When South Park Got Tired

I spent way too much time watching South Park when it was actually good. Just sitting there, letting it do its thing, episode after episode. It felt like the only show that wasn’t lying to you. Everything else was so careful, so worried about offending someone, and South Park just didn’t care. Trey Parker and Matt Stone had figured out how to be nasty and brilliant at the same time.

The episodes I still think about—”Is Hell handicap accessible?”, World of Warcraft—those ones hit differently. They’d set up some stupid premise and then just demolish it. Not in a mean way. In a way that made you actually think about things you’d been taking for granted. The show didn’t demand that you agree with anything. It just showed you the machinery and let you decide.

Then they started doing seasons as one long story instead of standalone episodes, and the whole rhythm changed. It got ponderous. Less punchy. And then 2016 happened and the writers just… broke. They’d spent all season setting up Hillary as the obvious next president, and when Trump actually won, the show didn’t know what to do with itself. I watched it scramble and I remember thinking, okay, this is over.

I didn’t formally quit or anything. I just stopped watching. Happens all the time with shows, right? They run out of ideas or they run out of anger or they just get old. South Park wasn’t old—it was exhausted. That’s different.