South Park: Season 20
A “bad” season of South Park? How is that possible?
Brief Backstory
Comedy Central’s most iconic series – South Park, is often ranked as not only one of the greatest adult animated series, but also one of the greatest shows of all time. The first few episodes were of a rickety start but quickly became a major hit just after finishing the 1st season.
Surprisingly, South Park has had its’ share of bad episodes (thankfully these are typically isolated unlike Family Guy or SpongeBob) but as time went around 2014/2015, South Park would switch from episodes that were sometimes affiliated with a previous episode to full blown serialization starting around season 18/19. While season 19 for the most part has held up decently, the following season, season 20, was relatively panned and often ranks as one of – if not, the worst season of the series. While the quality of South Park has claimed to have improved since season 20, the damage from season 20 had forever harmed South Park.
Story
A mysterious person in South Park named Skankhunt42 has been harassing people, some of whom had committed suicide. In light of this, a Danish company decides to retaliate with a system that detects cyberbullying. Meanwhile, Mr. Garrison decides to run for president while sentient fruit conspire to control America.
Random Facts
Even Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, had deemed this season as a disaster. This led to scrapping future serialized stories for South Park.
Originally, this season was written to have Hilary Clinton as the winner of the 2016 election. Due to her losing the election, the tail end of the season had to be completely reworked in a brutal time crunch.
According to a high school yearbook of mine, South Park was the most popular show at my high school. So in a way this somewhat probably made lots of my high school alumni disappointed.
The Danish song is Tjing Tjang Tjing.
Random Opinions
I’m tired of serialized animated shows… I mean it works well for some like the old X-Men series from the 90s, F is for Family, Solar Opposites, and Koala Man, but for something that wasn’t originally serialized, then it doesn’t work. Nevertheless I personally think serializing is getting old. Time to find another way to create a series, people!
Because this is serialized, I have placed this under the “films” section on my blog.
Come on man, is Star Wars seriously the only thing member berries talk about mostly when they’re not talking about conspiring a hostile takeover? There are plenty of things they could “member” like Lion King or Wolfenstein 3D.
After Trump won in 2016, it would’ve been better to delay the rest of the season rather than saying “fuck it – blow everything up!” but then again Parker and Stone probably couldn’t delay any longer. I’m sure they couldn’t.
Pros
- Cartman’s shirt is hilarious.
- The premise would’ve worked well for a movie, not a season.
Cons
- Already rather dated. Episodes from the earlier seasons are still just as great as they were back then because the writing was just so much better.
- If you didn’t like Sheila in the other episodes, you’re going to want to draw and quarter that loudmouthed beaver by the end of the season. And people say Gurgi from the Black Cauldron was annoying!
- Emoji analysis? Why? That has to go down as one of the stupidest things I’ve heard of in my life!!
- Normally South Park is great with politics, but the election coverage was already all over the news.
- The member berries (when they’re not saying anti-american sludge) constantly reference Star Wars and almost nothing else. If I wanted to “member” Star Wars, I’d watch the fucking trilogy!!
- No, I do not enjoy the relationship between Cartman and Heidi. Cartman is best when he’s diabolical, not turning into modern Stewie Griffin. Come on man, he grinded up a kid’s parents and turned that kid into a cannibal, disguised a fan club as neo-nazis, tricked Butters into ending up lost, and attempted to resurrect the actual Civil War!! This makes Katz’s plan of mixing colors in a washing machine look evil!!
- The biggest issue here is that this season actively made a long running series that was going well for nearly TWENTY seasons jump multiple sharks. Afterwards, South Park just never got back up to how good it was prior (however the later seasons are still better than this.)
Rating: 4/10 – Poor
While I can’t blame Parker and Stone for their animosity toward this season, the fact of the matter is they made it and should remained ashamed of themselves for doing so.
Still though I’ll take this over modern Family Guy.
Leave a Reply