The second half of CSI 's first year takes Grissom and his untiring team down some darker paths than before. Nick finally gives in to his urges and sleeps with the hooker who has a crush on him in"Boom"--with predictably disastrous consequences. Sarah is badly affected by the rape and attempted murder of an unknown woman in"Too Tough to Die"; and even Grissom is shaken when dealing with the sudden death of an infant in"Gentle, Gentle". The final episode of the year,"Strip Strangler", is a real shocker, as the team track a brutal serial killer.

Elsewhere, the morbid business of investigating corpses and crime scenes is enlivened with flashes of welcome humour: when a horse is found dead with packets of uncut diamonds concealed in its uterus, Grissom deadpans"This horse is a mule". Throughout, the show remains focused on its scientific remit, only revealing enough of the characters' private lives to provide added piquancy to each investigation: Sarah's complete lack of a life outside her work; Warrick's old gambling habit; Catherine's attachment to her daughter and troubles with ex-husband Eddie; Nick's over-eagerness to please. Grissom, meanwhile, like the Dalai Lama, is the model of inscrutable wisdom. The show itself, like a millennial antidote to a decade of X-Files , is relentlessly empirical: everything that initially seems mysterious--from spontaneous human combustion to an apparent case of vampirism--is always explicable and explained by the team's scientific dedication.

On the DVD: CSI, Series 1 Part 2 contains 11 episodes on three discs. Extra features consist of a brief promo featurette, production notes and a series of on-set interviews with the cast. Oddly for such a cutting-edge show, picture is old-fashioned 4:3 with basic Dolby stereo sound. -- Mark Walker

The latest in a long line of successful US police dramas, the forensic cop show Crime Scene Investigation varies the formula by focusing on a team of civilian scientists who work the night shift in Las Vegas, poring over crime scenes for fingerprints, blood spatters, DNA-laced mucus and (especially) maggots.

Star William Petersen plays a variation of his role from Manhunter , the cool puzzle-solving genius who can rattle off mystifying speeches with aplomb, while his contrasting partner is Marg Helgenberger, cast as a single mother/ex-stripper who is as concerned with the emotional as well as the physical mess left by crime.

While most US cop shows (witness NYPD Blue ) tend towards soap, neglecting the cases in favour of personal crises, CSI gives its regulars enough life to make them human but is essentially puzzle-based, with individual episodes following two or three cases à la Homicide: Life on the Street . The occasional special focuses on a major job with the team investigating the slaughter of a whole family ("Blood Drops") or a death in first class on a plane over Vegas ("Unfriendly Skies"). A few continuing threads are laid down, with a recurrent villain who gets away, but will inevitably return, but on the whole these shows play pretty well as one-offs. Very high-tech in style, with lots of zooms into microscopic examinations of hair follicles or stomach contents and distinctive visualisations of the different stories told by witnesses and evidence, this is one of the best shows currently airing.

On the DVD: CSI 's first DVD box set contains the show's first 12 episodes: the pilot followed by"Cool Change","Crate & Burial","Pledging Mr Johnson";"Friends and Lovers","Who Are You?","Blood Drops";"Anonymous","Unfriendly Skies","Sex Lies and Larvae";"The I-15 Murders" and"Fahrenheit 932". In addition to inventive menus, the three-disc set offers character profiles, a trailer, some B-roll on-set footage, a subtitle option, and snippet-like interviews with the cast and creatives. -- Kim Newman

Brand new factory sealed, great DVD box-set, limited edition with 'glow in the dark' packaging, 497 minutes running time approx, fast dispatch, UK SELLER

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Las Vegas - Season 4 Part 1 [DVD]

The second half of CSI 's third season serves up generous amounts of the bizarre and depraved for our voyeuristic viewing pleasure: a man driving with a wooden spike in his head, ultra-violent Robot Wars, decomposing bodies in toxic waste drums and violent death during foam-soaked debauchery all add up to a typical night's work for the Las Vegas crime lab. Standout episodes include the 90-minute special,"Lady Heather's Box", in which Grissom renews his acquaintance with the sultry bordello madam and her world of S&M. But is the delightful dominatrix the murderer? In"Night at the Movies" the plot hinges on a reworking of a Hitchcock classic and in"Play with Fire" an explosion in the lab has disastrous consequences for the team.

Personal concerns come to the fore in these 12 episodes more prominently than ever before (a contrast to the show's original single-minded focus on the cases). Here, Sara Sidle's paramedic boyfriend unwittingly reveals a guilty secret when he is involved in a devastating car accident ("Crash & Burn"); Warwick witnesses his boyhood mentor falling apart when the older man's daughter is killed in a drive-by shooting ("Random Acts of Violence"); Catherine Willows' daughter and ex-husband are caught up in more violence and mayhem; and Grissom finally has to admit that his hearing problem can no longer be ignored. A welcome development is the expansion of the CSI unit and the introduction of some new, albeit secondary, team members. Guest stars include Elizabeth Berkely ("Lady Heather's Box") and Bobcat Goldthwait ("Last Laugh"). The show remains unrivalled for slick, fast-paced entertainment.

On the DVD: CSI, Series 3 Part 2 is a three-disc set with a handful of minor extra features. It has two frankly rather uninspiring episode commentaries featuring the directors, scriptwriters and other crew. Better are the two small featurettes--"Making It Real" and"The Writer's Room"--that shed more light on the making of the show. -- Mark Walker

Now firmly established as the top-rated US drama, by its third year CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is a show positively glowing with confidence. Even when individual cases seem either too contrived or too easily resolved, the indefatigable night shift at the Las Vegas PD crime lab always look the part, solving conundrums and discovering microscopic damning evidence while, apparently, never shedding their own loose hair or skin cells all over the supposedly quarantined crime scenes. In reality, Catherine Willows' flowing blonde locks would contaminate any evidence she collected, but in the world of CSI only the bad guys leave body parts behind--the CSIs themselves are so good they're positively pristine.

The first 12 episodes of season 3 on this three-disc set present more deliciously bizarre situations for the problem-solving sleuths: cannibalism, snuff movies, dwarfs, death while drag racing, bodies falling from the sky, and various dismemberments all tax the team's acumen. These are all double or multiple-case episodes, though in a characteristic trick of the writing sometimes apparently unrelated murders turn out to be connected (or vice versa, as in"Blood Lust", where a road accident victim is not what he seems, and the death of the driver at the hands of an angry mob is made all the more tragic.) The mix of genuine forensic science with the glossiest Jerry Bruckheimer production values, plus the virtues of a good ensemble cast headed by William Peterson's modern-day Sherlock Holmes, remains as compelling as ever. -- Mark Walker

Brand new factory sealed, great 3 DVD box-set, limited edition with 'glow in the dark' packaging, 466 minutes running time approx, fast dispatch, UK SELLER