These Were the Worst Reviews for ‘South Park’s First Episode
South Park has been on the air for nearly three decades, and despite what a certain country’s government would have you believe, it seems to be as culturally relevant as ever.
But when the very first episode of South Park premiered way back in 1997, a not insignificant number of TV critics casually dismissed the show, and even suggested that its foul-mouthed antics would never last beyond the ‘90s.
As Trey Parker and Matt Stone revealed in a Season One DVD commentary, they were specifically irked by a review published in Time Magazine. While discussing Jesus’ public access talk show, which Comedy Central was “a bit freaked out by,” Parker noted that the Jesus cameo was “another of the many things” that Time blasted as “completely unoriginal.”
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“The first article that Time Magazine did, right before South Park came out — I think they’d only seen the pilot episode actually, and seen some scripts or something — they said it would never last past one season because it wasn’t satirical like The Simpsons was,” Parker recalled.
“I remember, it was, ‘It wasn’t the brilliant social commentary of The Simpsons, and it also didn’t go into the nihilism of suburban teenagers, like Beavis and Butt-Head did,’” Stone added. “And we were like, ‘Well, dude, we only have one show done. Give us a little time. There’s more than one show.’”
Time was hardly alone in not believing in South Park’s future. A critic from The Seattle Times claimed that the show didn’t appear to “have the staying power of The Simpsons or King of the Hill” because “those series have told wacky stories (Hank’s constipation, Homer’s chili problems) with some restraint. That’s what South Park sorely needs. Its chances for success die each time Kenny does.”
A review in The Spokesman-Review, while not wholly negative, similarly questioned, “How long can South Park keep it up?” speculating that “the novelty of a cartoon about irreverent tots could wear out in a big hurry, leaving parents to search for another clue to Western civilization’s imminent collapse.”
Far more scathing was a piece in The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s dismissible juvenilia,” the article argued, “a collection of poorly paced, lowest-common-denominator setups that are not even sophomorically funny or scatologically goofy.”
The critic ultimately concluded that “South Park is a witless offering that wants to score as it seeks to be pointedly outrageous and aggressively offensive but clocks in as merely dumb.”
Incidentally, Time Magazine eventually changed their tune, and named South Park as one of the “100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME” in 2007. But they stopped short of naming Eric Cartman as “Person of the Year.”
