Law & Order: Criminal Intent
By: Bruce Fretts
Entertainment Weekly
September 8, 2001
With a résumé reaching back to ''Hill Street Blues'' and ''Miami Vice,'' TV producer Dick Wolf is an old pro at putting out fires on sets. But the question is, can ''Criminal Intent'' blaze the same successful trail as predecessors ''Law & Order'' and ''Law & Order: Special Victims Unit''? Wolf's betting the show's premise will provide the necessary spark: ''You get to see inside the criminal's head,'' he says. ''It's the first time a 'Law & Order' series has broken the locked point of view.'' In fact, ''Criminal Intent'' devotes almost as much screen time to the perp perspective -- the planning, execution, and aftermath of the crime -- as it does to the investigation by the Major Cases Squad, an elite unit of detectives assigned to the highest profile crimes.
But will viewers really want to spend that much time inside the mind of the bad guy? Yes, says executive producer Rene Balcer, a member of the Wolf pack since ''Law & Order'''s first season 11 years ago. Criminals are ''a twisted mirror of our own wants, needs, and desires -- there's a vicarious thrill in watching somebody do something you would never dare do.''
One of the detectives on their trail will be Robert Goren (played by Vincent D'Onofrio), whom Wolf is fond of referring to as ''an American Sherlock Holmes'' who uses deductive reasoning rather than brute force to nab his prey. It was this pitch that persuaded D'Onofrio to star in his first small screen series. ''I was not interested in playing some tough cop on a TV show,'' says D'Onofrio. But he was attracted to the idea of playing a more sensitive hero. ''I've played some pretty nasty f---ers,'' says the actor, citing the serial killer in last year's ''The Cell.'' ''I'm trying to even out my karma.''
Like D'Onofrio, costar Kathryn Erbe saw her ''Criminal Intent'' part, Alexandra Eames, as an antidote to a dark role: the mother who killed her kids (and was eventually put to death) on ''Oz.'' Her jailhouse work so impressed Wolf that he hired her to play opposite D'Onofrio. ''It's not that she's physically commanding -- she's intellectually commanding,'' says Wolf.
Cast members from the other ''Law & Order'' shows will also pop up occasionally. DA Nora Lewin (Dianne Wiest) chews out Carver in one episode, and the cops consult detectives Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) and Green (Jesse L. Martin) in another. Plus, a five-hour miniseries using actors from all three shows is planned for May sweeps (the plot involves a bioterrorist attack on Manhattan). ''This sounds horribly pretentious, but the whole concept is that it's like Dickens' London,'' says Wolf of the ''Law & Order'' trilogy. ''People can transit freely across all the platforms.''
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