What went wrong with South Park and when did it start going downhill in your opinion?
What went wrong with South Park and when did it start going downhill in your opinion?
Really the continuity between episodes I think is what did it for me.
When the 4 kids stopped becoming the focus. Randy episodes were funny because of Stan being a bystander to the madness, now it is just the viewer as the bystander to the Randy show. It is not even exclusively him either, PC principle or Garrison or honestly any of the adults get more screentime than the kids nowadays when they have an entire school's worth of characters they could use gor their plots.
The end of Season 18. S18 has some bangers in it - Go Fund Yourself, Gluten Free Ebola, Handicar, Grounded Vindaloop, Cock Magic... but the hashtag two-parter was garbage and then next season they started in with the continuity shit and it was all downhill from there.
When it started doing season long stories, stuff like coon and friends, the game of thrones parody, and the whole kyles dads a troll thing. If I'm watching south park I don't want to have an attention span or watching anything in order.
When they decided people were watching the show for Randy.
Matt and Trey got old, the specifics don't matter
It went downhill after the Coon & Friends 3 parter and it fell down a cliff after "I should have never went zip-lining" spread this educated opinion like it's gospel.
"I should have never went zip-lining"
Why do people hate this episode so much? It seemed really average in a neither good nor bad way to me.
It was extremely extremely boring for a last episode and it marked the end
Most people who watch cartoons and films absolutely hate live action techniques such as wobbly cameras and giving each character some awkward interview where they give some shit opinion they could have said in the back of their heads without interrupting the flow of the narrative.
When you wouldn't leave Paris well enough alone, OP.
when it drifted away from my politics
I actually didn't realize it was the season finale. That makes it make more sense.
When everything started to be about politics and current thing instead of kids in wacky adventures and weird situations their innocence couldn't grasp, sometimes involving their imagination.
Now they even put romance drama bullshit among the kids and made two of them gay. They were supposed to be brats that couldn't even understand masturbation and have dumb thoughts about the opposite gender.
I miss the total weirdness of the show. The show used to have it's own weird worldbuilding instead of being just some parody of real life. It used to have mad scientists, aliens, hell, demons and even a talking poo. Now it only has american politics. It sucks!!!
It wasn't the season finale, I've no idea what that anon's talking about and I really don't know why that episode in particular is considered so notorious
When they stopped coming up with original plots and instead of just reading the newspaper or popular news sites to generate current event/trend plots. A lot of such episodes will become incomprehensible a decade or so after airing.
The whole NFT thing they shoehorned into the second half of the Post Covid multi-parter is especially egregious. They were talking about NFT's in the future when they became irrelevant less than a year after that episode aired.
When Matt and Trey went so far up their own asses they eventually became those two elephnt looking aliens that the boys met who sucked each other off, fucked a hooker together and did drugs all in front of them.
They don't know how to be funny anymore all they know how to do is troll, try to be edgy,controversial, preachy and get on their soapbox using their characters as mics with an excuse plot it's been like this since 2012 really.
Comedy comes from people struggling these two stopped struggling once the movie came out and made them millionaires now they're the same out of touch people they used to mock
This is the right answer
Matt and Trey haven't made any epsiodes since March 2023 because they don't want to address Israel. They're zionists and would never criticise israel. One of the core protagonists ((Kyle)) is KIKE JEW for a reason.
((EARLY LIFE)) golems
Season 20 is the point of no return but Season 19 was also pretty bad.
can't even ripple properly
It was the season finale stop lying. You actually believe Wikipedia's lies? Don't do that. Ziplining was the last episode of season 16, not Obama.
When they turned Randy into the main character
They haven't made episodes because they're in the middle of a lawsuit between WB and Paramount over their bullshit "special events" and gutting the actual seasons from 10 episodes to 6
early life
Everyone knows Matt's Jewish, this isn't some grand revelation
Everyone also knows both Matt and Trey have insane jungle fever. Trey's stripper wife was half black and I think there was some other black ex gf
Splitting the season between TV and Parammount+. I just dont watch now.
Golden age ended with season 10
It still remained pretty good up to season 14
15 was the first really noticeable decline
18 saw an even worse drop off
20 was the nail in the coffin
22 (Tegridy) is the corpse decomposing and zombifying
I'd say after Cartoon Wars
The better the animation got, the worse the writing became
It depends on the episode for me. I don't think its terrible now really like sometimes its a little funny but compared to the earlier seasons its kinda shit. Might also be staying a bit in the middle on how I feel about it because I do like watching it with my dad time to time, he thinks its still funny and I like that he likes it and all but overall yeah its kinda shit. If I had to really pin point why its gotten worst
this guy and this guy both pretty much sum up my entire thought on it as a whole.
Like those "Le trump le dump" episodes were fucking terrible, it was like a bit circle jerk about current president being stupid. Long post I know my bad.
Also there's rumors that some of the season budget money was embezzled and used for restoring Casa Bonita
It died the moment they got pissy about Trump winning elections
double parentheses instead of triple
At least get your own dogwhistles right.
Archer suffered the same fate
Originally started out with cheap animation ala Frisky Dingo but overtime it became more elaborate and the soul was missing
Be HBO Max
Pay hundreds of millions for the streaming rights of a hit show for about 4-5 years
Expect yearly seasons of 10 episodes (at least 40 in total)
Get the two pandemic specials from 2020 and two six episode seasons (12-14 in total)
Your rival Paramount gets multiple hour long specials that should have been included in their respective seasons
I don't like WB but they are 100 percent right to be pissed
I also hate how they decided to be mega Jews in regards to the blu rays released by selling them separately. Even worse, while post covid and streaming wars sets had 2 parts, the other specials were released by themselves for the same price
When chef died and nobody to properly call out the bullshit. Also, when they made it about american politics.
If I weren't so lazy I would make a South Park episode of the boys watching a Terrance and Phillip episode. In it, Terrance and Phillip wouldn't be farting stupidly but make it about politics of Canada. Who care about Canada's politics? Boring right? RIGHT?
South Park was always political, but I see your point. They don't have wacky adventures for the sake of it, they have to serve some preachy message now.
They should have ended with you're getting old
Now the show is run by fat, rich, out of touch boomers who have no idea what "comedy" is
South Park works best when the kids are acting like kids with dumb kid logic.
The kids being essentially teenagers/adults in kid's bodies got old. But apparently, Randy being Peter Griffin is so much more appealing to Matt and Trey
It feels like growing up.
You remember your childhood like Starks Pond, a small little thing, but as you got older and the world developed more in your eyes, it grew into something else.
The boys don't act like children
The Randy show
Continuity
99% is just local news article of the week from a year ago
its funny and ironic considering how vocal they are about hating family guy
Oh and:
The boys aren't always the center focus
The boys aren't genuinely friends
Even Cartman was an ass, but their friend. None of them act like they even like each other anymore and just hang out for the plot.
They did a Israel/Palestine episode back in Two Thousand fucking Thirteen
Trey's just gearing up for the next buttmonkey Kyle plot, which will be that bird flu one.
The 2016 election, as with media
Now that I think about it, that was the last consistently good south park season.
Pretty much this. The show was already wandering down the trail of mediocrity, but that election really broke Matt and Trey.
You posted what went wrong with it already
when they went all-in on hillary winning in 2016
Yeah I gotta second but I'd specify that it's the selective continuity where continuity is only real if it's used to dicksuck the current mouthpiece.
The season long plots I think were the nucleus or culmination of that shit and definitely didn't help.