South Park Season 22 (2018)
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South Park Season 22 Review
The twenty second season of South Park is an improvement when it comes to its number of highly strong episodes, but it still has its many stinkers unfortunately.
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“Sucks for you!“
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Dead Kids is actually terrific. It started this season with a promising bang that I was eventually disappointed with the end outcome. But this first episode is so good because finally, finally it brought us back the original Cartman who is awesome here. His frustration with ‘Black Panther’ being so popular made me laugh so hard. I also really appreciated Sharon’s subplot about school shootings which was necessary for the US and very soberingly done.
A Boy and a Priest is solid for what it is which is essentially a much weaker version of the regular pedophilia in church storyline that South Park creators for some reason regularly get back to. Butters is fine here and Father Maxi is excellent and the episode is definitely serviceable, but a much less funny version of so many better episodes about this subject matter that we’d gotten before.
The Problem with a Poo is okay for a Mr. Hankey episode. I have never liked this piece of shit (pun intended), but here he got some fine moments and I liked that this season brought back old characters and actually kicked him out of the town. I found that Simpsons reference ending funny, but again overly pro-PC for my personal taste.
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Tegridy Farms is awful. It’s by far the worst episode of this season along with the penultimate one. Everything here is bad from Randy’s poorly structured country visit storyline to annoying references to vaping to unfunny jokes and scenarios.
The Scoots is okay, but it could have been much funnier. It has a very strong use of Mr. Mackey, but otherwise it’s overly typical and never as funny as it thinks it is. And now we come to the finest episodes of the season which is the duology about ManBearPig – Time to Get Cereal and Nobody Got Cereal?
Both episodes are actually amazing and similar in their superb quality which is evident for all real South Park fans. This story has it all – the return of Al Gore who steals the show per usual due to many hilarious one-liners, a terrific use of Satan himself who also returned thankfully, a well crafted, intricate storyline and many great jokes that really worked. What it also has is an apology from Parker and Stone to Al Gore about the climate change/global warming and a fantastic metaphor about how we all put the problem of destroying the planet aside for future generations to think about. It’s a smart, needed story which also features a hilarious Grandpa Marsh.
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Buddha Box is fine in its central theme and PC Principal and Strong Woman actually got a strong conclusion to their story, but I disliked the overly big emphasis on them throughout this season and PC Babies aren’t all that funny to me. But Unfulfilled is a giant crap of an episode with too many songs, speeches about capitalism and Marxism and an emphasis on politics instead of storytelling and humor. Yes, Bike Parade is better, but still this story is overly serious and again overly concerned with American culture, this time with Amazon which doesn’t concern me at all as I don’t use it myself.
So in the end, this season definitely has its couple of amazing episodes that really are superb, hilarious and a welcome sign of Parker and Stone’s still sometimes brilliant minds, but too many episodes are overly American, political, boring and unfunny leading to a flawed season once again.
Worst Episodes: Tegridy Farms and Unfulfilled.
Best Episodes: Time to Get Cereal and Nobody Got Cereal?
