The reason to watch.....is D'Onofrio's performance

Degree of poetic justice in television crime drama
The Star Phoenix
Alex Strachan, Canwest News Service, 8.22.09

Law & Order: Criminal Intent has always been treated like the unwanted stepchild of the Law & Order universe, even though it features one of TV's most eccentric and oddly hypnotic performances.

The brainchild of Law & Order creator Dick Wolf and Montreal native Rene Balcer, a former Concordia University English major and one-time staff writer for the (now-defunct) Montreal Star, early episodes of L&O: CI played like an updated version of Columbo, in which a dishevelled-but-brilliant detective, played by Vincent D'Onofrio, plays cat-and-mouse games with ingenious criminals (almost) as smart as he is.

In recent seasons, as Balcer left the show -- to help revive the original Law & Order -- L&O: CI has adopted a more melodramatic tone. Tonight's repeat, from June, is loosely based on the infamous Madeleine McCann case, in which a three-year-old girl vanished from a holiday apartment in Portugal while her parents were dining in a restaurant just metres away.

In the L&O: CI version, Goren and his partner, Det. Alex Eames (Kathryn Erbe), are investigating a hotel robbery when they learn a toddler has been abducted at the same time a thief was allegedly breaking into people's rooms.

Here, similarities to the McCann case end -- there's a jaw-dropping twist at the end that feels more like the product of a TV writer's imagination than something that could happen in real life -- but the reason to watch, as always, is for D'Onofrio's performance.

He has a way of burying himself in the role of a brilliant but damaged sleuth. The performance is made all the more surreal in tonight's episode by the seeming continuity problems: D'Onofrio's beard, which was shaved in subsequent episodes, is full one minute, a 5 o'clock shadow with whiskers the next, semi-shaved the moment after that and then back to the full ZZ Top. Full article

CI episode "Folie a Deux" airs tonight on NBC 8pm.