Geek Overture

Before we get started, fyi UK readers-slash-viewers: this week’s episode is based on a US reality show called I Shouldn’t Be Alive, which to me sounds like a reality show about the misbegotten life of a clone mutant. It’s a silly potentially-dangerous-situations re-enactment/talking heads thing, and yet another reality TV parody, which as CultJar points [...]

Another kind of uneven week last time round for South Park. “Jewpacabra” was more of the same for a lot of reasons, and leant pretty heavily on some easy targets and some of Cartman’s well-explored personality quirks. Fun episode, but not a massive return to form. So it’s kind of a relief this week to [...]

Seems like the South Park guys have found their feet after a couple of fairly C+ episodes. This week’s episode, “Faith Hilling” shows off a bunch of their best qualities, and – most satisfyingly – brings everything back to the totally skewed and uncomfortably familiar perspective of Stan and the boys. It also pulls off on [...]

In its sixteenth year, South Park is a little institution all by itself, a unique show made by an alarmingly small writing team on a shockingly short schedule, and the number of times they’ve come up with standalone twenty-minute units of comedy that are still worth watching years down the line is phenomenal. That said, [...]

On the back of news that South Park has been renewed until 2016, which to put into perspective means seventy new episodes, we wrap up the series with “The Poor Kid”, an episode that – much like last year’s “Mysterion Rises” storyline – explores Kenny’s life not only as the middle child in a low-income and emotionally [...]

Okay, you know all the interesting political stuff that South Park‘s been wrestling with recently? Well forget about that. This is the One Where Silly Things Happen. It has a lot in common with “Go God Go” where the future is controlled by warring atheist factions, one of whom is a race of highly intelligent [...]

The only really surprising thing about the South Park take on the #Occupy protests is that it took them so long. Given that it’s maybe not so surprising that the show spends so little of its time dissecting the politics of both sides and so much on Cartman’s explosive psychoses. South Park Elementary – under the [...]

So, remember all the way back in 2005 South Park did an episode that made fun of someone important? It is understandable if you do not, because that is every episode of South Park. What made “Trapped in the Closet” (or S09E12 to its friends) slightly unusual is that Tom Cruise personally had repeats of the [...]

South Park has allegedly come a long way since its debut episode “Cartman Gets An Anal Probe”, aired in August 1997 to an audience of just under a million viewers.