It's Officially The End Of An Era For South Park

Published Oct 29, 2026, 1:30 PM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

The more things change in the titular town of South Park, the more they stay the same, judging by the show’s latest risky storytelling choice. While The Simpsons bringing back Apu might seem like a potentially controversial choice, South Park season 29 gracefully opted to take the heat off its long-running competitor by releasing a much more shocking episode the same month.

Despite the fact that numerous episodes of the series have historically been banned, South Park season 29, episode 2, “Billionaire Weenietown,” still managed to be the show’s grossest and most shocking outing ever with an obscene story that compared the world’s ultrarich to literal talking sentient penises. The episode was met with critical acclaim, but South Park season 29 has since decided to double down on a risky routine that the show has explored before in recent years.

In 2014, South Park dropped its traditional episodic approach in favor of a serialized, season-length story arc where the show’s status quo did not reset at the end of each episode. While seasons 18 and 19 were praised for this daring experiment, season 20 infamously ended with the cheekily titled finale “The End of Serialization as We Know It.” South Park’s writers tacitly admitted that the experiment had gone too far when they incorrectly predicted the outcome of 2016’s US election and had to rapidly rewrite an entire episode as a result.

Season 29’s Kenny Twist Proves South Park Is Bringing Back Serialized Stories

Image courtesy of Paramount/ Comedy Central

This seemed like it would be, as the title implied, the end of serialization for South Park, but the show has never been shy when it comes to playing with new formats. Thus, the Tegridy Farms plot line that began in 2018 didn’t end up wrapping up for good until 2025’s season 28 finale, making this subplot South Park’s longest serialized storyline by a stretch.

Even after South Park’s Randy Marsh plot ended with season 28's finale “The Crap Out,” season 29 soon returned to serialized storylines by starting season 29 with the death of Kenny. Of course, South Park viewers know that Kenny regularly died at the end of every episode in the show’s first five seasons, before the series retired this running gag for over a decade.

However, in South Park season 29’s premiere, “South American Biker Gangs,” the show killed off Kenny once again, and season 29, episode 4, “Guinea Pig on a Stick,” doubled down on this twist. “Guinea Pig on a Stick” called back to one of South Park’s earliest influences, as uber-rich customers eating beef and instantly exploding into piles of diarrhea was a nod to from the infamous Mr. Creosote sequence from 1983’s Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

South Park Season 29’s Serialized Storyline Has A Familiar Problem

However, when the boys attempted to get the beef supply to their school cafeteria reinstated, Cartman noted that Kenny would have known what to do, and the rest of the gang agreed. Thus, after the premiere killed off Kenny and season 29 episode 3's horror movie spoof turned Randy into a child, South Park maintained both changes in “Guinea Pig on a Stick” instead of returning to normal.

This serialized season-length plot seems risky, since it is tough to see how the show’s overarching story could come together cohesively in time for its finale. Specifically, the running gag of ignoring the US elections in favor of GTA VI’s release will be tougher to pull off after the midterms have actually happened.

By the time the next episode of South Park airs, the much-hyped midterms will have been and gone, while GTA VI’s release date will still be days away. Thus, it is hard to imagine how South Park season 29 will continue to comedically equate both events, although the show has written its way out of weirder corners before.

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  Trey Parker

  Eric Cartman / Stan Marsh (voice)

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  Matt Stone

  Kyle Broflovski / Kenny McCormick (voice)