‘Paula Deen SHOOTS Trayvon Martin’ in new SVU that wraps both scandals into one controversial episode… and Cybill Shepard plays gun-wielding TV chef.” the headline at the London Daily Mail breathlessly reports, in a story that’s largely cribbed from this Entertainment Weekly article:

In fact, the SVU writers have taken things one step further and combined two of the year’s biggest headlines: The trial of Zimmerman over the killing of Florida teen Trayvon Martin and the Paula Deen scandal. “[Jeffrey] Tambor is a defense attorney representing a very high-profile celebrity woman chef who thought she was being pursued by a rapist and turned around it was a teenager. And she shot him,” said Leight in an interview with EW. “There’s a lot of stop and frisk elements to that as well. Cybill Shephard is playing the part of the celebrity chef, and Smash’s Leslie Odom, Jr. is portraying a minister of the slain child in what will be the third episode of the season. They won’t be shying away from the big questions either, according to Leight. “Is racial profiling justifiable? Can self-defense involve racial profiling? We’re diving right into that,” he said. “Can that happen in New York? Absolutely.”

Can a show chockablock with leftist Democrats smear their fellow Obama supporters? Can a show look back and see the shark it’s jumped is receding even further in the distance? Can once semi-respected crime drama become camp? Is it time to retire this show? Absolutely.

If I’m remembering correctly, the original Law & Order had a heavy-handed anti-Tea Party allegory in its last season before euthanasia was mercifully applied to that once-great, long-exhausted series. Perhaps this upcoming segment is, if we’re lucky, a similar clue that the end is near for its spin-off.

Incidentally, I wonder what the man who is suing NBC’s news division for slandering him thinks about this development.

Matthew Sheffield of Newsbusters has further thoughts on this segment ripped from the headlines Dick Wolf’s fever swamp imagination.

(Cross-posted at Ed Driscoll.com.)