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.