A 'Law & Order' Spinoff Acquires Some Reinforcements

From NY Times
November 11, 2005

There are people, annoying ones, who claim they never watch television. What they mean is that they never watch anything except "Law & Order."

The sun never sets on the Dick Wolf empire - quite literally. It is almost impossible to find a time, day or night, when an original episode or rerun of "Law & Order" or its spinoffs is not on somewhere. The franchise's appeal is lasting and bizarre: a dark, misanthropic police drama that viewers find endearing.

In the vast, jumbled television landscape, the "Law & Order" formula is reliably distinctive and smart, often topical yet most of all familiar and comforting. That could partly be because, like all the best mysteries, "Law & Order" provides cathartic social vengeance: middle-class detectives and prosecutors expose the greed and perversions of the rich, exacting a retribution that the tax code fails to deliver. (It is remarkable how many homicidal psychopaths live in apartments with views of Central Park.)

This season on NBC's "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," a new pair of detectives are sharing the caseload with Detective Robert Goren (Vincent D'Onofrio) and his prosaic sidekick, Detective Alexandra Eames (Kathryn Erbe). The newcomers star in half of the series's 22 episodes. And as a team, they are quite different in style and temperament.

Chris Noth, who left the original "Law & Order" in 1995 and spent a few years as Mr. Big on "Sex and the City," has returned to his old persona, Detective Mike Logan. On the show, Logan joins the major case squad on sufferance after a long, punitive stint on Staten Island, where he was exiled after taking a swing at a city councilman. His new partner is Carolyn Barek, a former F.B.I. agent played by Annabella Sciorra, and the two are more evenly matched than Goren and Eames.

Logan is tough, smart and cynical and, of course, driven by inner demons (his alcoholic mother). His captain tells Barek that Logan is "the kind of cop who is always looking for the crook in the room." Barek is gentler but enigmatic - she has a bruised, watchful manner and mumbles to herself as she works.

Since it began in 2001, "Criminal Intent" has showcased Mr. D'Onofrio as the maddeningly sensitive, eccentric Detective Goren. The series is structured differently from the original or its sex crimes spinoff, "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit." The focus does not shift to the prosecutors partway through. Instead, the criminal and the detective circle and parry and play each other's psyches - a little bit like the old "Columbo" series, only less playfully. Almost all "Law & Order" detectives have a dark past that may have driven them into law enforcement, but Goren is more richly tortured than most. He has a mentally ill mother whom he visits regularly and a brooding internal life that gives him an empathic bond with even the most twisted killers. He also has an encyclopedic knowledge of small, seemingly irrelevant facts: he's a natural born "Jeopardy" champion.

In the new team, Barek is the one with the tics and sudden flare-ups of arcane knowledge. On this past Sunday's special two-hour episode, which had all four detectives working on the same case (the son of a prominent judge is suspected of sexual sadism and murder), Eames complained that her teenage witnesses could describe a nightclub only as being down a flight of steps with a red bar. Barek replied, "Oh, the Shock and Awe club, on Harrison, between Greenwich and Hudson." As her colleagues stared, she muttered, "There's this D.J. down there I know." She seems to know quite a few louche characters. When on a different episode Logan bullied a fence into giving information about a suspect's whereabouts, Barek had no trouble identifying a place the fence referred to as Papoose. She told her startled partner that it was a nickname for a "nickel slot casino outside the Atlantic City bus station."

Mr. Wolf, who created the franchise, prides himself on keeping his detectives' back stories in the background. Unlike "NYPD Blue," where the officers' private lives were as much a part of the series as their cases, the law enforcement officials on Mr. Wolf's series are reticent civil servants who live and breathe the job. It was only on her final day on the job on "Law & Order" last January that Assistant District Attorney Serena Southerlyn (Elisabeth Rohm) revealed, somewhat extraneously, that she was a lesbian.

At most, an episode will slip in a hint about the investigators' backgrounds. So far, Barek's is baffling. When Logan asks her what languages she speaks, she replies, "Spanish, Yiddish, Italian, Polish, Creole, some Russian, some Cantonese from when I was working in Chinatown." And she didn't even include the pig Latin she picked up serving as an elementary school crossing guard.

"Criminal Intent" is up against ABC's "Desperate Housewives" on Sunday nights, and lagging behind, so NBC decided to give the show more exposure by rerunning episodes from the current season on Friday nights, and sometimes also on Saturdays. Reruns of older episodes are also shown on Bravo and USA throughout the week.

Amid this rerun cornucopia, the addition of Mr. Noth and Ms. Sciorra is a welcome move. "Criminal Intent" has passionate fans, but Mr. D'Onofrio's overwrought theatrics don't always wear well over the long stretch. The new team of detectives mark a return to the brooding minimalism that has kept "Law & Order" so popular for so long.

:: Thank you to Mel