South Park: The End of Obesity Special Mocks Hollywood’s Ozempic Craze, Hates on Lizzo’s Music — Grade It!
We’ve seen science do some pretty incredible things on South Park over the years, from engineering a talking towel to creating a monkey with four (no, five!) asses. But attempting to make Eric Cartman thin? Now Trey Parker and Matt Stone are just playing God.
Cartman’s morbid obesity feels deeply ingrained in who he is as a character, right alongside his unabashed racism and rampant antisemitism. But the show’s latest Paramount+ special, South Park: The End of Obesity, threatens to change everything by introducing Ozempic to the quiet, little mountain town.
More from TVLine
Concerned about Cartman’s weight, his doctor suggests putting him on the “miracle drug,” but Mrs. Cartman simply can’t afford the $1,200 a month it costs for someone without diabetes, so the doctor instead prescribes watching Lizzo videos. As Cartman puts it, “rich people get Ozempic, poor people get body positivity.”
Cartman’s pals attempt to dispute the matter with his mom’s insurance company, but this involves navigating the American healthcare system, and we all know how much fun that can be. Cut to a sobering, spot-on montage of the boys booking appointments, filling out forms, copying documents, arguing with the insurance company and jumping through various other hoops to no avail.
Fed up with the broken system, Stan suggests that they order semiglutides from a factory in India to make their own weight-loss shots. After all, “who needs hospitals and insurance when we have TikTok and YouTube?” When the boys’ experiment proves (allegedly) successful, they start mass-producing the drugs for anyone in America who needs them, which soon makes them a powerful new enemy.
Enter the boardroom of Big Sugar, where sinister characters like Cap’n Crunch, Little Debbie and the Trix Rabbit conspire to shut the boys’ operation down. As Dig’em Frog asserts, “Only one drug is king in America — and that drug is sugar.”
Meanwhile, Randy accidentally gets involved with a group of Ozempic-addicted soccer moms when he mistakes them being “into drugs” for, you know, them actually being into drugs. But he enjoys partying with “hot MILFs,” so he sticks around long enough to help them rob a local pharmacy. He’s in way over his crop top at this point.
Randy and the boys eventually cross paths when his gang of needling ninjas attempts to hijack a shipment of semiglutides that Cartman’s friends ordered from North Carolina. A crisis of conscience inspires Randy to turn against the women, but it isn’t long before the cereal mascots show up to make it a real party. What ensues is one of the wildest IP massacres since South Park took us to Imaginationland all those years ago. Sonny the Cuckoo Bird fires a machine gun from a helicopter, Twinkie the Kid gets severed in half — it’s a mess. “Tony the Tiger killed Kenny!” is something we never thought we’d hear, even on this show.
And even after the boys manage to fight off both the mascots and the moms, they discover that the company from which they ordered their shipment is insured, so it’s back into the hot mess that is the American healthcare system. (Better luck next time, boys!)
In the end, Randy and Sharon decide to screw Ozempic and stick to only doing “good drugs,” like molly, which they enjoy during a wild night at the Holiday Inn. As for the kids, Kyle arrives at an enlightened conclusion: “It isn’t fair to put the blame on anyone for their weight. Let’s all agree as a school — no, as a society — that we won’t make fun of obesity anymore.”
Essentially, this means that Cartman gets exactly what he’s always wanted. Not only can he remain overweight without being judged, but now he’s giving himself permission to pick on everyone else — for, let’s say, their race or religion — because that’s how his sick little mind works. And we wouldn’t have him any other way.
Well, that’s the skinny on South Park‘s latest Paramount+ special. Did you enjoy chewing the fat with Cartman and the gang? Grade The End of Obesity below, then drop a comment with your full review.
Best of TVLine
Get more from TVLine.com: Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Newsletter
