re: South Park Season 15 season long thread. Returns tonight 10/9c!

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Best of the season, and the best since the marijuana episode.

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This was an average episode -- not terribly bad, but not very good either. As a sports fan I think they missed the mark, and as a fan of the series I think they could have made better jokes, but it was still a decent half-hour of TV.

Crack baby basketball is Cartman's latest scheme, and that led to the obvious allegory between the NCAA athletic programs and their well-known problems with compensation for athletes. It seems like a perfect topic for South Park to tackle with its unique brand of satirical humor, but the execution was far from perfect.

The storyline makes its point well-enough, but it lacked a solid grasp of the topic it made fun of. The NCAA parody was established early on, and then they just kept piling on, without bringing anything new to the issue. This was, dare I say it, easy pickings. Satire is best when it is clever and successful at putting its subject in a new perspective. This episode was neither, and it totally ignores the most controversial part of college sports – the fact that the top athletes often get paid under the table anyway, in addition to athletic scholarships and preferential treatment which are FAR from slave-labor.


- Comedy Central
With that said, there's no doubt that everyone but the students are cashing in BIG on many college sports. It is still a great travesty that top academic professors wallow in relative poverty compared to NCAA coaches who rake in millions. But all these issues point to a systemic problem that goes beyond just paying the students. Even if you start openly paying the students (as some leagues are considering), that by itself is a complex issue that lends itself to corruption. These are all topics this episode could have easily satirized and made some great points on, but the story instead took the easy route.

So, if we're going to call this episode satire, it's low-quality satire because it fails to address some major aspects of its topic, and that's really sad because when South Park is at its best it is brilliant social commentary. However, South Park doesn't always have to make a cogent point, and we don't have to take its metaphors all that seriously. It is, after all, still a show about 9-year-olds who love poop jokes. But if I'm going to give this episode a cartoon pass and measure the story on comedic value alone, it still falls short.

The problem here (as is often the case in South Park episodes) is that the story runs the main joke into the ground. Once the link between crack baby basketball and the NCAA was made, there wasn't much else to the main plot. The episode needed a strong side-story to supplement its main premise with a few extra laughs, and the writers halfheartedly tried with the "Slash as Santa Claus" idea, but that concept was too random and odd to add enough comedy to elevate this story above mediocre. This Slash side-plot was such a bad fit with the main story that I'd almost say it was just tacked-on filler to take up some empty airtime when the writers finally ran out of jokes in the NCAA story.

But the flaws in this episode aren't horrible, they're just disappointing. I expected more and the story didn't deliver, but that doesn't take away from what actually is there. I did like that the episode showed Kyle falling into Cartman's schemes as the allure of money clouds his judgement, and Stan stoically acts as the cavalier voice of reason. Cartman will always be Cartman, but the rest of the cast members often go through some interesting personal dilemmas, and it was nice to see Kyle fall to the dark side, but make his way back. And then there's Butters doing karaoke, which I could watch all day. Add to that Cartman's entertaining southern businessman shtick, and you've got a number of moments that keep this episode afloat despite a smart but halfheartedly executed main premise.

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