of the actors on “CSI” and the ugliness of their cases makes the show somewhat risible. But it sure looks like fun when Grissom gets off his trademark groaner wise-crack before “Who Are You” starts and the titles run.

–Skot C.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 11:23 am and is filed under General, Hosts, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.