South Park deploys somehow-unused “South Park Sucks Now” URL

Entertainment

South Park has spent the last few months making bold, frequently puerile efforts to grab the zeitgeist and then wring its zeitgeist-y little neck for all it’s worth, going in hard on critiques of Donald Trump and his various, pretty-easy-to-transform-into-cartoons-as-it-turns-out lackeys. Now, the show—which aired the second episode of its very abruptly launched 28th season on Halloween night—is having some fun with the idea that some of its fans might not be as amused by the show’s bold swings as others. To wit, the show’s latest episode has (in addition to its plotline about Trump being haunted by his wife Melania for tearing down the East Wing of the White House, which is one of those things that later TV historians may have to footnote was not an invention of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s deadline-driven imaginations) “The Woman In The Hat” sees Stan, Kyle, and Kenny launch a meme coin titled “South Park Sucks Now.” (To quote Stan, “It’s because of all this political shit.”)

Kudos to the marketing department at Comedy Central for somehow securing this URL before anyone else could in, like, 2006, because southparksucksnow.com does, indeed, now redirect to the show’s page at Comedy Central. Meanwhile, the episode pulls the same trick that South Park has been using all season(s): Doing some pretty broad material with Trump and his goons—attorney general Pam Bondi’s constantly shit-covered nose is a recurring feature—while using its other plots to comment, with a bit more canniness, on things like the basic scam nature of pump-and-dump meme coins and other crypto-based garbage of modern finance, and the ways basically any emotion can now be weaponized to feed the con. (There’s also some material in there about the ongoing government shutdown, although nothing particularly trenchant.)

Is there a sense here that South Park is starting to run out of a bit of steam with the all-in-on-Trump approach? (Someone has finally gotten White House staff to stop responding to their caricatures in recent weeks, which was only fueling the series’ position in the political discourse.) If so, it’s not anything Parker and Stone aren’t comfortable pivoting to make fun of, too: They’ve been using the show to periodically attack itself for decades, after all.



Source link

Tags

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *