South Park — Season 5

If South Park's fourth season took the show from a promising, occasionally brilliant series into a consistently rewarding product, the fifth thrust it into the realms of true greatness. Even the show's superb fourth season fit in more with the lighter, scatological nature of the early days, but here the show at last moved into the darker territory that would define its golden run. Oh sure, people look upon "Trapper Keeper" and "Chinpokomon" as classics -- and for good reason -- but had South Park not taken this final step in its evolution, it'd be little more than a cult memory today.

From the very first episode you know that you're in for something special. At the time, late night dramas such as N.Y.P.D. Blue were allowed to say shit uncensored for the first time. They cited artistic reasons, such as the added realism of letting cops and criminals use the words they actually use. They're right, but Parker and Stone found it interesting that they take a massive drubbing weekly for using those words (even though they're bleeped out), while dramas can do it and be called "mature." So they came up with "It Hits the Fan," an episode that contains over 160 uncensored uses of the word shit. It attacks the gimmickry of the whole thing, more than implying that those crime dramas exploited their "artistic bravery." Then, in true absurd fashion, it becomes a rather convincing argument for standards and practices on television, arguing that, if given free reign over language, T.V. could rob all taboos of their shock and therefore fun.

It acts as a primer for the season, one so full of boundary-pushing that I'm surprised I wasn't desensitized to it by the end. "Cripple Fight" introduces Timmy's foil Jimmy, whom everyone takes a liking to, leading a jealous Timmy to instigate the titular fight, a near shot-by-shot remake of the hilarious duel in John Carpenter's They Live. "Proper Condom Use," in the true independent nature of Parker and Stone, mocks both the parents who get up in arms over sex education and its utter inadequacy in the schools. And just try to get the image of Mr. Mackey and Ms. Choksondik getting it on.

Elsewhere, the writers hammer out their ability to spoof pop culture and bigger issues on a dime, with a Looney Tunes inspired post-9/11 show that blasts the terrorists behind the attack, to a show that deliberately creates the lamest, most two-dimensional (literally!) character in the world to mock all the characters made for merchandising reasons. Towelie shows up every 8 seconds, reminding our pals "Don't forget to bring a towel!" Sensing his own uselessness, he spends his down time getting high and trying to forget his menial task.

Airline bailouts and Segways are mocked in equal measure when Mr. Garrison invents a strongly homoerotic gyroscope to compete with the airline industry, which took bailout money, only to fire employees and pay out to the executives, leading to inefficient travel and more resentment of air travel (hmm, that sounds vaguely familiar...). When "The Entity" becomes a mass hit, airline companies, rather than improve their business, hire lobbyists to persuade the government to shut Garrison down.

Every single episode is a classic, but the centerpiece of the season, if not the series, is the twisted, utterly genius "Scott Tenerman Must Die." When Cartman buys pubic hair from a local teen thinking that simply owning pubes means he's hit puberty, his friends mock him and Cartman goes to get his money back. When the teen refuses, the two enter into a battle of wits to see who can humiliate the other into giving up. It is perhaps fitting that a show most people cite for its political and social satire -- I, for example, often find myself placing the biting episodes in my top 25 rather than should reach its apex with a completely meaningless episode, but this drew a line in the sand for the series. But when Cartman orchestrates a demented chili cook-off so well-planned Heath Ledger's Joker would give him props, the show forever alters from an occasionally biting series into a an anarchic firebrand with a borderline nihilist at its core. Cartman was always an ass, but here he becomes a true sociopath.

Most of South Park's seasons are great, but their on-the-fly parody often results in inconsistent episodes, even when either the main satire or the sideplot connects. This season, however, is the perfect synthesis of everything that makes South Park great without an ounce of its weaknesses. Even the lightweight "Cartmanland" connects among the darker stuff. They also tackle emotion (well, as emotional as the show could get, anyway) with the surprisingly touching "Kenny Dies," which turns the big running joke of the early days into something somber and meaningful as Stan never gets to say goodbye to his friend. Then the episode ends with his joyous epiphany that, hey, he's not the worst friend in the world: Cartman is. That's South Park for you: even when they're serious, they pull the rug from underneath you.

South Park — Seasons 3 and 4

After two seasons of highly entertaining yet clearly unstable programming, South Park hit upon a sort of stride starting with its third season. Parker and Stone realized that the show's then-formula of dick and fart jokes mixed with the occasional jab at pop culture and/or society was getting stale, and over the course of this season they began to morph South Park into something more. That it not only worked but produced one of the strongest seasons of the show is all the more surprising given the fact that the boys wrote a movie around the same time.

You can tell you're in for a ride from the start with the excellent season premiere "Rainforest Schmainforest," a biting attack on environmentalists who don't realize how necessary trees are to keep society moving, as well as their naïve view of the "purity" of wildlife and the jungle. Reeling from George Lucas' stinging betrayal of all that was good in the Star Wars franchise, Parker and Stone craft "Jackovasaurus" into the ultimate hate-letter to Jar-Jar Binks. In it, the titular creature pops up in South Park and the scientific community's initial joy is replaced by increasing annoyance when the Jackovasaur refuses to shut up. It has no real underlying social message, but it's the first of several great episodes devoted to exposing George Lucas' decision to ruin everything good he ever did over the course of the last decade.

Elsewhere, other highlights abound. "Chinpokomon" examines the phenomenon that was "Pokémon" by positing that children were actually manipulated by the Japanese toy companies via subliminal messaging. That said messaging attempted to brainwash children into mounting an attack on Pearl Harbor only makes it funnier. There's also some penis gags (the word "chinpokomon" itself is a play on "chin chin", the Japanese for "penis") to make sure things don't get too serious. "Starvin Marvin in Space" basically takes the original Starvin Marvin episode from Season 1, cuts out all the filler, and adds a hilarious science fiction element that casts Sally Struthers as a Hutt.

But the season's centerpiece is undoubtedly its three episode mini-arc revolving around a meteor shower. For the first time, Parker and Stone kept a sort of continuity, not just within the arc but the show as a whole, that allowed them to still kill and revive Kenny and make other retcons while making callback jokes possible. The highlight of the arc is "Jewbilee," in which Kyle takes Kenny with him to a Jewish summer camp and the boys must ultimately save the other campers from an group of Jewish anti-Semites who seek to revive the evil Persian, Haman. It's nothing but gold, but honestly it's worth it just to see Moses portrayed as the Master Control Program from Tron.

It's still a tad uneven; "Sexual Harassment Panda" was the first episode to air after the full-length (and extremely funny) South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut and was written while Trey and Matt were working on that film. Frankly, it shows; everything the episode has to say about our overly litigious society and how some people exploit a very serious crime just to make a quick buck (and therefore make it that much harder for people who have been sexually assaulted or molested to be treated seriously). But other than that one episode, the only weaknesses come from within strong episodes, such as the actual cat orgy of "Cat Orgy." The episode itself is a fun poke at those generic comedies where two characters who hate each other gradually bond when they realize they're not so different after all, but the cat stuff gets old quickly.

Nevertheless, this is by far the most consistent and rewarding of the first three seasons. The first two suffered from weak episodes and a number of lame gags that kept good episodes from true greatness (with the notable exceptions of "Spookyfish" and "Gnomes"), but here only a few bits fall flat. It lacks the darker edge that slipped in around the fifth season, but it's a big step forward from what came before it.

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...But it can't compare to the quantum leap that was the show's fourth season. The release of the movie, coupled with declining ratings after the initial South Park mania calmed down (to this day it doesn't regularly pull in the numbers of viewers it got in the frenzy of the first two seasons) led one critic to suggest that South Park's time in the spotlight was coming to a close. In hindsight, it's easy to mock the guy, but I imagine he was just saying what everyone was thinking at the time. Imagine, then, the looks on their faces when Parker and Stone took everything that was good and wonderful in Bigger, Longer & Uncut and somehow put it on TV every week.

The season rockets out of the gate with one of the quintessential "boys just being boys" episodes of the series, in which the gang goes around town collecting baby teeth to bilk the tooth fairy out of enough cash to buy a Sega Dreamcast. Then it morphs into a great commentary on the dumb lies we tell our children (what is the point of Santa and the tooth fairy, anyway?) when Cartman's mother finally tells her son the truth when the scheme nearly bankrupts her. The fact that this is one of the lesser episodes of the season should only tell you what's in store.

"Quintuplets" is about as damning an attack on the Elian Gonzalez debacle as you could hope to find, equally sending up the botched federal operation and the arrogance of many Americans concerning the event. Then we meet a little character named Timmy, a palsy-stricken boy with Tourette's confined to a wheelchair. When you first see him, it's easy to think that Parker and Stone finally lost it. They spent so much time toeing the line of edginess and obscenity and they finally tripped. Yet, by the end of his introductory episode, we see that the boys' insults are no different than their jabs at each other, and that placing the disabled on a pedestal only alienates them more (a theme introduced in "Conjoined Fetus Lady").

This episode is only the first of a slew of episodes this season that prove that all the outrageousness attributed to the show in its early days were child's play. I mean, who would dare to write an episode where Cartman, seeking to hang out with more mature people, winds up joining NAMBLA and dragging all the other little boys in his class along with him, not to mention the fact that it's one of the funniest episodes of the series? And what about the spoof of the boy-band explosion, which inspires the boys to form their very own group, Fingerbang?

Honestly, it's impossible to pick out highlights. "The Wacky Molestation Adventure" takes the strong concept in the undercooked "Sexual Harassment Panda" and expands it into a classic parody of Children of the Corn. "Trapper Keeper" blends The Terminator with 2001 and still has time to take potshots at Rosie O'Donnell, while the two part episode concerning the boys' religious fear after a wrathful priest warns them of the perils of Hell is one of the most vicious (and viciously funny) attacks on religion ever made. Of course, the writers would outdo themselves when they took on Mormons and Scientologists down the road...

The only weak spot of the season is an episode devoted entirely to Pip, the British lad inexplicably hated by everyone. Pip is based on the lead from Dickens' Great Expectations, and Trey and Matt thought it would be fun to reflect that with a modern -- um... retelling of the classic tale. On the plus side, they roped in Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange) to narrate it, and the episode is gleefully absurd, but it's pointless and too silly for its own good. Besides that, it's all gold.

Believe it or not, South Park isn't through growing, but this collection of episodes, like The Simpsons' landmark fourth season, took a show that was inching towards greatness and thrust it into classic territory in one fell swoop. Even though it pushes the students into a new grade, introduces new characters and offers character insights (such as Mr. Garrison coming to terms with his sexuality) that won't be as funny if you don't know the backstory, the fourth season is an excellent place to start potential newcomers, as it boasts a substantial number of classic episodes and giving them an idea what the show has in store for them while remaining more accessible than the much darker 5th season.

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South Park — Season 2

Having never stuck with South Park for a full season, I finally decided to start from the beginning to get the full experience before Trey and Matt (or, more likely) stopped altruistically streaming their entire series online. After a bit of disappointment with the dated feel of the first season but still fueled by more than enough laughs to propel me straight to the next set of episodes. Happily, the second season, despite suffering from a much bigger inconsistency than the first, is a marked improvement and contains the first true classics of the series.

The last season ended on the cliffhanger of the identity of Cartman's father, but if making fans wait 4 weeks to learn the answer tested viewers before they really cemented as hardcore fans, airing an entire episode revolving around Terrence and Phillip, the Canadian fart joke equivalents of Itchy and Scratchy, as an elaborate April Fool's joke instead of the second part of the episode took balls the size of grapefruits. In retrospect, "Terrence and Phillip in Not Without My Anus" isn't very funny and its appeal lies solely in its proof that Trey and Matt were willing to alienate people from the get-go.

Happily, its follow-up, the real season opener, is a fine coda to the first season's finale, even if it spends way too much emphasizing the clichés it sends up. From there we get early classics like "Chickenlover," in which we learn about Officer Barbrady's illiteracy and "Chef's Chocolate Salty Balls," a gaudy pun played up for an entire episode but never too much. "Conjoined Fetus Lady" mercilessly attacks how political correctness often only highlights differences and places them on a pedestal rather than allowing people to treat those with disabilities like human beings.

But there are also some duds. "Summer Sucks" has some great digs into Mr. Garrison's sexual confusion, but its main plot involving the attempt to make the biggest fireworks snake fizzles. "City on the Edge of Forever" introduces us to a clip show (this soon?) and even though it changes most of the clips around, it still follows the trend of most clip shows and just ambles along.

Likewise, "Chickenpox" never really gets off the ground until its disgusting finale, and "Ike's Wee Wee" features a main plot that would have been better served as a side-story. "Cow Days" has nothing going for it until Cartman suffers head trauma and mistakes himself for a Vietnamese prostitute. Consistency is a real problem this season, not just between episodes but within them.

Two episodes, however, point towards the future greatness of the show. "Spookyfish," the requisite Halloween episode has little in the way of satire, but it's just a damn good story that's full of laughs. A parallel universe opens up in South Park and a bearded, kind Cartman emerges. His world is evil but, as Cartman's doppelganger, he's pure and passive. This leads to a great twist in which Stan and Kyle try to send their Cartman to the parallel universe so they can keep the nice one.

But the season's centerpiece is undoubtedly "Gnomes," the first true masterpiece of the show. This season (and even the last one) boast a few fan favorites, but this episode is just perfect. Now, it's not as funny as it could be, but "Gnomes" is a blistering satire on the media's anti-corporation slant and the general assumption that every single big business got to the top by drinking the blood of small business owners. When coffee purveyors Harbucks try to open a franchise in South Park, local café owner Mr. Tweek manipulates the boys into railing against big business to ensure he can still hold the monopoly in the town. It paints Mr. Tweek as a far greedier and exploitative person than the Harbucks' operators, and even dares to suggest that maybe some businesses got big because they offered a superior product.

So, while the season oscillates between brilliance and mediocrity, its high number of classic moments (Cartman as a cop, Cartman the Vietnamese prostitute, Chef Aid) and the handful of classic episodes elevate above its more consistent predecessor. It's still got aways to go, but slowly the animation and the writing is coming together.

South Park — Season 1

As The Simpsons continues to descend into mediocrity stemming from outliving any fresh plots, and with Family Guy just plain sucking, South Park must hold aloft the flag of quality animated T.V. Over the course of the decade, the show has proven to be the most relevant piece of social commentary on the air, skewering topics ranging from tabloid-fodder to Elian Gonzalez to the War in Iraq. But what about the beginning, back when South Park was a crudely-animated, crass comedy that single-handedly launched Comedy Central into a national station?

In retrospect, South Park's first season does not seem to warrant the media storm that it received, nor does it really explain why it became such a commercial sensation in the late 90s. That's not to say that it isn't funny -- far from it -- but its style is such a far cry from the pitch-black satire of its later seasons that at times its almost unrecognizable. Oh sure, all the main characters were there from the start, and a few lesser characters came to the forefront over the years, but their personalities haven't been fully defined yet.

Case in point: Cartman, the show's defining character and one of the darkest creations ever allowed on television, comes off more as an incorrigible scamp. If anything, he's like Bart Simpson with Homer's weight. The Simpsons is a clear influence on the show -- could any animated program made since possibly not be indebted to it? -- but in this season Trey Parker and Matt Stone flirt with ripping Matt Groening off at various intervals: just watch "Weight Gain 4000" and try not to think about the masterpiece that is "King Size Homer." It kind of makes their Family Guy parody way on down the road a bit ironic, as they accuse Seth McFarlane of just ripping off The Simpsons and mixing it with unfunny random humor. Then again, considering how quickly Parker and Stone found their voice and carved out a unique program, I can't really bring myself to hold this over their heads any.

Despite the lighter tone and the general lack of a biting satirical element (with a few notable exceptions), most of the 13 episodes have something to recommend them, and a few are quite excellent. "Volcano," an underrated gem, viciously attacks the media's exploitations of emotions as well as taking an early swipe at hunting for sport. "Damien" introduces Jesus and Satan and even pits them together in a hilariously anti-climactic, pay-per-view boxing match. And for pure surreality, nothing beats the uproarious "Mecha-Streisand." Of course, the highlight of the season is the tongue-in-cheek cliffhanger in which Cartman attempts to learn the identity of his father. It sends up just about every season finale cliché, but the best shots were saved for the next season.

Other episodes, unfortunately, just don't stack up. Apart from the aforementioned "Weight Gain 4000," several episodes fail to get more than a few chuckles. "An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig" is nothing but shock humor, but it's far from shocking by the show's standards so it never really goes anywhere. The pilot, in which aliens anally probe Cartman, earns points for showing how casually Parker and Stone would push the boundaries of taste even from the start, but you can tell instantly that this is a first episode. Even good episodes have elements that take away from it: "Starvin' Marvin" sends up Sally Struthers and the hypocritical and self-satisfying nature of all those ads to help starving children, but the second plot involving a turkey uprising falls flat.

The animation on South Park has never really approached beauty, but here it is borderline awful. The animation is so crude that it actually distracts at times, and it's hard to care about the town and its inhabitants because of it. Stan and Kyle have too much of a heroic streak; they're always the ultimate voice of logic and peace in the show, but they're far from saints in later seasons. South Park's relative lack of continuity makes this season more of a "for fans only" season; those wishing to introduce newcomers would do well to start them a bit further down the road. Nevertheless, there's enough moments worth your time and enough near-classics to make the inaugural season a fun, if dated, look into the start of a classic.