The "Law & Order: SVU" Twofer ... The Good, The Bad, And The Kathy Griffin

Egads.

Let me start by saying that I do like Law & Order: SVU. Really, I do. It's the only show in the franchise that I've ever watched, primarily because of the talents of Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni.

So it pains me to say that "P.C.", the first of last night's double episode, was, in a word ... awful.

We start with the discovery of a woman bleeding and left for dead in an abandoned building. Her last word is "Mitch", which will be important (in an eye-rolling way) later, and she soon succumbs to her injuries in the hospital.

Detectives Stabler and Benson are called in to investigate, and immediately discover that the building had been used by a "death metal" band called Vampyre Sacrifyce.

A-Ha! So it's another one of those "ripped from the headlines" episodes ... if the headline was from 1987.

The detectives hunt through the social networking website "FaceUnion" and haul in the vamp in question (who fancies himself a real vampire and looks like the road show version of True Blood's Eric), but it's obvious that he had nothing to do with the murder. Why? Because the first fifteen minutes of every SVU is a red herring.

Sure enough, the blond bloodsucker is soon given the heave-ho so the real star of the episode can be introduced - Babs Duffy (Kathy Griffin). And this is where the show goes from the sanguine to the the ridiculous.

Next Page - Mitch, please!