South Park Finally Feels Like South Park Again, And It’s About Time

By Robert Scucci
| Published 5 seconds ago

Last year, I mostly wrote about how Seasons 27 and 28 of South Park would go down in history as the most forgettable story arcs in the entire series for one specific reason: all of the politics and topical humor. I’m saying this as a lifelong fan of the series, and with the knowledge that the show has always provided social commentary based on current events. This is nothing new. It’s embedded into the show’s DNA.

The main distinction here is that classic South Park still holds up years later because there’s enough small-town absurdity doing its own version of current events in an allegorical sense that allows old-timers and newcomers alike to appreciate the episodes in a vacuum because they were framed in an episodic fashion.

Somebody born in 2010 who’s just getting into South Park could enjoy Season 8’s “Douche and Turd” without knowing that it was about the Kerry-Bush election cycle. Season 9’s “Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow” is clearly an allegory for how our government mismanaged the damage caused to New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, but at the end of the day, Cartman is trying to cover up how he convinced Stan to steal a boat with him, and how they accidentally destroyed a beaver dam hanging over the small neighboring town of Beaverton while their small mountain town deals with the catastrophic fallout.

Season 29’s premiere, “South American Biker Gangs,” released under the South America banner instead of being stylized as South Park, is a step back in this direction. It’s the best episode the show has put out in years because it strikes the perfect balance that South Park (I’m still calling it South Park, fight me) spent so many years perfecting.

Listen, I’m not going to get into the whole South America stylization thing that’s going on. I know it’s fully meant to antagonize our current president, which is pretty much all South Park has been doing in recent years, so I’ll keep this part of my commentary brief:

South Park fails when it’s in straight-up “roast the news” mode. There are plenty of other places to get your fix if that’s your thing. You have SNL and literally every other late-night talk show where the punchline is “Donald Trump, derpity derp,” and that’s fine.

What I’ve felt since my initial rounds of complaints, though, is a sort of vindication. Most of my conversations about the last two seasons of the series were met with pushback, in the sense that if I’m critical about the artistic direction of a show that’s critical of Donald Trump, then I must be triggered by the jokes themselves. When, in actuality, I just like it when my comedy is funny. Making the same small wee-wee joke week after week isn’t really good writing, and I think most of my peers, most die-hard South Park fans and reviewers, and, most importantly, Parker and Stone have finally caught up with this sentiment.

Which brings us to Season 29’s premiere, which had me worried that I’d finally have to walk away from media that no longer serves me. I thought the whole South America thing meant a whole other season of recycled Trump jokes, but guess what? Not a president in sight driving the actual story… just a bunch of boys with e-bikes living in the moment.

Boys Will Be Boys … FINALLY!

Listen to any DVD mini-commentary from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and one sensibility is always brought up: Trey Parker thinks South Park is at its best when the boys are just being boys, and a bunch of crazy things are happening around them.

“South American Biker Gangs” offers this in spades. Even better, outside of the boys’ main plot is a rock-solid Randy Marsh plot involving Officer Harrison Yates, and one that involves Randy mentioning that he “used to smoke marijuana” as a playful callback to the polarizing Tegridy Farms arc that has dominated the better part of the last decade.

What we get in “South American Biker Gangs” is a return to form, but some rust is being shaken off. The whole “South America” angle, which I approached with guarded enthusiasm, turned out to be a welcome driving force in the narrative that, once again, taps into current events, but in a way that’s completely localized to the fictional town of South Park.

Here’s what happens, in brief, as there are actually spoilers in here worth glossing over if you haven’t yet had the opportunity to check out “South American Biker Gangs”:

Cartman manipulates Liane into purchasing him a $2,000 e-bike so he can brag to his friends and tell them to do something very specific with his genitals. Jealous of Cartman’s new bike, Stan uses the $200 he has to purchase three Chinese-made e-bikes with all sorts of electrical problems (great foreshadowing, by the way) from none other than City Wok’s Lu Kim, who has rebranded City Wok as Super City E-Bike in order to keep up with the times.

Here’s where it gets interesting, and where I think the show is truly finding its footing in a post-Season 28 world: Randy’s B plot drives the conflict and social commentary without actually naming the elephant in the room. Randy, who’s now a health nut, has taken to conventional cycling and is incensed over how these new “South American Biker Gangs” are ruining their small community by disrespecting the rules of the road.

The recurring gag in the episode involves Randy and his cycling cohorts working with Sergeant Yates, mostly in the form of Googling how to deal with South American biker gangs while congregating at a Biker Bar that’s really just a Jamba Juice, which leads to gags involving bribery, corruption, and some pretty awful and backhanded tactics as the boys’ e-biking is constantly at odds with conventional cycling.

It’s a simple story about the boys being boys, who simply want to pop wheelies and ride really fast, and Randy, who always lets his new fixation dictate his impulsive behavior in increasingly destructive ways, reacting to it in the most Randy way possible.

This entire story culminates in one of the most classic South Park throwbacks you could think of, and I’m not even going to mention it here because you need to see it for yourself. You’ll know when you know, though. This isn’t some sort of deep-lore Easter egg, but it addresses one of the show’s oldest running gags in tandem with one of the biggest complaints about one specific character’s lack of play over the past several seasons.

A Sign Of What’s To Come

“South American Biker Gangs” is, if I had to weigh in with any bit of authority here, a return to form for one of my favorite shows that I was just about to give up on. The social commentary is on point, and the escalations in this context are palpable and distinctly on brand in a way that’s more in line with the show’s Golden Era. The most important part, though, is that you could watch this episode 10 years from now, not knowing anything about the current state of the world, and still enjoy it as a self-contained, standalone episode.

Not to mention, whenever anybody mentions that the problems they’re experiencing will blow over in November, which you think would build up to a political joke, we’re constantly reminded that’s when GTA VI will come out, meaning the kids won’t be running amok in the streets anymore. That’s called a misdirect, and that’s funny.

My biggest criticism of South Park in recent years is that it lost the plot. It has always been a topical show with its finger on the pulse, but its approach turned more toward real life rather than allegory. Unless you’re collecting Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth trading cards and watching Fox News and CNN all day while foaming at the mouth for your next political pundit dopamine hit, the humor will be lost on you if you’re just looking for some good old-fashioned, small-town absurdity and don’t obsess over every single current event in real time.

That is all to say, if you were ready to walk away from South Park for completely abandoning what made it so special in the first place, “South American Biker Gangs” is the return to form we’ve all been waiting for. And if the show continues to move in this direction, I think it’s safe to say that the series is finally entering its Rolling Stones era: they’re going back to the hits, but putting a fresh spin on them.

South Park (or South America if you want to be pedantic) is streaming on Paramount+.

SOUTH AMERICAN BIKER GANGS SCORE