Posted on 07/19/2008 8:41:37 AM PDT by chasio649
Based on prime-time precedent and the general laws of television, South Park - the animated Comedy Central series created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone that's currently in its 12th season - should have degenerated by now into a pathetic parody of itself that has fans and critics calling for its immediate demise.
Yet the general consensus about South Park is that this savagely funny satire has never been as biting and relevant as it is now.
All of which begged this question during a phone interview earlier this week with Parker and Stone: How did the pair ward off the inevitable decline that afflicts most long-in-the-tooth programs?
"Part of is that it just sucked so much when it started, that it had nowhere to go but up,'' jokes Parker, 38. "When it started, we knew how to be brash and deconstructionist, but we didn't really know how to write. We've learned how to be writers as the show's gone along.''
Staying intimately involved with the day-to-day production of the show is also key to its enduring quality, Stone adds.
"With most shows, you come up with a good idea, you work really hard on it for a few seasons, and then it kind of takes on a life of its own,'' explains Stone, 37. "If you're the creator/executive producer, you then hand it off to somebody else, take a step back and figure out how you can become a multiple- show person, like Dick Wolf or David Kelley, and multiply your money.
"We haven't done that. We still work on every single show. It's our main thing - actually it's pretty much all we've done with our lives.''
For the uninitiated, South Park focuses on the consistently bizarre happenings among the denizens of the fictional Colorado town that gives the series its name, all filtered trough the prism of Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny, the four boys at its heart. The series has garnered multiple Emmy wins and even a coveted Peabody for its unsparing satire, which has trained its lens on everything from religion to politics to celebrity culture.
Unlike many shows that trade in "equal-opportunity'' offending, South Park's off-kilter take on social, cultural and political matters truly defy convention and expectations.
"The only thing that we always fall back on is that extremists are extremists - to us, the super-hardcore liberals are just as lame and stupid as the super-hardcore conservatives,'' says Parker. "They're the same people to us - people who can only see one side, their side, of an issue.''
Being flexible, as opposed to adhering rigorously to any kind of pre- ordained views on a given topic, can often lead to conclusions that surprise even the show's creators, Stone says.
"Sometimes we set out to say one thing and we actually end up saying the exact opposite,'' he explains. "You'll start writing a story and you try to make it resonate on a human level, aside from just the jokes, and you end up talking about in the writers' (meeting), where sometimes we argue - and sometimes we'll put those arguments in our characters' mouths - and it comes out completely differently from than you'd planned. I think those are the best shows: where we kind of work out our s-t in front of people.''
"And it's not like we sat down when we were 25 years old and said, "OK, here's our completely coherent political philosophy that we will unfold over 10 or 12 years. A lot of times we'll even do stuff that we don't actually believe, just because it's funny.''
Parker and Stone have committed to doing another three seasons for Comedy Central - the show airs on the Comedy Network in Canada - and fans who are worried that the pair might be getting bored or feeling creatively constricted in the South Park universe can chill out.
"Eventually we're going to have a season where we realize that it wasn't very good and that we're tapped out,'' Parker says. "But it's the kind of show, being about a town and not just about a specific character, that you have so many places you can go with it.
"It's funny because as we're getting older, we're almost becoming less inclined to do other stuff because we're so creatively satisfied doing South Park. I never feel like we have such a great idea but we can't really do it. We can always figure out a way to do it on South Park.''
ping
Montreal let this be published in English?
I guess so...
cool drawing.
I think what gives them the ability to NOT be bored is that the show is often topical, and the town/characters are just hangers to put the wardrobe on, so to speak. The news writes the shows for them. You couldn’t envision Election 2000, Janet Reno and the Texas stuff, Katrina, the Iraqi invasion etc ahead of time, but if it was based only on the development of the characters it gets burned out. Cartoon characters don’t age.
I don’t like South Park and don’t let my kids watch it on TV - however my 12 year showed me this on his PC:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=NQvH-iGMBVU
Their “Global Warming” program was screaming funny.
A must see. Would love to tie Al Gore to a chair and force him to watch it for weeks on end.
O.C. ?
If you can’t laugh at that...then there’s no help for you! :D
I can't wait to see what they're going to do with MacCain and Obama.
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The Simpsons did it first!
Is that the episode that they couched as head lice? It seems to me that they never tire of mocking Al Gore and ‘global warming’. There may be another that I missed.
I love the one titled A Critter Christmas. I’m giggly by nature, but I’ve never cried from laughing too hard. That episode brought me close to tears and incontinence both at the same time.
All about Mormons was also so great. I saw that right after reading Under the Banner of Heaven. It was very funny and timely.
You should also see Mystery of the Urinal Deuce. They take a hatchet to the 9/11 "Truther" retards.
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