23x02 Band in China

[8.0/10] One of the most salient episodes of South Park in a while. Both the A-story and the B-story do a good job of taking the stuffing out of Hollywood for bending standards and ideals in order to reach a Chinese market. It’s the sort of sharp, no-nonsense criticism, the sort of harsh but accurate truth-telling, that the show can do at its best.

The A-story is a little blunt, but effective, with Randy going to China to sell some Tegridy Weed and seeing firsthand how brutal the regime there can be. I love the return of hard-nosed businessman Mickey, and the pair of them doing anything and everything (up to and including a pretty graphic murder of Winnie the Pooh) is a great way to dramatize and satirize the lengths American companies will go to get some of that sweet sweet yuan.

The B-story with Stan trying to do a biopic for his new band and running into Chinese censorship is just as good. It’s a good way to get more specific about the things that aren’t allowed to be in films distributed in China, like references to homosexuality or organ transplants. It’s also a good two-fer by taking aim at the recent resurgence of formulaic Hollywood biopics. Plus the unexpected return of Fingerband was a delight. Granted, Stan’s speech about not selling out their ideals was a little on the nose, but still worked.

Overall, this was one of the better hypocrisy callouts South Park has done in recent years, and it’s a fitting way for the show to celebrate this milestone.

Pretty stupid!

Everything in the Chinese prison camp was so cartoonishly ridiculous that I thought the joke was going to be making fun of the insane shit people say about china, but the episode just ends up pushing all that itself, and there is no joke with the prison camp, it's like Trey has his head so far up his own arse he thinks he needs to spread awareness about some deep, serious issue without making light of it... didn't stop you from making light of the border crisis last episode! (which was fine, those jokes were good btw). Speaking of which, the only real thing they every bring up is censoring Winnie the Pooh posts on Weibo, which they keep bringing up over and over again (this happened over a year before this episode was written btw, not exactly topical) which, sure, dumb? yes! But what was that about the detention centres in the last episode again? "Sure, the US may abduct children from their homes and imprison them in concentration camps on their own, but atleast it didn't ban Winne the fucking Pooh! Won't someone think of Winnie the Pooh!" The whole censorship thing was stupid too, it starts off as a critique of major studios but quickly turns into "China is censoring our art!", which, A. Avengers 4: the one where a hundred indiscernible characters punch cartoon aliens in the shittiest looking CGI landscape in history and The Assembly Edit of the Queen Biopic are not exactly art and B. It's up to Disney if they choose to censor that shit or not.

It really sucks because the whole death metal band/Bohemian Rhapsody parody bit was good until it turned into "China is a fascist regime because multi-billion dollar American companies are choosing to make the most profit profitable!". Honestly there could of been great commentary about studios censoring art to whims of a foreign government, but when you legitimately say shit like people get taken to labour camps for criticising the government mildly and get executed on the spot if they don't pledge allegiance to the party, like come on man you sound fucking nuts Trey.

Oh yeah, and they also implied that the reason Bohemian Rhapsody was so generic was because of China lol, like the fucking newscorp produced Queen biopic made by Br*n S***r, who they swapped out last minute and released in a state that the editor was complete shit and was ashamed of winning a fucking Oscar for, was China's fault, and theatres were never filled with generic studio shit before recently, sure.

Thank the Viacom overlords we were blessed this latest product's hard biting social commentary instead of bowing down to the foreign government on the other side of the world that can't make them do anything!! I love Viacom!! True freedom is when you're fed blatant red scare propaganda dressed in new racist clothes by (a couple of gullible idiots employed by) a $50b corporation!!