Review
| - South Park's Season 17 premiere featured a relatively smart critique of the recent NSA scandal, as told through Cartman's Snowden-esque hijinks. Meanwhile, Butters' DMV confessionals and door-to-door sermons failed to bring anything new to the proceedings, comedic or otherwise. Generally speaking, the laughs were pretty slim this week, as "Let Go, Let Gov" succumbed to an overtly preachy message.
- It doesn’t take long for the episode’s first big point—mocking the way we rail against invasion of privacy while simultaneously volunteering all sorts of personal information—to get hammered home, what with Cartman’s rally organization to protest the government. The question from there is whether or not the show can carry the point home without getting too lost along the way. It can’t: Instead of sharp satire, we get a limp A-story that wanders a bit with stale riffs and a lackadaisical payoff and a B-story that doesn’t evolve and, in both cases, plenty of wasted opportunity. The idea of what we consider to be our privacy and how we undermine it seems to be the theme the show would usually latch on to and mock everyone—especially us, the viewers, for—but that idea is dispatched after the first bit.
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