Law and Order: what is it with me and Law and Order? I’d never been one for crime shows, but I can still remembering seeing it for the first time, when it was showing in reruns on A&E, and thinking to myself, so this is how you make crime interesting! With the exception of SVU, which I’ve never cared for, I’ve loved them all: Law and Order: Los Angeles, with the handsome Skeet Ulrich, Law and Order no subtitle, with the noble Sam Waterston, but most of all Law and Order: Criminal Intent, with the prodigiously talented Vincent D’Onofrio as off-kilter Detective Bobby Goren. Goren spoke in an odd, stuttery way; he groped towards discoveries; he leaned (there’s a whole subreddit on the Goren Lean). Goren was definitely the Law and Order character I found most interesting, and Criminal Intent was definitely the Law and Order I felt closest to. I was already thinking about being a novelist when Criminal Intent first appeared, and I think I sensed that if I ever wrote mysteries, they’d be more like Criminal Intent than like anything else.
Many years ago I saw an interview with Mariska Hargitay (Olivia Benson on SVU) in which she said – I’m paraphrasing here – that she saw SVU as a show in which terrible things happened but Mommy and Daddy, in the form of detectives Benson and Elliot Stabler, were there to set it right. I still think this is a very insightful and accurate way of describing not just SVU but the other Law and Orders, too. I’d argue that part of what makes the franchise so beloved and so successful is that each episode labels, vanquishes, and contains a threat: the police and the DA’s get their perpetrator and lock him up – although there are exceptions, perhaps to keep the series interesting, or perhaps as a nod towards realism. As a writer, I’ve found there’s a lot to be learned from the way all the versions of Law and Order adhere so tightly to their structure – not least because watching that structure play out each week really allows a writer to analyze how and why it works.
But, while Criminal Intent also had its structure and got its perpetrators, it was the oddball in the Law and Order family. Bobby Goren was interested not just in catching criminals but in understanding the underlying psychology that made them criminals in the first place. In fact Goren, and the show that contained him, believed that understanding a criminal’s underlying psychology was the key to catching them. This made it a very unusual crime show, not so much interested in whodunnit (usually the show told you that at the start) as in why they dunnit. And often why they did it was for a twisted version of a plausible reason: because they loved their child, because they loved their spouse, because someone made them feel special and so was able to manipulate them. Criminal Intent presented criminals as people. Not very nice people, but people who were products of the things they believed, wanted, felt, and hoped for. Okay, those desires and motivations took a wrong turn somewhere, but they were, nonetheless, understandable.
Given this, I can’t say I’m surprised that Criminal Intent didn’t last as long as the other two main versions of Law and Order (it only made it to ten seasons, as opposed to the original’s twenty, plus five since its reboot, and SVU’s twenty-six). Plumbing the depths of weirdos – and Criminal Intent had some real weirdos (shout-out to the episode in which Michael York, playing a TV version of serial killer Charles Sobhraj, left a head in somebody’s refrigerator) – is not as psychologically reassuring as putting them in prison, especially when it turns out that their motivations might just be curdled versions of your own. But I’m also not surprised that it became the one I found most engrossing. “Why?” has always been my favorite question, and it seemed that it was Bobby Goren’s, too.
So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised when Criminal Intent provided me with the seed of inspiration that grew into my novel, Missing. In my experience there are several stages before I write, which I’d roughly divide into Not Ready, Getting Ready, and Ready but Without a Focus. I was in that last stage when I saw the Criminal Intent episode “Folie à Deux,” about the fallout when a baby is taken in a hotel robbery. I didn’t take the solution to the mystery, or anything beyond that premise, but the psychological depth that Criminal Intent modelled gave me the stimulus I needed. And now, six years later, here I am with a mystery that’s as concerned with why people do what they do as any episode of Criminal Intent ever was. I guess you could say I Goren-Leaned into it.
