“We are in a funny position,” says Naren Shankar, Executive Producer of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” “We demand scientific realism in techniques, results, and conclusions, but we take dramatic license with how these things are rendered on film because it has to look beautiful and cool.” And it does. The Las Vegas crime lab depicted in the television show is all super-saturated colors and moody lighting; large flat-panel screens scroll numbers at hyperspeed, and the liquids that drop from pipettes into test tubes always have a gorgeous hue. Sometimes the camera even swoops into an experiment to show you a macro close-up of a tiny spot sticking to a carpet fiber, then swoops back out to show deep concentration on the face of a stylish young investigator with perfect hair. Anyone would want to work in a place like that.

A crime lab as seen on “CSI”

Shankar got a PhD in applied physics from Cornell in 1990. He interviewed in his field and would have taken a position at Apple Computer, but when he didn’t get that job he decided to try screenwriting. “Had I known the actual odds of success, I wouldn’t have done it,” he says. His writing credits ranged from space operas like “Star Trek: The Next Generation” to cop shows like “Undercover” before he landed at CSI five years ago. He says the show’s producers are acutely aware of the impact they are having on young viewers. “Interest in forensics at the college and postgraduate level has just exploded, and we have close ties to that community,” he says. “I know that an actual crime lab has fluorescent lights and old equipment and cinderblock walls. But I also know people don’t want to look at that.”

CSI is a “research intensive” show, says Shankar, and “the techniques and the instrumentation we show is all real. We have two criminologists working full-time as script advisors, and one who is a full-time set advisor.” Aside from the shiny surfaces, another big difference between the show and reality is how long it takes to get results. “But the labs are catching up to us,” he says. “You can do an actual DNA test almost as fast now as we do it on the show. When those tests began, they took much longer.

Naren Shankar

“The appeal of the show is empirical analysis,” he says. “People love to know how things work and they like to be taken into those roles. That’s why we push the camera into carpet fibers and through cadavers. Going into things is part of the appeal. And this might sound odd, but the main thing I bring to the show from my background in science is my comfort with peer review. There is a lot of revision in television. When the revisions start, I fall back on my training to see how a mystery might play out. If a fingerprint is six inches off the floor instead of three feet off the floor, what does that imply? When we tear apart a script and put it back together so it’s better, that is peer review.”

Shankar knows that students are getting excited about science when they watch his show, but he doesn’t write for them specifically. With about 22 million viewers for an average episode, “the show is a classic mainstream broadcast hit,” he says. “We get fan mail from everyone — even scientists.”