After a Season 27–28 stretch that played less like satire and more like a slow-motion political breakdown, “South Park,” now officially “South America,” opens its 29th season with the funniest episode the show has produced in years.
The rebrand is a pretty entertaining joke. Trey Parker and Matt Stone announced the name change ahead of the premiere, framing it as a jab at President Trump’s renaming spree: Lake Ontario became Lake America, the Gulf of Mexico became the Gulf of America for those who haven’t been following. The pair credited Apple and Google’s compliance as their “inspiration,” tongue firmly in cheek. The opening credits carry the bit through. The theme song’s lyrics now refer to the town as South America, and the joke recurs as background texture through the rest of the episode instead of getting front-loaded and dropped.
That’s the first sign this episode is built differently than last season’s material. The renaming gag does its work through repetition and understatement, not through a lecture, like they delivered in such a heavy-handed manner last season. Season 28 felt personal against Trump, this makes fun of something on a light-hearted level that is what used to make South Park great.
The plot follows as Randy Marsh assembles the town’s fathers into a biker gang to fight what they see as an epidemic of reckless kid e-bike riders. They target the local bike shop owner, Mr. Kim, whom they confront, beat, and blame for supplying the bikes. Randy’s crew turns to Google for guidance on how “South Americans” handle a problem like this, and gets results for the actual continent: advice on bribing police and planting car bombs, which they follow without noticing the mismatch. It’s a dumb-guy-takes-instructions-literally gag, but the show commits to it fully, which is why it ends up being so funny.
Meanwhile Cartman, Stan, Kyle, and Kenny form their own e-bike gang and tear through town, alarming the adults. Cartman’s ride through the streets climaxes in a crash through a Denny’s window, staged as a direct homage to the opening of Akira. Kenny gets extended, unmuffled dialogue for the first time in years, because he’s in biker gear instead of his parka. It’s a small gift to longtime viewers. The episode closes on Kenny dying again, killed by a bomb planted in his e-bike by the parents’ gang.
Then there’s the line of the night. Amid the general griping about the state of the country, a character says things are bound to get better in November. It plays as a setup toward the midterms until the punchline lands: he means the release of Grand Theft Auto VI. The gag repeats at least once more before the episode ends, and it’s the show at its sharpest. It clocks the earnestness of “the midterms will fix everything” politics on both sides without needing to take a side to make the joke work.
There is a ton of crudeness throughout the entire episode. This is South Park after all, so don’t expect to go in watching this with your kids.
What’s notable, and what I went in not expecting, is restraint. Last season’s Trump material was relentless to the point of exhaustion, every episode swinging at the same target with the same intensity until the satire stopped reading as satire and started reading as fixation. This episode doesn’t drop the political material, but it puts the story first. The renaming joke stays in the background. Trump barely appears. The energy goes instead into what “South Park” has always done better than almost anyone else on television: taking a real, current absurdity and dramatizing it precisely enough that anyone with kids in that age range winces before they laugh. E-bikes-as-unlicensed-motorcycles is exactly that kind of target.
The image of Randy and the other dads, overcommitted in tight cycling kit, blocking traffic and staging a moral crusade against their own kids’ choice of transportation, is funny for two reasons at once. It’s a dead-on parody of aggrieved suburban-dad energy, and it reads as a broader jab at enforcement culture generally, without the show ever pausing to explain the joke.
This is the best season premiere “South Park” has produced in years, a return to the show’s real strength. That strength was never “attack Trump relentlessly.” It was noticing something true about how people are behaving right now and dramatizing it mercilessly. If this episode sets the tone for Season 29, Parker and Stone have found their footing again.
Rating: 4.5/5
They lost me.
We watched this show as a family for years, screening out certain episodes until the kids were old enough for them (or just left the few really bad stinkers like "Brittany's New Look" alone--no reason to subject anyone of any age to that one).
But the show has gone on for far too long. It lost the plot more than a decade ago and just makes self referential jokes about how it "used to be" about the four kids and their adventures.
if Randy Marsh was killed in a fire and never mentioned again, if they stopped doing "topical" episodes that age like milk locked in a hot car for an entire summer, if they made the show about the four boys, their friends, and their adventures, if they even pretended to be more balanced in their targets, and if they weren't clearly captured by the industry (and its resultant ideology) they once lampooned, it might be worth watching again.
Until then, it's just another Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy*, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and Archer that went on too long and drifted too far away from base camp.
*While Family Guy follows the same pattern by all accounts, I actually don't care for the show and am only including it as an example.
The idiot-dad-who-takes-things-too-far appears to be an uninspired trope that all adult animation seems insistent on falling into. It destroys the humor by making it formulaic and predictable (both The Simpsons and Family Guy had their own unique formulae before that, but they were not predictable in how the story would progress).
At least with Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin, they were always part of the main cast. Randy Marsh was only ever useful in that role as long as he was never more than a B-story at best, better still as background idiocy.
I wish I’d given up on the show when they allowed the Muhammad episodes to be jettisoned - the greatest thing about Parker & Stone was their absolute support for free expression. However, I could understand the concerns inherent in those episodes and was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they had not personally sold out. I can respect them despite not agreeing with every decision they make, but was disappointed that they didn’t fight back against this egregious censorship (benefit of the doubt still on the table - I wouldn’t be surprised if they personally stepped back from the show’s direction at this point, as this seems to fit the chronological point of downturn in quality).
They eventually lost me, however, and long before the TDS focus and what seemed to be recycled Saddam-Satan jokes. Tegrity Farms and the whole run when the show was about Randy was simply too tired for me.
The hopscotch with different networks and having to jump between different platforms in order to watch the episodes I wanted also played a huge part (as a hockey fan, the NHL had already broken my spirit in this regard).
South Park has always been best when it was written from the perspective of four observant elementary school kids and their varied reactions to how their peers and parents took passing trends far too seriously.
Even if they go back to that (the renaming as an understated running gag sounds genuinely funny, but it might be nothing more than a good joke), I doubt they’ll win back my effort to watch. The hardest patrons to attract are the ones you’ve already driven away.