In Treatment

“I’m very interested in everything you’ve got to say. I mean that.”

Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown

He: “How many men do you try to forget?”

She: “As many as the women you remember.”

...Then she started writing about CSI, and her tone changed. Her words sounded silly: “shwap, schmooz” went the bullets into their victims.

She referred to its cast being “so uncharismatic.” What! No-one disses Horatio, my favourite criminalist! (Actually the females in these shows are all lean and ugly, a few days past stale, propped up by gymwork, bosomed and botoxed. There is a feminist issue here, if she wanted to acknowledge it.)

But she insisted that CSI “stops you thinking.”

Actually, I would have argued, it can start a different kind of thinking, setting up a creative resistance. And it workshops its way to the truth, through a sequence of revelations; the characters narrate their way to a conclusion. Thus, in fact, CSI’s storytelling structure exemplifies the process of argument.