Hey guys, Jared again. Today we're talking about your favorite little town
in Colorado, yup, South Park.
For the past three seasons, the show's ditched its signature standalone episodes, and embraced
season-long serialization. And it's largely been awesome.
Season 19 brilliantly blended themes of PC culture, advertising, and gentrification, over a
multi-episode arc. And most recently season 20 kicked off with an even more
ambitious storyline that juggled the presidential election, member berries, a
militant feminist Cartman, a girl hating dick flashing Butters,
and a whole lot of internet trolling.
It all seemed to be leading up to some epic conclusion,
and then, everything just fizzled out into confusion, convulsion, and holy s**t
they just blew up the internet? So why did season 20 leave us feeling all itchy
and uncertain like a fourth grade school-wide outbreak of lice had just surfaced?
Well we have an idea, and it all has to do with Matt Trey's secret sauce
that makes South Park's writing so good.
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition of South Park Season 20: What Went Wrong?
and as always spoilers ahead.
Watching South Park feels like peering inside the mind of the world's funniest stoner.
Its unpredictable, imaginative. and completely unhinged in the best way possible.
But, make no mistake, there's a strict order to the madness.
The show is constructed with one rigid plot line rule:
We've found out this really simple rule that maybe you guys have all heard before.
We can take these beats which are basically the beats of your outline
and if the words and then belong between those beats, you're f**ked.
For instance, here's a three plot storyline about stick figure John.
John adopts a stray dog, and then John wins the lottery, and then John
becomes a Scientologist. John's story has a sucky narrative because there is no
cause and effect. You could rearrange each action into any order, and it would
remain a random series of events in the life of a lottery winning, dog rescuing,
intro-level Scientologist. So what makes good South Park approved writing?
And whenever you can replace your ands with buts or therefores makes for better writing.
Take South Park's famous Mormon episode. An annoyingly perfect Mormon kid moves
to town, therefore he pisses everyone off,
therefore stan decides to kick his ass. But the kid is so nice, that he tell Stan
to go ahead and beat him up. Therefore Stan doesn't beat him up.
Instead, he agrees to go to the kids house for dinner. Notice how each action that
begins with therefore or but indicates a consequence or reaction to the previous action.
Every plot point matters, which is why the show never loses momentum.
Okay, so that's South Park's Golden Rule, but before we dive into what went wrong
with season 20, it's time to talk about the orange-tinted
elephant in the room; yup ,the President of the United States. Stone and Parker
have been upfront about the fact that, like 99% of the pollsters, they expected
turd sandwich to win the election, and planned the series around that outcome. They
had to do desperate last-minute rewrites in order to air an episode the day after the election.
So, not ideal. As soon as giant douche Mr. Garrison wins the
election, the show starts breaking the creators core rules-
And f**king them all to death!
as seen in the two main plot lines; member berries and trolling.
Let's map out the member berries plotline.
Randy tries member berries, falls into a nostalgic trance,
and things get a little dark.
member when there weren't so many Mexicans?
Therefore, Randy realizes member berries are dangerous brainwashing germs.
What the f**k is going on with these member berries?
Meanwhile Mr. Garrison, along with his VP Caitlin Jenner,
is leading in the polls. But he realizes he doesn't have a plan
to carry out his campaign promises, and will look like a jackass if he wins.
What the hell do? If I win I won't be able to do what I promised.
Therefore Mr. Garrison spends the first half of the series trying to sabotage
his campaign so Hillary will win.
I don't know what the f**k I'm doing. I've got to come clean,
I had no idea I would get this far, but the fact of the matter is, I should not be president.
But, his voters catch on and demand an explanation.
Therefore, Randy tells Garrison the truth about his popularity.
When the world is changing so fast, it makes us yearn for the old ways when life seemed simpler,
but it doesn't mean those old ideas are good for us now.
Therefore, the two of them set out to destroy member berries,
but quickly realize that these little guys just won't die
Therefore, Randy convinces Mr. Garrison to give a heartfelt speech denouncing nostalgia.
On November 8th, you must vote against me
and show the world that you didn't think the new Star Wars was all that good.
And there you have it a; perfect half season set up for a Hillary victory that
follows the golden rule of South Park storytelling, except newsflash,
Hillary lost.
Suddenly they have to justify Garrison's surprising win, and that's when things
get messy. Now South Park has to improvise its way through the rest of
the season, and the writers start to break their own storytelling rules. We go
from a strictly but or therefore based plot, to a big cluster f**k of and thens.
Starting with and then Mr. Garrison wins anyway, out of nowhere. And then Caitlin
barfs, reinfecting Mr. Garrison and Randy with member berries. So Randy and
Garrison trip out on nostalgia, forget their quest to destroy member
berries, and generally get stoked on Garrison's victory. This presses the
rewind button on the plot. Watching them unlearn the perils of nostalgia is
literally narrative backpedaling. Also you have this nagging feeling that it
should take more than a bit of berry flavored nostalgia to explain Garrison's
split-second transformation from terrified self sabotaging presidential
candidate, to be cocky leader of the free world.
*singing*
Guess who's here? it's the President of the United f**king States.
From here the member berry storyline just generally gets muddled. At the beginning of the season they had a
clear purpose; to set up a physical embodiment of the toxic nostalgia that
will eventually be overcome, like the human ads in the earlier season. They
start out as lazy intoxicating berries, and then, they magically turn into a
weird vomit inducing virus. And then they stop by a 1920s nightclub in a brief
side story that seems quickly forgotten. And then we find out they're Nazis
Member storm troopers? Sure, I member.
Not those storm troopers, the real old ones.
People want to member? They're gonna member.
Also pals with Vladimir Putin and by the end they're ultimately looking
like a tiny fruit militia. Ultimately the show doesn't offer any justification for
the member berries transformation, instead we get a random progression of
events that build without any apparent logic and that's just not the South Park MO.
Well I'm getting pretty sick of it!
Now on to another subplot that got tangled up by a Trump win;
trolling. For most of the season we watch Kyle's dad Gerald living his best life
as the wino troll skankhunt42. This initially conforms with the South Park
philosophy of story structure; Gerald's trolling angers the Danes,
therefore the Danes threatened to release everyone's internet history,
sending Gerald, Cartman, South Park, and the world into a panic.
Enter Hillary Clinton, who's confident she's about to win the presidency.
But, she finds out troll trace might leak her online activities. Therefore she needs
Who is skankhunt42? We believe he's the only one who can save you.
Then, crap, she loses the election and again, the narrative structure starts to crumble.
Without her presidency to defend, Clinton doesn't have any real reason to recruit
Gerald/skankhunt42, and then confusingly, Clinton recruits him anyway
with a vague mission; he needs to infiltrate troll trace to protect U.S. secrets.
We want to send someone in to Denmark undercover and steal their technology.
This entire scene of Hillary meeting Gerald below the bridge feels
super weird and disjointed, almost like it's from an alternate reality?
That's because it probably was recycled material from the original "if Hillary
had won" version of the episode. It certainly would fit the South Park rule
of storytelling; a newly elected Hillary is afraid of having compromising emails
released by troll trace, therefore she recruits Gerald to take down the Danes.
Gerald wants to stop troll trace from revealing his secret identity anyway,
therefore he agrees to go and delete the evidence and save both of them from exposure.
But in this strange new President Garrison run world that can't fly.
So in a desperate attempt to salvage the plotline, the show reveals that
Clinton's claim was merely a ruse, and she's actually just helping
the Danes kidnap American trolls in exchange for the protection of her emails,
and then oops...
♪*rick roll*♪
turns out they're just trolling the American trolls they captured, and then
this top Danish guy wasn't trying to punish the trolls, he's also just a giant
troll trolling the world for the lulz. And also he's
not even f**king Danish
Did your brain just melt? If so it's probably because South Park abandoned its most
basic narrative premise. None of the events in the trolling narrative
actually build off previous actions, they're just a seemingly random
increasingly complicated laundry list of plot points. The show writers openly
complained about the narrative hole they dug for themselves.
Come on, this isn't South Park. What's happened to us? We used to have a challenge and deal with it.
Then move on to the next one. Now we've just been dealing with
trolling and internet stuff over and over, week after week, and I don't know
about you but I'm getting pretty sick of it.
It almost feels like the Danish guy's announcement that he's
just strolling the world is a last-ditch effort to rescue the narrative.
Maybe this is like the new post funny era of satire!
Just like Mr. Garrison when he's drunk on member berries, a completely nihilistic
troll doesnt need plot consistency. From there the writers need to wrap up a few
incomplete storylines; most notably the risks Cartman and Gerald face from
having their internet history revealed. So they commit plot hari-kari by blowing
everything up. That's right, everybody from Kyle's little brother Ike, to the
top generals at the Pentagon, collaborate to take down the internet with a massive
blitz of trolling and a little help from Elon Musk's SpaceX program. By blowing up
the internet and deleting everybody's ugliest secrets, they also destroy the
cause-and-effect relationship that in building up all season. Instead of a
satisfying conclusion where things get, you know, resolved, audiences just get a
big ol' Psych! We're blowing everything up. Before that the season had done such a
good job of analyzing the way the Internet has fragmented our public and
private selves. How this sense of privacy has given us all the ability to behave
like assholes without the people we love ever having to find out. This was all
building up to a really promising conclusion but, we've never got it.
The show also brilliantly skewers the outrage cycles that dominate internet
culture as trolls expertly push our buttons. This kind of simmering outrage
actually seems like a more interesting explanation for Mr. Garrison's
victory than member berries the show never develops this idea aside from
giving it one quick shout-out during the finale.
What the hell is Trevor's axiom?
Trevor's axiom is a well known equation in online trolling. It's a way in which
one person could create a massive reaction on the internet. All bringing
out the worst in humanity.
That sort of sounds like how I got elected.
Because Matt and Trey thought Hillary would win, they spent the first half of the season
teasing the perils of having your internet history exposed, but since Trump
won, Hillary's emails exposing her are no longer as relevant as say the outrage
cycles on social media. So what might season 20 of South Park have looked like
in a parallel universe, where the turd sandwich triumphs?
Haven't you seen the polls? It's president-elect sandwich.
According to a deadline interview with Stone and Parker, viewers got a sneak peak in the
post-election episode. Bill Clinton and Bill Cosby joined forces to announce
their new South Park gentlemen's club, and obvious hangover from the if Hillary
one version of the episode. Later, Bill confides in Butters that the club was
actually a place for men to hide because
Trust me, my wife is a crazy bitch.
She and all the other women in the world about to get
payback, and we are all completely f**ked.
Parker says that in the alternate reality Season 20,
they would have focused on Bill settling into his new role as the
apparently terrified First Gentleman of the U.S. It would have been a fitting
way to escalate the battle of the sexes already underway at South Park Elementary.
It also would have given a lot more poignancy to Cartman's newly
inspired fear of his girlfriend Heidi, who he suspects is trying to destroy him.
Instead, the first gentleman's club is understandably abandoned.
So what does the future hold for South Park? Well the creators weren't being subtle
when they called the last episode of season 20 the end of serialization as we
know it. If they're really leaving serialization behind, that's kind of a
bummer, because as messy as season 20 was, there was a lot of promise. And in our
humble opinion they did some of their best work as a decade in seasons 18 and 19.
Why let a silly election between a giant douche and a turd sandwich ruin all that?
So what did you guys think of season 20? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Thanks for watching guys, peace.