Petersen lays it on the table By Bill Keveney, USA TODAY LOS ANGELES — William Petersen picked the cafe for its quality. 
 

		Complex man: William Petersen, in CSI's autopsy room, says he's healthier since he "stopped fighting for everything."
		By Dan MacMedan, USA TODAY

"This is the worst of the coffee places on the block. The others are crammed. Nobody likes (this place), so it's great," he says.

Not so great if you're a coffee lover. Quite appealing if you're the lead star of CSI (tonight, 9 ET/PT) and are used to attention at airports, Las Vegas casinos and even the neighborhood drugstore, where moments earlier he signed an insistent fan's shopping bag.

Hollywood success stirs contradictory feelings in Petersen. He accepts fame but doesn't embrace it. He has been handsomely rewarded, but he rails against corporate greed. He talks proudly about the CBS series and says it will be remembered as groundbreaking, but he sounds angry, wistful and even hurt about talent and CSI potential lost to two spinoffs. 
 

"When they started to copy it and take people away to go do those shows, it was like (the breakup of) a love affair," he says. "You thought you'd done everything right, and you found out you were just one of many." 

Since the forensics drama rose from last scheduled pilot to the most watched (an average 26 million this season) and copied scripted series, Petersen, who plays bug whiz and reluctant boss Gil Grissom, has been known to drop the occasional bomb during interviews. 

He has compared the CSI spinoffs to creating McDonald's franchises and, in a Playboy interview in 2004, suggested tongue-in-cheek that he'd like to see CBS chairman Leslie Moonves and CSI producer Jerry Bruckheimer as guest corpses on the show. ("He is an artist, and he is passionate. He puts a lot of feeling into everything he does," says CBS entertainment chief Nina Tassler.)

The Chicago theater veteran, sitting down for a rare, 90-minute interview, is smart and straightforward, if not tactful. But he's not looking for a fight. Part of the reason is philosophical: "They" — network and production executives, powers-that-be — "do what they do, and that's up to them. I can't fight that anymore. That's not something I'm going to win."

Besides, "the show does well whether I fight or not."

And part of the reason is health. A summer medical "wake-up call," a bunch of risk factors rather than any specific event, caused him to reduce his workdays from 14 hours to eight or nine (five days a week) and rethink his pugnacious style. 

"I was truly every one of those clichés of the workaholic: overworked, bad diet, bad blood pressure, too much stress. I'm OK as long as I don't work too much," says Petersen, 51, looking relaxed in a gray T-shirt and jeans. "I also stopped fighting for everything. I used to fight for everything."

Revealing personality 

He has had fewer scenes in recent shows, though rearrangement of Petersen's shooting schedule is expected to raise his screen time close to earlier levels.

Petersen's shortened workday is evident in tonight's episode, "Nesting Dolls," which intertwines domestic abuse with mail-order brides. However, his scenes are significant, marking one of the rare occasions in which CSI goes home with a character to peel back layers of personality.

In the episode, Grissom visits the apartment of suspended subordinate Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox) to ask why the abuse case triggered an outburst that endangered her job. 
 

CSI is at its best when solving crimes, Petersen says, "not when people are crying." Yet he sees room to reveal personality through characters' reactions to crimes.

Scenes between Grissom and Sidle also stir up the complexities of a five-season relationship that has featured sometimes awkward flirtation and hints of deeper meaning. 

"It's this weird sort of mysterious dance. We rarely know from one season to another how we're going to play the relationship," says Fox, whose character was first imagined as a love interest for Grissom.

The actors help influence the shaping of their characters, Fox says. "One of the things I adore about Billy is that, coming from Chicago and that theater experience, he said, 'This is going to have to be a collective thing. We have to talk about things together.' " 

About that raise... 

The thought that CSI could have lost Fox and George Eads bothers Petersen. The pair, who were fired last summer during a salary dispute, eventually were rehired at their old pay.

The matter was resolved properly, says Petersen, who adds that the network "would have been looking for me" if the dismissals had stuck. "You want a raise and that's wrong? When did that become wrong in this country? When did you have to get castigated for it?" 

Petersen talked to Fox and Eads but didn't go to Moonves, saying it was their business. He trusts Tassler, who matched him with CSI creator Anthony Zuiker, but appears to group Moonves with many he says have changed with success. "I'm good friends with Les when Les is a good guy."

Petersen also disputes the notion that actors are interchangeable parts on procedural dramas. 

"You can call it a procedural. You can say it's all about the science. If that were true, then these 30 million people would be watching the Discovery Channel. They're not," Petersen says. "They want to see Marg (Helgenberger) and Billy. They want to see George and Jorja. They want to see Gary (Dourdan) and Eric (Szmanda)."

He believes that actor chemistry, along with a wry sensibility, sets CSI apart from the two spinoffs, CSI: Miami and CSI: NY. Today, however, Petersen isn't railing against the creation of those shows, as he has in the past. He's resigned to their existence but disappointed at the loss of writers, directors and technical advisers to the spinoffs. "Why shouldn't we have access to all the ideas, stories and forensics advisers?" he asks. 

Even without the spinoffs, there would still be copies. Success breeds imitation, he says. "CSI is everywhere on every network at all times. Mostly on CBS," he says. "They're going to put it on until it doesn't work anymore."

As it is, CSI is doing "as well as can possibly be expected." He likes a lot of the writing and says its film-quality look is unique for TV.

Petersen, who has rumbled in the past about leaving before his contract ends in 2007, says he isn't planning to depart anytime soon: "I'm not going anywhere unless they want me to go." 

As an executive producer, along with longtime producing partner Cynthia Chvatal, Petersen acknowledges being paid "a lot of money." Reported estimates have run as high as $500,000 an episode, but he says it isn't that much.

And though he says he doesn't want to be seen as whining, he also refers to the actor's lot in Hollywood as "high-priced, well-dressed serfdom."

'One to go his own way' 

Joan of Arcadia's Joe Mantegna, who knows Petersen from Chicago theater days, says he isn't conventional. When Mantegna and others took an '80s Chicago production of Glengarry Glen Ross to Broadway, Petersen passed on what seemed a great opportunity. "I think it's part of his nature. Bill has always been one to go his own way," he says. 

Petersen gets most animated discussing the acting moments with his co-stars, whom he praises. He has concerns about CSI's recent structural split, in which Grissom's night team was divided, with Catherine (Helgenberger), Nick (Eads) and Warrick (Dourdan) moving to the swing shift. He wonders whether the chemistry will suffer.

"I don't know how that's going to play out. You have to try to do stuff after 100 episodes," he says. "As an audience member, I'm not as interested in it, but who knows?"

Despite his fears that spinoffs might lead to story drought, Petersen marvels at CSI's plots. Some of the most outrageous attract the most viewers. November's 100th episode examined the mutilation of a transgendered person.

"In the middle of that episode, I kept thinking, 'Now we've gone too far,' " Petersen says. It drew a CSI-record 31.5 million viewers.

This month's "King Baby" episode is on infantilism. "I was looking at this guy in diapers, and I'm saying, 'Now we've gone too far.' "

Post-Janet Jackson, it's not clear how much of diaper man will make it onscreen. Network concerns focus on skin and sex, Petersen says, not "how many times we plunge a knife into somebody's chest." 

That's just one of the many things about Hollywood that Petersen either doesn't understand or agree with. But he lives with it.

"The why and wherefore of all the rest of it is beyond me. It can make me angry, it can make me laugh, it can make me sad. And I can understand it on some level. But it is unacceptable to me. 

"Yet here I am in the midst of it. That's my dilemma."