Review: South Park “Help, My Teenager Hates Me!”

Overview

Airsoft is all the rage in South Park and you’re not a cool kid unless you’re shooting kids with little plastic bullets. While at first not thrilled with the fact in teaming up with fourth-graders, the teenagers soon team up and befriend Kenny, Cartman, Kyle, and Stan. Unfortunately, the team-ups aren’t relegated just in the airsoft fields, but soon the kids have to help the teenagers with friggin’ everything. They whine, they have pimples, and are mostly hopeless, the teenagers soon become a nuisance to anyone involved.

After a few days, the kids are sick of these teens but love airsoft so they have to do their best to save face. Kyle recommends a book called Help My Teenager Hates Me! and the first thing the book recommends is taking the teens camping in the woods. When that doesn’t work, the kids start losing interest in airsoft so the dads opt in as potential adversaries for the teenagers. Together with their kids, the teenagers are simply no match.

Our Take

I honestly had no idea airsoft was that big of a deal that it got the attention of the producers of South Park, though the duo are parents to teenagers so it’s possible this is very much influenced by that. In any event, this week’s episode focused on the modern-day pimply-faced teenager who constantly whines about everything and probably are ill-equipped to fight any major military battles for us in the future, unlike Vietnam or WW2 which featured legions of 18/19-year olds bravely fighting for our freedoms that we too much take for granted.

Teenagers are probably the one area that South Park hasn’t focused a bunch in over the years. We’ve had plenty of time with the kids. and lately Trey will write through Randy or another adult when dealing with more adult issues. The gap here, is teenagers, a void that over the years of adult animation has been played well by Family Guy but most notably is used for more fantastical efforts like Steven Universe, Infinity Train, and others of this ilk. The notion of dumbing down the male-teen audience to it’s bare elements is probably long overdue for this show, and we get a solid episode.

Nothing ground-breaking or political this week for South Park, but still an episode that is fresh and continues to show that these guys have a lot of cards that yet been played even with 25 seasons in. Teenagers muffling in the grocery store, complaining about lack of hair gel, and yes, constantly jerking off, all are featured here, but I don’t know if we got a “fix” for these teens’ lifestyles. Usually, South Park likes to have a morale and while we got some comeuppance for jerk teenagers, it’s not like I hated them so much that I wanted to see them suffer. I think a little more time of us feeling the pain of dealing with teenagers would’ve done this one good, but still a solid go.