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User Reviews for: South Park: The Streaming Wars Part 2

AndrewBloom
CONTAINS SPOILERS5/10  2 years ago
[5.0/10] I don’t mind puerile humor. One of the things that first draw me to *South Park* as a kid was the fact that yeah, they weren’t afraid to go scatalogical or juvenile with their subject matter. And maybe, now that I’m not a kid, that stuff doesn’t work on me as well anymore, but I’d like to think I might enjoy it more if *South Park* didn’t beat the joke into the ground.

Celebrities have to pretend to like pee for a commercial and are, in fact, grossed out by it. Is there a mild laugh to be had from that? Sure. But good lord, it’s not enough to sustain five more fake commercials that all hit that same comic note. There’s no real escalation, no additional cleverness. The Matt Damon one has one small, clever subversion when Matt has the same reaction to the impossible burger (which is fine, by the way) that he does to the glass of urine. But otherwise, this is just being beaten over the head with the same joke for nearly an hour.

The same goes for the “deck sounds like dick” jokes. And the “My eyes are up here” jokes with Cartman. And Pipi’s whole deal. The second part of the *Streaming Wars* duology isn't devoid of laughs. But it is, unfortunately, a handful of okay jokes that get utterly driven into the ground by the end.

The plot isn’t any better. Like I said in my review of the first installment, if you’ve been watching *South Park* for any length of time, then chances are you’re pretty tired of everything turning into a byzantine conspiracy theory as the show’s main narrative move. There’s nothing particularly interesting about Pipi or his plan, and the Cartman/Tolkien/Butters triumvirate trying to get to the bottom of their respective mysteries is overfamiliar and no great shakes either. The efforts to tie everything together are strained, and not nearly as clockwork as the special seems to want them to feel.

The one thing I like about this, god help me, is the stuff with Randy. I griped in the last special about how tired I was of the grating and over-exaggerated character he’d become. Watching the show acknowledge that with a metatextual wink, and return him to being a slightly saner Randy felt weirdly wholesome for a show that doesn’t hit those notes often. Him having to return to being a Karen for the greater good didn’t do much for me, but the representation of it being a superpower was mildly amusing. Still, I hope this is a sign that they’ll at least tone Randy a little.

The only other thing I really enjoyed was Butters’ quick summation of the titular streaming wars. Again, I talked about how much the metaphor for both streaming services and water rights got exhausted pretty quickly in the first installment. But Butters not only sums up the point nicely, but brings the two parts of the analogy together when he (and by extension the writers) complain about the race of streaming services to acquire content as a nonsense scheme that was always unsustainable, to where all that's left in any service is “a bunch of piss.” It’s a pithy (if you’ll pardon the expression) encapsulation of what the creative team seemed to want to say, and I wish they’d said it more succinctly. (Though the implicit digs on the same thing affecting crypto helped accentuate the issues at play.)

On the whole, this was a hodgepodge of a standard *South Park* conspiracy plots and overdone jokes, with the germ of interesting commentary via Butters and a half-decent deconstruction of Randy’s devolution. Still, I could do without more of these specials going forward, especially if, as seems to be implied here, the creative team isn’t too fond of them either.
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