By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2010
In late 2010 the creator of CSI sat down with Mediabistro to talk up a format he was sure would be the future of storytelling: the ‘digi-novel.’
Then
Anthony Zuiker, the mastermind of the CSI franchise, freely admitted that his first interactive book, 2009’s Level 26: Dark Origins, had been a misfire — the cover too ‘masculine,’ the companion website video unnervingly like a snuff film.
In an interview with Mediabistro.com, he explained how the second installment of the planned trilogy, Dark Prophecy, aimed to be a smoother experience. The concept paired a printed novel with a separately watchable one-hour motion picture, and even crossed into television: a villain from the books could appear in a CSI episode, with the storyline continuing in a book released the same day.
Zuiker called it the ultimate cross-platform of the television-and-publishing experience, and closed the Q&A with five tips for aspiring TV writers — the first, echoing the recently departed Stephen J. Cannell, simply being to ‘have some level of talent.’
Now
The ‘digi-novel’ did not become the future. Transmedia storytelling — deliberately splintering a narrative across book, video and website — was a recurring late-2000s and early-2010s enthusiasm that mostly failed to find a mass audience, and the term itself faded.
What did arrive was a quieter, more powerful version of Zuiker’s instinct. Franchises now routinely extend across film, streaming series, games and short-form video — not as one labeled product but as sprawling connected universes, the dominant logic of 2020s entertainment.
CSI itself proved the more durable franchise. The original series ran until 2015, and the brand returned with CSI: Vegas in 2021 — outlasting the experimental format its creator was so confident about in 2010.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.