Stage and screen star Laurence Fishburne's last turn as a series regular on network television was the role of Cowboy Curtis on the 1980s kids demo Pee-wee's Playhouse.
So the acclaimed actor - better known for playacting dark, brooding characters - says he looks forward to his new TV gig as a forensics investigator with disturbing tendencies on the hit CBS detective drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
Not that he had of all time seen the series before his first meeting with the show's executive producers, Carol Mendelsohn and Naren Shankar.
"I mat a little stupid and embarrassed that I hadn't watched the show prior to having a get together with them," Fishburne, 47, acknowledged in a conference call with reporters for the announcement that he is joining the show's cast.
"But I'm happy to say that the episodes that they sent me to look at were really, in truth engaging and really terrific, and kind of dark and moody, like a lot of the work that I've actually been involved in," he added. "So I'm very excited."
Famed for his movie work as Morpheus in The Matrix trilogy and his Oscar-nominated role as Ike Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It, Fishburne is slated to make his CSI debut in episode nine-spot of the show's forthcoming ninth season.
CSI, which averaged 17 jillion viewers lowest season, ranks as CBS's top-rated render and the third most-watched scripted series in all of US prime time.
Mendelsohn and Shankar hailed Fishburne as their "dream" casting choice.
He was hired to replace worker William Petersen, who has starred since the show's inception in 2000 as Gil Grissom, the smart as a whip head of a Las Vegas police force crime scene unit, and is departure the series to follow other creative pursuits.
PROFESSOR WITH 'DISTURBING' PAST
Producers said Fishburne and Petersen will overlap for two episodes, in all likelihood airing in mid-December of early 2009, before Petersen's exit. Production on those episodes is set to begin side by side month, they said.
Fishburne will join the cast as a medical doctor and expert in criminal behavior who, after being forced out of his vocation as a research diagnostician, became a college professor and ends up tortuous in a CSI investigating, Shankar said.
Fishburne's character, world Health Organization does not yet have a advert, specializes in probing the underlying causes of fierce, aggressive behaviour, "tendencies he disturbingly sees within himself," according to CBS weigh materials.
But Shankar said producers have backed off an earlier approximation that the character's have genetic profile might tally that of many serial killers.
CSI first Baron Marks of Broughton Fishburne's return to the CBS network two decades after his recurring role as the psychedelic Cowboy Curtis with Paul Reuben's Pee-wee Herman character on the children's television exhibit Pee-wee's Playhouse.
Fishburne's other small-screen credits include the HBO television movies Miss Evers' Boys, for which he won an Emmy, and The Tuskegee Airmen.
He as well won an Emmy for his edgar Albert Guest appearance in the pilot episode of the transitory Fox series Tribeca.
Fishburne latterly completed a Broadway run, and earned a Tony Award nominating speech, for his role as Thurgood Marshall in the one-man designate Thurgood.
In 1992, he north Korean won a Tony for his stage performance in the August Wilson play Two Trains Running.
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