#2. Law & Order: SVU Takes On Gamergate By Making Everyone Unhappy

NBCUniversal Television Distribution

For those unaware, Gamergate was a brief hashtag movement in 2014 which helped women gain a voice in the gaming community (Woo! Nice job, Gamergate!) before unceremoniously dissolving like a dead raccoon in a vat of pickle brine. Other than that, the most worthwhile thing to come from the hullabaloo is undoubtedly one of the most hilariously tone-deaf episodes of Law & Order: SVU ever. That's right, folks -- we're back in Dick Wolf's mind palace, and it's just as we left it.

NBCUniversal Television Distribution

This is about ethics in shitty television.

The episode follows a mashed-together caricature of Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn getting kidnapped and gratuitously brutalized. It's the worst depiction of online harassment ever to be narrated by Ice-T, who fumbles his way through gamerspeak like a blind man with a coloring book:

Like some kind of asshole magic trick, the episode manages to insult everyone. The loner video game misogynists of not-Gamergate are depicted as ISIS-level terrorists, men are painted as mindless violence junkies, and the female game developers who get victimized are ultimately punished for standing up for themselves. In the end, the villains are gunned down while the victim quits the industry, lamenting, "Women in gaming. What did I expect?"

If I had to find a silver lining, it would be the consolation prize of seeing the singer of "Body Count" be monetarily strong-armed into vomiting hackneyed video game references like a rapping granny. Well, a rapping granny who kills a teenager and jokes about it.

NBCUniversal Television Distribution

In the original draft, they throw Lipton teabags at the corpse while saying this.

It's excruciating for everyone. And still, this isn't the worst thing to come out of SVU ...

#1. Paula Deen Killed Trayvon Martin On Law & Order: SVU

NBCUniversal Television Distribution

In case you haven't noticed, every Law & Order: SVU episode I've put on this list manages to take a recent controversy and exaggerate it in such a grotesque way that you kind of feel bad for the terrible people they are lampooning. And with her folksy vacancy and silver mane of the frightened aged, Paula Deen already looks like the ideal personification of racism. It was only dumb luck that the discrimination lawsuit against her surfaced in the exact same month George Zimmerman was put on trial for shooting Trayvon Martin, causing what I'm guessing was a fever of panic at the SVU production offices. And as the writers frantically jumped for both stories like a dog attacking the rain, they eventually landed on smushing the two narratives together like a campfire treat:

NBCUniversal Television Distribution

She kills him with a gun made entirely out of butter.

That's "Jolene Castille," a fictional celebrity chef played by Cybill Shepherd, who shoots a young black boy named "Craybon Marvin" or some shit while walking alone at night during a recent rape scare. You see, it turns out that Craybon matches the description of a serial rapist in the area (read: young and black), whom the cops have been hunting down with the bulletproof investigative technique of tactfully prejudiced stop-and-frisks:

NBCUniversal Television Distribution

"Uh, yeah, I'm not an actor. You're filming in front of my house, asshole."

Terminally lacking in self-awareness, the police are then forced to choose between probable cause and blatant racism, as it is revealed that our Paula Deen lookalike once referred to her black employees as "field hands". Any pretense of subtlety is brutally strangled to death in an alley when the episode reveals that the cartoonishly racist chef is so racist she refuses to touch Ice-T:

NBCUniversal Television Distribution

At this point, Ice-T just has that face during the entire process of making this show.

The episode ends with the obviously guilty chef being exonerated, same as with George Zimmerman. While that might be the realistic outcome, SVU is so batshit crazy that I was half hoping she'd turn into a snake-person whom Ice-T would then have had to kill with a pickax. Every episode seems like an over-the-top fictional cop show that exists in the Arrested Development universe, so much so that I'm seriously wondering if my very existence is a cog in some satirical GTA-like simulation left blinking on standby in a warehouse somewhere. Frankly, that's way less disturbing than picturing the writers' room of Law & Order: SVU.

Dave owns the world's largest collection of medieval dog armor. Hit him up on Twitter.

Also check out 5 Historic Sex Scandals That Put Bill Clinton to Shame and The 6 Worst Attempts at Damage Control in Political Scandals.

Be sure to follow us on our Facebook and also our YouTube page, where you can catch all our video content like After Hours, Cracked Responds, New Guy Weekly, and other videos you won't see on the site!