Dying in prime time

On Halloween night, some 30 million viewers of CBS’ stylish forensic science series “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” will watch actor Jon Sklaroff go off into television’s great beyond.

Which brought him to the show’s stages at Santa Clarita Studios a few weeks ago for a nearly four-hour session with makeup artists John Goodwin and Jackie Tichenor. As his rugged features gradually disappeared under layers of ersatz charred flesh, Sklaroff could glance up at bulletin board snapshots of many who had gone before.

There was Nancy Yoon, playing a girl with drop-dead looks and a throat that somebody opened with a corkscrew. Rachel Shumate as a cheerleader disemboweled and wolfed down by drug-crazed companions. Tricia Helfer, a troubled teen who cut up her own face. In the snapshots, they all cheerfully show off their gruesome wounds.

Done to a crisp, Sklaroff walked stiffly to the set’s autopsy lab. He lay there for two hours, not moving, in a painful U-shaped neck brace designed to keep dead bodies in place, while series star William Petersen and co-star Robert David Hall worked him over as they ruminated on the characteristics of flame-seared lungs.

“CSI,” in its third season, has ushered in a prime-time era when death rarely takes a holiday. As ratings soar for medical-detective and black-comedy thrillers, the demand grows for edgier sequences littered with corpses. Burdens grow for producers, visual effects artists and network censors, not to mention the actors playing characters vividly depicted in the Reaper’s icy, gruesome grip.

“I’ve never had to put on any makeup like that. It was tougher than acting,” Sklaroff said the day after his autopsy scene, nursing a stiff neck and peeling bits of glue off his skin.

With a growing list of Hollywood action credits and aspiring to roles that, he said, might have fit a young Harry Dean Stanton, Sklaroff has been shot several times, gulped by a crocodile and barely survived a traffic accident on “ER.” But he’s not sure he would ever again endure a fiery demise and autopsy.

“People were taking my picture all day, like I was in a sideshow. They were looking at me, turning me around, poking me. It was a little humiliating,” Sklaroff said. “But the crew and cast were all so nice and [it] was such a nice set it didn’t matter that I had a moment of humility.”

Death in all its gritty realism is big on “CSI,” which offers an unflinching look at a team of gumshoes doggedly sniffing out whatever microscopia it takes to snare a miscreant.

“When a forensic show comes along that has to be correct in terms of forensic science then it’s important to feature the body up close,” said “CSI” creator and executive producer Anthony E. Zuiker.

After all, there’s nothing like a good victim to win over the audience. And, Zuiker added, “it’s not just anybody off the street who can act dead.”

Tim Kring, executive producer of NBC’s second-season medical examiner drama “Crossing Jordan,” said he asks actors at casting sessions to show him the Big Sleep.

“Some can’t do it. They twitch, or you can see them breathing,” Kring said. “But some are very good. You can pry their eyelids open for close-ups and get a blank stare.”

The trick is total relaxation, said Danny Cannon, who directed Sklaroff’s episode, a thriller involving a magician titled “Abra Cadaver.”

“Holding your breath doesn’t work,” Cannon said. “You get starved for oxygen and your veins throb. But if you shallow-breathe down in the diaphragm, then we don’t see it.”

Real bodies are customary in TV productions rather than realistic dummies favored by movie crews as a simple matter of economics, said “CSI” associate producer Brad Tanenbaum. Each episode of the show is filmed in only eight or nine days, but it takes a couple of weeks of painstaking work costing up to $50,000 to craft a good dummy.

Still, “prosthetic bodies,” as they’re sometimes called, are used for special occasions -- as in an episode of the WB’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” last season in which the title character got shot. “We did an incredibly realistic torso of Buffy for an insert shot of them digging the bullet out of her chest,” said effects artist Robert Hall. Network executives decided it was a bit too good. “I was watching the show with some of my friends and was all, ‘Watch! Watch! Here comes this great shot! Uh, well, that’s where it was supposed to be.’ ”

Actually, such disappointing moments for members of his profession are growing rarer, said Goodwin, the makeup department chief on “CSI.”

“On the first season, if the script called for it, I would put it there, but a lot of times they wouldn’t shoot it,” Goodwin said, proudly displaying a photo of an actress he made up as a decomposing corpse covered with insects. “By the end of the second season they were showing everything.”

Prime-time network shows don’t linger over gruesome images. And winning over executives sometimes takes effort, said Zuiker, who said he has gone all the way to CBS President Les Moonves for approval to air certain shots, some showing partial female nudity.

“We’re going to shock our audience on occasion but we’re not about drowning your senses in gore,” Zuiker said. “When you start doing gore for gore’s sake, you run into a level of distrust with your audience. They don’t take the science seriously and they don’t take the story seriously.”

Not long ago, TV hardly hinted at the true face of death. What changed?

Frank Spotnitz, an executive producer of Fox’s “The X-Files,” believes his series shattered the prime-time ickiness barrier, regularly showcasing graphic autopsies conducted by one of the main characters, Dana Scully, a doctor.

“Before, medical examiner shows like ‘Quincy’ showed the dead covered by sheets, and actors would lift the sheets and react,” Spotnitz said. “We were the first allowed to be really gross. We took highlight reels to coroners’ conventions. We were always a big hit.”

John Furia Jr., professor of film and TV writing at USC, pointed out that shows with a lot of dead people are ratings winners because they treat death from the point of view of people at everyday jobs, like HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” which focuses on a family-run funeral parlor. Death, he said, becomes another crazy part of modern life.

Because viewers get the joke, makeup artist Todd Masters said, “Six Feet Under” can confidently take a truly bizarre sequence -- like one in which a mortician uses a can of cat food to properly support a well-endowed porn actress’ figure -- and not only get away with it but draw big audiences and win an Emmy to boot.

“We don’t want to gross people out,” Masters said. “We have to walk a fine line.”

Meanwhile, the march of the dead will only quicken -- a trend Furia predicted will continue as long as viewers clamor for reality.

At “Crossing Jordan,” executive producer Kring is readying an episode that will trot out scores of victims of a bombing.

Back at “CSI,” with several corpses per episode, makeup artist Goodwin worked in his studio, where a skeleton watched him put the finishing touches on actor Peter Cunningham, playing a boxer who dies during a fight.

“I’ve never played dead before,” said Cunningham, a real-life former boxer, chuckling into a mirror at his pulverized features. “I have to be careful not to react. They’ll say, ‘What’s wrong with this corpse?’ ”

Which happens many times on camera, it turns out, even if those scenes never get aired.

“We always have the best outtake reels,” Goodwin said as his deceased boxer bobbed and weaved off to his autopsy.

“They don’t treat you like a corpse. They treat you like a work of art,” Yoon, the girl who got the business end of a corkscrew, said of the “CSI” set. “It’s the land of the walking dead.... It’s Halloween every day. I was at lunch and people are staring at me. I’m all blue and my neck is hanging open.”

“We see the corpses at lunchtime and have to laugh,” Goodwin said. “They’re dead, but they still get hungry.”