REVIEW: South Park: Joining the Panderverse (2023)

Television Reviews

It was only a matter of time before South Park took aim at the woke infestation of modern cinema. But instead of its normal Comedy Central run, the long-running satirical series dedicated one of its hour-long specials on Paramount+ to the topic, with South Park: Joining the Panderverse premiering today on the streaming service. And while the forcing of identity politics into entertainment is the primary target, Joining the Panderverse also sets its sights on the declining value of college education, AI use in Hollywood, and the sudden overuse of the multiverse as a storytelling trope. The result is the best, most consistently funny of the South Park specials yet.

Cartman begins having strange dreams where he, Stan, Kyle, and Kenny are ethnically diverse women instead of little white boys. He starts ranting and raving about the multiverse and Disney’s race-swapping agenda, convinced that Kathleen Kennedy is out to get him. His friends laugh him off until he’s suddenly replaced with an adult black woman who claims to be Eric Cartman. Meanwhile, Randy Marsh decides to teach Stan and Shelly how to do practical things for themselves, but ends up facing the harsh reality that the menial jobs he once looked down on are now more lucrative than his.

The trailer for South Park: Joining the Panderverse promised a skewering of woke movies, and it doesn’t disappoint. From the moment it begins, the special rips into the ridiculous way identity politics are forced into art nowadays, and it’s biting in large part because we all know it’s true. The sight of the boys being replaced with your typical modern Hollywood casting call is hilarious because it’s not as outrageous as it should be; if South Park were to be remade today, it would probably look something like the absurdity of Joining the Panderverse. The special even differentiates between original characters who are diverse and given strong backstories (I disagree with the example they use, but I get what they’re saying) and simply turning Cartman into a black woman out of nowhere and expecting everyone to be okay with it. Almost every line is hilarious because it all rings true.

But the most biting attacks are saved for Disney and Kathleen Kennedy. Kennedy is portrayed as… well, a few things, but the one getting the most attention is an almost caricaturist angry vessel of thoughtless diversity quotas. Disney, meanwhile, is run by a board of helpless empty suits who refuse to make any changes in their failing strategy and cower before Kathleen Kennedy. But it’s not that simple; Joining the Panderverse presents Hollywood pandering as a complicated issue with plenty of villains, including some critics of forced diversity who’ve taken their antagonism too far, and Disney not being as passive as they like to pretend. As always, South Park attacks all sides, and wherever you fall on the issue, you’ll find things to laugh at in others as well as yourself.

But it’s not just wokeness being mocked. A subplot highlights the modern era’s shifting cultural emphasis on practical knowledge instead of academics, with Randy unable to fix a broken oven (while being smug about what he thinks are his old-fashioned abilities) but equally unable to book a handyman because they’re so in-demand. You’ve almost certainly seen people advise today’s youth to go to trade school instead of college, and this is South Park’s version of an argument in favor of that career path. Randy and the other well-educated dads are at a loss when it comes to making simple household repairs, but their ignorance has also priced the average handyman out of their reach. The escalation is full of laughs, with Randy’s typical boneheaded solution, the increasingly lavish lifestyles of the town handymen, and the lengths the college grads are willing to go to get someone to make repairs on their homes all funny. Admittedly, though, this isn’t as funny as the wokeness plot, and despite how well it’s done, you miss the Kathleen Kennedy and Disney roasts when the handyman story resurfaces.

AI and the multiverse aren’t as prominent as the other two topics, used mostly to complement the main storyline. The primary argument against wokeness in film is that it’s lazy, a cheap way around writing a good movie (or a new movie); AI and the multiverse are other examples of that laziness, with AI used as a quick fix to Hollywood’s problems and the multiverse a storytelling crutch to buttress weak scripts. Again, these ring true, and South Park expertly mines them for laughs. They tie into the secret behind Kathleen Kennedy’s pandering ways, and the heart of the story is classic South Park, with fantasy and sci-fi storytelling elements becoming a reality in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s world. As a result of its less prominent status, South Park has lampooned AI more successfully elsewhere, specifically in the episode “Deep Learning,” where Stan learns to use ChatGPT for all his relationship problems.

South Park: Joining the Panderverse is easily the best of the show’s Paramount+ specials and one of the funniest things they’ve done in years. The jokes almost all land, the escalation of each topic happens both naturally and ridiculously, and on a personal level, it’s gratifying to have people like Trey and Matt tell you through their art that you’re not crazy. Some people are saying that this will lead to the end of wokeness in movies, but I think that’s a tall order; it might help, but Disney and other studios are too entrenched in it to care much about what an animated TV show has to say. Then again, their pitch-perfect mocking of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle seemed to turn even the fawning news media against the former royals, so I guess you never know.