On the Case From the Start

Although this television season’s biggest hit involves solving crimes, neither the show itself nor those behind it qualify as the usual suspects.

Then again, very little has gone according to form on “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” the first-year series that surprised pundits with its success on Friday nights, then became a smash on Thursdays at 9 p.m. following “Survivor.” Not bad for the last program CBS decided to put on its schedule, and one whose studio bailed out before the program hit the airwaves.

Presiding over this criminal empire is the tandem of Carol Mendelsohn and Ann Donahue, two well-traveled writer-producers who shared a long history of murder and mayhem--on their resumes, at least--without having previously experienced this sort of out-of-the-box sensation.

“CSI” is under the banner of blockbuster film producer Jerry Bruckheimer and was created by Anthony Zuiker, but overseeing the show on a daily basis falls to executive producers Mendelsohn and Donahue, two women with crisscrossing pasts that somehow managed not to intersect previously.

Mendelsohn, 50, came from Chicago and received a law degree before embarking on her writing career. Donahue, 46, grew up in Cleveland and served as a paralegal in the same Washington law firm where Mendelsohn once worked. The two share the same manager and live near each other in Westwood, making the trek to the Santa Clarita Studios that the show, set in Las Vegas, usually calls home.

For Mendelsohn, the venue represents a sort of homecoming, returning to the lot where she spent years as a producer on “Melrose Place.” Due to Zuiker’s inexperience in television, Mendelsohn--having worked on series ranging from “Fame” to “Tour of Duty”--was brought in the first day of shooting “CSI’s” prototype to shepherd it along, later recruiting Donahue, who had written for such series as “Murder One” and the police drama “High Incident.”

Of joining “CSI” at that stage, Mendelsohn said, “It’s one of the reasons the show was able to get on its feet so quickly. Anthony and I had bonded, we had at least some inkling of what the show could be, and then Ann came in.”

“CSI,” she said, has become “a marriage of three sensibilities,” with Mendelsohn and Donahue bringing the necessary structure to Zuiker’s framework about forensic investigators.

According to Mendelsohn, the real epiphany came when lead investigator Gil Grissom, played by William Petersen, uttered the line, “The victim talks to me,” establishing the program as not-so-much a “whodunit” but a “how-done-it.”

“At a certain point, the show took on a personality, a life of its own,” Mendelsohn said. “It’s like voices in your head. The show began to say what would work and what wouldn’t. . . . In addition to the subject matter, what I think really makes our show a hit is it’s smart, without being elitist or anything.”

Still, nothing with “CSI” came easily, beginning after it was ordered by CBS, usually a time for celebration. Disney’s Touchstone Television, a sibling of ABC, saw little advantage in producing an expensive show airing Fridays on a competing network and opted out.

Enter Alliance Atlantis, a Canadian company that partnered with CBS to underwrite production. President Peter Sussman admitted the company first had to resolve its qualms whether the show would be perceived as damaged goods and “was going to suffer in a marketing sense and a cast and crew morale sense.”

The producers themselves, meanwhile, sought to focus on the work and ignore the politics. “We never let it bother us,” Mendelsohn said. “As long as the bills were being paid, and we had offices, I didn’t care. . . . Everything that’s happened on the show has sort of happened around us.”

Indeed, at this point they have had scant time to savor their success, which exploded when CBS slotted the show after “Survivor” in February. Since then, “CSI” has been averaging more than 22 million viewers a week--easily beating NBC’s “Will & Grace” and “Just Shoot Me.” The series figures to again benefit from following “Survivor” when the third installment premieres in the fall.

Both writers cut their teeth at Stephen J. Cannell Productions, on series ranging from “Hardcastle & McCormick” to “Wiseguy.”

“I was the token woman on so many male-oriented action shows,” Mendelsohn said. “It was like going to Harvard. It was a training ground for young writers, and there were never very many women there.”

“Cannell is the Roger Corman of TV,” Donahue added. “That’s where everyone went, and he didn’t just give you titles. He let you earn it.”

The two didn’t know each other then, but their experiences were similar. Despite the spartan atmosphere, especially in the 1970s and ‘80s, both say the male show runners who hired them--from Cannell to Steven Bochco to “Midnight Caller’s” Robert Singer--were open to letting them grow.

“Those guys who are so gruff and macho, I never found that they were sexist,” Mendelsohn recalled. “It’s the guys who seem to be politically correct, the guys who hide it so well, that are the sexists.”

That isn’t to say it was always easy. Far from it. “I’ve been on shows where they said let’s have a story meeting, and they’d all go in the men’s room, or the door would shut in my face,” Mendelsohn said. “I always had a motto: Never let them see you cry. . . . Over a course of a career, I just always picked myself up, dusted myself off and just worried about the job.”

While both graduated to high-ranking positions overseeing shows, neither has been affiliated with a project of this commercial magnitude.

Moreover, Mendelsohn created a show that has almost become folklore in Hollywood. She wrote the never-broadcast pilot for “Frogmen,” an action show starring O.J. Simpson that was shelved after his 1994 arrest in connection with the murders of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

By coincidence, Mendelsohn was on the freeway, about 30 minutes behind Simpson during his chase. “One of the executives said to me, ‘This is the one time we won’t blame the writer,’ ” she said.

Looking ahead, the producers see opportunities to tinker with “CSI” but say the show must remain focused on investigation, in much the way “Law & Order” has stayed fixed on procedure. They have learned by trial and error, with scenes involving the cast unrelated to cases consistently winding up on the cutting-room floor.

“We want to deal with our characters, but we want to see their personalities through a case,” Donahue explained.

If it has been a long road for both to this juncture, the producers cite no regrets about the stops along the way.

“I think of my career as a journey,” Mendelsohn said. “It’s had ups and downs, but all of it is experience that you bank.”