‘South Park’ Fans Mourn How the Show Has Seemingly Forgotten About Kenny
The South Park writers used to kill Kenny McCormick on a weekly basis. Then, the marketing department decided to simply kill him off.
South Park’s 27th season is underway, and the first two episodes that took aim at the President Donald “Saddam Hussein” Trump's White House have drawn more attention to the series than South Park has enjoyed in seven years. Once again, South Park is the most talked-about show on television, and the triggered, disorganized response each new episode receives from its powerful parody targets only further increases South Park’s popularity as TV viewers across the country clamor to see what exactly has Kristi Noem melting down worse than her face.
Don't Miss
To the many in the South Park fandom, the show’s triumphant return to the top of popular culture (as well as the President’s hit list) has been one of the all-time peaks in South Park’s storied, 28-year history. However, not every member of the South Park family has had an equal share in the success of Season 27, and the superfans are speaking out about a glaring omission from the promo material for next week’s new episode:
As many South Park fans pointed out, the still frame used for the new episode promo comes from South Park Season Six when, following the penultimate Season Five episode “Kenny Dies,” South Park's resident undead poor kid was still semi-permanently deceased. At the time, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone were experimenting with giving Butters a bigger role in the show, and Kenny was a necessary casualty to give the show’s fifth Beatle more screentime.
Unfortunately for the Kenny stans of the internet, Parker and Stone simply have a harder time finding ways to build an episode around a character who speaks almost exclusively in muffled tones, and, as the series has significantly slowed its episode output since those early years, there just aren’t enough plotlines to go around anymore. So far in Season 27, Kenny has mostly been a background character, and, with so many White House officials left to roast, it seems unlikely that he’ll play a more prominent role in any upcoming episodes.
Butters, on the other hand, could still steal the show on any given week, despite the focus on national politics. Considering what Noem and Trump did to Dora the Explorer last week, we wouldn’t be surprised if Butters found a job working in the Mar-a-Lago spa.
