It may be that the show's producers are taking their new license to kill a little too far. Last season was marked by the gratuitous and unnecessary murder--her heart was cut ot--of Goren's nemesis, the terrific Nicole Wallace (Olivia D'Abo). That plot that also involved the deterioration of Goren's mentor, after his daughter became a serial killer in an earlier episode in an effort to get her father's attention. You get the idea. In earlier seasons, the crimes themselves were less sensational--for ezample, the beating murder of an Orthodox Jewish convert who was seeking a divorce--but they were more deeply grounded in communities and established cultures. The latest seasons of the show have given viewers sicker killers, but not necessarily more interesting or carefully sketched ones. I miss the episodes where Goren solved a crime by empathizing with an Asperger Syndrome, or a lonely, isolated woman who became the accomplice of a murderer. The show was at its best when the crimes were as interesting as the characters who committed them. At its best, the show, in the limited time available in each episode, made those character sketches both deep and shaded. In recent years, the show seems to focus on the crimes instead, and to have settled on red as the hue of choice.
But worse, the producers and writers have worn the grooves of their A-Squad characters too deep. They filled in Goren's backstory, giving him--and then executing--a serial-killer biological father, and killing off his schizonphrenic mother. But the death of Goren's parents hasn't freed him for future discoveries. He acted out for a while, but beyond that, hasn't moved forward. Eames (Kathryn Erbe) hasn't done much interesting since she served as a surrogate mother for her sister, though she apepars to be poised to have chosen a bad boyfriend somewhere in her past. The B-Squad's been through a rapid rotation in recent years, and while there is some promise in the pairing of Julianne Nichols and Goldblum, it's not yet clear if the latter is going to do anything more than skip work to watch "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and rely on his intuition. It might be time for the A and B Squad to switch places for a while, if only to give the B cops time to develop a little chemistry, to give D'Onofrio a break from shouting at suspects and a chance to catch his breath. His writers, it seems, could benefit from a similar chance at renewal.