"We've had a lot of changes in the show these past years, and this is a big one.  Everyone feels on unsteady ground right now," Marg Helgenberger probably said it best, talking about William Petersen's leaving CSI after the tenth episode of this upcoming season.

For his part, while Petersen, who plays the inimitable Gil Grissom on the hit CBS show, is really quite set on leaving the show, he admits that it won't be easy.  "The hard part is saying goodbye to the cast and crew and writers.  It's the people you've been with for nine seasons.  It'll be very hard not going in the morning into one of those rooms and seeing them."

Now that the Grissom exit has been established, according to Petersen, the next step would be mapping out an exit worthy of his nine-season stint on CSI.  Petersen, 55, revealed some details on how this departure would proceed, especially mindful of how the show took care of two notable exits in recent memory: Jorja Fox (Sara Sidle) and Gary Dourdan (Warrick Brown).

"We've been mapping out my last 10 episodes that will take Grissom from one place to another,” he said.  "There will be no brain tumor for four episodes.  That's the easy way out.  We're trying to paint it as we have done with Jorja and Gary.  We're trying to make it as real and close to reality as the show has been all along."

CSI fans need not despair though.  The Golden Globe and Emmy-nominated actor won't be leaving totally as he will stay put as a producer.

"I'm going to come back and see the guys on set doing episodes I'm not in… The show is important to me, and I'm not abandoning it.  I'm coming back on some level.  I just don't know what yet."


-Glenn L. Diaz, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Source: TV Guide
(Image Courtesy of Yahoo! TV)