Here’s the thing about modern episodes of South Park: they don’t exactly make for a technically great show.
For the past… let’s say at least five years, the show has usually packed in one or two very good to great episodes per season that have the same focus of the series in its prime. The rest of each season’s episodes have a few to even a bunch of funny moments, but there’s a lack of precision and a too heavy hand taken on the series’ long-held targets of satire that feels off where it would’ve felt on the nose without being obvious years ago. You can see what they’re going for from a mile away, and it doesn’t necessarily make the show better.
Last night’s season premiere was, despite the credit its been getting from most of the sports internet, an example of the latter. The show attempt to not only parody Dan Snyder and his awful football team, but also their loss of trademark on the team’s name, Silicon Valley corporate culture, the NFL and its owners themselves, and the very notion that people are protesting a football team’s name. Oh, and there’s a token tribute to that commercial where the Native American man sheds a tear over litter that’s been done about 100 times before.
So yeah, South Park will get all of the headlines saying they “destroyed” or “trashed” the NFL and Dan Snyder, but was any of this actually good television? A few moments I really enjoyed:
– Any of the shots taken at the NFL and its owners seemed to be the place where show creators and writers Trey Parker and Matt Stone took the most care. The club owners are seen as ineffective cowards who want nothing to do with any of the league’s problems. The introduction of Roger Goodell as a robot (the show literally just used things he said in his press conference) was also a really good idea and an actual cathartic laugh.
(h/t @SBNationNFL)
– The show is never not funny when Cartman is presenting something in front of a crowd, so they Bay Area startup aspects of the episode were really funny. The original idea of the show, that he, Kenny, Stan, Kyle and Butters all want to start a company that does nothing so they don’t have to go to school, is a classic South Park idea that I wish the show had done more with.
That said, none of the stuff with Snyder and the football team felt particularly inspired. It felt like, as modern South Park perilously does, the show saying “Look at this stupid thing, isn’t it stupid?” and not having much of a point beyond that. The one clever twist was when the citizens were protesting the boys’ company for actually hurting Snyder and the NFL. I thought they could’ve done a little more with the backlash to the backlash.
So yes, South Park will get a lot of credit (and I guess deservedly so) for taking down a group of people that we’ve all wanted an excuse to laugh at without feeling any remorse for the past month or so. But don’t get it twisted, ‘Go Fund Yourself’ was not a particularly great episode of the show. It was unfocused, and the Snyder satire felt on the nose and like the show had little to say about what of the league’s grossest characters. They’d have done better to go further into their satire of NFL owners and Goodell, which had a lot more bite to it.
That said, it was funny, so who am I to judge?