SOUTH PARK Broadway Bro Down – RECAP

 Parts of this episode were pure brilliance and parts of it bored me, but overall I felt it was a great episode brought down by a boring B plotline and a tendency to run a joke into the ground, something South Park has made a habit of doing this season. That pretty much sums up how I felt about Broadway Bro Down. While the main plotline had flashes of brilliance, the vegan plotline just didn’t make me laugh and it didn’t really go anywhere either.

Good old reliable Randy. No matter what else changes he is consistently one of the funniest characters in South Park and this episode is no exception. The central idea of the episode was pretty funny, bringingwith it some great moments. I, for on,e was in hysterics seeing Randy’s face while watching Wicked and Randy’s description of it afterwards as some green chick and a goat to the guys afterwards was priceless. Randy’s bright idea to make his own play was hilarious and filled with some fantastic one liners such as ‘A Blowjob isn’t with your mouth it’s with your heart… now get on your knees and put that heart to work’. Simply genius! I don’t think he really understood what subtext meant either considering every second word of the play was blowjob! What came next is hard to describe. I had no idea what a bro-down was but it certainly didn’t disappoint, probably one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while, just for the absurdity of it all! We also got classic moments such as him acting like a maniac, dressing as Spiderman, and without a doubt my favourite moment,  him calling that old man a paedophile for bringing his granddaughter to the show. A classic moment!

After being so overwhelmingly positive, it’s time to talk about the negative aspects of the episode. The blowjob joke was hilarious at first, but  was overdone to death by the end of the episode.  After about the sixth time we heard Randy’s play and the word blowjob for about the hundredth time I just had enough. The vegan storyline, while sweet at moments, just wasn’t funny, at least to me. Nothing about that story really captured my interest, and whenever the story paid any attention to the vegans, I just wanted to go back to the main story. It did however give us Randy’s great Spiderman speech at the end, but overall the storyline wasn’t worth the payoff.

The episode itself was a great parody of Matt and Trey’s success with The Book of Mormon, and I enjoyed how they were using subliminal messaging. Blowjobs is used in the story to get wives to give blowjobs, very clever! There wasn’t any deep-seated meaning to this episode, its message was simple: go see The Book of Mormon. The episode got the point across in a way that was neither crass nor overdone, a fantastic achievement! The hilarious ending pretty much proved that!

So looking back this was actually a very funny episode. While the B plotline didn’t do anything for me and some of the jokes were repetitive, it was clever and accompanied by a  great main story with classic Randy moments. South Park is slowly but surely returning to form, and I for one couldn’t be happier!