If viewers are immediately gripped with a desire to change all their online passwords after the first episode of “CSI: Cyber,” then the latest iteration of the show will have succeeded.
Premiering Wednesday night at 10, the show takes its zoomed-in lab approach into cyberspace, focusing on a special team of FBI agents that roots out Internet bad guys. But instead of sifting through DNA, fingerprints, and autopsies, the white hats investigate IP addresses, social media, and the “dark web” to make their arrests.
Change of venue notwithstanding, “CSI: Cyber” falls squarely in line with its predecessors and is a perfectly adequate diversion in the way that crime procedurals can be. It scares us with the idea of “it can happen to you” and then reassures us with a righteous collar in under 60 minutes.
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The cast is the same basic group of types typical of these shows.
Newly-minted Academy Award winner Patricia Arquette heads up the team as agent Avery Ryan, a former psychologist. She tells us in the voice-over that precedes the obligatory Who theme song — in this case, “I Can See for Miles” — that just like us she posted on social media and checked her bank account balance online. Unlike most of us she also kept the confidential files of her practice on her computer, was hacked, and as a result one of her patients was murdered. The subsequent investigation brought her to the FBI where she is teamed with quirky, cerebral boss Simon Sifter (Peter MacNicol, doing that thing he does), the dashing and square-jawed Elijah Mundo (James Van Der Beek, up a new creek), snarky tech nerd Daniel Krumits (Charley Koontz, familiar to “Community” fans as “Fat Neil”), and newbie Brody Nelson (Shad Moss, a.k.a. rapper Bow Wow), who was headed to prison for being a black hat hacker but was spared by Ryan, who has him use his expertise for the white hats.
Everybody gets the requisite handful of personality traits and backstory black clouds to help shade their characters; for instance, Mundo loves video games and is coping with a recent divorce and the pain of shared custody of his daughter. Everybody has to spout technical dialogue and exposition in something resembling natural conversation, to varying degrees of success. Everybody gets to make one of the occasional jokes that are thrown in to lighten the mood as they investigate baby abductions by means of hacked monitors or a roller coaster crash by means of hacked computer. And there are lots of flashy graphics projected onto the screen to enliven scenes that basically amount to the characters typing.
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Incidentally, although the show is set in Washington, D.C., Boston figures prominently in a couple of the early episodes — one concerning a subway train and another a serial killer abusing an Uber-like app to target victims — and there’s something oddly enjoyable about seeing the city portrayed without a single inch of snow on the streets, practically traffic-free, and with a fully operational, albeit hacked, mass transit system.
Essentially, if you’ve enjoyed the basic “CSI” formula up to this point, “CSI: Cyber” should not disappoint, and maybe you can change your passwords while you’re watching.
Sarah Rodman can be reached at srodman@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @GlobeRodman.