g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Cartago Delenda Est




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Thursday, October 4, 2007
13:27 - Get that wobble under control

(top)
Is it just me, or have the latest couple of seasons of South Park seemed a bit... I dunno... forced?

It's like they've finally reached a plateau where they can't shock us anymore. The last ten or fifteen episodes have all been grandiose, megalomaniacal, and seem to be overreaching their grasp. It's now all blockbustery soundtracks and overwrought social-commentary plots, and their twists of premise don't quite seem to ring with the same incisive wit as they used to. Randy Marsh being persecuted by rednecks for having used the "N-word" on national TV? The homeless as zombies? Hillary Clinton unwittingly harboring a "snuke"? Yet another bit of global warming teeth-grinding, cast among head lice?

Last night's premiere of the second half of Season 11 was more of the same: Cartman pretends to have Tourette Syndrome. Unfortunately, that sentence right there kinda tells you everything there is about the episode: Cartman likes to swear and get away with it, so, score. The plot doesn't really twist from there. And it was broadcast uncensored, so the whole thing felt more like an excuse to play a bunch of swear words on the air than like a real episode. Like Trey and Matt missed the thrill they got from "It Hits the Fan" back in the day, and tried to recapture it.

What's funny is that South Park made its very own "jumping the shark" joke, literally showing Fonzie jumping over a shark on his motorcycle, many seasons ago. Yet they kept on building the edifice higher and higher after that. I sort of think that the point where things really did start to go stale was right about at "A Million Little Fibers": not funny, not clever, and really just not South Park.

Can they get the energy back? I hope so; but if their plan is to just keep aiming for bigger and bigger targets and using more bombast and manufactured gravitas every time, it's just going to take it further and further away from the down-home, character-driven show that it has to be at its core for all the social commentary to work in the first place.

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