TVSquad

Every time he thinks he's out, they pull him back in again! No, just kidding. It's not like that. This isn't Michael in Godfather 3. Nobody's forcing anyone.

However, it is true that William Petersen is returning to CBS's CSI for the ninth season. This is great news for fans of the show -- and the star -- because for years now he's been yelping about leaving the hit series to do other things. Last year, for example, he was written off the show for a brief hiatus in which Liev Schreiber was cast as a temporary replacement for Gil Grissom in the Las Vegas crime lab.

Petersen's new one year deal is very flexible. He'll still be well-paid -- $600,000 per episode -- but he'll be doing less shows in order to appear in the play Dublin Carol. That was the same show that prompted the Schreiber fill-in last season. This year, Petersen has been booked into the Upstairs Theater in Chicago for a November 13-December 21 staging of the Christmas drama.

The way CSI is crafted, Grissom's absences are fairly easy to write into the storytelling. The plots are driven by situations and events outside the lab and rarely are the characters the prime-movers of the stories. If Grissom decides to go up the Amazon and search for a new strain of spider, he'll be missed, but the CSI gang will go on without him. That's not to say that William Petersen doesn't bring a lot to the table. He does -- star power. He's the face of CSI and if he left for good, the show would suffer.

As a loyal viewer, I think the producers -- including Petersen who has a shingle as executive producer -- should do what they did last year and get a star like Liev to do a mini-arc. That opens the door for a wide array of really interesting and top-notch stars who may only want to do a drop in guest turn.