Hey guys, Jared again. Today we're
talking about your favorite little town in Colorado, yup, South Park. For the past three seasons, the show's ditched
its signature standalone episodes, and embraced season-long serialization.
And it's largely been awesome. Season 19 brilliantly blended themes of PC culture,
advertising, and gentrification, over a multi-episode arc. And most recently
season 20 kicked off with an even more ambitious storyline that juggled the
presidential election, member berries, a militant feminist Cartman, a girl hating
dick flashing Butters, and a whole lot of internet trolling. It all seemed to be leading up to some epic conclusion, and then, everything just fizzled out into confusion, convulsion, and holy s**t they just blew up the internet?
So why did season 20 leave us feeling all itchy and uncertain like a fourth grade
school-wide outbreak of lice had just surfaced? Well we have an idea, and it all
has to do with Matt Trey's secret sauce that makes South Park's writing so good. Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition of South Park Season 20: What Went Wrong? and as always spoilers ahead. Watching South Park feels like peering inside the
mind of the world's funniest stoner. Its unpredictable, imaginative. and completely
unhinged in the best way possible. But, make no mistake, there's a strict
order to the madness. The show is constructed with one rigid plot line rule: We've found out this really simple rule that
maybe you guys have all heard before. We can take these beats which are basically
the beats of your outline and if the words and then belong between those beats, you're f**ked. For instance, here's a
three plot storyline about stick figure John. John adopts a stray dog, and then
John wins the lottery, and then John becomes a Scientologist. John's story has
a sucky narrative because there is no cause and effect. You could rearrange
each action into any order, and it would remain a random series of events in the
life of a lottery winning, dog rescuing, intro-level Scientologist. So what makes
good South Park approved writing? And whenever you can replace your ands with
buts or therefores makes for better writing. Take South Park's famous Mormon episode.
An annoyingly perfect Mormon kid moves to town, therefore he pisses everyone off, therefore stan decides to kick his ass.
But the kid is so nice, that he tell Stan to go ahead and beat him up.
Therefore Stan doesn't beat him up. Instead, he agrees to go to the kids house
for dinner. Notice how each action that begins with therefore or but indicates a
consequence or reaction to the previous action. Every plot point matters, which is
why the show never loses momentum. Okay, so that's South Park's Golden Rule,
but before we dive into what went wrong with season 20, it's time to talk about
the orange-tinted elephant in the room; yup ,the President
of the United States. Stone and Parker have been upfront about the fact that,
like 99% of the pollsters, they expected turd sandwich to win the election, and
planned the series around that outcome. They had to do desperate last-minute rewrites
in order to air an episode the day after the election. So, not ideal. As soon as
giant douche Mr. Garrison wins the election, the show starts breaking the
creators core rules- And f**king them all to death! as seen in the two main plot lines; member berries and trolling. Let's map out the member berries plotline. Randy tries member berries, falls into a nostalgic trance, and things get a little dark. member when there weren't so many Mexicans? Therefore, Randy realizes member berries
are dangerous brainwashing germs. What the f**k is going on with these member berries? Meanwhile Mr. Garrison,
along with his VP Caitlin Jenner, is leading in the polls. But he realizes he doesn't have a plan to carry out his campaign
promises, and will look like a jackass if he wins. What the hell do? If I win I
won't be able to do what I promised. Therefore Mr. Garrison spends the first
half of the series trying to sabotage his campaign so Hillary will win. I don't know what the f**k I'm doing. I've got to come clean, I had no idea I would get this far,
but the fact of the matter is, I should not be president. But, his voters catch on and demand an explanation. Therefore, Randy tells Garrison the truth
about his popularity. When the world is changing so fast, it makes us
yearn for the old ways when life seemed simpler, but it doesn't mean those old ideas are
good for us now. Therefore, the two of them set out to
destroy member berries, but quickly realize that these little guys just won't die Therefore, Randy convinces Mr. Garrison to give a heartfelt speech denouncing nostalgia. On November 8th, you must vote against me and show the world that you didn't think
the new Star Wars was all that good. And there you have it a; perfect half season
set up for a Hillary victory that follows the golden rule of South Park
storytelling, except newsflash, Hillary lost. Suddenly they have to justify Garrison's
surprising win, and that's when things get messy. Now South Park has to
improvise its way through the rest of the season, and the writers start to
break their own storytelling rules. We go from a strictly but or therefore based
plot, to a big cluster f**k of and thens. Starting with and then Mr. Garrison wins
anyway, out of nowhere. And then Caitlin barfs, reinfecting Mr. Garrison and Randy
with member berries. So Randy and Garrison trip out on nostalgia,
forget their quest to destroy member berries, and generally get stoked on
Garrison's victory. This presses the rewind button on the plot. Watching them
unlearn the perils of nostalgia is literally narrative backpedaling. Also
you have this nagging feeling that it should take more than a bit of berry
flavored nostalgia to explain Garrison's split-second transformation from
terrified self sabotaging presidential candidate, to be cocky leader of the free
world. *singing* Guess who's here? it's the President of the United f**king States. From here the member berry storyline just generally gets
muddled. At the beginning of the season they had a clear purpose; to set up a physical
embodiment of the toxic nostalgia that will eventually be overcome, like the
human ads in the earlier season. They start out as lazy intoxicating berries,
and then, they magically turn into a weird vomit inducing virus. And then they
stop by a 1920s nightclub in a brief side story that seems quickly forgotten.
And then we find out they're Nazis Member storm troopers?
Sure, I member. Not those storm troopers, the real old ones. People want to member? They're gonna member. Also pals with Vladimir Putin and
by the end they're ultimately looking like a tiny fruit militia. Ultimately the
show doesn't offer any justification for the member berries transformation,
instead we get a random progression of events that build without any apparent
logic and that's just not the South Park MO. Well I'm getting pretty sick of it! Now on to another subplot that got
tangled up by a Trump win; trolling. For most of the season we watch
Kyle's dad Gerald living his best life as the wino troll skankhunt42. This
initially conforms with the South Park philosophy of story structure;
Gerald's trolling angers the Danes, therefore the Danes threatened to
release everyone's internet history, sending Gerald, Cartman, South Park, and
the world into a panic. Enter Hillary Clinton, who's confident
she's about to win the presidency. But, she finds out troll trace might leak her
online activities. Therefore she needs Who is skankhunt42?
We believe he's the only one who can save you. Then, crap, she loses the election and again, the
narrative structure starts to crumble. Without her presidency to defend, Clinton
doesn't have any real reason to recruit Gerald/skankhunt42, and then
confusingly, Clinton recruits him anyway with a vague mission; he needs to
infiltrate troll trace to protect U.S. secrets. We want to send someone in to Denmark
undercover and steal their technology. This entire scene of Hillary
meeting Gerald below the bridge feels super weird and disjointed, almost like
it's from an alternate reality? That's because it probably was recycled
material from the original "if Hillary had won" version of the episode. It
certainly would fit the South Park rule of storytelling; a newly elected Hillary
is afraid of having compromising emails released by troll trace, therefore she
recruits Gerald to take down the Danes. Gerald wants to stop troll trace from
revealing his secret identity anyway, therefore he agrees to go and delete the
evidence and save both of them from exposure. But in this strange new President
Garrison run world that can't fly. So in a desperate attempt to salvage
the plotline, the show reveals that Clinton's claim was merely
a ruse, and she's actually just helping the Danes kidnap American trolls in
exchange for the protection of her emails, and then oops... ♪*rick roll*♪ turns out they're just trolling the
American trolls they captured, and then this top Danish guy wasn't trying to
punish the trolls, he's also just a giant troll trolling the world for the lulz.
And also he's not even f**king Danish Did your brain just melt? If so it's probably
because South Park abandoned its most basic narrative premise. None of the
events in the trolling narrative actually build off previous actions,
they're just a seemingly random increasingly complicated laundry list of
plot points. The show writers openly complained about the narrative hole they
dug for themselves. Come on, this isn't South Park. What's happened to us?
We used to have a challenge and deal with it. Then move on to the next one.
Now we've just been dealing with trolling and internet stuff over and
over, week after week, and I don't know about you but I'm getting pretty sick of it. It almost feels like the Danish guy's
announcement that he's just strolling the world is a last-ditch effort to rescue the narrative. Maybe this is like the new post funny era of satire! Just like Mr. Garrison when he's drunk on
member berries, a completely nihilistic troll doesnt need plot consistency. From
there the writers need to wrap up a few incomplete storylines; most notably the
risks Cartman and Gerald face from having their internet history revealed.
So they commit plot hari-kari by blowing everything up. That's right, everybody
from Kyle's little brother Ike, to the top generals at the Pentagon, collaborate
to take down the internet with a massive blitz of trolling and a little help from
Elon Musk's SpaceX program. By blowing up the internet and deleting everybody's
ugliest secrets, they also destroy the cause-and-effect relationship that in
building up all season. Instead of a satisfying conclusion where things get,
you know, resolved, audiences just get a big ol' Psych! We're blowing everything up. Before that the season had done such a good job of analyzing the way the
Internet has fragmented our public and private selves. How this sense of privacy
has given us all the ability to behave like assholes without the people we love
ever having to find out. This was all building up to a really promising
conclusion but, we've never got it. The show also brilliantly skewers the
outrage cycles that dominate internet culture as trolls expertly push our
buttons. This kind of simmering outrage actually seems like a more interesting
explanation for Mr. Garrison's victory than member berries the
show never develops this idea aside from giving it one quick shout-out during the
finale. What the hell is Trevor's axiom? Trevor's axiom is a well known equation
in online trolling. It's a way in which one person could create a massive
reaction on the internet. All bringing out the worst in humanity. That sort of
sounds like how I got elected. Because Matt and Trey thought Hillary would win,
they spent the first half of the season teasing the perils of having your
internet history exposed, but since Trump won, Hillary's emails exposing her are no
longer as relevant as say the outrage cycles on social media. So what might
season 20 of South Park have looked like in a parallel universe, where the turd
sandwich triumphs? Haven't you seen the polls?
It's president-elect sandwich. According to a deadline interview with Stone and
Parker, viewers got a sneak peak in the post-election episode. Bill Clinton and
Bill Cosby joined forces to announce their new South Park gentlemen's club,
and obvious hangover from the if Hillary one version of the episode. Later, Bill
confides in Butters that the club was actually a place for men to hide because Trust me, my wife is a crazy bitch. She and all the other women in the world about to get payback, and we are all completely f**ked. Parker says that in the alternate reality Season 20, they would have focused on
Bill settling into his new role as the apparently terrified First Gentleman of the U.S.
It would have been a fitting way to escalate the battle of the sexes
already underway at South Park Elementary. It also would have given a
lot more poignancy to Cartman's newly inspired fear of his girlfriend Heidi,
who he suspects is trying to destroy him. Instead, the first gentleman's club is
understandably abandoned. So what does the future hold for South Park?
Well the creators weren't being subtle when they called the last episode of
season 20 the end of serialization as we know it. If they're really leaving
serialization behind, that's kind of a bummer, because as messy as season 20 was,
there was a lot of promise. And in our humble opinion they did some of their
best work as a decade in seasons 18 and 19. Why let a silly election between a
giant douche and a turd sandwich ruin all that? So what did you guys think of season 20?
Let us know what you think in the comments. Thanks for watching guys, peace.
