CBS at TCA: Will "CSI: Cyber" Be the Most Important Show on TV? – Ed Martin

Pasadena CA amp8211 CBS served up a busy half day Monday at the Winter 2015 Television Critics Association tour from a breakfast celebrating the 30 th season of quotSurvivorquot to an executive session with CBS Entertainment Chairman Nina Tassler to a session for the upcoming sitcom remake quotThe Odd Couplequot with Garry Marshall serving as executive producer as he did with the original back in the 3970s to a panel with the network39s newest late night star James Corden who takes over quotThe Late Late Showquot on March 23But the most important session of the morning had to be the one for the upcoming third spinoff from the profoundly durable quotCSIquot franchise quotCSI Cyberquot which debuts on March 4 and stars Patricia Arquette James Van Der Beek and Peter MacNicol Anticipation was high for this panel in part because Arquette had just won a Golden Globe award the night before for her performance in the acclaimed drama quotBoyhoodquot and in part because of recent events in the news involving hackers and online crimeIn fact news of the apparent hacking by militant group Isis of the United States military39s social media accounts broke shortly before this timely session was taking placequotWelcome to the reboot and the future of our franchise 39CSI Cyber39 where every crime is amplifiedquot quotCSIquot creator Anthony Zuiker said at the start of the session quotThe bank robbery of yesterday was going into a bank breaking in taking a lot of money The bank robbery of tomorrow is taking three cents out of your account The arson of yesterday was burning down a forest because you39re burning love letters for a loved one The arson of tomorrow is hacking into your smart house and having all the megahertz be rerouted to your appliance to burn your house down in the middle of the nightquotFor anyone who was paying attention Zuiker39s remarks and those of cast members and other producers throughout the panel couldn39t help but induce chills The panel included a woman named Mary Aiken who serves as an advisor on the show and is a quotcyber psychologistquot and a professor of cyber analytics at Hawaii Pacific University Arquette39s character Avery Ryan is based on Aiken and has already appeared on the quotCSIquot mothershipquotWe knew cybercrime was on the horizon as of five years agoquot Zuiker said quotIt was one of those things that first came on the scene that was very very scary to everybody People asked quotHow could this possibly be Maybe this is not going to be realquot Now you cannot pick up a newspaper or go into a CNN app and not find something cybercrime oriented Even as of this morning the Central Command was hacked in the United States of America These things are happening daily And I believe our audience will be very curious about what this subject matter is 39CSI Cyber39 will provide a level of entertainment and also edutainmentquotquotI feel like we39re at the dawn of a new timequot Arquette said quotThis is like the Industrial Revolution This is an explosion of the way that we39re going to be living our lives The writers know how to write things that are entertaining moving that excites audiences And yet they39re also introducing all this information about these new technologies and the ways that we39re living now moving forward the way that crime is developingquotAiken explained that she is involved in quotall aspectsquot of quotCSI Cyberquot quotfrom the creative process in terms of conceptualizing episodes all the way down to working with the script We39re trying to deliver an authentic interpretation of cybercrime We39re slightly future paced in terms of what it could be Our first episode is based on an actual case involving a twoyearold infant in which a baby cam was hacked and a predator was verbally abusing the infant online when her father walked into the room We wrote conceptualized filmed and had finished the episode when just eight weeks ago a website in Russia hacked footage from 75000 individual webcams and it ranged from footage of malls and stores to people39s driveways to footage of infants in their cribs So this was footage that was unsecured and hacked and available for all to see I think it was a good example for us in terms of how we conceptualize crime and then how it manifestsquotquotOne of the things so horrifying about all of this is that 90 percent of the time it39s totally randomquot said quotCyberquot costar Charley Koontz quotIt has nothing to do with you There39s nothing you can do It39s somebody who wants to park outside your house and hack onto your wifi and steal all your stuff and really put you in a precarious situation That39s what I found to be the most crazy about all these scripts We have to solve crimes where two people aren39t linked There39s no jilted lover and there39s no bully at schoolquotquotCyberspace is an environmentquot Aiken explained quotIt39s a place where people go especially youth and they can become very immersed in it So if you think you have problems with your kids with their mobile phones and they won39t pay attention at the dinner table wait till they come with a full HMDU head mounted display unit Try talking to them then when they39re actually in a virtual reality environment Everybody in the family will be able to engage with the show be entertained but most importantly be informed about safety and security aspects of technologyquotquotI don39t think we should hide from itquot Arquette cautioned quotThis is the reality and it is sort of like an ostrich burying its head in the sand to pretend this isn39t happening We may want to question if we have to have every device WiFi enabled Do we really have to have our coffee maker WiFi enabled We might want to think about the products we39re using and how they can be changed and removing some of those components and keeping them a little more lowtech to avoid some of these unnecessary extra things that are glommed on for convenience It39s pretty inconvenient when you get hacked So we might want to start thinking about actually buying products supporting products and companies making products that do keep us a little safer from thisquotEd Martin is the Editor of Planet Ed and MediaBizBloggers and the television and video critic for MyersBizNet Follow him on Twitter at PlanetEdCheck us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggerscomFollow our Twitter updates at MediaBizBloggerThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaBizBloggerscom management or associated bloggers MediaBizBloggers is an open thought leadership platform and readers may share their comments and opinions in response to all commentaries

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CBS at TCA: Will "CSI: Cyber" Be the Most Important Show on TV? – Ed Martin

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