The Times has a piece on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and it is a sad one: it seems that the show's shortened eight-episode 10th Season may very well be its last. USA has billed it as the "final season," and most of the cast and crew seemed resigned to their fate, though some, such as Kathryn Erbe (who plays Det. Alexandra Eames), are in denial. “To have a show in New York go down is not good for New York...The fact that we managed to do these eight more episodes gives a lot of people eight more episodes of income,” said Vince D'Onofrio, aka Det. Robert Goran.
If this is the end for the show, it will leave Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as the last remaining Law & Order production in the city. The ratings for the show in the ninth season slipped after both D'Onofrio and Erbe left (drunk Jeff Goldblum wasn't good enough?), accounting for the shorter episode order. This season, they will have an episode which references the Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark mess, as well as one with a Charlie Sheen-like celebrity played by Jay Mohr. Chris Brancato, the executive producer of Criminal Intent this season, is still hopeful the show may get a stay of execution: “The fans of the show will come to it. And promotion of the show may bring more people in. Or, maybe saying it’s the last season will bring more people in.”
There was also this interesting tidbit about the episode they were filming at the time:
On Wednesday the actors were working on Episode 6, “The Last Street in Manhattan,” involving a murder in Inwood, the borough’s northernmost neighborhood. The corner of Seventh Street and Avenue B, eight miles south of Inwood, had been plastered with fake signs for West 218th Street because the show was not allowed to shoot in the episode’s real setting.
“It’s a hot zone,” said Amanda Slater, a unit production manager, meaning that the city had banned filming for a period because of complaints about too many film shoots in the neighborhood.
