Animated series South Park recently aired its 23rd season and it’s still going strong. Right after this season premiered, Comedy Central renewed it for three more years, up to Season 26, meaning Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s sharp-edged satirical ‘toon isn’t showing signs of slowing down yet. The series’ latest 10-episode outing made a few changes to the expected formula — namely, replacing the opening titles in most episodes — and it received mixed reviews from critics throughout its run. So, while we wait for South Park to return next year, here are 5 Things Season 23 Did Right (& 5 It Did Wrong).
10 Wrong: Dragging out the Tegridy Farms storyline
At first, the fact that South Park had moved out to Tegridy Farms full-time and Randy had become the show’s lead character was fun. But the novelty wore off quickly. Within a couple of episodes of the six-part Tegridy Farms storyline, the joke had gotten old.
Even the characters were aware of this, constantly telling Randy no one cared about his weed farm anymore, so it’s baffling that the show dragged it out for so long. There was only one episode, “Let Them Eat Goo,” in which Randy took advantage of the plant-based food craze by making burgers out of his stems. This was the only instance in which Tegridy Farms didn’t feel out of place and in the way.
9 Right: Not ripping storylines from specific news headlines
Pretty much since the beginning, South Park’s insane production schedule has seen each episode get produced from scratch in the week that it airs. This has meant that the show can be a lot more current than other animated series, like The Simpsons and Family Guy, whose episodes take months to produce. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the episode. Sometimes, when South Park takes aim at a specific headline, it can make the episode age horribly.
And it’s even worse if this headline-ripping storytelling is used for a season-long arc, because it means the writers have to make it up as they go along. Fortunately for this season, the show focused on lampooning more general current affairs, like ICE detention centers and plant-based food, than specific news stories.
8 Wrong: Transphobic jokes in “Board Girls”
Season 23’s seventh installment, “Board Girls,” was criticized for perceived transphobia, and the controversy was justified. In the episode, a transgender athlete named Heather Swanson enters a women’s athletic tournament alongside Vice Principal Strong Woman. Heather’s appearance is based on “Macho Man” Randy Savage, and the idea is that Heather is pretending to be trans to get back at Strong Woman for ending their relationship.
The episode’s suggestion that someone would lie about being transgender — even if it’s just for one specific character — is incredibly dangerous. Gaining acceptance is already hard enough for trans people as it is.
7 Right: Further developing the Whites
First appearing in the Season 21 finale “Splatty Tomato,” the White family is a hysterical satire of the White Lives Matter movement and, more generally, Caucasians who feel they’re getting squeezed out of society in the new era of wokeness. “No one cares about the Whites!”
In Season 23, these characters were developed further. They adopted a couple of Mexican kids from an ICE detention center to make themselves feel like good people, and then got mad when the kids didn’t immediately adapt to the Whites’ lifestyle. Every time the Whites showed up in this past season, they stole the show.
6 Wrong: Making Randy Marsh a murderer
In the Season 23 premiere, “Mexican Joker,” Randy sees his business suffer from private residents growing their own weed. In response, he bombs all the backyards in South Park containing private weed farms. The sequence plays out as really over-the-top, setting up a storyline that was never quite paid off.
Randy was later arrested for the bombings, but the plot seemed aimless and unplanned. It was a shame to see Randy lose his ‘tegridy to sink this low. Having said that, the moment in which Randy snuffed out Winnie the Pooh to appease Xi Jinping in the following episode was pretty hilarious.
5 Right: Meta references to South Park’s recent streaming deal
A few weeks ago, HBO Max bought the streaming rights to South Park for $500 million. Then, the show did an episode called “Basic Cable” about the effect of streaming on the television industry. It might be South Park’s most self-aware episode to date.
There’s a reference to shows making shows within their show to have more streaming content, on the back end of a season’s worth of new opening credits sequences with alternative titles for the show. At the end of the episode, there’s an ad stating that the streaming rights to The Scott Malkinson Show are available, with a phone number to “call Trey” and make an offer.
4 Wrong: Underwhelming 300th episode
South Park reached a major landmark this year with its 300th episode. However, the show didn’t really do anything special with it. With their 100th episode, “I’m a Little Bit Country,” Trey Parker and Matt Stone tackled the outbreak of the Iraq War with a storyline that encompassed their libertarian political standpoint.
With their 200th episode, “200,” they generated so much controversy that they received death threats, and the episode can no longer be found anywhere online or in syndication. But the 300th episode, “Shots!!!,” just felt like another lackluster installment of the show, save for the Cartman storyline spoofing anti-vaxxers with a vaccination rodeo, which was admittedly hilarious.
3 Right: Memorable one-off characters
While South Park has an iconic cast of both main and supporting characters, the show has also introduced one-and-done characters in various episodes. Season 23 brought us a handful of new memorable one-off characters, from the spot-on parody of There Will Be Blood’s Daniel Plainview in “Let Them Eat Goo” to the ICE agents who love superhero movies and fear that they’re in a supervillain origin flashback in “Mexican Joker.”
These single-episode characters help to give each season its own identity. When South Park fans look back on Season 23, they’ll remember the “goo man” and the representatives from MedMen.
2 Wrong: Not focusing on Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny
Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny have always been the focal point of South Park. Over the years, as characters like Butters and Randy have gained popularity among the fanbase, South Park’s focus has expanded beyond its central quartet, but they’ve always remained the main characters.
In Season 23, the boys were only involved in a couple of storylines, and what’s worse is that they were the best storylines of the season, from Cartman getting Kyle sent to an ICE detention center to Stan rewriting his own biopic to appease the Chinese propaganda ministry to the boys stealing Kyle’s mom’s feces for a copy of Jedi: Fallen Order.
1 Right: Ending with a Christmas special
South Park originated when Trey Parker and Matt Stone were hired to make an animated Christmas card for a Hollywood executive to email around their friends. Titled “The Spirit of Christmas,” it ended up becoming one of the world’s first viral videos, and eventually landed the pair a series at Comedy Central, drawn from the characters in the video, which became South Park.
The show’s origins are in lampooning holiday traditions, so it was apt that the 23rd season ended with a Christmas special. South Park generally does a Halloween episode every year, but it’s been a while since we saw a Christmas episode.
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