South Park: Classic or Dud?

enjoyed first 3 episodes of the new season

first 6 episodes completely wonderful. 7th is where we find out whether they've moderated their stance on trans rights though so i'm a bit nervous

the answer turned out to be 'we just wanted to self-knowingly bait the liberals' but i think they're maybe closer to a positive portrayal of an actual trans character, give it another 5 years ffs

nonetheless, the show is generally as good now as it's ever been, both morally and as a satire

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2019 season is nominated in the 2019 ILX TV poll:

ILX's Best Television of 2019 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends January 31

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (4 minimum, 25 maximum, organized by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail by end of day today. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

Pandemic special is out now - nice behind-the-scenes video showing them shipping workstations to the artists' homes, animators crawling under their houses to install ethernet extensions etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox1x-OzxRII

Parker and Stone's new deepfake video made me lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM

kinda endearing that their style of humor has not changed at all over the years, watching that I feel like I'm stuck in 2004

900 million!
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/14-south-park-films-parker-stone-deal-1234993150/

"South Park" got really tiresome really fast.

― Michael, Friday, June 8, 2001 (twenty years ago)

apparently the next thing shows the characters as if they actually aged normally over the last 25 years?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzEoBrr9gRA

looks fun and lol @ Cartman's chosen profession but everything else seems like Babylon Bee-style humor

The premise is that COVID is "nearly beaten" so things will get back to normal "soon". Trouble is, it's 40 years later.

It's a fairly gun romp at times which closes out the Randy stories of the past couple of seasons and has none-too-subtle digs at anti-vaxxers, cryptocurrency and woke comedians along with some interesting characterisation of what the cast are like at that age.

To be honest, I'd be happy if it was the end of the show. It's a perfectly good full stop, in much the same way that You Got Old was.

o nice, will watch this

i haven't watched south park in decades but i'll give this a shot

This show is not ending - it's been extended to its 30th season, with 14 additional movies to be made in between.

https://screenrant.com/south-park-season-30-renewed-new-movies-updates/

It's okay. They got given a massive sum of money to make a dozen or so hour-long specials. The result is that it feels a bit like they don't need money, ratings or notoriety so they are just doing whatever they want, even if it's not really very funny. The format was already evolving over the past few series but it's now feels very different from classic South Park. Reminds me a bit of when Red Dwarf did a series with longer, unfunny episodes and half the cast missing or changed.

It's plot-heavy and there are not many gags and some of them are old, or just fall flat. Removing the kids seems like it would put the show in every shark-jump top ten list forever. Cartman is totally neutered and Butters isn't present so they've lost the best characters. The parents and teachers etc are barely there so they've removed that important dynamic. Kinda expect everything to go back to normal but maybe not.

It's still pretty good though. 3 bags of popcorn and maybe it'll get better once Butters and the real Cartman show up.

Didn't mean to imply it was ending, just that it would have made a satisfactory coda.

Butters isn't present

Well, he is, but...

Yes, I do expect the next episode to be funnier.

There was a point where the show started getting heavily serialized and I was kind of curious to see how that would play out, but the character of "PC Principal" was so detached from reality it was hard to watch so much of him. Yes, even for South Park, it was too stupid.

I loved PC Principal

The second part was pretty funny. I watched it with a few others and we were all laughing a lot. Still think they wasted Cartman but Butters destiny was pretty lol.

Thought this was pretty cool, and like many non-Coloradans, I didn’t know if it was a real place or something they’d come up with for the show:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/us/casa-bonita-restaurant.html

That story is amazing