South Park spent a full episode convincing skeptical viewers the show had found its footing again. “Billionaire Weenietown” undoes that work in under twenty minutes and lands as one of the weaker outings the series has produced in years.
The hook is Butters, who discovers a colony of billionaires living in his backyard, rendered as literal anthropomorphic penises obsessed with podcasts and public feuds. His parents use AI to remodel the house around him and warn him not to turn into a “libtard” over his objections, before his father pivots to wondering whether the measles vaccine Butters got as a kid is what turned him soft on billionaires in the first place. It is the same anti-vaxxer sneer the show ran during the COVID years, dragged back out five years after the debate it was mocking actually mattered. The mandates the show spent 2020 and 2021 cheering on did not deliver what they promised. A lot of the people who pushed back turned out to have a point. Recycling the joke now, as if none of that happened and the people who asked questions are still the crazy ones, plays less like satire and more like a writers’ room still running on 2021 talking points because nobody told them the news moved on.
The visual design does the episode no favors. Weenietown is exactly what it sounds like: a settlement of tiny, genital-shaped billionaires running their own data centers, and the camera parks on it for most of the runtime. It apparently used real ones as cut outs which made it completely unwatchable. A parallel bit has Butters glued to pimple-popping videos on YouTube, shot in the same unflinching close-up as the main gag. Neither one is funny. Both are simply hard to sit through, and the episode leans on the gross-out so heavily it starts to feel like a substitute for a joke the writers never actually found.
The closer brings back the AI deepfake Trump bit we saw in the last season: footage of him on a toilet while real audio from one of his speeches plays underneath, followed by the same small-penis payoff the show has used before. It is generic at this point, and lame for being generic. When “mock Trump’s body” is the one beat a show can be counted on to reach for every time the rest of the script runs dry, that is not edge. That is a crutch, and a tired one.
The frustrating part is that the premise underneath all of it had somewhere real to go. Data centers eating up power and land in ordinary neighborhoods is a grievance a lot of people actually have right now, on both sides of the aisle, and a sharper episode could have mined that for a full twenty minutes without needing to reach for a single Trump joke. Instead the show buried its one timely idea under a recycled culture-war punchline and shock imagery that stopped shocking anyone a decade ago. It is the difference between an episode that says something and an episode that just performs being edgy for an audience that already agrees with it.
Last week’s premiere worked specifically because it let the politics sit in the background and trusted the actual joke, the e-bike gangs, to carry the episode. “Billionaire Weenietown” reverses that completely: the politics are the whole point, the joke is an afterthought, and the result is an episode that feels less like comedy and more like a lecture with a penis costume on.
One of the weaker episodes the show has put out in years, and proof that one good premiere does not mean South Park has actually changed direction.
Did the show ever need to drag the anti-vax material back out, or was that just an easy button to push when the data center plot ran out of steam?
I was there all the way back in August 1997 (I think it was August) anxiously waiting the premiere episode of South Park at 10PM on a Wednesday. And wow did I laugh my ass off. The show continued to give me nearly two more decades of hilarious episodes. I can't watch it anymore. What was once the most biting, non-partisan satire, is now just the same old tired, woke crap that we get from everyone else. What a damn shame.