Call it the Laurence Fishburne “CSI” good will tour. It all starts on Monday night, when Dr. Ray Langston (Laurence Fishburne) visits Horatio Caine (David Caruso) on “CSI: Miami” after a severed leg belonging to a Las Vegas girl is found in the Everglades. Langston next follows the trail of evidence to New York, where he works with Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) of “CSI: NY” to foil an interstate trucking ring that specializes in human cargo and black market organ harvesting.
“We discover that women are being brought into Miami, forced to do things they don’t want to do. If they don’t cooperate, they’re being shipped across the country,” Fishburne says. “There’s one girl who we don’t know if she’s alive or dead and that’s who Langston is tracking. He’s just bound and determined to try and find this young woman.”
Fishburne doesn’t like the term “crossover” to describe the episodes.
“I’m calling it the ‘triple crown,’” he says. “I don’t like the cross-pollination. These are three really good shows. People love them; they’ve been successful now for a long time.”
“They came to me, and said, ‘Hey, how would you like to do [a crossover] and I was like, ‘What?’ I will tell you that David Caruso said to me, back last year when I first came to do ‘CSI’ — ‘We should do a crossover episode.’ He didn’t say why. We worked together 20 years ago. We did a movie here in NY called ‘King of New York.’ So I’m looking forward to seeing him and working with him again.”
Working on location in New York gave Fishburne the chance to meet “CSI: NY” cast members, such as Eddie Cahill. But he already knew Gary Sinise and Hill Harper. Other than Caruso and Adam Rodriguez, he didn’t know any of the actors on “CSI: Miami.”
“It’s going to be important for me to be a good guest, and to recognize that I am a guest in somebody else’s home,” Fishburne says. “Doing ‘CSI: NY’ is not ‘CSI.’ Doing ‘CSI: Miami’ is not ‘CSI: NY,’ it’s ‘CSI: Miami.’ It has a very, very specific tone, it has a very specific look, it has a specific way in which they tell their stories that’s different from ‘CSI: NY” and ‘CSI.’ So I’m going to respect that.
“There’s a different tone, there’s a different tone to the show. I think ‘CSI’’s tone is much darker than the other two, much darker. Yeah, I do like that. I am on ‘CSI.’ There’s no right one or the wrong one, I’m on ‘CSI.’”