Season four is the first season where I thought the show was lacking. While it had a good lot of funny jokes and gags, nothing in this season made me laugh as hard as anything in the first three seasons or the movie. The show still delivers on some quality jokes, laughs and interesting ways to view adult scenarios, some episodes just felt like they were either a little too loose or too out there and could have used a little tightening up.
While I though early season episodes Cartman's Silly Hate Crime and Timmy 2000 were humorous and had a worthwhile statement to make, they spend too long trying to force their viewpoint on the audience, when the audience is likely made up of people who agree on their stance to begin with. Meanwhile, the episode streak of Cartman Joins NAMBLA, Cherokee Hair Tampons, Chef Goes Nanners, Something You Can Do With Your Finger, Do The Handicapped Go To Hell?, Probably, 4th Grade, and Trapper Keeper were the strongest episodes of the season, which generally provided an interesting if not overzealous condemnation of some part of American culture and provides the best jokes and laughs of the season. The idea that Cartman, who looking for older men to make friends with becomes the poster child for a pedophile group was in particular one of my favorite sub-plots because it plays the line so well of being both a mockery of such a ridiculous group like NAMBLA and also making it believable (though unlikely) that someone like Cartman in real life could have this happen to him.
That I think is what is one of the strongest features of the show, bringing in believable child-like innocence to the plots. The show often deals with incredibly adult situations that the boys get themselves into, but the way in which they get themselves into it feels like it's something an innocent, well-meaning child could accidentally get into...unless they play it up to the incredibly absurd which they do on episodes like 4th Grade and Trapper Keeper, which both involve convoluted time travel plots played up as taking off nostalgia blinders in the former and the comically-absurd dangers of ever-changing technology in the later. But then even in the episode Trapper Keeper, the subplot of Ike's Kindergarten class having immense difficulties picking a class president is a direct parody of the 2000 election of George Bush and the recounts that took place in Florida at that time.
The weakest episodes to me were Quintuplets and Pip. While both had merits, they just kind of fell flat to me. Quintuplets felt like the weakest episode overall, because although I didn't like Pip a great deal, I appreciated the fact that they were comically recreating the novel Great Expectations as told through a show like Masterpiece Theater but in South Park style. It worked better as a concept as it does in reality I think, and I do want to give them credit for doing something different, it just fell flat for me.
My favorite episode overall however has to be the second to last episode, The Wacky Molestation Adventure, in which one by one every kid in town reports that an adult molested them, until only children are left, and they create themselves a land without order. The writing is consistently funny throughout the episode and the idea of all the kids taking over the town and having it go from paradise to dystopian future in a matter of days was great.
I do have to give a special mention to the last episode and Christmas special of the season, A Very Crappy Christmas, where the adults in town no longer believe in the commercialism of Christmas and the kids have to inject the "spirit of Christmas" into them to get them to spend money on the holiday. While a funny observation in itself, the plot anchors around the boys making their own little Christmas movie to raise the commercialism spirits of the people of the town and the entire process and finished product mirror Parker and Stone's work on the first season and their animated shorts before the show. It was a loving reminder of not only how far they had come since then, but also the amount of effort that went into making that content, which took a hell of a lot of effort for such a small reward. But just like in real life, having their animated shorts bring them notice and landing a tv show, the in-show animation inspires the town to believe in commercialism again, and the holiday and town are saved.
While overall this season kind of felt middle-of-the-road to me, I appreciated a large number of the episodes for what they were trying to do and when it was funny I found it very funny.
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