Taylor Swift Hits the Small Screen as Murdered Teen on "CSI"

For readers who lamented that Taylor Swift was on the cover of the last issue of Rolling Stone, last night's episode of crime drama CSI was must-see TV: Swift's character was murdered. No spoiler alert required — Swift's character's corpse is seen in a motel parking lot in the second scene of the show, which aired last night, March 5th, on CBS. For the Taylor haters out there, we have some bad news, however: Get ready to see a lot more Swift in acting roles because the Fearless singer held her own in her small-screen debut.

You can watch the full episode at CBS.com, but we did a little evidence-gathering of own and determined that Swift plays the daughter of a motel manager who gets into some kind of trouble (she winds up dead, after all). Also, when did Laurence Fishburne join the cast of CSI? Oh, Morpheus, no.

Swift is the latest in a long line of musicians to appear on a prime-time crime drama. Last year, Fall Out Boy's Patrick Stump acted a criminal role on Law & Order, and on March 18th, Stump's bandmate Pete Wentz and his wife Ashlee Simpson will guest on CSI:NY.

If we had to give some sort of tween acting award to either Swift in CSI and Stump in L&O, the trophy would probably go to Swift. Despite the fact that she was given eye-rolling dialogue and a cliché Lolita-esque character, Swift actually does a good job with the script. Her character is shown several times throughout one year in the episode, each time with a different haircut or style or attitude, and Swift surprisingly adapts well considering its her first go-round in front of the camera. Swift will next appear in the Hannah Montana Movie with her homegirl Miley Cyrus, though her exact role is unknown.

Related Stories:

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• Swift Onstage and Backstage: Photos of Taylor's Swift Rise to Stardom
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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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