Season Review: South Park Season 25

Some while discussing South Park’s eponymous 25th season lament the fact that some of the attributes of prior seasons have since been removed. With shorter seasons, no serialization to speak of, and classic jokes often put on the back burner, I can understand how longtime fans of the franchise might be put off by South Park’s 25th season. For my money, we got six episodes, and then two feature-length specials late last year, so we’ve had a solid almost five months of new quality South Park. I am also always on the side of quality over quantity. In fact, I’ve said for years that series like The Simpsons and Family Guy could probably do without 22-episode season orders and instead trim to ten a season, thereby allowing younger/newer franchises to come through a bit more and see if they can’t pick up some of the slack. In my view, Comedy Central attempted to do that this year with a shorter season order of South Park but also hoping a new franchise like Fairview could step up to the plate and provide a good 1+2 punch. That, probably hasn’t happened. In it’s first season, Fairview has been anything but original. South Park has shown that everyone else is still playing catch up, even 25 seasons later.

Think about that for a second. Twenty-five seasons later, and I’m mentioning that this season will probably make our ten best list by the end of 2022 and that’s fully-knowing that another South Park special is coming later this year for Paramount+. This show is still the creme-de-le-creme of adult animation even after all this time. To prove it, we just got an ADIDAS collection that dropped the other day and a concert with Primus (!!!!!) is coming later this year. How many shows are doing THAT shit?

Let’s talk about this season. As I mentioned, I’m all aboard for quality/quantity and this season has a mess of quality episodes that touch upon a lot of different social structures like race/ethnicity, COVID, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and today’s lazy teenagers. We also got a healthy remix of new settings and characters that I think are really going to help the show continue to sustain for a longtime. Steve and the rest of the Black family are now in a competing weed business, the Solokov family brought with them questions about Russian affiliation, and the multitude of teenagers gives us another group to play around with later. Cartman moving into a hot dog is a perfectly on-brand complement to the classic character, and seldom used characters like the Scotches, Mackey, and others took on some of the heavy-lifting in episodes to a hilarious degree.

Are some of the voices changing? Sure. Trey Parker isn’t getting any younger and he does 100 voices for this franchise. The Simpsons are going through a similar change. But, the difference is, the writing is still just as good as anything else on television. Future seasons could start to open those COVID-restricting doors and really see this franchise for years to come. New seeds have been planted where I’m not sure a serialized season or trio of episodes couldn’t happen in the future, but if we weren’t going to go that route, South Park is still the kings of episodic adult animation.