TV Is Back: South Park and The Sarah Silverman Program

As Tuned In's James Poniewozik exclaimed yesterday, "South Park is back, just when we needed it." And it brought its friends!

I love South Park. It has an enduring ability to savage the worst parts of our society while still actually being funny, not to mention that it's ability to deal with current events is matched only by SNL, since the episodes are sometimes produced in as little as a week. There are off episodes, of course, but no other current shows has as many "great moments per capita" as South Park.

If you were looking for one of those classics last night, you were mostly sadly mistaken. The episode involved Cartman pulling Butters into his "American Liberation Front" to save us from Chinese domination (he has nightmares about the Beijing Opening Ceremonies), which quickly ascends into a hostage crisis farce where Butters keeps shooting people in the crotch. This is the good part of the episode. Unfortunately, it also includes a stupid plot involving the boys having been traumatized by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas "raping" Indiana Jones in the latest movie, which plays on the cliches of a Lifetime-style weepie. The biggest problem for me with this isn't the way they deal Spielberg and Lucas (incredibly, ludicrously disrespectful, but half the point of these guys is they don't respect anybody... and was it any worse than what they did to Mel Gibson? Well, maybe...), but the fact that it just isn't funny. In a show like this, that's the ultimate sin. There were flashes of brilliance, though, mostly involving Cartman, and I'm confident the show will return to form next week. It's stayed at the height of its powers longer than any other show in my memory.

The Sarah Silverman Program is a showcase for the "no holds barred" comedienne who gets her unique touch from making jokes about racism and bodily functions with a wink and a smile. This works on the internet and in cut-up form, but in half-hour form it has only been really funny in fits and starts. This season premiere was probably the best episode I've seen. One of the large, slovenly, geeky gay guys across the hall (Brian Posehn), introduces Sarah to pot... and she discovers that as long as she's high, she's a genius, but she can't remember her incredible insights while she's sober. So she develops a system where she leaves her sober self voicemail messages urging her to follow her instructions. This also leads to a farcical hostage crisis (two in one night!). On a normal sitcom, Sarah would eventually go the well one too many times and learn, at the very least, that pot isn't for her. But there's no comeuppance, and high-Sarah changes people's lives and takes down a corporation with little to no repercussions. I'll probably never say this again, but it was actually better than South Park.