I've been a big fan of South Park since I was but a middle schooler. In addition to being really funny, it served as an important escape during some tough times in my life and when I was much younger, it helped me to make sense of things that were way over my head or outside of my sphere of knowledge. It's crazy to think that something that's self-described as "a show about potty-mouthed fourth-graders" can be those things, but the truth is that South Park has always had something useful to say and is often on-point with its social commentary.
Recently, South Park has organized itself into season-long arcs. While it's always had some appetite for playing the long game, the commitment to turning each set of 10 episodes into its own little movie with a few side plots mixed in has largely been effective. Season 19 of South Park, which was basically an extended story about PC culture, Donald Trump's rise to popularity, and the unsettling prominence of sponsored content online, was the long-running series' crowning achievement. That sentence seems bizarre, particularly when rivals The Simpsons and Family Guy had thoroughly tanked far prior to that breakpoint, but it's true.
Season 20 of South Park largely picked up right where Season 19 left off. PC Principal remained on as a character, albeit more of a minor one, and we jumped right back into the presidential campaign, featuring an over-his-head Mr. Garrison as a Trump stand-in against Hillary Clinton. Shortly after the season begins, we're introduced to one of the season's best features, "member berries". These are essentially little purple berries that speak in high-pitched voices about pop-culture days of yore ("memba Jeff Goldblum?"), most frequently about Star Wars. The overall point that Trey Parker and Matt Stone were trying to get across with these is that there's a lot of parallels between nostalgia and the things that many voters felt Donald Trump stood for. While this was fairly obvious from the start and they still spelled it out for the viewer, it made for a compelling storyline.
The other excellent narrative from the early half of the season was an in-depth look at online trolling. There's a troll on the school message board that's ripping girls to shreds and everyone is completely convinced it's Cartman. In a crazy twist, it turns out that the troll is Gerald Broflovski, who is just about the last person you'd expect. Gerald is a successful lawyer and is the patriarch of the closest thing that South Park has to a stable family. The stereotypical reasons that one might assign to trolling (rage coming from getting picked on as a kid, behavior stemming from the shittiness of one's own life, a complete lack of morals, etc.) don't really apply to Gerald. He's just doing it because he thinks it's really funny. One of the strongest episodes shows Gerald, fresh off a trolling session, leaving the house and interacting with the world in a thoroughly positive, friendly way. Trolls can be a jerk to strangers on the internet and not have that behavior affect their life at all once they step away from the computer, so it's a way to act privately in the most public of forums. It's commentary on how the internet reflects the ugliness of many of us and that we can't assume anything about the people we meet there.
After a relatively strong start, however, Season 20 begins to lose a lot of its steam. The latter half of the season revolves around a scheme from some folks in Denmark trying to set up something called "Troll Trace" that would make everyone's internet history public. There's some decent one-liners in there along with jokes about just how catastrophic that would be for the vast majority of humans, but overall, the last several episodes fall relatively flat. They're mostly just forcing the plot forward at the expense of being funny or saying anything meaningful, and unlike last season's PC Principal arc, the plot wasn't edge-of-your-seat exciting.
I'm sure much of this can be forgiven because Parker and Stone got thrown for a loop on Election Day when Donald Trump won the presidency and they had to scramble to re-boot an episode in less than 24 hours (consequently, that episode sucked). That afforded them the opportunity to get in more Trump satire (splicing "Hail to the Chief" with "The Imperial March" was particularly inspired, particularly given the season's focus on Star Wars), but there's plenty of that to go around these days. I would have loved to see how they would have wound up the season had Clinton won, because you get the sense that was the story they were prepared to tell.
I guess this means that South Park is back to being just a good show instead of whatever awesomeness we got to experience in 2015. That's just fine for a show that just concluded its second decade of life. At this point, it's doubtful that Parker and Stone's material will ever get stale, because the insanity of our wonderful society will always keep generating more.
Season Grade: B
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