>Randy and Sharon talking about their mid-life crisis in a serious tone
>Stan becoming depressed
>Liane whining about how hard it is to be a single mom raising Cartman and acting like a victim (Despite it being all her fault)
>That Heidi arc with dumb gay tumblr-tier armchair psychologist speeches like "Heidi, people like Cartman, they always make things someone else's fault. We all wrongly see ourselves as the victims sometimes but Cartman sees himself as the victim all the time. He'll always find someone to blame for his shortcomings, and because of that, he's never gonna change" holy crap compare this cringefest to that Saddam and Satan arc.
>The specials being about how depressing the world.
>Characters act like sane actual people and only deviate from it if the joke calls for it (whereas in early South Park, being crazy was basically every character's default state)
Like seriously, what's with emotional soapboxing? I want to watch an absurd comedy, not dumb homosexual "deep touching" scenes where characters complain about how depressing their life is while gay le sad piano music plays in the background.
The creators realize they're getting old
Pretty much that. They've become more attuned to the older characters now.
Watch joke compilations from the show on youtube then zoomie
Baby's first time watching South Park?
i can't help but wonder if it's a case of matt and trey wanting to do more "serious" stuff but being unable to branch out from south park so they shoehorn their serious ideas and serialized plotlines into the show.
the "liane is a struggling single mother and you're supposed to feel bad for her" shit pisses me off so much. she has been established from the beginning as being a shitty mother and a shitty person, and there was an entire fricking episode about the fact that her shitty parenting is a big part of why cartman is so awful. now we're expected to sympathize with her and feel sorry for her.
>le sad piano music plays in the background
this is so obnoxious in the later seasons. even the games overuse the sad piano music to an annoying extent, especially the second one (i still like them both though). and it's always, always, always the exact same music too. you'd think after nearly 30 years they'd have expanded their catalog of background music, but i guess trey can't be bothered to write another handful of sad piano notes to add some variety.
no, he's kinda right. the show has changed a lot, especially over the past 10 years (though it's been changing since the beginning, and the decline really began more like 15-16 years ago if you ask me).
What I don't get is why don't they just do make a different show for that kind of stuff and leave South Park for surreal humor. They've often shown derision for Seth MacFarlane but at least he is willing to branch out and make shows other than Family Guy (and a decent chunk of them even turned out to be better).
i don't get it either. they've barely ever done anything outside of south park - team america and the book of mormon are the only things that come to mind (they also acted in a couple movies like baseketball, but didn't make them). and they were reasonably successful, so it's not like they have to worry about not being able to be successful with something not related to SP.
though i suspect a big part of why they don't do anything else is because they force themselves to do every episode in a week. apparently they were already putting out episodes that quickly even during the good years of the show, but it's clear it isn't working anymore. the advantage it gave them was being able to commentate on current events, but they suck at making comedy out of that now, so there is no point to it anymore.
i think they're ultimately just lazy, especially looking at how much they've reduced the episode count per season. first they reduced it to 10, now it's even lower.
Matt and Trey turned into bitter old fogies and the show reflects that.
South Park is one of the few shows in the history of entertainment where the writers have remained the same through its entire run. Trey plus Matt, with I assume suggestions from some brainstorming crew. This kind of approach to making shows is in theory, great for consistency. For a narrative story with an eventual end, it's ideal. However, South Park has no "ending." And Matt took a back seat about 10-15 years ago to focus on the business half of the series. This change alone was enough to set off a slow slide into a new direction for the show. One where only Trey is behind the helm with perhaps some assistants. That basically doubles the pressure on the lone writer, and whenever the writer's life changes it affects the products of his creativity too. Trey is the captain of the ship, and without someone like an editor or partner to consult with he's probably navigating based on feeling. And based on interviews it seems he's got a lot of those. He got old, he had a kid, keeps getting divorced, probably having a midlife crisis of some kind at his age, you name it. Even if you brought Matt back full time, Matt's changed in his own ways, it still won't bring back what it used to be.
At this point I think South Park is just like an experimental thing now. Where Trey just tries new cinematic and writing ideas on the cheap.
>South Park is one of the few shows in the history of entertainment where the writers have remained the same through its entire run
didn't they have a crew of talented writers just like early simpsons? iirc bill hader was there for some of their most popular episodes like the fishsticks one.
Nothing gets past trey is what's most important. I remember reading the first thing some slag they hired tried to do in the writers room was give a suggestion and they showed her the door for not knowing her place
Trey sounds like a diva
Are you really surprised?
No. He married a coalburning stripper with a halfgroid son. He's obviously a piece of shit. Just didn't figure he was the "fire someone over an unwritten rule" kind, though granted that's not as bad as the stripper thing.
>I remember reading the first thing some slag they hired tried to do in the writers room was give a suggestion and they showed her the door for not knowing her place
Proof?
>proofs?
https://www.nme.com/news/tv/kristen-schaal-fired-south-park-one-month-3013304
I thought she got sacked for being too much of a hyper chatterbox.
We can only speculate Matt and Treys opinions of her but she still got fired for suggesting too much
Did you just forget all the preachy "I learnt something today" speeches in the early seasons? And no, they were not ironic
>they were not ironic
The punchline at the end of starvin marvin says otherwise, you dumb c**t.
For the first six seasons or so they were mostly antimorals ("reading sucks" "We need to stop rainforests") or would follow the speech up with "or something gay like that" keeping that edgy, tongue in cheek vibe. Later on though, it became captain planet for adults.
It's hard to keep a show funny for over 20 years, and the creators are on record saying what they thought was funny in the early seasons makes them cringe now so it's absolutely over for the series if you have any sort of attachment to early SP.
I always found it weird that the kids have romantic relationships with each other that's almost on the level of an adult minus the sex
>the kids have experiences that are almost on the level of an adult
Thats the whole premise. At least until the actual adult characters took over
Matt and Trey fundementally can't balance what they want to do with the show anymore. On the one hand, people tell them they are an issues show and blow smoke up their buttholes about their takes. On the other hand they want to have wacky shit happen to the kids or the kids deal with a kid issue. On a third, mutant hand, they want to try and shock people that have long since passed the ability to be shocked.
So apply that to the new episode. The stuff on influencers was kinda interesting almost there but failed to really hit a landing. The kids storyline didn't fully connect to the first point and was not really wacky or dealing with the issue correctly. And Randy's penis was not that shocking and neither were the miners.
The problem is that their takes on stuff often feel dated or well after the fad has passed. The kid stuff is very hit and miss. The wacky stuff is usually centred on Randy, Cartman or Butters with inconsistent results.
South park has always been rather soapboxy.
This tbh
Wrong.
Slacking again, 15 hours late