South Park Premiere: Season 17?

Just this past week, South Park aired it's premiere to it's 17th season, Let Go, Let Gov. It's was your typical episode with offensive terms, crude humor, and overall makes a relevant message at the end. The two main story themes that we're taking place in this episode was Eric Cartman trying to take down the NSA via social media and Butters thinking that when Eric says "the government is always watching him" that he meant the government is a god like entity watching over the world. Two very clever spins on the whole NSA thing.

In Eric's story he infiltrated the NSA and was trying to bring them down from the inside. While he's talking to the main guy in charge, investigators keep coming up telling them about leads based off tweets and texts about things like "going to the movies," "Do we need milk?" and other daily unimportant things. I think this is hilarious because it makes you think about all of the pointless stupid things people put up on the internet who are also worried that their precious tweets are being spied on. This is further emphasized when Eric discovers a new form of social media that directly broadcasts your thoughts to the internet called "shitter." Through Eric's investigations we discover that the NSA is using Santa Clause's power of watching over all the good and bad children to locate who are the bad people they should be keeping an eye on. Writing like this is what I think makes South Park so successful.

Now in the other half of the episode you have Butters who believes that the internet is a holy spirit/god like entity. I think this is a really clever spin on the paranoia of the government watching over people all the time. He starts confessing his sins at the DMV and slowly starts gathering followers. He even converts a pair of door-to-door Jehova Witnesses to open up their heart to Barack Obama. In the end Butters has turned the DMV into a happy place. I really enjoy Butter's character because in some episodes they have him make these beautifully profound dialogues. Things that you would never expect to hear from a show as vulgar and crude as South Park. In other episodes he discusses how feeling sad is a part of being alive which allows you to feel happy as well as how bullying only tells people that the bully has a miserably sad life.

When I see shows like this, that have been around for 17 years, it just blows my mind. I mean this show is 4 years younger than I am. How do you create and maintain something for that long as well as have it do well? From looking at it, they do have good characters and they keep it focused on recent events. It's also weird to me how these characters have developed because all of the character's personalities are definitely different from their first season yet the same. It's impressive actually because these boys have been 12 years old for 17 years now but the writers have found ways to have them develop without aging them that much. It's even more shocking that they've made it 17 seasons being as offensive as they are but they've definitely developed this untouchable kind of enigma. Also I'm sure after 17 successful seasons they have enough money for some pretty good defense lawyers.

Overall I love this show because it does make very intelligent opinions on current events in the most vulgar and offensive ways possible.