Started strong, ending weak, like most things that stay on the air far beyond their Best By date.

Matt and Trey got old and turned into the same kind of curmudgeons they used to mock.

It happens to everyone, especially when they've had fame and money and stop being the punk rock weirdos in the biz. They aren't the young upstarts pointing out the absurdity of the business anymore, they're the financial lynchpin of Comedy Central. They're as important to revenue as shit like the Daily Show. Whether they want to admit it to themselves or not, they've grown to become what they hated. As artists working for a big corporation, they represent The Industry.

They don't think of themselves at the rich corporate tools, but they are whether they think they are or not. The run-ins they've had with the staff at Casa Bonita speak to it as well. They're not actually listening to their workers. Further, no word on whether the people at Casa Bonita are allowed to unionize. Wouldn't be surprised if Matt and Trey are outright against unionization. "Why would you want to unionize when we're offering $30 an hour?" Because at some point you can just change your mind about it, like you've already changed your mind on your employees once already.

South Park's real crime was to think they were being subversive and not understanding that Capital doesn't give a fuck about morals or ethics or who gets made fun of, they only give a fuck about money. If being subversive and making fun of everyone makes money then they'll back it to hell and back, social consequences be damned. They don't care if your dumb show makes people think dumb shit, and you don't get to absolve yourself for it by saying shit like "we think people shouldn't get their politics from our cartoons." Sorry, they do get their politics from your cartoon, dumbfucks. You don't absolve yourself of it by handwaving it away like the people are the problem and not the product you're creating.

They don't get to hide from the endless stream of copycat "adult" cartoons that all try to out-offend each other. They're all trash and none of them have ever equaled what South Park originally brought to the table.

EDIT: Also, they went from being the guys who put all the episodes of their show online, for free, on southpark dot com to the guys who made a deal with Paramount to lock everything behind a paywall. If you want to bitch about how the corporate suits are making PIRACY WORSE because they fail to see that access to their content is a SERVICE PROBLEM, then maybe you need to accept that Matt and Trey are some of those corporate suits.

https://www.wired.com/2008/03/south-park-to-o/

In an appropriately glib statement, Parker and Stone said they were inspired to start the site when they got "really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time. So we gave ourselves a legal alternative."

Interesting how times change and now they're simply money grubbing assholes that don't care about locking content behind paywalls? Fuck em. They're fucking corporate suits like anyone else now. Matt and Trey together have a wealth of over a billion dollars combined, but they don't have enough money to put the episodes online for free anymore apparently... Suits.