Here is an article that I stumbled across about Rene Balcer that definitely was published this season since it mentions Noth/Sciorra. I found this quote promising "What Balcer's next change up might be remains unclear: He's in the midst of a multi-year deal that should keep him with Criminal Intent for the foreseeable future. But one gets the feeling that he still yearns to try his hand at something completely different-and that, whatever it is, he'll be successful at it." Usually a show loses something when the creator or original showrunner leaves.
The article is from :
www.themysteryplace.comReel Crime
By Steve Hockensmith
Reel Crime by Steve Hockensmith
René Balcer says he's always been fascinated with outlaws. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the one and only script he helped write for Star Trek: The Next Generation was more film noir than space opera.
"I basically did a take on the old Humphrey Bogart movie The Desperate Hours but set on the Enterprise," Balcer says of the resulting episode, "Power Play," in which bad-guy E.T.'s take a group of crew members hostage. "One producer's comment was that my aliens sounded like 1930s gangsters. I don't think he meant it as a positive thing."
Fortunately for Balcer, he found a home with a more down-to-earth television dynasty that suited his talents better. He's written nearly two hundred Law & Order and Law & Order: Criminal Intent scripts, winning four Edgar Awards, the Writers Guild Award, and the Peabody Award in the process. Franchise mastermind Dick Wolf might get more ink, but Balcer played an important part in making Law & Order the hydra-headed ratings monster it is today, serving as L&O's top-dog writer-producer (or "showrunner" in Hollywoodese) for four years before co-creating Criminal Intent with Wolf in 2001.Though Balcer has become a television industry MVP through Law & Order, it wasn't the crime genre that first sparked his obsession with outlaws. The French-speaking Montreal native picked that up the same way he picked up the English language: by watching hour after hour of American TV Westerns as a child.
"I learned English from The Lone Ranger and Have Gun, Will Travel," says Balcer (pronounced bal-SAY).
He discovered mysteries later, devouring the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, and Georges Simenon. Though Balcer's literary heroes sparked his desire to write, he began his career not at a keyboard but behind a camera: He served as a combat cameraman for Canadian television during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. He later went on to work as a print journalist and, after that, a documentary filmmaker, but a very different kind of writing and filmmaking beckoned.
In 1980, he traded The Great White North for Tinseltown, moving to Los Angeles to try his hand at screenwriting. Whether or not he was successful depends on your point of view. For the next decade, he made a good living writing feature film scripts-none of which were produced.
"It was a ten-year exercise in frustration," Balcer recalls. "By the time you've finished writing some-thing for one set of executives, they're fired and someone else is in. You're really at the mercy of the studio and the stars and the schedules."
In the midst of yet another soon-to-crumble feature project, one of the producers asked Balcer if he'd be willing to crank out a script for a TV movie. While the movie remained tied up in studio red tape, the telefilm zipped through production and hit the airwaves.
"That told me television is much better suited to writers," says Balcer. "If you're writing scripts, you're writing them to be shot and seen, not to sit on a shelf somewhere."
More TV movie assignments followed, and they were indeed seen-by just the right people. On the basis of his telefilm work, Balcer was approached by Wolf's production team, which asked him to join the writing staff of a fledgling NBC drama, Law & Order. Balcer says his rise to the showrunner slot on the series was simply "a process of attrition."
"There was no dog-eat-dog," he says. "Some of the writers get thrown off the show or leave for whatever reason, and you acquire more experience the more scripts you write, and the show just gradually starts to bend in your direction."
After serving as Law & Order's executive producer/head writer from 1996 to 2000, Balcer decided it was time to move on. There was simply too much order to the rigidly structured ensemble series, which rarely gave viewers a glimpse into its protagonists' (or antagonists') personal lives.
"I wanted to start telling different kinds of stories and get inside the heads of the people I was writing about more," Balcer says.
Though he assumed he'd have to leave the Law & Order universe in order to tell those stories, Balcer learned otherwise during a lunch meeting with Wolf, who was mulling over yet another L&O series.
"He said it would be just two cops, not an ensemble, and you'd get to spend some time with the criminals," Balcer recalls. Wolf's bare-bones pitch was enough to intrigue the outlaw-obsessed Balcer, who sensed an opportunity to explore both the criminal mindset and a more eccentric, haunted lead character. He quickly agreed to flesh out the concept. The result, of course, was Criminal Intent and its offbeat hero, Robert Goren, a brilliant, driven NYPD cop Balcer describes as "a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Philip Mar-lowe, with a little Bob Dylan thrown in."
Goren (Vincent D'Onofrio) and his Watson-ish sidekick, Detective Alexandra Eames (Kathryn Erbe), quickly won a huge following, drawing an average of 14.3 million viewers each week at the series' ratings peak. But Balcer didn't foresee one of the dangers a hit series faces when it relies heavily on one character: star burnout. In November of 2004, just as an upstart series called Desperate Housewives was beginning to eat into Criminal Intent's ratings, D'Onofrio passed out on the set and had to be hospitalized. The culprit, according to the actor, was the wear and tear of the show's strenuous shooting schedule. Something had to change.
"It's a grueling pace," Balcer acknowledges. "Both Vincent and Kate [Erbe] were working twelve hours a day nonstop, with thirty scenes each per episode when the average series star might have fourteen. The time shooting, the time at home learning the script-they carried it for four years, and they were exhausted."
So though he signed on for Criminal Intent partially because it wasn't an ensemble show, Balcer found himself working on just that . . . sort of. This season, Annabella Sciorra and L&O alumnus Chris Noth joined the cast to take the pressure off D'Onofrio and Erbe. But instead of appearing on screen together, the characters have a sort of timeshare arrangement: The two detective teams alternate as the series' leads from week to week. "It's worked out well," says Balcer. "And it gives [the writers] the chance to use a slightly different set of muscles. It's a nice change up."
What Balcer's next change up might be remains unclear: He's in the midst of a multi-year deal that should keep him with Criminal Intent for the foreseeable future. But one gets the feeling that he still yearns to try his hand at something completely different-and that, whatever it is, he'll be successful at it.
"It's not confidence," he says when asked about the almost blasé attitude he seems to have about his Law & Order and Criminal Intent achievements. "I just never thought about failure."
So, here's the short version as I'm now running out of time to post...
But if he had been portrayed by anyone else, he’d have been an entirely different creature; so I wouldn’t say Goren was actually born until D’Onofrio put flesh on the bones of the character Balcer provided. 
