We had mixed feelings about last night’s debut of South Park’s 21st season, which, in classic South Park-ian fashion, braided together a few resonant strands of American culture toward an ambiguous but still condemnatory conclusion. (They also didn’t mention Trump while, weirdly, writing about Trumpist white supremacy, which seems like a dead end for the show’s writers.)
The sub-plot involving personal assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home featured Cartman delighting over programming the devices to perform endless, cyclical insults at each other, and while the result worked magically for him, it was a lot less magical for users at home.
There’s a lot of comedy to be mined in these personal assistants, both via their weird facsimile of human behavior and the creepy way they sit listening in our homes, ready to be violated by shows like this, as well as by larger companies. Leave it to South Park to tap into those fears with a bunch of jokes about balls and titty chips.