Coming off a hit-and-miss season premiere in which South Park took aim at the NSA, “Informative Murder Porn” keeps the satire local, social, and more consistently amusing in its second week. There are not a lot of twists and turns to this episode: Once you understand the premise, there’s not much in the way of new comedic invention throughout the installment. But there’s a whole lot of Randy Marsh, who’s been one of the show’s most consistently funny characters over the years. So that’s a big reason why this is a big step up from the premiere. This wasn’t on par with something like “Broadway Bro Down” by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a solid outing all the same.
The premise is simple: The episode flips normal concerns about the psychological effects of consuming certain entertainment on its head by making the children worried about what shows their parents are watching. Apparently, documentary programs that feature recreations of grisly marital violence (dubbed “murder porn” by the children) have increased in popularity with the citizens’ parents. Why? Because the lineup of shows on networks such as Investigation Discovery, A&E, and Oxygen is sending these adults into a sexual frenzy. The children worry that watching such programs will carry over into in real life, and those worries are realized when a husband in town brutally murders his wife in a similar manner to a murder depicted in one of these shows.
To combat this, Stan introduces an app that serves as reverse-engineered parental controls. Rather than adults dictating what children watch, the kids block the appropriate channels with passwords only understood by those that play the video game Minecraft. “What is Minecraft and how do you tame a horse in it?” begs Randy, desperately covering up the erection obtained moments earlier by watching Southern Fried Homicide. The parents soon find a means to learn the game through Cory Lanskin, a child who agrees to teach them the rules of the game for “100 silver pieces.” None of the adults understand how the game works, but soon fall under its spell regardless. Not only do they spend hours in the game, but they also start punching trees in their own backyards and erecting fortresses in and around public buildings.
The Minecraft stuff is silly (having played only a cursory amount, I am glad I’ve never got sucked into it, because holy hell I don’t sleep enough as it is), but the real attacks in “Informative Murder Porn” are saved for cable companies and the nanny state. Neither antagonist is particularly new to the world of the show, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen members of a cable company rub their nipples in sexual delight quite as much as those on display in this episode. Anyone who has ever wished for a la carte service in their cable package probably wanted to throttle the smug employees as they protested how much they wanted to decouple certain cable packages, but simply couldn’t. In the end, in response to Stan’s earnest plea to prevent his parents from murdering each other, the cable company comes up with a brilliant business plan: They take the “murder porn” channels off the normal package, but offer them at a higher tier of payment. (Along with 300 additional channels, all in Portuguese. Naturally.)