Crime Scene Investigation

When Kimberlee Heale was a little girl growing up in Covina and San Diego, she used to ask her father, a firefighter, to describe traffic accidents. By the time she took a tour of the FBI Crime Lab as an eighth-grader, she knew that a career in forensics was for her. "It was just the whole idea behind being able to put pieces of a puzzle together to figure out what somebody did," she says. "It was pretty interesting to me."

To any viewer who thinks "Sons of Anarchy" is too violent, consider the bright side: At least the castration scene got … um … deleted. Kurt Sutter, creator of the drama about a California motorcycle gang, presented the idea of showing a character getting the unkindest cut early in the run of the show, now FX's highest-rated. But he backed off after the network's chief objected. "I have no filters," Sutter said with a laugh. "I just assume everyone feels the way I do about things.

Before last May, neighbors in the upscale Ventura County community of Faria Beach didn't have much reason to think they were unsafe. On one side, they were guarded by electronic gates. On the other side, the ocean lapped at their sea walls. At low tide, strollers greeted one another on the magnificent shoreline six miles up the coast from Ventura. But on the night of May 20, an intruder walked through an open terrace door and stabbed a man and his pregnant wife to death. Their two children, ages 9 and 11, were in the house when the attacker entered.

Twenty years ago this month, a small, hip-hop infused coming-of-age drama set in South-Central Los Angeles called "Boyz N the Hood" was causing extreme reactions from two very different audiences. Written and directed by John Singleton, a brash 23-year-old just months out of USC's film school, and made for a mere $5.7 million, largely with an unknown and untested cast of African American actors, the film had just played May's prestigious Cannes Film Festival where it received a 20-minute standing ovation.

The crash of a Learjet in South Carolina that killed four Southern Californians stunned rock music fans Saturday with news that the two badly burned survivors are former Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker and popular DJ Adam Goldstein, both of Los Angeles.

By spring 2007, the CBS drama "NCIS" looked to have run out of luck. The show, about a team of special agents who investigate Navy crimes, had become a stalwart of the CBS lineup, even though it never attracted the media buzz enjoyed by many far less popular shows. But a poisonous rift with star Mark Harmon led to the sudden and unceremonious departure of co-creator Don Bellisario, who happens to be one of the most successful producers in TV history (his credits include "Magnum, P.I."

ABC's show about dinosaurs came up a turkey in the ratings. The months-delayed premiere of "Dinotopia" on Thanksgiving night ran a weak fourth in its time period. ABC ran back-to-back episodes from 8 to 10 p.m., but CBS was first with reruns of "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." CBS also claimed victory in overall viewing for the November ratings sweeps, which officially concluded Wednesday night. Based on preliminary Nielsen data, the network finished the four-week period averaging 13.

"Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," the most-watched show ever on Bravo, drew fair but unspectacular ratings in a special Thursday telecast on Bravo's parent network, NBC. The edited-down version attracted 6.7 million viewers, not quite matching the 8 million who watched its lead-in, a rerun of "Will & Grace," according to Nielsen Media Research. Both series came in far behind CBS' airing of "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which attracted 13.3 million viewers. -- Greg Braxton