South Park's New Main Character Takes Aim At The Show's Critics

Published Nov 11, 2026, 10:00 AM EST Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock. Sign in to your ScreenRant account There’s nothing Trey Parker and Matt Stone like to do more than troll their own audience. South Park has been the most pressing and prescient satirical social commentary on television for the past three decades, but that’s just a nice bonus on top of the fun that Parker and Stone have teasing the viewers at home and incorporating the discourse around the show into the show itself. After fans spent years complaining that Tegridy Farms had taken over the whole show, Parker and Stone did a 300th-episode spectacular celebrating the weed farm that everyone in town is fed up with. Last season, Parker and Stone had Stan Marsh outright say, “South Park’s gotten all sh*tty now,” in reference to what the fans were saying online amidst the fatigue of several Trump-centric seasons in a row. South Park is currently in its 29th season, and Parker and Stone are trolling their viewers (and their president) more than ever. Season 29 has rebranded the show South America, in reference to Trump’s attempts to rename Lake Ontario, the Gulf of Mexico, and even the Atlantic Ocean, and it’s touched on everything from data centers to e-bikes to the horrors of the Sephora Backrooms. While South Park has mostly done away with the serialized storytelling it started dabbling in about a decade ago, one of the best bits from that Sephora episode has become a running gag in the subsequent episodes. In season 29, episode 3, “You Like That on Your Face,” Randy becomes obsessed with looksmaxxing, goes to Sephora to get an age-rejuvenation makeover, and comes out as a 10-year-old kid. Little Randy has proven to be one of South Park’s grandest experiments in self-awareness. Randy has basically been the “fourth kid” for years — and that’s been the most common complaint about the show for well over a decade — but now, South Park has killed off Kenny (again) and literally made Randy the fourth kid. South Park has been on the cutting edge of meta humor since the very beginning. In the early seasons, when the show became a massive hit and garnered offers from A-list stars to do guest spots, Parker and Stone cast huge celebrities to play tiny, unrecognizable roles: they got George Clooney to play Stan’s dog; they got Brent Musburger to play Scuzzlebutt’s leg; they got Henry Winkler to play the Kid-Eating Monster in “City on the Edge of Forever.” When Isaac Hayes left South Park to join the Church of Scientology, Parker and Stone used archival recordings of his voice to make an episode where his character Chef gets indoctrinated into a sinister cult called the Super Adventure Club. The Honey Boo Boo episode wonders if South Park itself had something to do with “lowering the bar.” South Park has always had a searing self-aware edge. Little Randy is a genius South Park meta gag. When Parker and Stone started making South Park, they most related to the four boys. But, as the years went by, they found themselves relating more to Stan’s middle-aged dad, Randy, so the series began to shift its focus more toward him. For years, South Park fans have been saying that Randy is the new fourth kid, and season 29 has made that literally the case: Kenny will remain dead indefinitely, and Randy will remain a Backrooms Still Life 10-year-old indefinitely, so South Park has become the very thing that people have been accusing it of for over a decade. The Backrooms parody was South Park’s best movie parody in years. It takes the underlying concept of Kane Parsons’ horror blockbuster — the notion of a copy of a copy of a copy, slowly getting uglier and more uncanny — to reflect the real-world horror of children getting cosmetic procedures on faces that haven’t fully developed yet. South Park 8/10 Release Date August 13, 1997 Network Comedy Central Cast Trey Parker Eric Cartman / Stan Marsh (voice) Matt Stone Kyle Broflovski / Kenny McCormick (voice)