What do TV writers do while on strike? Apparently, they use some of their spare time wondering how they would fare if they got to work on another show, preferably one as far away from their normal day job as you can get.

That must be how it came to pass that we're getting a crossover between the writing staffs of CSI, the top-rated series on CBS, and Two and a Half Men, the network's top-rated sitcom. It begins tonight with a murder mystery on Two and a Half Men.

On the face of it, the whole idea sounds really ridiculous, since the two series don't share a similar sensibility in any way. However, CSI, in particular, has a good track record for finding ways to tweak its format, and deadpan humor is a regular part of its mix. And for a TV season that had a giant hole in the middle and is ending with the usual hand wringing about disappearing audiences, the stunt is a reminder that prime time doesn't have to be about formula and playing it safe.

This will not be a crossover such as the one this past fall between CSI and Without a Trace, where the shows shared a plot and many of the same characters. Only the writers are swapping shows: CSI executive producer Carol Mendelsohn and Naren Shankar putting on their sitcom hats, and Two and a Half Men showrunner Chuck Lorre and his partner Lee Aronsohn getting down with the gore.

The permanent writer/producer staffs on both shows pitched in with commentary where needed in order to ensure that something resembling the normal tone was maintained, which is a particular issue on CSI, episodes of which are twice as long, contain a good deal of technical jargon, and in the end are about dead people, usually murder victims. There's often dark humor on CSI, but rarely the sort of belly laughs you would get on a sitcom. For their CSI, Lorre and Aronsohn came up with the idea of centering their plot on a slain sitcom star who no one really liked very much off-screen. An unsympathetic victim + funny suspects = an episode that's humorous but still doesn't look totally out of place on Thursdays at 9:00. Or at least that's the hope.

Tone is also an issue on Two and a Half Men, since the introduction of a corpse into the carefree lives of the Harper boys is not what people tune in for. And though there are funny ways to deal with death, murder is trickier, especially for writers who don't play it for laughs all the time. Much of the humor here will come from incongruous elements, such as the trademark CSI flashback scenes, with the effect of making the episode seem less like something the CSI staff may have penned and more like an outright homage.

If this experiment works out, we could see the idea spread. Viewers can make a game out of coming up with their own prime time mash-ups. Tina Fey and the gang from 30 Rock writing a Law & Order? The staff of According to Jim giving us a Lost where we're guaranteed to get an answer to something at the end of every hour? The folks from House writing a Simpsons episode? (Hey, that one isn't a half-bad idea.)

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