Law and Order - Criminal Intent
By: Chris Dahlen
Save the Robot.com
NBC could get away with putting drek on the air if it didn't run the same drek so many times each week. Their tacky news magazine Dateline is harmless by itself, but now that it's broadcast almost every night it has become oppressive and unavoidable. NBC's most successful crime show, Law and Order, is going down the same road: there are now three series, turning out sixty-six hours a year of "ripped from the headlines" crime stories. Originally an entertaining two-for-one drama that followed a crime from the police activity (the "order") to the courtroom scenes (the "law"), Law and Order has become dull and predictable: the same formula repeats week after week, and the stories get more "shocking" every season.
Where other crime stories explore issues like the nature of violence, or the conflict between professionalism and instinct, Law and Order sticks to twist endings and flat, unexplained characters. The producers were betting that a sicko crime is more interesting than the people who investigate it. The ratings backed them up, so two years ago they launched a spin-off, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, which covers nothing but sex crimes. When a third series debuted this year, the prospects looked dim: how many more rape/murders could we take in a week?
That said, the new series, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, is pretty damn good.
As with the other series, Criminal Intent has a gimmick: each story features the criminals' point of view as well as the detectives'. We watch the guilty parties scheme and maneuver as the cops close in on them. By itself, this doesn't add much - it's usually just a convenient way to fill in the plot - but the gimmick changes how we see the detectives. Criminal Intent takes away the easy "watching over their shoulders" perspective where the characters are only there to get us from one plot point to the next. We already know what's going on (or think we do): when the detectives are on screen, they have to do something interesting.
The cast is great - restrained and serious but good with gallows humor, and capable of suggesting depth and history that aren't in the scripts. There are only four leads this time: Vincent D'Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe as elite detectives Goren and Eames, Jamey Sheridan as the Captain, and Courtney B. Vance batting clean-up as the Assistant District Attorney. All of them are great, but Vincent D'Onofrio is undeniably the star. D'Onofrio plays a disjointed genius, working off of instinct and a head full of esoteric knowledge: he can identify a man's law school class ring or discuss fine points of art forgery; he can talk crazy to a crazy man in one interrogation and fly into a calculated rage in the next. His reaction shots alone make the show. Erbe deserves appreciation as well, however, for playing a cop whose brains and confidence keep her from kow-towing to her partner's brilliance: it takes skill to play straight man to someone like D'Onofrio, and Erbe pulls it off.
Law and Order has steadily turned out disposable episodes for several years now; that's part of the reason it was easy to franchise. Criminal Intent hasn't totally solved the problem - some of the stories are still convoluted or hang on arbitrary twist endings - but if only because the cast is smaller and better, the show is moving in the right direction: we're getting some thrills, and they're not as cheap.
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