South Park Keeps Living in the Past
I felt like the latest seasons self referenced their own past more and more. You may agree or disagree, but I feel like the last seasons were primarily running on nostalgia bait. It had some creative ideas, like an entire episode satirizing the Labubu craze by making it look like a Satanic ritual, but most episodes from the last seasons feel like compilations of re-hashed ideas, but who resemble the original concepts only on a surface level, and adding well received characters only to be there and not even making them act in a meaningful way.
They had Satana date Donald Trump and made the dynamic play off just like the time Satan dated Saddam Hussein, except it makes absolutely no sense since unlukie Hussein, Trump is narcissistic, blunt and loud while past Satan preferred subtlety and was only manipulated by Sadan because Sadan was subtle with his manipulation. Not to mention that Satan grew from his past relationship with Hussein and got wiser about his romantic life, yet the show just threw all the development.
They added the Christmas Critters to help Satan give birth, except they just have them as observers and make them repeat the word "crap" multiple times, making me wonder if the show also wanted to reference "It hits the Fan" where they repeated the word "shit" multiple times because it no longer got censored. At the end it was all pointless anyway, since Satan's baby killed itself off screen without any given reason. I would say it feels like a middle schooler wrote this plot, but even they can do better than this.
There's also Towelie who now shows often, which is not inherently wrong, but they changed him from a parody of a mascot who markets the brand too much and who was naive about the world, but was mostly functional and had self preservation skills when sober while struggling with weed addiction, being very unstable when high, to an yes man to Randy and who just lets Donald Trump use him for dirty actions without even trying to escape and now Towelie is far more harmless and less active when he's high as opposed to when he's sober. I want to mention how even the official real life South Park store sells towels and other cloths that are replicas of Towelie for quite high prices and mostly synthetic materials and how it even sells pet items with Towelie prints. Even if the writers of the show played absolutely no role in this, they aren't exactly helping matters by showing Towelie so much and having him act like a shell of his former self. If they showed Towelie often but had him act like himself or even just wrote funny jokes with him, I would've cut them so slack, but given how popular Towelie is and how much merch he sells, I don't think it's a coincidence that the writers kept on using him so much without putting much effort into writing him. Toweile started out as a parody of an overly marketed mascot and now he ironically turned into an overly marketed mascot and he's not even particularly entertaining anymore.
There are many other examples of the Show referencing its past and Stan even lamented that they used to be highly relevant until politics influenced them. Whether the meta meaning is that South Park itself dropped in quality because it was too political or that politics repressed the show's creativity or another possible message about the state of the show, South Park was always political and that it mostly got away with things that few shows managed to and that South Park was much better back then, because it was just trying to tell a story and making jokes. I have heard others claim that the show became too political, but I doubt that this is the main issue if an issue at all. I feel like the main issue is that the writers seem to desperately want to recapture the former reputation the show had but instead of just writing crude stories and humor without caring much how others react, they mostly just reference past things and put no effort to make them make sense or even be entertaining.
I am not against the show referencing its past in on itself and I don't think it has to be as shocking or as ground breaking as it used to be, I just want more substance and it to be entertaining. You may be thinking that decline is about to happen to all long running shows, but the creators could end it at any time or at least not over use trends and what worked in the past in the show just to gain views.









