South Park - Series 6 (Region 2)

The quiet little mountain town of South Park, Colorado enters its sixth season as America's weirdest and most dysfunctional town, and if you thought that title was already claimed by Springfield, I have one word for you: Lemmiwinks. If you thought it couldn't get any weirder, this season will prove you wrong. But the good news is that South Park has always been able to maintain a mathematical-like balance of proportionality so impressive it could be charted on a graph: as South Park gets weirder, so it gets funnier (usually). Which makes sense because one of South Park's greatest strengths has always been to reflect the strangest elements of society, which, let's face it, are pretty strange. Targets this season include exploitive daytime TV shows ("Freak Strike"), celebrities gone wild (Russell Crowe fightin' round the world), the Catholic priest sexual-abuse scandals ("Red Hot Catholic Love"), and the meat industry ("Fun With Veal"). Creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker even parody the reality of competing with The Simpsons's longevity in "The Simpsons Already Did It," where Butters, gone out of his mind and in his Professor Chaos persona, can't even come up with an original evil scheme to unleash on the citizens of South Park. Fortunately for fans, the quality of the writing is as strong this season as it has been at any point in the show's run and it's not like the show's going to back off from its trademark gross-out factor at this point. Proof of that can be found in "The Death Camp of Tolerance." In an extreme satire of sex education class, Mr. Slave and Lemmiwinks, the heroic and intensely unfortunate gerbil, make their, umm, debuts. In South Park, this is what qualifies as a normal school day. Taken as a whole, Season Six is one of the show's strongest punches yet to the face of a society that had it coming. --Daniel Vancini ... (more) (less)