"South Park" Season 13, Episode 1: "The Ring" Grade: 8.6

South Park Season 13, Episode 1:
Grade: 8.7

What a solid season premiere this was. It stared out good but just kept getting better culminating with the greatest depiction of Mickey Mouse that will ever be seen anywhere in the history of anything. Kenny gets a girlfriend who is in 5th grade and when he finds out that she gets all hot and bothered when listening to the Jonas Brothers he buys them tickets to the concert. Then the Jonas Brothers call a few girls backstage to ask them if they want to wear purity rings. Kenny and his girlfriend start wearing purity rings while the other boys attempt to put a stop to everything going on. In the meantime the Jonas Brothers want to rebel against the purity rings which lead to Mickey Mouse being brought in to essentially beat them into agreeing with their contracts.

This episode perfectly exemplifies what I love about the show. I do not like when I think it goes over the top which is not all that often actually since I have a pretty high standard as to what I think goes over the top when it pertains to this show. I.E I thought the Woodland Creatures Christmas episode was brilliant if not disturbing. Anyways though this show has a very keen eye of basically ripping something in our culture, pop culture or of the moment popular thing and doing it in a way that actually manages to provide some level of insight and bizarre truth to the whole thing while simultaneously making humanity look absolutely absurd. I adored Kenny in this episode. His excitement and the boys’ disgust were amusing.

What I liked most though was the way it depicted the Jonas Brothers and Disney. Instead of showing the Jonas Brothers as kids who are the exact opposite of how they appear to be, they are shown as kids who really do have religious beliefs but increasingly believe they are being taken advantage of by Disney who is using their beliefs to promote the exact opposite of what they believe. They are also shown as having appropriately awful music and are kids who believe that they should sing “baby” in the most annoying way possible every chance they get. They are shown as kids who make bad music, are basically cowards and cannot escape their contracts. They come out relatively unscathed. (Outside of the part where Mickey Mouse kicks the shit out of one of them). Disney are the ones who are ripped apart here and rightly so. Mickey Mouse is shown as a psychotic power hungry Nazi sadist essentially and its one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on this show. I will never look at Mickey Mouse the same way again.

This episode takes a look inside of the phenomenon of the Jonas Brothers and places the blame for it all in the right places. It may be an obvious statement to make but it’s one that needs to be made and it could have been done in much less intelligent and insightful ways. Yes I am talking about South Park in this manner.

Also I think the most brilliant part of the episode might be the depiction of the Jonas Brothers concert. I nearly pissed my pants.