CSI: Vegas review — Time has stood still for Gil Grissom and the gang in this lacklustre revival of the series

And the mainstream TV networks, the so-called legacy broadcasters whose audience is being steadily siphoned off by the streamers, are more than happy to capitalise on it.

We’re due to be bombarded with sequels, reboots and revivals. Frasier, we’ve known for quite a while, is coming back, although nobody can say when. Whether anyone from the original other than Kelsey Grammar will feature is also unknown.

We’re definitely getting a new Quantum Leap this year. It lands on US television in the autumn and will probably arrive here soon after.

Rather than a reboot, this is a continuation, set 30 years after the original. Raymond Lee plays a new time traveller, Dr Ben Seong, who takes the same leap into the unknown that Dr Sam Becket (Scott Bakula) took.

Also confirmed are a revival of Criminal Minds, featuring many from the original cast, including Joe Mantegna and Paget Brewster; the return of Law & Order with both old and new cast members, among them Downtown Abbey’s Hugh Dancy, and animated series Bedrock, an adult-themed sequel to The Flintstones, in which Fred, now on the verge of retirement, and Wilma are struggling to adapt to the new Bronze Age. Yabba, dabba, don’t!

Personally speaking, as someone who’s presumably among the target audience for all of these, I could happily live without any of them.

I’ll watch them, of course, out of a sense of duty. Who knows, I might even enjoy some of them. But here’s the point: what is the point? Not one of them is necessary.

The same goes for CSI: Vegas (Alibi, Wednesday), a lacklustre revival of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation under a new title. The cast is new too, except for three returning favourites: William Petersen, Jorja Fox and Paul Guilfoyle.

CSI was, for a period, the most-watched TV series in the world, sometimes drawing 30 million viewers in the US. It won 68 Emmys in its 15 years on TV, spawned three spin-off series (CSI: Miami, NY and Cyber) and sparked huge interest in forensic science, even though the way the series depicted this was wildly misleading and romanticised.

It was great fun in its time, as well as hugely influential on how crime procedurals looked. But its time began in 2000 and ended in 2015 with a feature-length finale. A lot has changed in the real world — and also in the world of television production — in seven years.

In the world of CSI: Vegas, however, time has stood still in every sense. All the kinetic tics from before are present: the swooping camerawork, the gleaming nocturnal cityscapes, the rapid-fire editing, the swish-swoosh visualisations of bullets going into bodies.

But where these once looked ferociously modern and exciting, if always a bit daft, they now look dated and even more daft. One thing we’ve learned in the last few years is that audiences are prepared to watch crime dramas that take their time telling the story and don’t need to fry your eyeballs with CGI trickery.

The Who still blast their brilliant, question mark-free Who Are You over the title sequence, although this doesn’t arrive until 10 minutes into the action. The format has been tweaked a bit. As well as the usual case (or sometimes two) of the week, there’s an overarching plot about the old team being targeted for death.

Former LVPD captain Jim Brass (Guilfoyle), who’s now almost blind, is attacked in his home but manages to kill his would-be assassin.

When the new crime lab head Maxine Roby (Paula Newsome), whose young team includes former Doctor Who star Mandeep Dhillon as Allie Rhajan, connects the attack with one of his old cases, Brass calls on Sarah Sidle (Fox) for help.

Where Sara goes, Gil Grissom (Petersen) can’t be far behind.

He duly turns up in the very last shot to deliver a line that will be familiar to fans of the old CSI.

It’s done well enough in the US to get a second season (without Peterson), yet the fact that it’s showing here on a lesser channel like Alibi says a lot about the lack of buzz surrounding it.