Last night, on a Very Special Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, showrunner Warren Leight made good on his promise to combine every racial issue from the summer into one blockbuster racial episode that involved Cybill Shepherd as a Paula Deen-wannabe who shoots a black teenager in a hoodie (echoing the shooting of Trayvon Martin) while the police force squabbled over stop-and-frisk.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxaiYTXjk64&w=560&h=315]
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Ooh, she’s so evil! Or racist! Or both! For the record, Mr. Leight also believed he could have lumped this weekend’s government shutdown into the mix, telling the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
“They’re seemingly different stories, but they all involve race,” Leight says of the episode, which airs Oct. 2 at 9/8c on NBC. “Clearly race is the issue that does not go away. I would suspect that part of the reason the government shutdown is happening is that people are still uncomfortable with an African American president, six years in. Everyone tip toes around it.”
Woof. Even more woof-er is the end of the episode, which followed one of Law & Order’s favorite tropes: the Bad Guy Who Gets a Not-Guilty Verdict So the Cops Can Shake Their Head About the State of the World Today. Unfortunately, this wasn’t followed by our favorite L&O trope: Bad Guy Gets Shot on the Stairs Leading to the Hall of Justice.
