CSI can trace its origins to pop culture's original forensic file, Manhunter

40 years ago, Michael Mann's thriller introduced audiences to investigators who get to know killers a little too well.

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  July 31, 2026 | 7:00am
Photo: Studiocanal
Film Features Michael Mann
CSI can trace its origins to pop culture's original forensic file, Manhunter

In the early 1980s, still licking his wounds from the failure of The Keep, writer-director Michael Mann retreated back to television, where he transformed the police procedural with a pair of pastel blazers. Premiering in 1984, Miami Vice brought cinema-quality—or close to it—filmmaking and a working pathology to primetime, building on Hill Street Blues‘ realism with expressionistic art deco buildings, pearly white beaches, and Don Johnson’s ever-present five-o’clock shadow. Mann would do it again in 1986 with Crime Story, a complicated and serialized period show about a Chicago cop and mob-tied informant fleeing the Windy City for ’50s Vegas. In between these series, Mann returned to theaters with Manhunter, based on Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon, the first in the author’s Hannibal Lecter series. Like The Keep, Manhunter bombed, sending Mann back to the small screen until the ’90s, and today, Manhunter mostly exists as the pre-Anthony Hopkins Lecter movie. But, speaking to Mann’s time on TV, Manhunter forever altered crime media by being the first to the forensic lab.

Celebrating its 40th anniversary with a new “Final Cut,” Manhunter follows Will Graham (William Petersen), a shell-shocked FBI profiler who quit the bureau after catching Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox), as the script spells it, in an operation that nearly cost him his life. Lured back in by Behavioral Science Unit lead Jack Crawford (Crime Story alum Dennis Farina), Graham agrees to help catch Francis Dollarhyde, a.k.a. The Tooth Fairy (Tom Noonan), a new kind of killer that can only be caught once he’s understood. 

Graham’s journey, from his Floridian haven to Dollarhyde’s swampy hell, is one about learning to tap into that killer instinct without losing control. It’s an archetype now commonly found on TV, particularly (and obviously) in Hannibal, Bryan Fuller’s Lecter series, which did a multi-episode Red Dragon arc in season three. But by sanding down Graham’s pathos and Dollarhyde’s humanity, network television took to FBI profilers and forensic scientists like the Red Dragon to a woman clothed with the sun.

After pioneering the archetype in Manhunter, Petersen would return to forensic science in 2000 as the lead of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Dr. Gil Grissom. A much more palatable version of Graham, Grissom’s work fascinates him, and he maintains a distance from the edge by speaking to the dead rather than empathizing with the killers. In his first appearance, in the pilot episode, Grissom is asked, “How do you talk to a dead body?” “I let him talk to me, actually,” Grissom responds as he assesses the body of a man who fell from a Las Vegas skyscraper. “In fact, he just spoke. Didn’t you hear him? He just told me that he didn’t commit suicide[…]This guy fell to his death wearing prescription eyeglasses. Jumpers take their glasses off.”

CSI is hardly the first show to feature forensic and behavioral scientists as investigators, nor would it be the last. The true-crime docuseries Forensic Files and Cold Case Files predate CSI, and CSI would be followed by NCIS, which had its own forensic analyst, Abby Sciuto (Pauley Perrette). Sciuto’s unique hacking style would become the example of network TV’s approach to the kinds of technology Mann introduced, immortalized in various hall-of-fame YouTube videos.

In 2008, the cable channel Investigation Discovery launched, giving true-crime junkies wall-to-wall Will Grahams 24 hours a day. As Grissom says in a self-referential 2006 episode of CSI, “There’s too many forensic shows on TV.”

And it was Manhunter that introduced that form of policing. The FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit opened in 1972, only nine years before Harris published Red Dragon, and Mann was more than willing to explore the realities of the field for his film. Filmed in actual FBI crime labs, where Mann had access to the kinds of state-of-the-art technology that would later be fetishized on CSI, Manhunter doesn’t use its tech to put the killer in jail. It uses it to find a motive. Pulling a fingerprint off an eyeball probably wouldn’t hold up in court, but it does solidify Graham’s notions about The Tooth Fairy’s psyche. Graham admittedly empathizes with the killer, developing a deeper relationship than the 42-minutes-plus-commercials cases on CSI would later afford the same actor.

CSI and its many spin-offs are probably not the legacy Mann envisioned, but it is one that grew in part from his own shows. Shortly after Manhunter left theaters, similar stories appeared in Crime Story and Miami Vice, airing a month apart. Crime Story‘s third episode, “Shadow Dancer,” in which Lt. Mike Torello (Farina) investigates a Tooth Fairy-esque home invasion, aired in late September; Miami Vice‘s “Shadows In The Dark” premiered just before Halloween that year. Miami Vice, in particular, attempts the same level of pathology as Manhunter, with Crockett (Don Johnson) entering the mind of a creepy-crawling home invader. There are hints of Dollarhyde’s unsettling grace and vulnerability in Vice‘s killer, The Shadow (Vincent Caristi), but neither of these shows gives the killer as much to do as Manhunter. The second half of the film shifts the focus away from the investigation and onto Dollarhyde, asking the audience to empathize with him, just as Graham does. While Lecktor is at peace with the killer inside, Dollarhyde struggles with it after making a romantic connection with Reba (Joan Allen), a blind photochemist he works with. She connects to Dollarhyde’s humanity, and he is overcome by her willingness to rest her head on a sedate Bengal tiger, reminding Dollarhyde of the inner beast he hopes to quell.

While Graham’s adventures with Hannibal would make for great psychosexual drama decades later (sans a proper series finale) with Hannibal, in Manhunter, the profiler gets a rare happy ending. Mann’s new cut gives Graham even more. After killing Dollarhyde in a “Gadda-Da-Vida” shoot-out, Graham visits the homes of Dollarhyde’s planned victims. “I just wanted to see you,” he tells the confused couple, before returning to his family. Before these stories needed another weekly episode, a look was just enough.

 
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