In early 2020, fans of the long-running CBS procedural, CSI, were very surprised and pleased to hear that plans were in the works to bring the show back to TV in some way. The excitement ramped up when stars from the original iteration of the series, including Jorja Fox and William Petersen, were announced to be on their way back to the LVPD Crime Lab. Now, Fox has opened up about why she was excited to return as Sara Sidle.
Most people who recognize Jorja Fox’s work were likely fans of her because of her portrayal of Sara Sidle on CSI. While she wasn’t a series regular for the entire run of 15 seasons, she was a major player for most of it, and did recur or guest star in the seasons where she wasn’t present on a weekly basis. Fans loved watching Fox’s Sara and her passionate drive to bring criminals to justice, despite how it sometimes affected her personal life and relationships with her co-workers and superiors. And, it turns out that those are some of the reasons why Fox wanted to bring her back to the CSI cast. In a chat with Entertainment Tonight, Fox said:
Sara Sidle is my favorite character I've ever played. There's so many reasons to love her. I love that she's flawed. I love sometimes that she's not the most popular person in the room, but she always sticks to her heart and her beliefs. One of the most exciting parts for me of coming back, was there's been this long standing love affair between Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle. It's 21 years old. It's as old as the series itself. It's been on again, it's been off again. They've been separated, they've been married, they've been divorced. And we haven't seen very much of any of that on screen...We'll be playing that relationship way more than we ever did before. That was really fun for me. It was also unprecedented. I didn't expect it to be really in the script because it never was before. So that's been really fun.
It seems pretty clear that Jorja Fox has a great love for Sara Sidle and how the character moved through the world while handling a lot of professional and personal difficulties. But, it’s also very apparent that Fox was just as taken with the romance between Sara and Gil as fans viewers were.
While we all love our workplace sitcoms, family dramedies, and crime procedurals, many TV show genres benefit from some good, old fashioned, will-they-or-won’t-they romantic tension. Friends is famous for the Ross and Rachel relationship, New Amsterdam has audiences going crazy over Max and Helen, and even Lucifer has given the titular devil someone to fall for in Chloe. CSI fans have had GSR (Grissom Sara Romance) since the very beginning of the show, because their lovey-dovey dynamic actually started prior to the first episode.
People who tuned in to that first season could see that there was already way more to the relationship between Gil’s CSI supervisor and the Level III investigator he brought over from San Francisco. And, as Fox noted in her interview, while the couple went through a lot of ups and downs, much of it happened off-screen, with even their full romance starting without fans being clued into it until the Season 6 finale. That move did not go over well, and now audiences will be treated to a much more robust view of their GSR ship.
Fox also noted another reason why she felt like it was a perfect time to return to CSI and to bring the series back, altogether, and added:
The second part of why it's been exciting to come back is, and not necessarily for a good reason, I think when the show started in 2000, the world seemed very topsy-turvy...I never would've thought that in 2021, the world would be even more topsy-turvy than it was 21 years ago, and it is. Because the show is so much about truth, finding the truth and using science to find the truth, it's super exciting to be back and in a very appropriate time for the show to be back.
Fans will be able to see for themselves if Jorja Fox’s words ring true, when CSI: Vegas continues on CBS, Wednesdays at 10 p.m. EST. For more on what you can watch right now, check out our 2021 fall TV schedule.
