Thanks to lockdown, and much like Butters with The Simpsons, I have seen just about every episode of South Park. I enjoyed most of them, others not so much. But before I go any further, I think a brief history lesson is warranted.
South Park began in 1997 and was created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone following on from two short Christmas films they had made. As most people will know it focuses on a group of four friends, Stan Marsh, Kyle Brovlovksi, Kenny McCormick and of course Eric Cartman. Typical episodes would have the boys getting involved in one crazy situation after another and often had a satirical edge. It was undeniably vulgar and controversial, but above all else, popular. It has spawned a cinema film, video games, CDs and innumerable merchandise, and is still running to this day.
Like any long running show, South Park has had to find ways to keep the audience engaged and for the past few seasons they appear to have abandoned the weekly ‘standalone’ stories in favour of serials with ongoing themes and storylines – with often mixed results.
Back in 2014 when season 18 was airing, there was no overarching theme. We got episodes on subjects like start-up companies, gluten, transgender bathrooms and Uber, ending with a two-part finale with its own plot about holographic entertainers and how families don’t watch TV in their living rooms anymore. Just about every plot detail came back into the finale at some point, either front and centre or within a line of dialogue. It probably sounded like a good idea at the time as it could lead to a majority of the other South Park kids being angry at the main four because of the way they behaved at the thought of having a start-up company that quickly failed. I don’t think you had to have seen every single episode of the season to enjoy and follow what was going on in the finale, but that appeared to be the way that it was meant to be viewed and experienced.
A year later, the same method was applied but this the overarching theme of the season was obviously political correctness. There’s a heavy emphasis on the then new character, PC Principal. It started off well enough but digressed onto topics like Mr Garrison running for president, Canadian immigrants, Yelp critics, safe spaces and city gentrification. That’s quite a lot of subjects for half hour show with only a ten-episode run. Some of it’s done fairly well, although the episode about the ninjas feels a little out of place with the rest of it. But what I do find a little odd is how we get from trying to get rid of a violently politically correct principal to a world-ending scenario involving sentient advertisements and everyone pointing guns at each other.
2016 brought America another election so of course South Park was going to have some fun with it. Its topics of choice included the election itself, internet trolls, a war between the sexes at school, and nostalgia-inducing berries. This was also where the show started going overboard with dramatic cliff-hangers to ensure viewers for the following episodes. Once again, a lot of topics were being covered but it all went crazy following the election night. The writers apparently planned out the season on the assumption that Clinton would win and when that didn’t happen, they needed a plan B in a hurry. Suddenly the episodes were about trying to stop Denmark from tracking trolls all over the world, and Cartman getting a girlfriend and having visions of Mars and using SpaceX to get there. Once again it started off simply but somehow escalated to a level I don’t think anyone could have seen coming.
Season 21 tried to do things a little differently. Once again, continuity was carried over from episode to episode. But there was one problem; with Season 19 and 20, sudden as the changes in them were, they did have what felt like a natural ending by the time the final episode was over. But with 21 that was thrown away and we were left with a finale that felt anti-climactic and unsatisfying. (Not forgetting that Cartman still had a girlfriend who eventually become a female version of him.)
Things didn’t improve much the following year. Stone and Parker really concentrated on the character of Randy Marsh – maybe a little too much – and had several episodes centred on him and his new weed-growing ‘Tegridy Farms’. Like the idea of serial-type seasons it probably looked good on paper but fails in execution. The finale is about Amazon workers on strike and everyone looking forward to a bike parade. Once again there was no real sense of a climax and the season just petered out.
If serialization was intended to help the show focus on characters that don’t get a lot of attention, then Season 23 was that idea taken to extremes. Now nearly all ten episodes had their own opening sequences, from the farm to the PC Babies and even all the main female characters got an intro that called itself “One for the ladies”. Did people somehow forget that this show is about four young boys in a Colorado mountain town?
Then 2020 happened and people weren’t expecting any new South Park due to the pandemic. But then out of the blue came the one-hour Pandemic Special and it looked set to tackle everything the year had given us. But once again there was a problem: yes, the serialized South Park tackled multiple issues but at least had multiple episodes to do it in. But a one-hour special can only take on so much, and some subjects will only have half the depth of others explored. It looks at the pandemic and how it’s affecting people, Zoom calls and social distancing. I thought it was okay at best, it could have been funnier.
Less than a month ago both the UK and US got to see the Vaccination Special which looked at people’s efforts to get vaccinated and saw President Garrison returning to South Park following the 2020 election and expecting everything to go back to the way it was. By the end of the special one teacher has caught Coronavirus and died from it and thanks to a sense of growing mistrust among them, the four main characters end their friendship and go their separate ways while trying to agree on who can be with Kenny on what day.
After multiple seasons that have carried continuity from episode to episode, and hour-long specials, I really do wonder when we will get the old South Park back, when it was about the four boys going on crazy adventures that often resulted in a speech from Kyle. Standalone episodes about the boys becoming cops or encountering celebrity ghosts are what got the show to this point in its history. Yes, it’s had stories in two or even three parts sometimes, but that was made to feel like an occasion and was often saved for a story that was worth more than one episode. If you ask me, recent South Park struggles to be funny and seems more concerned with preaching at the viewer, with ‘messages’ about how workers turn on people during strikes and how detention centres can traumatise children. South Park has proved itself time and time again to be capable of handling such unpleasant subject matter -but still keeping the comedy going; and most of them were carried out successfully in just over twenty minutes in standalone episodes that happily hit the reset button when it was all over.
I don’t know if South Park will do more with the serialized format, but I think many long-time fans share my view that it has run its course and it’s time to go back to the way things were. As always it lies in the hands of the creators – let’s hope that they will come to a decision that will determine a positive future for South Park.