CSI: AN OSCAR WINNER, A FORMER TEEN STAR, AND A HIP-HOP ARTIST TEAM UP TO SOLVE CRIMES

CSI: AN OSCAR WINNER, A FORMER TEEN STAR, AND A HIP-HOP ARTIST TEAM UP TO SOLVE CRIMES

We go behind the scenes of CSI: Cyber (Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on CBS) and deep into the Web with stars Patricia Arquette, James Van Der Beek, and Shad Moss.

IT’S A FRIDAY AFTERNOON in January, and the stars of CSI: Cyber are tweeting. Patricia Arquette tweets: She was so honored to give a lifetime-achievement award to her Boyhood director Richard Linklater at last night’s Casting Society of America awards. James Van Der Beek tweets: He links to the Kickstarter page for a crowdfunded documentary about Alzheimer’s research. Shad Moss (formerly Lil’ Bow Wow) tweets: He’s launching a new vodka company; flavor options include citrus and blood orange.

This digital oversharing is a bit ironic, since CSI: Cyber is a procedural focused on the do’s and (many) don’ts of our digital age. The trio are currently filming the finale of the 13-episode first season, which apparently features a recurring antagonist: When I arrive, they’re shooting a scene that requires Arquette to stare thoughtfully into dead space and say “He’s back.” The same scene also requires Moss to type fervently on a computer and say “The language is an older version of C++!” which, you have to admit, is exactly what you were hoping for from a cop show about the Internet. I’m sitting on the show’s main set, the office of the FBI’s Cyber Crimes Division, which is one of those great only-on-TV offices where the walls are made of glass and every computer screen has an importantlooking rotating-Earth graphic.

Cyber could have been just another guaranteed-successful spin-off of a bigmoney procedural franchise. But the show hit the jackpot with its casting. In the past few months, Arquette has been relentlessly collecting accolades on the awards circuit. It’s been a whirlwind for the actress. The evening of Jan. 11, Arquette won a Golden Globe. The morning of Jan. 12, she was on stage at the CSI: Cyber Television Critics Association panel. (Van Der Beek memorialized Charley Koontz this moment with an Instagram selfie.)

“When it rains, it pours” is the understatement Arquette uses to describe this moment she’s having. “I’ve been doing a bunch of press for [Cyber], shooting this, press for [Boyhood],” she says. In one week from my visit, she’ll be done with Cyber’s first season. In one month, she’ll be holding her first Oscar on stage and making a passionate speech about women’s equality. “It’s all gonna be over at the same time,” she laughs. “So I’m gonna have a lot of time all of a sudden.”

Shad Moss, who plays a former blackhat hacker named Brody Nelson, tells me about watching the Golden Globes when Arquette won the prize. “I took my phone as she was up there doing her acceptance speech, turned it around, and was in the video, like, ‘Patricia, you fucking killed it!’ I sent it to her, and she said, ‘Bow, you are the craziest.’

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There is something at once confounding and exhilarating about that story: the former preteen protégé of Snoop Dogg sending an exuberant video to the woman who spent the ’90s acting for Burton and Lynch and Scorsese. “She’s so real,” says Moss. “I don’t think a lot of people know this. Patricia is real. There’s no other way to put it.” In context, this sounds like the coolest thing anyone has ever said about Patricia Arquette.

You could argue that this crossgenerational dissonance is a central aspect of Cyber, a show that nobody will call a spin-off in my presence. “It’s a reboot,” says Van Der Beek. “There’s more emphasis on character than there’s ever been in previous CSIs. And it’s not just one city. The entire World Wide Web is our jurisdiction.” Van Der Beek plays Elijah Mundo—“I kick down doors, I chase people, I jump over cars”—and today he’s dressed in the CBS Procedural Man Uniform: dark gray Henley and jeans.

Arquette plays Mundo’s boss, Avery Ryan, a “cyber psychologist” in the grand Grissom tradition of cerebral crimescene investigators. “She’s developed an acute sense of perception, and applies that to crime,” says Arquette. But if Cyber got lucky with Arquette’s casting, it got even luckier with its timing.

The show will hit screens in the wake of the Sony hack. Don’t expect the show to rip plotlines straight from the headlines—unless there’s a headline I missed about someone hacking a roller coaster—but grander implications of this show haven’t escaped the actors. “I thank God that Twitter didn’t exist when I was 21,” says Van Der Beek. The former Dawson’s Creek star is hardly a digital skeptic; this is the man who kickstarted a whole new act with Van Der Memes, a Funny or Die video that simultaneously satirized and perfected ’90s nostalgia for the social-media age. “I used to be super-private, and then I realized we don’t live in that age anymore.”

Arquette, for her part, uses social media “in a very rudimentary, grandmotherly way.” Not so Moss, who tweets at least four times in the few hours I’m on the Cyber set. Like everyone under 30, he just lives online intuitively, shuttling between Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. (“I’m not on Snapchat,” he says, in a tone that suggests a wine connoisseur insisting he doesn’t drink merlot.) It is impossible to hang out on the Cyber set without giving in to the paranoia a little bit. Arquette explains to me that my email account should have dual verification; Van Der Beek tells me, “Everything, everybody is hackable.”

But it’s also impossible to hang out on the Cyber set without just giving in to our digital reality. In between takes, I chat with Charley Koontz, who plays super-genius Daniel Krumitz. Koontz is best known for playing (don’t-callhim-) Fat Neil on Community. With the maybe-exception of Moss, nobody looks more stoked to be making Cyber than Koontz.  And late in the afternoon, as I’m walking off the set, I receive a notification that Koontz has followed me on Twitter.

I have more followers than he does—I point this out only because this will almost certainly not be the case in a few weeks, when I am still a journalist and he is the fourth lead on a show with “CSI” in the title. I follow him back. After all, we’re both citizens of the cyberworld.

By DARREN FRANICH