Law & Order: Criminal Intent
NBC, Sundays, 9 p.m.
Created by Dick Wolf; starring Vincent D’Onofrio, Kathryn Erbe, Courtney B. Vance and Jamey Sheridan
As if Law & Order and Law & Order: Special Victims’ Unit (not to mention Bravo’s thrice daily syndication of the original series) didn’t provide audiences with enough detective work and judicial procedure to last a long and disease-free lifetime, Dick Wolf is at it again. In his latest series, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Wolf integrates a psychological component into his already-successful dialectic.
Vincent D’Onofrio leads the cast as Det. Robert Goren, a perspicacious policeman with a knack for penetrating the minds of his criminal quarries. Alexandra Eames (Kathryn Erbe) is his free spirited partner.
Last Sunday night, the duo had their hands full when a multi-million dollar diamond heist left three dead in its wake. After an appropriate amount of typical Law & Order twist and turns, including a mob-related red herring which left a man dead in the trunk of a rented car, Goren intuits that his suspect is a cold-blooded criminal (Jake Weber) who enlisted the assistance of his girlfriend (Michelle Hicks). With the help of the humorless district attorney (Courntey B. Vance), Goren then tricked the girlfriend into giving up her ol’ daddy.
As expected, Criminal Intent is replete with the Law & Order franchise accoutrements, including inter-titles that inform the viewer of the date, time and location where the action takes place, and that familiar ka-ching beat between each scene. Also, like the other Law & Order series, we know next to nothing about our protagonists’ personal lives. Based on the first episode, it’s hard to imagine that Det. Goren has a wife and two kids waiting for him in a red brick house somewhere in Connecticut. But we don’t know that for sure. And, according to Dick Wolf, we may never know. As with his other Law & Orders, Wolf plans to omit all extraneous information about the regular characters, dedicating the show instead to the 44-minute one-off plots. The best part about the formula? Beside the elimination of mind-numbing and addictive plot lines, if you miss and episode here or there you won’t be completely out of the loop. – JoAnne Steglitz