The Pandemic Special and What South Park Means in 2020
My friends and I have been asking ourselves different versions of the same question since March of this year: “How will [INSERT SHOW TITLE HERE] adapt to Covid-19 next season?” There have, of course, been quite a few bigger fish to fry in terms of anxiety this year than wondering if It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia can stick the landing in this new television landscape; but as a media-obsessed person living in lockdown, it was a relieving form of idle speculation. Scripted television shows we had loved for years were going to have to figure out new ways of being, new topics to consider, new styles of presentation, much like ourselves. It was fun to wonder how a sitcom like Superstore might handle the mask debate.
South Park: The Pandemic Special was released on September 30, 2020 on Comedy Central and then HBO Max a day later. It is the first episode the show has released all year, and South Park is the first of the big, long-running comedy programs to release an episode that deals explicitly with Coronavirus and everything else this year has brought. Personally, I loved it.
While there have been some minor mixed reviews of the episode, it also drew record-high ratings for the show. Clearly, the episode struck some kind of chord with viewers that the series hadn’t achieved in some years. The question is why. Is it simply that more people are bored and looking for things to watch? Did South Park manage to say something about our current situation we desperately needed to hear? What is the real purpose of scripted comedy TV in a time like 2020? What is the purpose of South Park in times like these?
Those last two questions were clearly not only on my mind as I watched the special, but on writer and director Trey Parker’s mind as well.
Because South Park felt a little different than usual during the special, in ways that go beyond it’s new form of an hour-long ‘special episode’, didn’t it?
I have loved South Park since I was eight years old and probably too young for it, about twenty years ago now. I still remember the first episode I ever watched: Rainforest Shmainforest. I remember the first time I saw Cartman make that kid eat his parents. The fake anime opening from Good Times with Weapons, the golden PSP in Best Friends Forever, what happened to Kurt Russell in the Imaginationland Trilogy, the kazoo scene in Margaritaville, all the Yaoi fanart in Tweek x Craig, when they finally admitted they were wrong about climate change in Time to Get Cereal. I’m a fan, is the point of this paragraph. I’ve been watching the show for literal decades of my life and I’ve watched it evolve that whole time.
Every major South Park fan has their own preferences, of course, but I can’t imagine any fan will disagree when I say the writing of South Park seasons 1-3 differs in drastic fashion from the writing in South Park seasons 20-23. The show has become more topical, more responsive to the immediate news of the day. It has focused less on four ‘innocent’ (innocent with a huuuge grain of salt) children misunderstanding the adult world to hilarious affect (think about the fact none of the boys were shown to understand what the ‘chicken lover’ actually did to the chickens in the episode where Cartman becomes a cop and wears the sunglasses) and more on the boys and the town as a whole (and way more Randy) reacting to the insanity of the modern world how the writers believe average Americans do. The short of it is that Matt Stone and Trey Parker have grown up, and the show has grown up with them.
There’s a chance that the new Pandemic Special is the next step forward along that path. And an important part of that development may be Trey Parker questing for what South Park means in a post-pandemic world, over two decades after it began.
Early on in the forty-five minute presentation, Randy Marsh (who has essentially become one of the main characters in the later era of the series) is driving in the car with Sharon, his wife. He has just announced a new strain from his marijuana business, Tegridy Farms, to help his struggling community. The new strain is called, of course: Pandemic Special. In the car, Randy Marsh (voiced by Trey Parker) can’t stop going on about how his Pandemic Special is so necessary, how it’s going to help people, how they need some kind of escape from the stress of the world. Sharon calls bullshit.
The meta-commentary is obvious, of course. This is Trey Parker talking to himself about the episode as he’s writing it. South Park can be a work of comic, satiric genius; but it has never been mistaken for subtle. You can almost imagine, as I did, Trey Parker trapped in his house veering wildly between thinking he was writing something helpful and important, and thinking the whole exercise was worthless. As someone attempting to start my career in a similar field, I gotta say I found this part kind of comforting. If one of my writing heroes like Trey Parker felt this enough to actually put it in his show, then it’s not so weird that I also veer wildly between the poles of confidence and hopelessness.
This sort of winking pseudo-4th wall breaking dialogue isn’t completely new to the Pandemic Special. It’s been making appearances in later era South Park for a few years now. Think about the whole #cancelSouthPark marketing strategy, or the boys on the bridge wondering why they couldn’t piss enough people off to get cancellation calls like they used to in Bike Parade. But the Pandemic Special was the first time, to my memory, that this commentary about the show or writers themselves actually served a real plot purpose in the episode. Randy’s Pandemic Special (the in-universe weed one, not the episode itself) serves as a vehicle not only for his attempt to assuage his guilt over the fact that everyone in town seems to be suffering while he thrives, but also as a hilariously wrong-headed (in more than one sense of the phrase) attempt to sneak a Covid-19 vaccine to the masses. This is a new distinct development in South Park writing, I believe.
But more important than simple plot-relevance, was Trey Parker explicitly wondering about the point of South Park right now. This is something that I don’t believe has ever been expressed in any previous episode. Luckily, the episode itself might have provided the answer.
There was a lot going on in the Pandemic Special. There were cops as teachers, performing as horribly and biased as recent news would lead you to expect. There were different mask debates and chin diapers. An eternally horny Mickey Mouse. A Cartman-led musical about the joys of social distancing and zoom-schooling. An Anthony Fauci press conference gone wrong. School lockdowns and Build-a-Bear and Mr. Garrison-as-Trump. Most of this, while genuinely hilarious and insightful, was more a continuation of the themes and practices of the more recent seasons of the show. None of it (while again, being very funny) probably made Trey Parker any more sure that he wasn’t creating just one more piece of bullshit for people to consume while trapped inside.
What I believe was different, and also a possible answer to Trey Parker’s question of what South Park can be in 2020, was the ending. (MILD SPOILERS FOR THE PANDEMIC SPECIAL FOLLOW).
The climax brings basically every major plot thread together (from the terrifyingly overzealous cops using literal tanks, to Stan dragging Butters and Co. to Build-a-Bear, to Randy and the Pangolin) in a ridiculous standoff in an outdoor mall. Cartman has just snagged the Pangolin that might hold the key to a Covid-19 cure and is holding it over an open incinerator. The literal hope of humanity is about to get burned alive. Old South Park would have let this happen, would have made a (most likely hilarious) joke about it.
Instead Stan starts giving a heartfelt speech. It is NOT an ‘I-learned-something-today’ speech, not quite. It’s a speech that acknowledges Stan’s own weaknesses, that acknowledges a lot of people’s weaknesses and struggles during this time, and doesn’t insult him or make him the butt of a joke for it. It’s a speech that empathizes. What’s even crazier than that however, is it works. In perhaps the first time in South Park history, Cartman is persuaded to do the right thing for someone else’s benefit and without being threatened. People doing good things, people empathizing, can sometimes actually win out, is what this episode is saying. The only time positive events happen in the episode is when people behave selflessly, when Stan admits his issues, when Randy returns the Pangolin despite that he might be incriminating himself, when Cartman gives the animal to the scientist despite loving quarantine. None of that is old-style South Park.
This is, I believe, a step forward for the show. This is a way in which the show might adjust to the post-pandemic world and remain necessary to the culture. South Park is a show, by virtue of it making fun of literally everybody, that reaches across the political divide in our country. I know both far-left and far-right individuals who swear by South Park, for whom the show is one of the few things they consume that doesn’t always agree with them. That is incredible reach for a television show in 2020. It is vanishingly rare. My guess is Trey Parker felt that responsibility more than he ever had while writing this episode. Which is why he wondered so loud about what it means. I think, for a show with that sort of reach and that sort of I-don’t-give-a-fuck history, making a real genuine argument for empathy and selflessness is almost a radical act.
And then Mr. Garrison-as-Trump shows up with a flamethrower and literally burns humanity’s hope alive. He then reminds everyone to vote, there’s a big election coming up. This explicit call to action is also new. It’s also a step forward. It shows South Park gives a fuck now, that it knows sometimes both sides aren’t the same.
South Park knows we’re going to need a lot of empathy and selflessness going forward. That’s new. That may be enough of a reason for the Pandemic Special to exist. That may be a new purpose (adding, never subtracting, to everything else) for South Park in a post-pandemic world.
I hope so. I’m looking forward to more specials. Although I might avoid Randy’s weed for a little while longer.
If you enjoyed this article at all, please check out my New Adult Contemporary Fantasy Novel: Magic, Television, & Marijuana. Out now on Amazon.
You May Also Like
