the "CSI" last week with the cameo by the "Mythbuster" guys was a tease of things to come. This month they ("CSI") swapped writing teams with "Two and a Half Men".
Monday was the "Two and a Half Men" show with a murder mystery at a wedding investigated by a CSI agent who looked very much like Marge Helgenberger of "CSI" but still had all the raunchy humor of the sitcom. There was the trademark "The Who" title song for the episode, the internal view of the body (Jake eating) and the scene recreations. As an aside, how the HELL did Jim Carey end up with the ultra hot Jenny McCarthy?
Last night was the other half of the swap : written by the "Men" staff with the CSI team going to Burbank to investigate the death of a sitcom star who was killed when in Vegas. This arc stars Katy Segal ("Married With Children") as a hated, selfish actress named "Annabelle Bundt" - if you are really not into it, Annabelle was once a tv clown, and Katy's "Married" character was Peggy BUNDy. It costars Diedrich Bader ("The Drew Carey Show" he was the goofy friend Oswald Lee Harvey - do comedy writers EVER take a break? LOL!) as Annabelle's husband Bud. Even there, the name was a nod to "Married", Bud was Peggy and Al Bundy's son. This joke is carried further by a scene with Annabelle as a dom 'spanking' Bud, "Are you a bad boy? Who's your momma?".
She is murdered early, and the show looks at everyone as a suspect, Bud, a stand-in body double, the writers, a former lover, and a competing actress in the show.
Oh man, I will be re-watching this episode all day tomorrow to catch all the jokes and inside gags.
Arriving on set in Hollywood (which confused me a bit - this is a CBS show but I thought they panned past a broken plane like maybe the one from "Lost" which is an ABC show), the CSI team drives past a trailer for the cast of "Two and a Half Men" where the 3 stars are standing outside in tuxedos (which they wore the "Men" show's wedding on Monday) and you see the young star, Angus T Jones, who appears to be smoking a cigar bite the end off it and spit it onto the ground. I assume they were at the CBS lot even though it looked alot like Universal Studios. I guess they all look alike (I worked for a time at ABC studios and that was definitely not the ABC lot).
The next to last scene is of one of the writers and the female co-star of the "Annabelle" show talking to Grissom ( the 'actors' playing the writers of the fake "Annabelle" show are the real life writers of "Two and a Half Men"). As he leaves the set Grissom says something like "I'll be watching", and the writer plugs the real time for "Two and a Half Men" : "OK, Monday night, 9:30, 8:30 central" and he waves as he walks out of view.
The final scene was with Deidrich where he is seen shaving with what appears to be a safe blade when his neck begins to spurt blood. He is seen trying to stop the flow with a finger as the screen goes black - in the fade you hear him say "Oh. OH! Whoa! uhn! . . . that looks BAD!"
And that gives away the answer to the who-dun-it.
I know the CSI writers had to deal with a hard switch to basically a simple scenario in a half hour format, but the "Two and a Half Men" crew did a much better job of bringing humor to the CSI set in my opinion. In fairness, they must have had forensic help from the "CSI" research staff to come up with the plot twists.
As the comic writers had Grissom say, "Dying is easy, Comedy is hard".
