South Park subsists on controversy and conflict the same way you and I subsist on carbon-based food matter. In this respect, the show could go on forever; the world sure isn’t getting less hysterical and contentious with time, providing Trey Parker and Matt Stone with an infinite supply of grist for their mill of proudly dim-witted parody. (Or at least, enough to fulfill their contract with Comedy Central for another five seasons and 12 hour-long TV movies to run on the Paramount Plus platform.) Limited more by the practicalities of maintaining a famously rigorous production schedule under the added strain of a pandemic than by creative stagnation, the show now returns to a regular season order following a quasi-hiatus that saw 2020 and 2021 pass with a pair of specials apiece. And because America continues to grow more fractious and paranoid, a pop-culture institution entering its 25th season still has plenty to work with – yet little to say.
The recent tragedy of parents and children everywhere comes to South Park as a lucky break, the setting at an elementary school placing the foul-mouthed tots right in the zeitgeist’s crosshairs. As the most inflammatory subject of public discourse, masking naturally claims the focus of last night’s premiere episode Pajama Day. The students in Mr Garrison’s classroom are abuzz about the chance to model their comfiest clothing for friends during the schoolwide holiday Mr Mackey calls “the Met Gala for children”. But when the youngsters show insufficient enthusiasm for Mr Garrison’s news that he’s found a boyfriend, he freaks out and bans them all from taking part in Pajama Day, an injustice that the town’s grownups protest by wearing their own PJs to work, the store and every other enclosed space. Of course riots break out, and at every step of this convoluted societal breakdown, whoever feels slighted by the turns of fortune busts out a comparison to Germany under Nazi rule.
Though it feels like we’re in a flashpoint moment as a nation and perhaps even species, this is basically business as usual for South Park. Parker and Stone continue to thrive on the non-commentary that their strategy of partial metaphor affords them, hiding behind the joke once it comes time to make a statement beyond the broadly agreeable. The divisiveness of pajama-wearing allows them to get a few good blows in, as in the scene that sees an anti-pajama-er declaring that he’ll never be cozy again, a succinct summation of the self-defeating “own the libs” philosophy currently dominating conservative thought. Earlier, rage faucet Cartman sputters a probable approximation of what many grade-schoolers have thought over the past couple of years: “We keep not doing anything wrong, and we keep getting fucked!”
But the pressing question of pajamas turns into an easy out when the episode might strive to do more than articulate our pent-up frustration. Of course no one expects pearls of sagacity from the show with the talking poop and the weed-smoking towel, but the tidy resolution tying things up still comes as a cop-out. After a faux-stirring monologue about doing the right thing and how “saying you were wrong is sometimes the strongest thing you can do” (a line delivered with surprising, awkward sincerity from a cornerstone of nose-thumbing irony), PC Principal uses Opposite Day to defuse the tensions. The show invites and refuses real-world analogs at its own convenience, ultimately offering a shrug of the shoulders.
That’s a slanted way of saying that in its third decade of existence, this show has maintained a freakish level of consistency, still getting its customary half-dozen-or-so laughs. There’s a well-deployed running joke about Matt Damon’s goofy commercials for Bitcoin bankrupting families by encouraging them to take risks in personal finance, and an amusing montage of mayhem set to the baby-friendly strains of the Laurie Berkner Band’s Pajama Time. It’s all easy enough to watch, especially for the hordes of longtime viewers for whom tuning in has become an annual ritual as reliable as the beginning of a new year.
But familiarity and expectedness have never been aspirational qualities for South Park. You can’t spend 25 years making a TV show without developing some habits and routines, and it could be argued that that’s a necessity in the labor-intensive process of generating a complete work of original animation on a weekly basis. Even so, the danger of Stone and Parker’s subversive streak is the soul of the show. Without that, the buttons being pushed don’t feel so hot, a given topic’s equivalent of whinging about those clowns in Congress. Looking at the history of the small screen, an unending broadcast run and the guarantee of an easily satisfied audience have led to only one thing: complacency. With Parker and Stone now entering their 50s, the greatest challenge facing them is their own success.
