Dear Rick Welch,
Recently, FOX announced it was trying to find a way to give “The Simpsons”  could have a complete final season. Add this to the anxiety that many “South Park” fans have been experiencing over the fact that the creative duo behind the show, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, has yet to commit to anything beyond the season currently being filmed/other synonym. If “South Park” goes the way “The Simpsons” will, or the way “King of the Hill” already has, it will be the end of the era of great animated American satire.
To be clear, this is not a knock at shows like “Family Guy” or any other of the Seth MacFarlane ilk; these shows exist as a parodies of sitcoms and perhaps that of American culture at large. But “The Simpsons” and “South Park” took it to new extremes, creating entire universes to make their points: hacking, slashing and reconstructing each aspect of our culture to hilarious ends (on second thought, it might be more scaru than funny). In “New Kids on the Blecch”, a mysterious Lt. Smash rescues Bart Simpson from an angry mob, only to make him part of his new boy band – we later discover Lt. Smash was only using the boy band to implant subliminal messages into the minds of young people. Preposterous? Yes. Absurd? Probably. Hilarious? Of course. But if you have ever seen how the U.S. Army uses video games to lure young people into recruitment centers, then you can also see how “The Simpsons” seems aware of just how NOT funny it is.
Few of us can really truly remember The Simpsons in its heyday: a cultural phenomenon, with days where literally millions of Bart emblazoned shirts flew off the shelves, and parents were enraged at slogans like “I’m Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?” Early “South Park” hysteria was similar; people were a mix of befuddled and amused at this group of four squatty, foul-mouthed kids, one of whom died every episode and another, on occasion, would cook his enemy’s parents into chili.
But where parents might see shorts eating or two Canadians passing gas and quickly turned it off, others stuck around and saw two of the smartest, most challenging shows on television.
Right now, it could be said “South Park” is more challenging than ever. While avoiding a recap, Stan is coping with growing up and looking at the world in a way that is different from the way we saw him for many years. One can look at this as a response to his parent’s recent divorce or they can see the world through Stan’s eyes, where everything is feces — a metaphor for coping with a changing America, with seemingly shallower culture and dimming future prospects. In a somewhat earlier episode, they take on the financial crisis and the federal government’s stimulus and bailout; as Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly put it, “The episode was the most back-handed endorsement imaginable of President Obama’s economic bailout plan. Or the most withering dismantling of it. As usual, ‘South Park’ had it both ways.”
In the end, though, we are always looking for “deft satire,” and we have already covered the satire bit. But we have yet to look at the “deft” aspect; what allows these two shows to stand tall where shows like “Family Guy” fall?
It is in the fact that they are centered on a tangible sense of love — in one instance a nuclear family, in the other childhood friends. These are things we all understand, and can hark back to. That familiar ground gives us the ability to feel right at home, regardless of the new territory to which they take us.
So regardless of how these two landmark half-hours end their runs, we should be there, learning from them, laughing at them and enjoying them. While we may be able to look back at their brilliant archives for wisdom, we will still miss their guidance and commentary when we should have been paying closer attention for years. Let us enjoy them while they are still on the air.
Trey Burke is a graduate student in public policy and administration. He can be contacted at opinion@reflector.msstate.edu.