Few had thought about South Park ending until Wednesday night, when Season 15 went into a surprisingly depressing midseason break. To those who watched the episode, it seemed like Trey Parker and Matt Stone were saying they were fed up with the show's formula and the series was getting crappier to them with age. As such, there is genuine fear that South Park could really be ending after the final seven episodes of the season this fall.
Warning: Spoilers follow
For the first 15 minutes of the midseason finale, it seemed like a typical episode, as Stan imagined everything looked like crap now that he was 10 and Randy went nuts trying to prove he wasn't old. Yet by the time Randy and Sharon confessed that their formulaic marriage was getting worse with age, a more troubling message came across.
Virtually every critic and fan is convinced that Parker and Stone used the episode to say that South Park is getting worse to them with age, just like everything got worse to the Marshes with age. Therefore, when the ending broke from the usual formula and didn't resolve everything at the last minute, the suspicion was that things are being set up for the end of the show.
Parker and Stone haven't officially signed a contract to do Season 16 and beyond; if they want to end it all after this year, they are allowed to. This might be the right time for them to go, since they already have another smash hit to fall back on.
Their Broadway musical The Book Of Mormon became massive right before the new season started, and could sweep the Tonys this weekend. So, since all of their eggs aren't in one basket anymore, there may be no better time for them to retire from television.
But there is just as good of a chance that all this is one giant prank, in typical South Park fashion. Wednesday's episode may have been a jab at the show itself, but it might not mean that Parker and Stone are thinking about ending it. In fact, the final twists could well have been a satirical swipe at the overly dramatic season finales that aired this past May.
The likes of House, Bones, The Mentalist and more tried to shake up their long-time formulas in their finales -- yet inevitably, they'll have to go back to business as usual anyway.
Parker and Stone might have taken note of that during production, and may just have been inspired to mock that TV cliche -- albeit at their worried fans' expense. Therefore, the first joke of the fall's first episode could be how everything went back to normal anyway during the break.
But since the two will presumably be at the Tonys Sunday, perhaps they will clear up there if South Park is ending or not -- if they aren't too busy celebrating.
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Did Trey Parker and Matt Stone just put making South Park on their Murtaugh List? If last night’s mid-season finale of the animated series was any indication of things to come, then it could very well be that Parker and Stone are getting too old for this, well, you know.
The episode titled, perhaps rather fittingly, “You’re Getting Old,” was all about the fallout from Stan’s 10th birthday party. When he begins to bug his friends off with his intolerable, and apparently incurable cynicism, everything — from music to his doctor’s advice — literally turns to s—.
And while they had fun poking at Stan’s cynicism about pop culture (How is playing L.A Noire supposed to be fun? Doesn’t Zookeeper look like a microwaved turd?), it turned, as it so often does on South Park, into something else entirely.
In the aftermath of Stan’s parents fight about ‘tween wave (Sharon thinks it sounds like crap, officially making her an old person, while Randy, desperate to hold on to his youth, lies and says he likes it), they realize it’s not the music that’s tearing them apart. It’s each other. After their many years together, they tell each other they’re now unhappy and that every week it’s the “same s— over and over” and that it’s only getting more ridiculous as time passes. (See clip below.)
<div style="background-color:#000000;width:368px;"><div style="padding:4px;"><embed src="" width="360" height="293" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" base="." flashVars=""></embed><p style="text-align:left;background-color:#FFFFFF;padding:4px;margin-top:4px;margin-bottom:0px;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12px;"><b><a href=" Getting Old</a></b><br/>Tags: <a style="display: block; position: relative; top: -1.33em; float: right; font-weight: bold; color: #ffcc00; text-decoration: none" href="Stan'">Stan Marsh</a>,<a href=" Marsh</a>,<a href="
