Look at that title, "Season 15." South Park first premiered in the summer of 1997. It's hard to believe that what started as basically four foul mouthed kids has managed to stick around this long and still be good. If the mid-season finale is any indication, the show may not be around too much longer, or it could just be Matt and Trey pulling one over on us. Guess we'll get a better indication in the fall.
I'm getting ahead of myself, though. The season started out strong with "HUMANCENTiPAD," a pretty thorough mocking of Apple in all it's Apple-ness wrapped in the guise of a body horror movie that few saw but most have heard of (side note - Human Centipede II was just completely banned in the UK). I especially love the plot device of Kyle not reading the "Terms and Conditions" and how everyone in this world can't believe he would agree to something without reading what he was agreeing to.
From there, the season took a sharp downturn into a couple of no where near as good episodes. I can't think of an actual bad South Park episode in years, but "Funnybot" and "Royal Pudding" were a definite step below the norm. That the titular Funnybot was a reference to the Daleks of Doctor Who was amusing, but nothing great like the Tron references last year. The one thing I really enjoyed was Tyler Perry and Token's inability to not find him funny. I usually enjoy when the Canadians are brought to light, but everything outside the mocking of the royal wedding rituals in "Roayl Pudding" was just kind of boring. I did really enjoy those two scenes with commentator remarking on which crazy things that were happening were part of tradition or not.
Next, there was an uptick with "T.M.I." While also not a great episode and with a point that has been made many times before (an inverse proportion of penis size to anger), it at least made me laugh more consistently throughout. Now we were getting somewhere with "Crack Baby Association." A parody of The Firm and Wall Street that becomes a skewering of the NCAA not paying its athletes is the kind of thing South Park revels in. Cartman's talk with the dean about student athletes/slaves was a wonderful scene. Another good episode followed with "City Sushi." Even though the Lu Kim character is really just an excuse to pronounce "city" as "shitty," I've always enjoyed that character, and Butters almost never fails to be great. Butters crazy parents believing his imaginary playing roles are actually multiple personalities is classic South Park parent failure. The twist of the two stories combining at the end was also well played.
And then the mid-season finale, "You're Getting Old." When this episode began it seemed a pretty standard episode. Parents don't understand kinds music. Said kids music actually consists of farting and crapping noises so when the parent says it sounds like crap, it really does. However, something more clever is actually going on. There isn't actual crap noises in the music that's only how the parents perceive it, the kids hear the same noises when they listen to the Police. Then things become really bad for Stan when, after his 10th birthday the kids stuff starts sounding like shit and the adult stuff starts sounding like shit. He's come down with "cynical bastard" and everything to him starts to look and sound like shit. Randy has his usual taking things too far with liking the kid music, but then that gets upended when in an argument with Sharon he admits he does all those things because he's not happy in their marriage. Stan's friends don't want to hang out with him because he complains how everything is shit and his parents are splitting up. The episode ends with a montage to "Landslide" which is a song I've never cared for, but damn if I didn't get a little emotional during it.
When the season returns in the fall I hope Matt and Trey keep this up and don't pull a Kenny reset. This could really build to something if this turns out to be the end of South Park. They do have a Tony Award Winning Best Musical on Broadway right now. Maybe they feel it might be time to move on, 15 years is a long time.
As a side note, it's been 10 years since "It Hits the Fan" aired when Comedy Central allowed South Park to say "shit" for an episode and they counted out in the corner 162 utterances of the word. It was a big deal back then, but now I wonder if this last episode would have surpassed it and no one cared. How times have changed.
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