What harm could a cartoon with the episode title “White People Renovating Houses” cause? We’ll find out on Wednesday when South Park‘s innocently titled season premiere arrives on September 13. Heck, you can watch the response in real time on Twitter when it airs.
A 15-second preview of the season 21 debut was released on Monday featuring the tease of angry white supremacists with tiki torches in the quiet mountain town. Confederate flag court goofs are all we really get in the early look, but odds are you can probably get a taste for the tone of this week’s ripped from the headlines satire in that quarter-minute. According to the episode description, Randy Marsh (and by extension Lorde, I guess) appears primed to go through a journey of white privilege discovery.
“Protests break out on the streets of South Park,” reads the tease. “Protestors armed with tiki torches and confederate flags take to the streets of South Park. Randy comes to grips with what it means to be white in today’s society.”
Trey Parker and Matt Stone have expressed their frustrations with incorporating Trump into the show’s universe, but maybe the right call is tackling subjects like white supremacists, protests and Confederate symbols without the albatross of the president dominating the story. As always, the trickiest part of the show’s act is mining these raw nerves for laughs. We’ll see how the skewering goes when South Park reemerges this week.
