Law & Order Does Spider-Man Musical Episode

We usually ignore Law & Order: Criminal Intent because it's the creepy Vincent D'Onofrio Law & Order that got banished to USA Network, but their Sunday episode just sounds too good to resist. In one of the franchise's standard "ripped from the headlines" plots the detectives investigate a case involving Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark clone, even opening with an actor falling in a "high-wire accident" -- this one playing Icarus and not our beloved and bemoaned Spidey. Cynthia Nixon is a Julie Taymor-like director and, get your OMG caps on, Patti Smith plays what ArtsBeat describes as "an academic expert in mythology who helps the detectives solve the case." Basically it seems that Law & Order is imagining what would have happened if the show were the disaster everyone thought it was going to be instead of just, like the Voice's own Michael Feingold says, an "ordinary bad musical." [NYT]