South Park: The F Word

This week's episode of South Park ought to be one for the books and it may well be when we look back on it, but something about "The F Word" just didn't feel as poignant as its material suggested. It had everything that makes this show good. There was a strong sense of street-level social commentary, a confident progressive voice and a powerful streak of absurdity. Still, something was just off. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed "The F Word" more than any episode since the incredible "Margaritaville", but I just can't shake the feeling that something was missing.

Maybe I've just gotten too used to South Park's formula after so many years, and this episode was nothing if not formulaic. It starts off with a number of uncharacteristically idyllic scenes around the town getting interrupted by the growling bikes of a motorcycle gang. A few minutes later the bikers hang out in a diner and it's made perfectly clear that they're just insecure, inconsiderate jerks who are starved for attention. The best bit of the show is the engine sound the bikers make with their mouths when they're irritated or want more attention, a development that comes about organically when they disturb people in the diner by clearing their throats as loudly as possible.

But this episode isn't about leather-decked bikers, or at least it's not only about them. Really, it's about our culture's use of the titular F-word. No, not the one you're thinking of. The other one, the one that has come to be a pejorative term for homosexuals. The kids of South Park start hurling the insult at the bikers, which results in a town-wide deconstruction of the origin of the term and its current colloquial usage.

Some of the better episodes of South Park have revolved around the re-examination of things like profanity, bigotry and sexuality. To date it's the only show I've ever seen that managed to make a funny AIDS joke and I think that Stan's gay dog did more for televised depictions of queer characters than the entire embarrassing run of Will and Grace. Maybe a South Park deconstruction of that specific F-word was overdue.

So, why did this episode leave me feeling like something was missing? It was funny, made a lot of good points and wasn't overly preachy. Maybe we've finally reached a point where the biting social commentary of our time has to come from somebody else. Maybe the best of TV has out-grown South Park.

Best Moment: The news reporters asking small children to assign the F-word to one of two pictures, with a gay stereotype on the left and a biker stereotype on the right. It really drove the jokes home to remind us that there are real people who dress up like the absurd bikers in the episode.

Biggest Laugh: The mouth engines. I don't even know what to call that kind of joke, but it's one of the best parts of South Park. I think this particular sound-meme might be Season 13's "they took our jobs!".

Episode Rating: 4/5- I'm giving "The F Word" such a high rating only because I understand that it really is a very good episode, at least on an intellectual level. It left me cold in a very subjective way, so I can't really justify a lower score.