Sela Ward was offered the role of Megan Donner but turned it down.
The Miami-Dade Police Department's crime scene processing unit is called the "Crime Scene Investigations Bureau (CSIB)", but unlike the TV show, MDPD's CSI technicians do not conduct laboratory testing. Miami-Dade Police Department has a separate Bureau that operates the Miami-Dade Crime Lab.
While all the fly-over shots, skylines and cityscapes really are of Miami, Florida, any beach scenes during the series were filmed at Manhattan Beach, a suburb of Los Angeles.
Believing that CSI copycat shows were inevitable, CSI producers and CBS agreed to create this spin-off series in the hope of being the first to copy the original CSI series.
The design of the autopsy theatre was based on a misremembering of a set from The Andromeda Strain (1971).
Horatio was named after the Victorian era "rags to riches" novelist Horatio Alger.
During the opening credits, the actors' names morph out of equations: - 4y - 1 = 3b(Nh) becomes David Caruso - 3a1 - X = (A9Xy) becomes Emily Procter - 3b + N = 7bn1(6A) becomes Adam Rodriguez - 2b + 4a = (7h)3XyNh becomes Khandi Alexander - A1b + B2c = R4 becomes 'Kim Delaney'