Law & Order and CSI: New York go head to head.

"CSI is a franchise. Law & Order is a brand," said Dick Wolf this summer, speaking to reporters  about the impending 15^th season of his venerable police procedural. I'm not sure my business-speak is fluent enough to grasp the precise distinction there, but Wolf's point is clear. The rapidly proliferating young forensics drama is an Olive Garden in a strip mall, while the aging cops-and-lawyers show is a Chanel bag with a logo. CSI is glitzy; L & O is classy. CSI's spinoffs are cheesy; L & O's spinoffs are ... well, they're cheesy too, but at least they've been around awhile. The two shows went head-to-head last night in a simultaneous season-opener standoff, throwing down the gauntlet for fans of prime-time network crime shows. Will your Wednesday nights be spent scrutinizing corpses with Gary Sinise, or carping at judges with Sam Waterston? There was only way to decide fairly: Watch them both at the same time, switching back and forth, and subject each show to a battery of simple tests:

Theme Song: CSI:NY tries to cop the original CSI's great usage of the Who song, "Who Are You?" by opening with the Who's "Baba O'Riley," better known as "Teenage Wasteland." But they missed the point: "Who Are You?" is the perfect CSI song because it's the perfect question to ask of a John Doe corpse. "Teenage Wasteland" would only work if the new show was called CSI: 90210 (actually, that pilot's probably already in development at CBS.) L & O's trademark "bong bong" opening theme, with its inevitable suggestion of the slamming down of jail bars, wins this one by a mile.

Hold 'Em Tactics:Law & Order started strong by kicking off the season with two new episodes back-to-back. Anyone who's lost an entire evening  to L & O reruns on TNT knows how hard it is to resist consecutive airings of that show. But CSI's grabby visuals and lurid plot twists all but freeze your fingers on the remote control. Resistance to Bruckheimer is useless.

Semi-Cynical Deployment of Still-Raw National Traumas: Well, L & O managed to build stories around, respectively, Abu Ghraib and the 9/11 widows (who were portrayed as either needy psychos or cold-blooded gold-diggers—so much for Sept. 11 nostalgia.) But then, it had two separate episodes in which to do so. CSI managed, in a single hour, to interweave the exploits of a Silence of the Lambs-style serial killer with a subplot about the collapse of the World Trade Center. Final shot: Gary Sinise clinging mournfully to the scaffolding at Ground Zero. Tastelessness trophy goes to: CSI.

Appeal of Crime-Solving Team: Gary Sinise has the requisite mien of a CSI investigator: pasty, sleep-deprived and grim, like Miami's David Caruso or Las Vegas' inimitable William Petersen. But Melina Kanakaredes, late of the NBC family series Providence, seems too roseate and dewy to be hanging out at morgues. She always looks like she's about to adopt a Korean orphan. On L & O, no living mortal could replace Jerry Orbach as a partner for Jesse L. Martin, but Dennis Farina's suave take on the good cop looks like it has at least a season's worth of mileage in it. CSI takes this one, for Sinise.

Grossout Factor: Not even close. L & O offers the odd peek at a murder victim's gently contused midriff, but CSI has singlehandedly reinvented gag-me television with its signature closeups of icky pulsing membranes and maggot's-eye-views of putrefying flesh. If you had a tiny camera lodged beneath your skull, what would it see? Cue Braincam!

Best Out-of-Context Line: L & O: "I'd put panties on every head in Abu Ghraib prison if I thought it would save one innocent life." CSI:NY: "GHB's dead as disco. Fry sticks are the new date-rape drug of New York City."

Is there really any contest here? L & O's entry should become the Bush administration's new campaign slogan. But I'm not attending another social event this season without flippantly announcing that "GHB is dead as disco."

Final score: CSI:NY, 4; L & O, 2. Looks like I'll be spending Wednesdays in the morgue with Gary and Melina. Oh, well, there's always—and I mean always—an episode of Law & Order showing somewhere.

Monday, Sept. 20 , 2004