I Don't Care How Much of Your Special Effects Budget You Spent, CSI: New York . . .

You have to stop showing me that model. Even my admitted weakness for fireworks and your pandering to it with an explosion in a fireworks factory isn’t enough to make up for that model.

Ever since we started watching CSI—the original—many years ago, Nick and I, along with our friends who watch the show, have kept a running informal tally of the most grotesque deaths that the programme has shown.

Grotesque, that is, in terms of the conditions in which they find the bodies, not any horror attending the circumstances of the death.

So far, I still think the two worst are the guy who died in a hot bath and the man found in a canvas bag.

CSI: Miami—in addition to being a remarkably silly show that, once Horatio Caine’s Sunglasses of Justice lost their amusement value, we stopped watching very quickly—didn’t really favour the grotesque deaths. Instead, it preferred punishing Bright Young Things for their decadent lifestyles.

CSI: New York—even with the added value that is Gary Sinise—shares this tendency towards glitterati crimes: Nick and I can now spot the intended victim as soon as we see the camera zooming in towards an expensive-looking party.

CSI: New York also showcases scientific montages that have no value whatsoever, since you never get the faintest idea what the people are doing, and tends to provide only the most spurious motives.

Recently, we’ve taken to betting each other that we can guess the ridiculous reason behind the latest murder, but we were stumped a fortnight ago, when a man starting a catering business horribly murdered his employer because the latter insisted on a meeting during the caterer’s son’s birthday party.

A convoluted motive? Sure.

Plausible? Not so much.

But CSI: New York does have grotesque bodies.

And that brings me back to the opening point of this post.

Please, CSI: New York, I realise that you must have spent an enormous quantity of your special effects budget for this episode creating the model corpse of the unpleasant Internet entrepreneur who was killed just after the opening credits by an exploding cigar.

But please, please, please stop showing the man on-screen. We saw him explode, and we saw the corpse. And then we saw it again. And again. And again.

I’m happy to put exploding-cigar victim at the top of my grotesque-death tally board (although even as I have been typing this post, you have just upped the grotesquery stakes, thanks to introducing the concept of eyeball tattooing.)

But you have to promise that I won’t have to see him ever again.

Sometimes, less is more.