Remembering Law & Order: Criminal Intent

Law & Order: Criminal Intent ran for ten seasons (2001-2010), during which it aired 195 episodes. It is a very respectable run for a TV show by almost any reasonable measure. Still, there is no denying that this run pales next to that of its two predecessors, the original Law & Order (in fanspeak, the "mothership") with its rare two decade run (1990-2010), and the first spin-off, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU), now in its twenty-seventh season on the air (1999-)--and that in this it was something of a disappointment for the producers. This was all the more in as the show's managing the ten seasons it did was partly a matter of their after season seven shifting it away from its original home on American Big Three network NBC to basic cable channel USA to get along on a lower budget in a milieu where a show could justify its staying on the air with rather lower ratings than network prime time required, in spite of which it only lasted three seasons more (the last of these a mere eight episodes).

Considering why that was it seems at least partly the case that it was a sign of the times. Appearing in 2001 Criminal Intent came into a market still somewhat more resistant to the franchise-milking taken for granted today. (Thus did we see in one episode of The Simpsons satirical reference to Law & Order: Elevator Inspectors Unit.) At the same time the show had to establish itself in a very different media world from the one that the original series launched in a decade before, or even "SVU" a mere two years earlier, with the reality TV and prestige TV booms newly but forcefully underway, and leaving less room for a procedural series, casual viewers easily inclining to reality TV's trashy ultra-lowbrow offerings of the former, the more "serious" viewers the snobby middlebrow offerings of prestige TV, and everything in between squeezed, perhaps especially where it was built on standalone episodes rather than trying to hook viewers with an arc in the hope that at least some of them would check out the next episode. Indeed, even the original Law & Order was doing less well, such that it ended its run the very same year that Criminal Intent went off the air, while no subsequent spin-off has fared so well yet. (Indeed, it seems notable that those entries that have stayed on the air for long have adapted to the expectations of the new market, not least in a greater tendency to arcs rather than standalone episodes, as seen in the more recent seasons of SVU, and the most successful of the newer series', Law & Order: Organized Crime, constructed around season-long arcs.)

Still, it seems entirely reasonable to think that what the show itself had to offer--its particular variation on the franchise's cops-and-prosecutors' theme--was at least partially responsible, that indeed the concept was a tougher sell in some ways, with this easier to appreciate if one considers the structure and tone that the original Law & Order established early on as the series' baseline. This had episodes beginning with a scene in which someone stumbles on the body of a murder victim, after which the episode focuses strictly on the professional activity of the two partnered detectives tasked with identifying and arresting the suspect and the two Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs) tasked with the Prosecution, respectively. This is so much so that we rarely saw events from the viewpoints of any other characters but these as the viewer comes to know of the drama behind the murder from what the four principals see themselves, and what the people they talk to tell them, while the writers kept even the principals' personal lives deep in the background, rarely even referenced as the detectives concentrated on "whodunit" and the prosecutors on making the charge stick. In presenting all this the writers split their episodes evenly down the middle, devoting the first half to the detectives' side of the matter, starting with their visit to the crime scene where the body was found, following the detectives through the legwork of the investigation, and ending with their arrest of the suspect just before the commercial break at the midpoint, after which the episode transitioned to the ADAs' prosecutorial efforts to their conclusion, while constructing the whole around a succession of short scenes briskly, sharply, crisply cutting from one to the next with the title cards indicating date and place in that way suggestive of the meticulous attentiveness to the relevant and exclusion of the irrelevant, and economy, of a well-written police report, punctuated by the famous "doink" sound effect. This tightness of focus and construction, the pace and punctuation, imparted to the episodes a more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts combination of efficiency, driving momentum and flashy style. The episodes also tended to plots "ripped from the headlines" that befit the flash, the more in as they so often had to do with the lives of the more privileged Manhattanites, the grit of the street, and those points where high life came into contact with low life, with all the contrast-heightened "high concept" texture going with that (the grit of the station or a venture into a "rough" neighborhood throwing the plushness of the rest of the show, with its expensively dressed upper class characters and their attorneys in plush homes and offices into sharper relief). At the same time, if the show typically presented its principals as upright and competent, they were not supermen, giving the often flashy narratives some grounding where the "human element" was concerned, which combined with the police report or documentary-like aspect to endow it all with a measure of verisimilitude.

By contrast the episodes of Criminal Intent dispensed with this intricate structure, events proceeding in a less formulaic, more variable fashion--with the detectives tending to hold center stage down to the end. (Thus instead of two cops and two ADAs being at the core it was two cops and one ADA at the outset, with the ADA often having little to do in an episode but tell the detectives they just didn't have a case yet, and then dropped altogether after season five.) Partially, but only partially, filling the vacuum created by the elision of the prosecutors' side of things we tended to see the other participants in the drama (the criminals, and those we were meant to think might be criminals) get a good many scenes of their own, without the cops or the prosecutors around, in which the makers of the episodes, true to the title of the show, Criminal Intent, endeavored to dramatize the personal intentions and motivations of the criminals. Consistent with this it was sometimes the case that the audience knew for a certainty who was responsible from rather early on in the episode, and sometimes even from the very start, leaving the detective with the job of finding it out for themselves and proving it to themselves (and the prosecutor), as the detective's half hour was stretched out into a whole hour, often with "whodunit" replaced by psychological "whydunit"--and backing up what the audience and the detective already knew in what was generally prone to become a psychologically-freighted "game of cat and mouse" between detective and suspect. As one might guess this accent on head games left less room for exploiting topicality--the appearance of which was in fact a red herring at times. (Watching the opening of the episode "Anti-Thesis" you may think it will be about the fight between Larry Summers and Cornel West, but could have dispensed with the bit while leaving everything really important to the episode perfectly intact.) And of course, with Criminal Intent not only did we get instead of "regular detectives" the members of an elite unit, the Major Crimes Squad, but in the show's original protagonist--for we could more easily speak of a protagonist here given the greater focus on his activities--we had not a "conventional" cop, even an exceptionally accomplished one, but rather, in spite of his being on a police force, a figure out of the Sherlock Holmes tradition of Great Detectives in Vincent D'Onofrio's Robert Goren. Constantly performing intellectual feats that at times can seem over-the-top (where Henry Higgins can tell which neighborhood a fellow Londoner came from by his accent, on the basis of secondhand information New York Detective Goren deduces precisely where an Australian picked up her Thai!), he was also consistent with the tradition in being highly eccentric, with line of work, temperament, reputation all combining to place them outside society to such a degree that it is hard to picture him having a "normal" life with a spouse and a family, or even close friends, or doing particularly well career-wise within an Organization (as Goren himself is all too aware).

Altogether one can easily picture all this having been less compelling for many. Formula, after all, can be constraining and after a time tiresome, but for those who like a formula, as long as they still like it, the repetitiveness, the predictability, can be part of the appeal, easing their getting into the goings-on, and making it easier for them to stay oriented even amid casual viewing, with that brisk, crisp flow of the mothership formula certainly helping hold their attention, and simplifying their following along. By contrast the episodes of Criminal Intent may have seemed comparatively shapeless, more uneven, certainly more measured in pace. Certainly, I think, it was more challenging for a writer to hold an audience's attention this way (or even just make it possible for them to follow along) than when using the earlier show's pattern, while the visual aesthetic was all too consistent with the approach, the set design, cinematography, lighting and editing choices of the show-runners went along with that less brisk, crisp, quality, giving the images a certain drabness (here the interrogations went on in a white, fluorescent-lit room that felt less like it belonged in a police station than in a hospital), as well as less sense of movement (thanks to a less mobile camera). If neither glamour nor grit were wholly absent from the episodes, they were on the whole less abundant, and due to the stylistic choices also less strikingly presented, such that one can speak of a "low concept" aesthetic--with form, again, aligning with content given the frequent choice of storylines foregrounding character and context neither particularly glamorous, nor gritty, as indeed they often skewed toward the marginal or the eccentric (as with a murder in the world of contemporary poetry in "Passions"). Meanwhile if Bobby Goren definitely had his fans he was not everyone's cup of tea, with some apparently finding his tics and his baggage off-putting, and this mattering all the more because this was so much the Great Detective's show, and Criminal Intent less able to lean on the other members of the cast, or the other elements that can enliven a piece of entertainment. Certainly this L & O series generally had less of the benefit of comic relief than the mothership (a significant point in the favor of detectives like Jerry Orbach's Lenny Briscoe and Jesse L. Martin's Ed Green). Meanwhile, precisely because this is the kind of thing that doesn't get said in respectable mainstream venues, even as Reddit fora and the like make clear that a great many people are thinking it, it is worth adding that taken as a whole the show was a bit light on sex appeal. (Law & Order was not and could not have been Baywatch where reliance on feminine charms is concerned, but the predecessors had certainly been prone to casting actresses who made many a male viewer running across the show stop flipping channels. It was not unfitting of the approach that this was less the case in this less glamorous take--particularly in the more consistent earlier seasons--but not helpful from a casual viewing standpoint.)

The result was that one was much more likely to be really on board with what the show was doing, or not, than was the case with the other L & O series'--while D'Onofrio's cutting back his involvement added another complication. The show-runners responded to his reduced participation by splitting their seasons between Bobby Goren and other detectives whose appearance entailed a deviation from the episodes' now-established tendency (the mothership's Mike Logan back to headline episodes that felt like original Law & Order minus the style, Jeff Goldblum's Zach Nichols offering "Bobby Goren Lite" with all the disadvantage implied in that comparison), changes not pleasing to all of those who had been on board. And so in the end even as a lower-cost production in the less competitive basic cable milieu Criminal Intent sputtered out fairly quickly--though like many an unconventional show that struggled in its first run it would seem to have enjoyed a long life in reruns in the years since it went off the air.