Last night’s episode of Law & Order: SVU promised a lip-lock between the red-headed stepchild of comedy, Kathy Griffin, and the fine lesbian icon that is Mariska Hargitay.
Guess what folks, they took out the kiss.
But this is just one of the things that angered me.
First, the entire episode was filled with over-the-top stereotypes and an unusually large group of bad actors.
Second, had I known there wasn’t going to be a kiss, I would’ve stepped away from my TV long enough to make my evening popcorn.
Third, we can’t even get a self-proclaimed militant lesbian to remain gay for the duration of an hour-long program. At the end, she was suddenly bisexual.
Our own Trish Bendix summed it up best when she said (via her Twitter account), “B.D. Wong, how did you let this happen?”
Since I suffered through all of this for you anyway, here are the high and low-lights:
Five minutes in, helloooo Mariska! “Dun dun, da da da da da, eoowie ooie.”
Let the terrible acting begin! Our first suspect in the brutal killing of a seemingly pleasant woman is a guy who thinks he’s a vampire. Can we please stop with the vampire stuff already?
Twelve minutes in, here come the lesbians and, for the first time in network history, they come in all shapes, sizes, ages and colors. Taste the rainbow!
Kathy Griffin makes her first appearance as Babs Duffy, the lesbian crusader who only fights for lesbian rights and will not touch a cause if it is gay/bi/trans/the list goes on. Her organization (with terrible logo design) is called “Lesbestrong.com” and she exclaims, “We’re dykes we’re pissed and we’re not going anywhere.” Get used to it!
It’s almost impossible to watch Kathy Griffin and take her at all seriously. I was waiting for everyone to laugh after she delivered every line.
Fourteen minutes in, Stabler gives a shout out to Trish and Emily Hartl when he mentions “Gal Pals.” The cops on SVU are obviously big fans of AfterEllen.com. Then, we learn that the murdered girl is a lez.
Back to the storyline, Stabler and Benson visit the girlfriend of the deceased. She is weird, to say the least, and the actress is using an accent I can’t quite place – it’s a mixture of British, Canadian and Fargo, North Dakota. Either she is awful or she has created a terribly complex character structure.
As she is being questioned about whether there are any men she might suspect, she explains, “We don’t hang out with a lot of men.”
Right, we hate men. All of us.
We are set up with a bad stereotype only to have Babs try to knock another one down when she says, “Oh right, because I’m a lesbian I should be at home with my cats. Sheet-rocking my bathroom.”
Somehow it has taken until almost 20 minutes into the show for Babs to hit on Olivia. Mind-boggling.
Benson gets back to the precinct and goes to our favorite Gaysian to get answers about lesbians. Turns out Sharon, the girlfriend with the weird accent, has a history of being abusive.
Stabler and Benson visit the ex-girlfriend of Sharon who is, of course, either an architect or construction worker. She explains to the detectives that Sharon’s alter-ego, Mitch, was the pet name “My Bitch” that Sharon uses in bed and is violent. “Mitch” is also the last word the dead girl ever said. DUN DUN!
When they pick Sharon up, she hits Stabler in the face and breaks some skin. They pull her in for questioning and she refuses to talk to Stabler, she wants to be locked in the room with Benson the hottie. Stabler then chuckles and says, “Some women don’t want to talk man-to-man.”
Really nice NBC, very grown up.
This Mitch character is just bizarre and over-acted. “Straights never understand people like me,” she cries to Olivia, “I get angry about things and I hit people, hit people I love.” Olivia moves closer and vows (in a very sexy deep voice) that she wants to help.
Another lesbian gets attacked, and this time the assailant has a message for Babs: she’s next! Olivia decides to stay with her and protect her. They begin to act just like a regular lesbian couple – Olivia tells Babs to stop updating her Twitter account (just like my REAL girlfriend!). They’re the new Tibette!
Was it just me, or was Olivia actually being really flirty? It’s understandable that Babs would go in for a kiss – but no, NBC fails and the kiss never connects – despite being hyped by NBC in advance. Olivia says, “That’s not on the menu.” I say, let’s go to another restaurant!
Babs tells her, “Ok, the job and the gun and the attitude? You’re like Ellen, Joan Crawford and Calamity Jane all rolled into one. If you can balance a checkbook I’ll throw in Suze Orman.” (Best line of the night).
Olivia gets duty relief from another pretty female officer and warns, “If I were you I’d stay outside,” because she’s too pretty to go into the lesbian lion’s den and be left alone with Babs. Whatevs.
Olivia, possibly questioning herself, then asks Stabler if she gives off a gay vibe:
Um, more like I haven’t seen a jock walk like that since I was BFF’s with the women’s basketball team in college.
Okay, so it turns out the perp was not really a perp – he was (gasp) Babs’s boyfriend.
Whyyyy?
Why did this have to happen? Now we need to get into the whole “lesbians hate bisexuals” crapola. Olivia and Stabler force Babs to come out as bisexual at a press conference she gives to all of her militant lesbian friends.
Again, whyyyy?
The only good news to come out of the press conference is that they were able to nab the right suspect. They bring him in for questioning and Olivia plays good cop-bad cop-gay cop with him.
When she sits on the table, my girlfriend says, “Oh she is hot! Reeeeowr.”
Yes, sit on that backwards chair, coerce the suspect into crying out his confession, grab his crotch…wait, what? Ah, of course, it’s the old “grab-his-crotch-to-get-a-confession-trick.” It works, the end.
WTF?
Coming into this, I didn’t expect the episode to be anything but over-the-top. You can’t cast Kathy Griffin in a role and expect to see some serious acting or plotline. That being said, I expected a lot more from this episode. And taking the kiss out was, I think, a pretty big slap in the face, particularly after all the hype surrounding it. Sure, I would’ve preferred seeing Mariska make out with say, Jennifer Beals or Alex Hedison, but I’d take pretty much anything at this point.
What did you think of the episode?
