Sunday marks the end of an era, although perhaps we should be a bit careful in calling it such, since we thought the era had ended once before. Chris Noth will make his final appearance on Law & Order: Criminal Intent as detective Mike Logan, nearly 18 years after the character was introduced during the first season of Law & Order.

It's hard to know what the impact will be on Criminal Intent, which got its first-run episodes bumped to USA in 2007 due to declining ratings on NBC. (There are rumors that everyone took a pay cut when the series moved, and Noth's lack of interest in doing that is why he's now a former cast member.) Noth will be replaced by Jeff Goldblum, who has been a name star if not a true A-lister for 25 years. On the other hand, neither Goldblum nor the show's key star Vincent D'Onofrio fit the traditional image of the New York City detective. Both connote intellectualism and eccentricity.

That was the element Noth added to Criminal Intent and its parent show: authenticity. The same actor who portrayed the urbane Mr. Big on Sex and the City was completely believable as a detective who wore his temper on his sleeve. When he was matched with Jerry Orbach on Law & Order -- they were together for less than three seasons but are still the best remembered of all L&O detective pairings -- the show really took off for the first time. The world-weary cynicism of Orbach's Lennie Briscoe fit perfectly with Logan's in-your-face physicality.

Along the way, viewers learned some things about what made Logan the man he was, rare bits of character development on the most plot-driven show in television history. He made reference to having been molested by a priest as a boy, something not often talked about in the early '90s. Logan often made sardonic asides relating to his difficult childhood, particularly growing up with an abusive, alcoholic mother. His reaction to the departure of his first two partners (one was killed and the other left the streets after being shot) revealed how much Logan relied on having an older figure in his life that he could trust.

The real Noth had one thing in common with Logan: both could be outspoken when things didn't go their way. After the fifth season of L&O, Noth had his first salary beef. Executive producer Dick Wolf had already developed a reputation for replacing cast members if he felt the chemistry was off or if actors were becoming problems in other ways. Determined to have a show where the scripts were the true stars, Wolf did not hesitate to fire Noth, giving Logan a sendoff that featured him slugging an exonerated murder suspect.

But crucially, Wolf decided not to kill Logan off: he was merely exiled to one of the outer boroughs. This allowed the other L&O characters to make occasional references to what he was doing now, and allowed fans to dream of a scenario that would find him coming back (dreams that grew more fervent after Benjamin Bratt proved to be an inadequate replacement). Logan's first revival came in 1998 with the made-for-TV movie Exiled, which told the story of how Logan got back in the good graces of the NYPD. It was a signal that the wounds were healing, and paved the way for Noth to return to the franchise for good in 2005.

In the meantime, of course, Noth took on a role that while less central to its show proved to be much more significant from a pop culture standpoint, playing the on-again, off-again love interest of Sarah Jessica Parker on Sex and the City. The film version of the series was a surprise hit in the spring, and may have given Noth the push he needed to say goodbye to Criminal Intent.

Like Tom Selleck in a previous generation, Noth is the sort of actor one could have easily imagined having a significant film career if things had broken a little differently. It's not hard to picture him as the object of desire in romantic comedies a la Sex and the City. But I do question if that's the sort of path he can really travel down at this stage. At 51, Noth isn't likely to be a romantic lead playing anything except Big, certainly not as an above-the-title star of an A-list film. But over 18 years, he has become practically the ideal TV cop. Dennis Franz has shown that you can make a very nice living at that.

Unless the sendoff for Logan on Sunday's Criminal Intent has more finality than the one we saw in 1995, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see him pounding the pavement again. It's his destiny.

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