Twelve years ago, Anthony Zuiker was earning US$8 an hour as a train driver at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. Today, the 39-year old TV producer is at the helm of one of the most lucrative series franchises in television history, CSI, which now comprises three different shows, each with huge international followings. To say Zuiker's life has undergone a profound change in the past decade or so would be an understatement. And he owes it all to the fact that he took something he was personally interested in and turned it into something for the masses, navigating uncharted territory in the process.
'The thing about Hollywood that people don't really know about is that they're always looking for something new,' says Zuiker, wearing a dark blazer and sitting in what is usually the interrogation room on the Los Angeles set of CSI: New York. 'There are spotters that are hired to find new talent, and there's never a lack of appetite to grab a piece of great intellectual property, or find the next young actor, the next hot writer, the next great producer. There's always a need to find that person.'
Zuiker's big break started with an idea. In the summer of 1999, he and his wife were watching a docudrama called New Detectives that told the story of a murder solved by the retrieval of a hair follicle from a car seat. 'I said to myself, 'Wow, all of that just on one single hair follicle', and the fascination for forensic science at that point began,' says Zuiker. 'It really was that show that started the whole thing.'
The original CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is about to start its eighth season, and sister shows CSI: Miami and CSI: New York are in their sixth and fourth, respectively. But Zuiker shoots down any notion of another spin-off. He says he is less concerned about market saturation than about the future of television, which he sees as under threat from newer media platforms.
'I feel a television set needs to always be the primary device in the house that [delivers] content [and] brings people together. I'm concerned about ... human interaction. We're able to consume content on devices that don't include anybody else watching at the same time. At a time when people need to be brought together and have more interaction, we're in a technology boom encouraging people not to be together.'
Zuiker wants to secure the place of TV as people's primary source of entertainment, and plans internet-based shows and content for mobile phones and gaming platforms that coaxes viewers back to the TV every week. 'That's the future of doing television properly,' he says.
For now, the CSI formula keeps millions of people coming back to their TVs for more. 'People love that formula,' he says. 'We don't change that. If we got a viewer to take a CSI script and give it to Miami or a New York script and give it to Las Vegas,
