5 classic South Park episodes that speak to our current moment

It was tempting to include the classic season-two episode “Gnomes” on this list. After all, comparisons between their moneymaking scheme and sketchy Web3 initiatives are rampant (if you’re not familiar, it goes like this: “Phase 1—Collect underpants, Phase 2—?, Phase 3—Profit”). South Park has come a long way since then, and Parker and Stone have only gotten more anti-capitalist with time. “Unfulfilled,” which pulls no punches in its takedown of Amazon and other exploitative corporations, is perhaps the culmination of this impulse.The opening of a new Amazon Fulfillment Center in South Park brings nothing but misery to the town and highlights the company’s most egregious practices. This leads to a worker’s strike that has such an impact that Jeff Bezos himself (or, the creepy South Park version of him) comes to sort it out. He states the company philosophy clearly—the customers are all that matters. But really it’s just their money he cares about. There’s even a sad song underscoring images of the townsfolk waiting for packages that will never come. It shows that workers do have some power, but they can be replaced. In this case, by the mutated employees of the town’s abandoned mall. It’s horrific and inhuman, but so is capitalism. And in case the socialist message was too subtle, the show literally has one worker (who was previously mangled by an automated robot) quote Karl Marx directly.This is the first of a two-part story that concludes in the season finale, “Bike Parade.” It’s also good, though not as tight thematically as this episode. With the supply chain still sorting itself out and the gap between the winners and losers in our economic system growing wider, the critiques raised in both episodes will likely continue to resonate for some time to come.

South Park has taken on racism frequently in its long run, memorably dropping the n-word 42 times in one episode (“With Apologies To Jesse Jackson”) to make a point about cancel culture and performative redemption before those words were part of the cultural conversation. In that episode, Randy Marsh has to face the stigma of being called “[n-word] guy” after he guesses it (wrongly) as the answer to a puzzle on Wheel Of Fortune. The point was that white people like Randy may not consider themselves racist, but are blind to the harm slurs inflict until they’re the ones being targeted.“The Big Fix” shows that Randy still hasn’t learned anything 15 years later. At a marijuana growers convention, he attends a talk about racial inequities within the industry. Not surprisingly, the message that communities of color are excluded from the profits of legalization despite being most affected by the racist war on drugs is totally lost on him. Instead, he focuses on the warnings of potential consumer backlash against all-white-owned businesses. To improve his public image, and thus his bottom line, Randy latches on to the closest Black person he can find, the father of Stan’s classmate Token (more on him later). It’s pretty clear Randy’s shamelessly using the guy, who catches on quickly and winds up flipping the script, harnessing the power of his own street cred to become Randy’s biggest competitionRandy may never recognize his racist blind spots, but at least Parker and Stone seem to be aware of their own. It’s also in this episode that they retcon the name of the only Black kid on the show, up until this point known as Token Black. It’s revealed that his name is actually Tolkien, in honor of his father’s favorite author, J.R.R. Tolkien. Stan—and by implication, the audience—has supposedly been hearing it as “Token” all this time due to unconscious biases. It’s a pretty good meta joke that forces us to examine the biases we have in real life, as Stan’s doctor instructs us to do at the end of the episode. Addressing the audience directly, he says, “If you or someone you know thought the name Token didn’t come from J.R.R. Tolkien, then please call 1-800-I AM A GIANT PIECE OF SHIT.”

One of South Park’s strengths has always been its lightning-quick turnaround time. Sure, these instant reaction episodes can lack the insight that comes with letting things sit for a while—and can also become quickly dated—but those disadvantages are often outweighed by the show’s nimble ability to comment on current events while they’re still current. That’s the case with “Back To The Cold War,” which premiered in March of this year and deals with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.The invasion itself provides the background of the episode, which plays on the nostalgia it brought out in those old enough to remember the Cold War. Parker and Stone channel their Gen X anxiety into Mr. Mackey, who dives head first into a midlife crisis when he hears the news the Russia is our enemy once again, blasting ’80s tunes and looking for spies around every corner. There are lots of ’80s movie references too, including Rocky IV, War Games, Red Dawn, and The Hunt For Red October. And also a subplot involving Butters and a dressage competition, which may have been fixed by the Russians.It’s ultimately Mr. Mackey’s mom who brings home the theme of the episode: the perils of nostalgia and the fear of getting old. She reminds him that those good old days weren’t as good as he remembers. People were scared. People died. At the end, the episode neatly connects it all back to Vladimir Putin himself. Or, as South Park puts it, an insecure and aging madman who started a war because his dick didn’t work anymore.