Worst of all, I’d taken my eyes off what really mattered. Actually, you know what, I don’t know what matters anymore. I watched South Park’s season finale looking for a takeaway from an arc that introduced the real Lorde to the world and restored the Internet back to the people. But there is no big “I learned something today moment” for me. I’m all pooped out from finding the common threads throughout season 18 and commenting on it. Again, all that was clearly laid out for us to bookend the episode. It’s the holidays after all! Matt Stone and Trey Parker wanted you to relax and enjoy their Christmas spectacular. Usually, if you wanted to kick around interchangeable jokes, you can head over to Family Guy for that. Matt and Trey would rather get a laugh out of you the hard way — look at the effort they put into the live-action ending of “Grounded Vindaloop.” They really did save their best shots, literally and figuratively, for last. It all centers on Kyle’s perceived grandpa complex. Our popular culture lexicon moves at the speed of the Internet and it has a fourth-grader feeling left behind. Kyle isn’t wrong, though. The living room is dying and tablets and XXL iPhones are the culprit. So he sets out to do what NBC thinks a live-action Peter Pan production can do: #SaveTheLivingRoom. I love that South Park was lampooning NBC’s crusade to keep live television relevant, and in turn ensuring the big cable companies remain profitable. Beyond that, they turned the finale into a hashtag-a-palooza in an effort to bring us back to the days when families would gather around the ol’ tube and watch Dr. Cliff Huxtable teach the youth of America valuable life lessons. That kind of shock humor is what gets us “blumpkin catchers” talking in the social sphere. South Park’s social media campaign throughout the week got me excited about this star-studded episode — not their TV ads. And they really did create a beautifully ignorant holiday special we can talk about for many Christmases to come. Redskins. Iggy’s singing, sagging ass. Kurt Cobain and a shotgun. Elvis. Michael “The Original Peter Pan” Jackson. Bill Cosby luring Taylor Swift with a stiff “Jell-O” drink. They fit all that into roughly 20 minutes. It was incoherent, hilarious madness — its own artform. Matt and Trey actively went out of their way to see if they could put together an episode with almost no plot, sprinkle in outrageous faux-celebrity cameos, essentially throwing nonsense on your screen, just to see if they could “trendscend” the Internet. They succeeded. When “The Washington Redskins Go F*ck Yourself Holiday Special” signed off, #IHateCartmanBrah was trending #1 in the United States on real-life Twitter. The episode’s success–along with PewDiePie–we just need to accept. Blunt, vulgar humor can sometimes get a pretty direct point across too. The proof is in the pudding pop. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for all news updates related to the world of geek. And Google+, if that’s your thing!
