South Park has little to say in its return for Season 25

The Guardian

In this week's season premiere, Trey Parker and Matt Stone "continue to thrive on the non-commentary that their strategy of partial metaphor affords them, hiding behind the joke once it comes time to make a statement beyond the broadly agreeable," says Charles Bramesco. He adds that "in its third decade of existence, this show has maintained a freakish level of consistency, still getting its customary half-dozen-or-so laughs. There’s a well-deployed running joke about Matt Damon’s goofy commercials for Bitcoin bankrupting families by encouraging them to take risks in personal finance, and an amusing montage of mayhem set to the baby-friendly strains of the Laurie Berkner Band’s Pajama Time. It’s all easy enough to watch, especially for the hordes of longtime viewers for whom tuning in has become an annual ritual as reliable as the beginning of a new year. But familiarity and expectedness have never been aspirational qualities for South Park. You can’t spend 25 years making a TV show without developing some habits and routines, and it could be argued that that’s a necessity in the labor-intensive process of generating a complete work of original animation on a weekly basis. Even so, the danger of Stone and Parker’s subversive streak is the soul of the show. Without that, the buttons being pushed don’t feel so hot, a given topic’s equivalent of whinging about those clowns in Congress. Looking at the history of the small screen, an unending broadcast run and the guarantee of an easily satisfied audience have led to only one thing: complacency. With Parker and Stone now entering their 50s, the greatest challenge facing them is their own success." ALSO: Parker and Stone name their 15 best South Park episodes and 53 worst.