South Park season 20

**SPOILERS HEREIN**

Is it too soon to declare South Park’s adoption of season-long storytelling a failure?

We’re only three seasons into this experiment, and they only just (sorta) pulled it off successfully last year. I wouldn’t call this season a success, but it’s hard to write it off completely because great comedy and sharp satire has coexisted along with some really bad, sometimes painfully unfunny stuff since the show’s earliest days. Such is kind of the nature of the beast for a show produced in less than a week’s time. However, this season suggests that the show is much better-suited to a standalone episodic structure (and tonight’s episode title would seem to be an admission).

As a continuing narrative, it was a mess of ideas that never really gelled. A lot of them were just bad ideas. Cartman's dreams of going to Mars didn’t have much to say and weren’t very humorous. Neither was the riff on Colin Kaepernick or the subplot of Butters and and the boys’ inappropriate protest, both of which were left dangling. The election stuff was pretty bland (the show recovered well enough from having to make changes at the last minute due to the result, but it was apparent they were unprepared to tackle it). The commentary on women and comedy came off as way out-of-touch, like Matt Stone and Trey Parker were vaguely aware of the subject but didn’t know enough to say anything about it.

The member berries were a great idea, one of the show’s surreal allegories that’s close to brilliant. This device made commentary as astute as any the show has ever given us, exploring how nostalgia is like a drug that clouds our minds and holds us back. The show presented a smart slice of cultural criticism by positing that obsession with “sacred” stuff from one's childhood and the desire to return to a better bygone era that never really existed aren’t that far removed from one another.

But the most cutting plot, for me, was Kyle’s dad Gerald as the king of the Internet trolls. Think about it: The man attacks targets of all kinds simply to get a laugh. Despite having a following that insists his actions mean something, he's adamant that he does what he does only because it’s funny. But when the Danish anti-trolling program is revealed to be the biggest troll job of all, one that will hurt many people, suddenly he doesn’t think it’s so funny anymore.

One can see Gerald as a vessel for Parker and Stone. And though none of what they’ve done over the years amounts to abuse, their comic viewpoint has always been “screw everybody,” rarely taking any issue seriously and never above mining a laugh from it even if it’s something that shouldn’t be laughed about. But now, the world suddenly seems less friendly and less stable than before. This plotline almost seems like they’re apologizing for displaying this attitude for so many years, and for all the much meaner nihilistic trolls out there who’ve applied this approach to comedy to real life, and hold the show up as one of their edgy, un-P.C. inspirations.

A good idea, but it could have been a single episode, or at most a two-part episode. Same goes for any of the aforementioned ideas. And even if the bad ones still didn’t work by themselves, standalone episodes would have allowed the season to more easily move on from the bad. The late 90s and early aughts are considered the show's classic era; no one dwells on awful entries from that period like “Quest for Ratings” or “City on the Edge of Forever” because the show would reset every week.

At the end of the day, the show’s problems are more structural than of substance. In outlook and humor, it’s the same old South Park, funny (not quite as much as a decade or so ago, but still funny) and full of ideas (good and bad ones). Maybe it’s just the member berries talking, but rather than trying to tie them together into some bigger whole, the show would benefit by going back to tackling one issue at a time.