Like it or love it, South Park is nothing less than a TV trailblazer.
Fearless and daring, the creation of Trey Parker and Matt Stone has never met a sacred cow it isn’t happy to skewer, satirise and mercilessly parody, all in the service of getting all of us, well all of us watching anyway, to take a good hard look at what makes us tick as people and why it is we do what we do.
And even more importantly, whether we shouldn’t give some serious thought, in amongst laughing at South Park‘s hilarious ballsiness, to do doing things a whole lot different.
As Kristian Williams, whom I support on Patreon, beautifully articulates in yet another of his brilliantly-realised video essays, South Park is all about pricking humanity’s pomposity, no matter which side of the political divide you occupy.
“South Park set out to dismantle any symbol of self-importance. It’s into escapism and rubs our noses in the ugliness of our world while simplifying current events into a less complicated, more easily understood format.”
Not bad for a cartoon that came to be the making not only of Comedy Central but TV animation as a whole.
Watch the whole video essay and you’ll come to understand how pivotally-important, intelligent and clever South Park is and how glad we, and society at large, should all be that television this daring and incisive exists.