It's World CSI Day – can Patricia Arquette breathe new life into the franchise with CSI: Cyber?

Are you in the mood for Danson? Today is World CSI Day, celebrating 15 years of meticulous crime scene investigation. To mark this historic occasion, CBS have mobilised broadcasters in 150 countries to screen the same CSI episode at midnight GMT (in the UK, it will be shown on 5USA; in the US, it will be streamed online), thereby claiming the Guinness world record for largest ever TV drama simulcast, a title currently held by Doctor Who, whose 50th anniversary episode was beamed to a mere 98 countries in 2013. To get fans pumped up, there’s a World CSI Day preview – although it’s region-restricted, which hardly seems in the spirit of the enterprise.

It may have lost its lustre in recent years, but the world’s favourite forensic procedural is still one of the most influential TV franchises of the modern era. First broadcast in October 2000, there have been 15 seasons and more than 300 episodes of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the show that effectively spawned a genre. Set against a queasy neon backdrop of Las Vegas nightlife, the show arrived slick, stylish and with a blazing theme song by the Who. It also celebrated extreme dorkiness. CSI team leader Gil Grissom (William Petersen) was patient, methodical and obsessed with insects – the opposite of the door-kicking hardass archetype of other cop shows of the time. CSI arrived at a time when being a geek was becoming not just socially acceptable, but aspirational.

The original CSI has outlasted its first two spin-offs – there were 10 seasons of the sunnier, goofier CSI: Miami with David Caruso, and nine of the nominally gritty CSI: New York with Gary Sinise – and is poised to launch a third, the rather 1990s-sounding CSI: Cyber, starring recent Oscar winner Patricia Arquette. But you don’t need to apply a UV light to see the fingerprints of CSI all over the current TV landscape, where every procedural has a crew of quirky lab techs, tough cases are meticulously timelined on enormous screens and Grissom’s softly-spoken mantra of “follow the evidence” appears to have superseded unquantifiable hunches.

There is a sense, however, that the original show may have run its course. The recent 15th season was shortened to 18 episodes from the usual 22, and renewal for a 16th season has yet to be confirmed. While CSI was an enormous hit from the outset – averaging 20m viewers in the US for its first season, and attracting 25m during its peak – the numbers have dwindled as the franchise has matured (season 15 averaged around 8m). World CSI Day also seems to have been primarily conceived as a launchpad for CSI: Cyber, which makes its US debut today (it will arrive in the UK on Channel 5 later this year).

Of all the episodes CBS could have chosen to simulcast around the world, they’ve gone for the one from season 14 that functioned as a backdoor pilot for CSI: Cyber, introducing Arquette as Avery Ryan, a self-proclaimed “cyber psychologist” specialising in “cyber forensics”, who swoops in to the strains of I Can See For Miles to unravel an extortion and murder plot orchestrated by a master hacker.

“You work dark alleys, I work the dark net,” Ryan explains to the Las Vegas team, now led by Ted Danson, although she’s really setting out the premise of CSI: Cyber to the audience, reassuring them it’s going to be different, but not that different. In the series proper, Ryan heads up the FBI’s Washington DC-based Cyber Crime Division, an elite team of keyboard ninjas that includes James Van Der Beek and Shad Moss (rapper Bow Wow). The first episode is called Kidnapping 2.0, which is either indicative of a bold reimagining of tired old tropes, or a worrying sign that the writers haven’t got a handle on all this cyber business.

But even if the original CSI fails to get renewed and CSI: Cyber flames out after a single season, it’s still worth marking World CSI Day in the appropriate manner – by firing off a party popper and then immediately testing your hands for gunpowder residue.