By Ryan Broderick, Editor-in-Chief
South Park is showing its age in very strange ways lately. Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s latest foray in continuity, a three-part episode following Cartman’s super team Coon and Friends and their battle against Cthulhu, an immortal monster originally created by horror author H.P. Lovecraft who in recent years has become something of an in-joke on the Internet, devolves into gibberish.
Although, once the first episode of three gets underway everything gets really confusing and pretty much loses its focus and becomes a huge steaming pile of weird references and plotlines that don’t go anywhere.
Over the last couple seasons South Park has become a very strange alternating mess, switching between really genius episodes like “Eat, Pray, Queef,” “Medicinal Fried Chicken,” and recently “It’s a Jersey Thing.” But then they put out episodes like “You Have 0 Friends” or “Pee.”
The point is it might be time to start saying goodbye to America’s favorite town of cartoon cut-outs that aren’t actually cut out and really just digitally made to look that way. The most recent contract signed by Stone and Parker have them on until 2011, but it’s hard to see them going any further than that.
Most recently in their Cthulhu three-parter they addressed what might be the last unanswered question about the town of South Park, the question of how Kenny always ends up dying and coming back, apparently he’s magic.
A level of dragging-out and ruining your favorite characters is expected in an American TV show. I mean if you want to watch nicely self-contained and satisfying television, watch BBC. But in a show like South Park, the Generation Y Anti-Simpsons, the show that morphed and mutated out of fart jokes and celebrity’s dying into something almost on a Mark Twain level, that might be over-selling it, but it’s been one of the best and only pieces of satire left on television.
The Dream ending for South Park would be this season to drop continuity all together until the last two episodes, do a double-feature hour long ending where Kenny finally dies, the rest of the gang graduates to high school and we say goodbye to the most foulmouthed children on television. Let’s hope they go gracefully. The last thing we need is another bloated, cynical and utterly detached animated comedy staying on television to sell toys.