While South Park continues its campaign to be the most talked-about comedy series in Washington, D.C., some OG fans complain that Trey Parker and Matt Stone have lost touch with the show’s roots. Little do the whiners know that Parker and Stone have been planning for this since Ms. Crabtree was still alive.
Whenever an adult animated cartoon series gets into double-digit seasons, its writers and showrunners are forced to make a massive decision: Will the show stick with the winning formula and risk getting stale, or will it try to expand its scope and inevitably piss off its earliest fans who will always hate any change to the comfortable dynamic? For an example of the former, look no further than the last 25 years of The Simpsons, during which the show’s floating timeline has locked the writers into an endless cycle of backstory episodes and Twitter-level topical humor as Springfield itself remains unchanged.
Then, there’s South Park, which has taken its iconoclastic approach to ripping popular culture and turned it into a thesis statement for the last several seasons as the grounded, small-time, age-appropriate adventures of Cartman, Kyle, Kenny and Stan slide further into the rearview mirror. To some fans, South Park becoming a platform for Parker and Stone to satirize the entirety of world politics and culture is a betrayal of the core chemistry that they first built at the bus stop. But all the way back in 1998, the pair warned their fans that, if South Park was going to stay on the air for years to come, it was going to end up looking drastically different from the first season.
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Said Parker in an interview with Rolling Stone just days before the South Park Season One finale, “The only way we’d want it to go on for a long time would be if it would change almost to the point where people would say, ‘Yeah, South Park is on, remember when it was about, like, four boys in Colorado?’”
In the uncannily prescient Rolling Stone interview, Stone agreed with Parker’s vision for the future of South Park, saying that he would rather the show become “the most Dali-esque Monty Python sketch than some banal sitcom.”
“We’re in the business of making people go, ‘What the fuck is this?’” Stone added of the early South Park ethos. “We would view success as finally getting to the point where we get canceled because no one gets it.”
The South Park creators’ comments during South Park Season One recently resurfaced in the South Park subreddit, where fans reflected on how Parker and Stone’s earliest ideas for the direction South Park would take in the later seasons predicted what’s become the most common criticism among contemporary fans. “Fantastic fucking pull,” one commenter said of the OP who dug up the old interview. “Anyone bitching about the quality of South Park after this many years has no idea how good we have it.”
“I read that article when it was published,” one OG fan wrote of the Rolling Stone interview. “I’ve always thought they were true to their word with the direction they went. I think they are brilliant. Heck I’ve even seen Book of Mormon, twice, and I fucking hate musicals.”
Even still, some fans found a reason to complain over Parker and Stone’s South Park plan from nearly 30 years ago. Wrote one such dissenter, “Moving away from the four boys was planned from the start? Well I guess they succeeded. You almost forget that they’re best friends half the time.”
Other users trashed South Park Season 27/28 while complaining that the early seasons were better, whether or not Parker and Stone always planned for the show to go this far off the rails. So, if the goal is still for South Park to meet an unceremonious end because “no one gets it,” then the subreddit is already halfway there.
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