Waiting For Cartman

Could it be that my beloved South Park has jumped the manatee?

As I posted last week, South Park's previous episode, "Tonsil Troubles," fell short of their usual quality.

Unfortunately, this week's outing, "Britney's New Look," wasn't much better.

The plot centers around a visit to South Park by Britney Spears. The boys, along with the rest of the town, turn into vicious paparazzi trying to hit the jackpot by snapping a picture of the pop star in an embarrassing pose.

Kyle, Stan, Cartman, and Butters manage to get past security and into Britney's hotel room by claiming to be her children (part of the deception involved dressing Butters as a squirrel).

Disappointed and distraught at not seeing her real children, Spears blows the top of her head off with a shotgun.

The funniest part of the episode occurs when the Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Butters all look helplessly at her lifeless body. After a beat or two, Cartman quietly turns around and heads out the door without comment (never to return).

Cut to the hospital where the ER team is able to keep Spears alive despite losing the entire top of her head. Guilt-ridden, Stan and Kyle stick around to try to make things right.

Even though the lack of a roof over her mouth prevents her from making more than grunting sounds, Britney's "people" lead her around like Spock in Star Trek's "Spocks Brain" (a reference I'm surprised the South Park writers didn't allude to) and have her continue to record songs and make appearances.

To what's left of Britney's face, the "Team Spears" people sing her praises. But, behind her back, the ink still wet on their paychecks, they chide and mock her.

Disgusted by this exploitation, Kyle and Stan plot to take her to Alaska.

I'm probably not doing it justice, but to make a long story short, it turns out that Britney is just the next in line to be sacrificed as part of a regular ritual carried out to ensure a robust corn crop harvest.

Like the Easter Bunny story, everyone except the kids are aware of this dark, secret conspiracy.

It's pretty rough satire which takes on our celebrity driven culture that, fed by "entertainment" news, loves to put people on pedestals for the explicit purpose of knocking them down.

However, the laughs weren't all that side-splitting for me. It mostly evoked appreciative chuckles. Such as the recreation of Britney's disastrous MTV appearance and, later on, a quick nod to "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers" when one of the paparazzi recognizes Spears.

But in it's first two new episodes, South Park has yet to come up with anything as fresh, and laugh out loud funny as the "Kyle's Mom's a Bitch" song, or the crew's metamorphosis into fat "Warcraft" warriors, or the spot-on Family Guy parodies.

I think one of the main problems was having Cartman leave the episode so soon and not come back. He certainly could have helped liven things up a bit. My guess is that the writers felt that there were already enough parasites being depicted and Cartman wasn't needed.

In retrospect, given how mediocre most of "Britney's New Look" played out for me, leaving the episode early turned out to be a pretty smart move.