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The Sexiest Man in the MorgueFarewell, William L. Petersen, the dumpy heartthrob of CSI.

By Dana StevensPosted Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2009, at 11:37 AM ET

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All this goes some way toward explaining why Grissom is such a compelling TV character, an enigma worth returning to week after week. But how does that make him sexy? To fully understand the richness and complexity of Grissom, let's return to the Mr. Spock model for a second. I interviewed a hardcore CSI fan and fanfic writer, who prefers to remain anonymous (her stories are not among those linked to in this piece). "Grissom is way sexier than Mr. Spock," she declared peremptorily. Pressed to explain why, she hemmed and hawed with the usual lover's tautologies ("I can't explain, he just is") before arriving at the following formulation: Where Spock's sexuality was simply repressed (his Vulcan half acting as superego on his all-too-human id), Gil's (implied) erotic life, on the contrary, is so radical as to extend to all life forms, from maggots all the way up to supermodels.

My interviewee (let's call her Lori) cited several episodes in which we witness Gil's remarkable tolerance, even fascination, for alternate lifestyles (and when you're investigating crimes of passion in Las Vegas, things can get pretty alternative). Bondage and domination is all in a day's work for Gil; investigating the props at a local dominatrix house, he tells the formidable madam, Lady Heather (Melinda Clarke), "I find all deviant behavior fascinating, in that to understand human nature we have to understand our aberrations." (When Lady Heather asks about his own "outlets," he cites books, bugs, and roller coasters.) In one unforgettable episode last season, the CSI gang investigated the Las Vegas "furry" scene, with adults in plush animal suits engaging in mass orgies at PAFCon, the "Plushies and Furries Convention." As the other CSIs (who include a jaded ex-stripper) recoiled from this new-to-them perversion, Gil observed placidly that "the only unnatural sexual behavior is none at all." Grissom seeks out, indeed craves, the marginal, despised, or ridiculed elements in society: Nothing human is alien to him. The qualities that make Gil a great forensic investigator—patience, attention to detail, the refusal to make moral judgments about physical facts—can be naturally extrapolated into the qualities of a great lover. (I sort of came up with this theory on my own, but Lori ratified it immediately.)

William Petersen has made a career out of playing characters with a Grissom-like attunement to the dark side of human nature. In Michael Mann's Manhunter, he played a profiler of serial killers who enters so deeply into the brain of Hannibal Lecter that he's briefly interned in a mental asylum. Petersen's black-humor off-set—in an interview with Playboy, he cited CBS chairman Les Moonves and CSI producer Jerry Bruckheimer as two of the people he'd most like to see on the show's autopsy slab—only adds to the bad-boy charm. But much as I love Petersen's work in Manhunter or the underrated cop drama To Live and Die in L.A., the quietly perverse Gil Grissom may be the role of his career.

Television is probably the entertainment medium most suited to erotic daydreaming—after all, unlike the characters in movies, the regulars on TV series visit us in our homes, often our beds, one night each week, leaving us with just enough information to embroider an imaginary life for them during the week we spend apart. Gil Grissom's appeal as a source for viewer fantasy is that he manages to give the impression that, in between episodes, he could be up for pretty much anything.