Crime Shows and Their Spin Offs

I'm not exactly what you'd call an "avid TV watcher". In fact, I only spend about an hour on average in front of a TV each day - and most of that time is spent dozing off. Truth be told, TV may entirely be losing out on the "sitting in front of the tube" crowd who now favor TIVO, other DVR systems, and the methods employed with them that create TV shows on the internet (commercial-free, just like the DVDs) or just being able to fast-forward the commercials with the recording.

That in mind, I DO watch a lot of downloaded/recorded TV shows - and have some theories on the differences between a few crime shows and their respective spinoffs.

The originals: humor, suspense, twists.
The spinoffs: emotional, personal, intricacy.

The two shows I'll be comparing are Law & Order and CSI. Each started off as just those shows, and after several successful seasons, they branched off with new casts and taking new spins on things. With Law & Order, they created the "Special Victims Unit" (which was originally to be titled "Sex Crimes", but they nixed that idea and went for SVU) to deal with crimes that weren't purely homicide cases like the original series tackled. With CSI, they expanded to the tropical Miami locale, with hotter temperatures as well as tempers, to deal with a more racially diverse crowd in an area with sexier apparel and dealt with new things not found in Las Vegas (like hurricanes and Cuban immigrants).

For the Law & Order series, the differences are primarily evident in the title itself. After all, these are "special victims", and deal more with live people than cold corpses. Every episode of the original L&O used to be classically known as having an "Oh my God" moment before the credits rolled - that moment where the scene goes from something totally irrelevant to having the first witnesses discover the body. Their common utterances of "Oh my God" upon stumbling across the dead body was how the 'moment's came to be. This isn't really the case with the SVU spinoff - they deal more with the original crime and the actual victim.