South Park: Season 17

Another up and down season of South Park, this one with more misses than hits. But rather than spend a few paragraphs talking about the episodes that worked here and the ones that didn't, I want to focus on a big change in the way this season was produced.

In the very early days of South Park, episodes took a long time to create. This is because they were made with computer software from the late 1990s. The first season led off with six straight weekly episodes, then slowed to a pace of one new episode a month for a little while before taking a two-month break and returning with the final four episodes in four weeks. The second season saw more of the same herky-jerky release schedule, with one uninterrupted run of six episodes amid a year of sporadic airings. Only by the fourth season were all of the episodes grouped into lengthy and consistent runs. Sometimes there were three a year and sometimes only two. By Season 8, the show's schedule finally fell into a consistent pattern it would hold for close to a decade: seven consecutive episodes in the spring and then seven more in the fall.

In recent years when the show seemed to struggle, I often blamed its production schedule. The crew works close to twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week during runs, and it's well known that most episodes are conceptualized on Thursday and then created from scratch in just six days. It's no wonder they've run dry on creative juices sometimes. My recommendation into the empty void of the Internet was that South Park should go back to three-part seasons, with month-long runs of four or five episodes at most. They've done this in the past, after all. Instead, starting here with Season 17, South Park has shifted in the other direction, to one extended run of ten episodes, once a year, in the fall. I'm not sure how I feel about this. In addition to cutting seasons by four episodes, the decision now only extends the runs by three weeks, increasing all that burn out potential. The crew also gets two weeks off during the ten-episode run, making the entire season a twelve-week affair, so maybe that's a better situation for them than seven consecutive weeks was. I don't know.

All that was pretty boring, I'm sure, but it beats reading me rant about the lacking quality in episodes about emo kids and Yo Gabba Gabba!, right?