As far as television goes, last night was pretty unremarkable—just your regular Wednesday night fare, plus a season finale or two, given the time of year. So it’s funny to think that just a few months ago, people all over the Internet were predicting that November 16 would bring the apocalypse of the televised world: the end of South Park.
It’s a fact of life that all TV shows, except maybe soap operas, must eventually meet an end. South Park’s 15-season run, which has included one Oscar-nominated feature film, has been impressive for its staying power alone. But after the success of The Book of Mormon, the multiple-Tony-winning Broadway musical created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the guys who have brought the primitively-animated adventures of Kenny, Kyle, Eric, and Stan to the small screen since 1997, the rumors started. All across the world, South Park fans thought that this crossover success meant the impending doom of this offensive, comedic mainstay.
That offensiveness is not what makes South Park so unique. Nominally, the show is just one of many in the growing genre of off-color animated comedies for adults, a group which has been bolstered in recent years by hits like FX’s Archer and the rotating series that air during the wee hours on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. But even Family Guy, which has drawn the most comparisons with South Park (a parallel which Parker and Stone parodied in the two-part episode “Cartoon Wars”) and has been on the air for a comparably long time, wouldn’t rock the TV world with rumored cancellation in the same way.
The reason is the highly clever way that South Park dips its cultural criticism and satire in the most inappropriate, offensive, and sometimes outright disgusting ways they can. Nothing is sacred, and Parker and Stone have gotten themselves into hot water on numerous occasions for taking their ridicule too far—that same “Cartoon Wars” episode featured an image of Muhammad that Comedy Central refused to air, and Isaac Hayes, who voiced the character of Chef, quit after a Scientology episode lampooned his religion a little too much. But obviously, religious spoofs are one of the duo’s biggest strengths, as the success of Book of Mormon clearly proves.
Despite all the protests, the show has remained on air for 15 seasons, and that’s largely because of the genius behind each episode. The show is up-to-the-minute with its cultural relevance, and no big event gets by unscathed. Among the media circus that has surrounded the Occupy Wall Street movement, no critic has made it seem sillier than South Park’s recent episode “1%,” with “full-on class warfare” breaking out between the fourth and fifth graders of South Park elementary. Watch the show for long enough, and you’ll lose your convictions for just about everything.
But the show never clobbers its viewers over the head with its satire, and that’s because it’s so heavily coated with insensitivity, vulgarity (The South Park Movie earned a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for “Most Swearing in an Animated Film”), and flat-out grossness. This combination is what makes it so unique among both animated and live-action shows. Sure, it makes you look at the absurdity of the modern world through a different lens. But it has also featured a high-voiced, anthropomorphic hunk of human excrement wearing a Santa hat. No other show dares to walk that line, and any that did would not only feel like a cheap imitation, but would be hard-pressed to execute it as perfectly as Parker and Stone have. Lucky for us, the rumors were false, and we don’t have to worry about a world without South Park just yet.
