Crime & Punishment[1] is a police drama television program created by Dick Wolf that ran for 6 episodes on NBC from March 3, 1993, to April 7, 1993.[2] With the exceptions of the first and last episodes, which aired on Wednesdays, the show occupied the 10 p.m. slot of the network's Thursday-night "The Best Night of Television on Television" programming block, a timeslot occupied for the rest of the 1992–1993 season by L.A. Law.
Premise
Crime & Punishment followed a "case-of-the-week" format, centering around two LAPD detectives, Ken O'Donnell (Jon Tenney) and Annette Rey (Rachel Ticontin), and their superior officer, Lt. Anthony Bartolo (Carmen Argenziano). Subplots were also developed around O'Donnell's relationship with his long-term girlfriend, a medical student named Jen Sorenson (Lisa Darr), and Rey's relationship with her estranged 17-year-old daughter, Tanya (María Celedonio).[3]
The program was also notable for including documentary-style "talking-head" segments, wherein the characters are interviewed by an unseen "Interrogator" (voiced by James Sloyan) to reveal their inner thoughts. The "Interrogator" segments were disliked by critics; Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly said they "stop the action dead and ruin any ambivalence or subtlety we might read into the characters",[2] while Tony Scott, in Variety, called the device "pretentious and disruptive".[4]
