Law & Order: Criminal Intent Are You a Goren Fan, or a Loganite?

One thing fans of Law & Order: Criminal Intent well know is that there are two camps concerning star Vincent D'Onofrio: the camp of people who love his idiosyncratic, scenery-abusing portrayal of Criminal Intent's Det. Bobby Goren and those who can't $#@!ing stand the guy.

And of course, yes, there are those who fall somewhere in between. Those are the people who only watch Law & Order: Criminal Intent on the commercials of Desperate Housewives. This year, cast changes - or additions- allow people who dislike Goren to still enjoy the CI mysteries on Sunday nights.

Criminal Intent, the third of Dick Wolf's L&O franchise, is a plot-and-character driven mystery show. As Goren, D'Onofrio is the main event, and his character's ability to get into the criminal - or even the witness'- mind and piece together crimes to nail the bad guy is the center of the show. There's also the "criminal's point of view" element- we get to see the criminals doing their thing outside of the police purview.

Goren is teamed with Alex Eames (Kathryn Erbe) who is more than a sardonic sidekick. Yeah, Goren gets to make all the big discoveries and do the final "gotcha" but Eames is smart and picks up on things pretty quickly herself. Co-stars Jamey Sheridan as Capt Deakins and Courtney B. Vance try to keep things going fullsteam ahead and in a way that leads to conviction, respectively. Vance, especially, is underused as the Law to Order ratio here is about 1: 1 million.

This year the detectives split episodes with L&O original Mike Logan (Christopher Noth) and Carolyn Barak (Annabella Sciorra), officially because D'Onofrio and not to mention Erbe were getting exhausted carrying the show. The divided fan camps were out in full force, some saying there can be no CI without Goren, others saying, Not as Logan, the sarcastic, old school cop who started the whole L&O thing going is better, more realistic, easier to watch and nicer to look at. Sciorra got a good review from The New York Times last year while TVGuide called her lifeless.

Her character, a smart profiler who consulted with the FBI is sort of the female Goren, more than another Eames, with a family-oriented Catholic background, and some kinks (like knowing an underground DJ)and quirks (talking to herself). Barak and Logan work well together; she's enough of a cop's cop to cope with him, and he's enough of a "whatever works" cop to take let her intelligence do what it can.

As to which (or whose) episodes are better? It's a matter of personal taste. This writer's personal taste prefers the Goren-Eames episodes, if only because, so far, they have had the better storylines and Barak and Logan can be a little dry as teams go. CI mysteries can be first-rate either way, Sometimes, they slack with the villains, giving us boring ones (or worse, recurring villain Nicole Wallace) but usually, they stay a few steps ahead of the viewer and once we know - as we usually do before he's caught- who the killer is- it can still be interesting to watch the cops turn the screws.

We get to see Goren or the other two - take the killer down. Some people find this unrealistic - which it is - no lawyer would allow his client to talk to the cops like that. It can also be a little tedious.

As one viewer recently critiqued "He does the same thing every episode, and he always knows everything" - two other reasons people dislike Goren. Then again, others like watching the guy in action. And really, aren't all L&O's enjoyed for their predictable format? And at least they use brains instead of guns - though there's plenty of violence on the show.

Fans of the show should try to check out the CI two-hour movie if it's rerun. Colm Meaney does a sinister turn as a bad dad. Goren and Eames are the lead cops, but the Logan-Barak pairing gets their own mini-crime to solve too, and talented Vance and Sheridan get a little room to move.

Law & Order: Criminal Intent airs Sundays at 9PM.