First episode of the new season of South Park already a huge hit with ratings
Andrew Sandoval
Mesa Legend
What Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and their creative team have made is one of the vilest, offensive, nonsensical allegories to our modern society ever incepted, as well as one of the most ingenious, captivatingly hilarious and surprisingly accurate shows ever viewed by human eyeballs. Member Berries are the life blood of what is to be a South Park fan. Many people have been following the show since its inception back in 1997. They take current events and turn them on their head, using topics of pop culture as the framework for their main characters to navigate. When these four foul-mouthed fourth graders get together it’s a guaranteed laugh, and Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman aren’t the only ones in the spotlight, now the show boast more than seventeen hundred unique and interesting characters within its two hundred and sixty-eight episode run.
Photo courtesy of Peabody Awards
The newest episode dawns on their 20th season debut, and these men have the magic formula to whatever it is that makes this show great. In a joke of Meta proportions, the show looks back on one of its earlier episodes, “Douche and Turd” and compares it to today’s presidential elections. Not only did they address the current reflection of America’s collective perception of the candidates, but they managed to tie that all into the Kaepernick controversy, topped off with the reboot of the national anthem done by none other than J.J Abrams himself.
With the South Park cow cheerleaders sitting down in an act of civil disobedience the whole town came to see the event unfold as news commentators cover the grade school sports game, only to leave the game as soon as they found out whom would sit. Mr. Garrison and Caitlyn Jenner continue their campaign across the country but they run into problems when Mr. Garrison realizes he doesn’t want to be president anymore. In the past few seasons it’s become common practice to juggle two or three stories within these thirty minute episodes, today they have reached a point of mastery within their craft Continuity is now the theme of the show, last year the whole season followed one single story arc, this year it seems to be following the same pattern picking up where it left off and leaving the end of the episode with a shocking reveal.
We see the return of some of the shows most beloved characters from Cartman to Mr. Mackey, and the crowd favorite, Randy Marsh himself. Randy runs into butters dad at the supermarket where he suggests to Randy that he should check out Member Berries, a new type of fruit that calms you down and helps you remember the good times. These cute little purple grapes with faces spout off nostalgic history; Star Wars, Bionic Man, Chewbacca, everything that would be enticing to Randy, right before they start spewing racial objectification and anti-gay comments cloaked under phrases like “member when marriage was between a man and a woman”. Leaving randy to question the grapes intentions.
It’s honestly insane the amount of story and detail they manage to cram into this show, while still keeping to a weeklong production schedule.Not only are there at least five budding subplots buried in his short narrative but they are definitely taking a page out of Netflix’s and the likes’ playbook, leading each episode into one another like one long continuous movie. Some critics are a little harsher on the show after the years, but it’s a show that is kind of like Saturday Night Live it’s never going to run out of ideas as long as things keep happening in the world and Matt and Trey find them hilarious.
Throughout the episode, Cartman and Kyle continue their aversion towards each other as Kyle tracks down the person responsible for shaming the girls on the school’s social media page, and Cartman is his main suspect, things seem to be heating up fast. In the conclusion of the episode Mr. Garrison try’s to cash in on the Kaepernick controversy by not standing during the pledge of allegiance at a football game but J. J Abrams new national anthem stops him right in his tracks. The 20th season premiere was a great continuation of their new found story pacing and original content and the fans are all waiting in anticipation for next week’s episode “Skank Hunt”.You can catch South Park Wednesday at 10/9C on Comedy Central.
