The Five Stages of ‘South Park’
http://splitsider.com/2017/08/the-five-stages-of-south-park/
Seasons 1-3: The Developmental Stageshare
South Park is the second most influential adult cartoon of all time, trailing only The Simpsons, and much like that show, it got popular pretty much out of the gate, quickly evolving into a phenomenon. Because the show captivated audiences so quickly, nobody seemed to notice how underdeveloped it was (the same also holds true for the first season of The Simpsons). The show had an immediately identifiable hook: adorable 8-year-olds who spoke like the most vulgar adults. It doesn’t seem shocking now (not when considering all the far-more-offensive shows that have appeared since South Park debuted), but it was unlike anything that had been on television before.
That being said, it also feels a little bare-bones in retrospect. Yes, there’s some glorious absurdity to be found in the early years, but it’s also fairly simplistic compared to what the show would one day become. Randy Marsh was a generic dad-type character rather than the beloved legend he evolved into later on, the main characters’ personalities were still being fleshed out, and Cartman — the villain from day one — was mostly just a loudmouth rather than the sociopath he eventually became. Cartman’s rivalry with Kyle wasn’t there yet, and really, Stan and Kyle were largely the same character, reacting to the stimuli around them rather than having clear views of their own.
None of this is to say the early episodes can’t be enjoyable; it’s still fun to watch Barbra Streisand lust after the Triangle of Zinthar only to be foiled by Robert Smith, and despite being massively overused in 1998, “respect my authoritah!” can still be pretty funny if you’re in the right mood. It’s just that South Park became something far deeper and more interesting than what it was in its first few seasons, and as a result, going back to them feels a tad underwhelming, especially considering what a big deal they were at the time. South Park’s stream of third-grade F-bombs won it an audience out of the gate, but it would ultimately prove to have much more to say.
Seasons 3-6: The Experimental Era
Matt and Trey must have realized the limitations of their show’s first two seasons, because starting with season 3 (and the movie), they would gradually begin experimenting with some more ambitious concepts. The best example in the third season would be the trilogy of “Cat Orgy,” “Two Guys Naked in a Hot Tub, and “Jewbilee,” which told the story of a meteor shower in South Park from three different perspectives. The show had already done one cliffhanger with the saga of Cartman’s father, but this was an ambitious bit of storytelling that would pave the way for later works like the “Imaginationland” series as well as the serial storyline of recent seasons.
In the fourth season, the experimentation would be taken a step further with the decision to age the main characters by placing them in the fourth grade. Admittedly, they still looked and acted the same, but it set the standard that South Park would not be resetting a perpetual status quo the way The Simpsons had. We also saw Mr. Garrison be forced to teach kindergarten after (accidentally?) picking up Cartman in a chatroom, a ridiculously absurd punishment that set the stage for the several evolutions Garrison would go through over the course of the show’s run.
The fifth season saw some of the show’s most important episodes. “Super Best Friends” might have just seemed like an amusing superhero spoof at the time, but it would ultimately become known for its portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad, which lead to the controversy surrounding both “Cartoons Wars” and the show’s 200th episode, where Matt and Trey would receive death threats for the portrayal.
Just one week later, there was “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” which featured one of the most shocking moments in the entire series. After being tormented by an 8th grader for most of the show, Cartman gets revenge on him by killing his parents, cooking them into a bowl of chili, and getting Scott to eat them. 16 years later, this ending is well-known, but at the time, it was stunning. It was proof that South Park could stave off stagnancy and still do things that could shock its viewers, no matter how desensitized they might have thought they were.
Towards the end of the fifth season, and throughout the sixth, the writers explored a natural question: what if they actually killed Kenny? He had died at the end of every episode (save for a few) in some of the most horrific ways imaginable, but he’d always re-emerge. That was the case until “Kenny Dies,’ where the boys are shocked to find out that Kenny is in the hospital and terminally ill.