| "You Have 0 Friends" | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| South Park episode | |||
Stan is transported to a virtual world that is the embodiment of the social networking that occurs on Facebook. The world's look borrows from the distinctive visual style of the 1982 film Tron. |
|||
| Episode no. | Season 14 Episode 4 |
||
| Directed by | Trey Parker | ||
| Written by | Trey Parker | ||
| Production code | 1404 | ||
| Original air date | April 7, 2010 | ||
| Episode chronology | |||
|
|||
| List of season 14 episodes List of South Park episodes |
|||
"You Have 0 Friends" is the fourth episode of the fourteenth season of the American animated television series South Park, and the 199th episode of the series overall. It first aired on Comedy Central in the United States on April 7, 2010. In the episode, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny make Stan a Facebook profile against his will and he becomes extremely frustrated with everyone asking him for friend requests. After he gets fed up with Facebook, Stan tries to delete his profile but is sucked into a virtual Facebook world. Meanwhile, Kyle starts trying to find ways to get more friends on Facebook after he drastically starts losing them due to his befriending of a third-grade friendless Facebook user, whom everyone thinks is a loser.
The episode was written and directed by co-creator Trey Parker and was rated TV-MA L in the United States.[1] "You Have 0 Friends" features several references to Facebook, and Stan's plotline parodies the 1982 Disney film Tron with Stan in the role of Kevin Flynn. The episode also parodies the CNBC series Mad Money and Chatroulette.
"You Have 0 Friends" has received positive reviews from critics, and according to Nielsen Media Research, the episode was viewed by 3.071 million viewers and became the cable lead in the 18-49 Wednesday night.
Contents |
Kyle, Cartman and Kenny surprise Stan by creating a Facebook account for him. Stan protests, not wanting to "get sucked into Facebook", but is quickly pressured by family and friends to add them as friends. To his annoyance and frustration, Stan finds people such as Randy, his grandmother and even Wendy confronting him over his supposed disregard for them and judging his real-world friendship solely by his Facebook configuration. Meanwhile, Kyle adds shy nerdy student Kip Drordy to his thriving friends list out of pity, the latter becoming ecstatic and over-enthused, taking his computer to movies and spending time on Kyle's Farm Town farm. His parents, unaware of his use of the term "friend", believe Kyle to literally live on a farm.
Kyle's number of Facebook friends rapidly declines when he does this, in part due to a Mad Friends podcast he finds Cartman has set up in which he berates Kyle for choosing a loser as a friend and asserts that nobody will want anything to do with Kyle due to having such a loser for a friend. Kyle understands this but, on principle and out of pity, cannot bring himself to delete Kip to please others. Desperate to stem the loss of friends, he asks Cartman for advice. Cartman introduces Kyle to Chatroulette as a way to make new friends, but all they find are men "jacking off" on webcam, although Cartman finally finds another Jewish kid named Isiah, who agrees to be Kyle's friend, much to Kyle's delight.
Meanwhile, Stan now has 845,323 friends (almost all of whom he hardly knows or does not know) on his account and has finally decided to delete it, only to find that Facebook refuses to allow him to. Instead of deleting his account, Stan is forcibly transported by the software into the virtual world of Facebook, where he meets "profiles" of everyone he knows, who communicate in Facebook lingo, and is forced to engage in Facebook activities such as Yahtzee, a game which Stan does not enjoy despite being particularly good at it. He wins on the first roll and is afterwards informed that he was not expected to win and that by doing so has made things complicated. Stan escapes and finds his way to Kyle's farm, blaming Kyle for getting him "sucked into Facebook" in the first place. Stan orders Kyle to check out his profile status and Kyle finds out that Stan is supposedly hosting a party elsewhere in Facebook at Café World. There, Stan discovers that his profile has taken on a life of its own and has rebelled against him. Kyle makes it to Stan's party, only to find that Isiah has refused to be his friend because of Kip, even though he lives in New York City and has never met him nor heard of Kip. Desperate to retain some friends, Kyle finally deletes Kip, leaving him with no friends. Kip, too, is disheartened to find his friend has abandoned him.
At the party, Stan encounters his online profile, which has the form of a huge monstrous version of himself. It challenges him to a game of Yahtzee and Stan wins, again on the first roll, causing the profile to be finally deleted. The victory returns Stan to the real world once more. He now has no Facebook friends, and Randy, upon realizing that Stan is no longer his friend, asks Stan why he deleted him. Stan explains what just happened to him and that he has "sent all his friends somewhere else" Randy asks if he and Stan are no longer friends in real-life, but Stan just says "Fuck off, Dad." Back at Kip's house, Kip is still depressed about Kyle deleting him as a friend, but is then overjoyed when all 845,323 friends Stan had prior to deletion have all suddenly been transferred to his account as friends.
The episode prominently features several aspects of the online website Facebook, including the Facebook games Farmville, Café World and a digital version of the Milton Bradley game Yahtzee.[2] Also, many aspects of the virtual Facebook world Stan gets sucked into in the episode parody the film Tron.[3] The episode also features the website ChatRoulette, as well as the fact that many men use their webcams to show their genitalia. Cartman's podcast, Mad Friends, is a parody of a segment from the financial show Mad Money hosted by Jim Cramer on CNBC.[4]
In its original American broadcast, "You Have 0 Friends" was watched by 3.071 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research making it the second most viewed cable show of the night after In Plain Sight and attracting more viewers than the previous episode, "Medicinal Fried Chicken". The episode also received a 18-49 rating of 1.7 and a share of 5% edging out Tyler Perry's House of Payne for the cable lead in the demographic.[5]
The episode received generally positive reviews from critics. Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly said "The half-hour was shrewdly precise in its targets: The older audience that communes on Facebook (such as parents and grandparents) as well as lonely kids; as usual, "South Park" is merciless when it smells a baby-boomer-adopted trend."[2] Ramsey Isler of IGN gave the episode a 9/10 saying it was "brilliant from beginning to end, and one of the best episodes the series has served up in a while."[3] Carlos Delgado of iF Magazine gave the episode an A- saying "You have 0 Friends has the right amount of humor, intelligence, and sarcasm to match any South Park episode. The question is, does it become an instant classic?"[6] Cristina Everett of the New York Daily News called the episode "hilarious, yet heartwarming," adding that the Kip Drordy subplot was "endearing."[7]
TV Fanatic gave the episode 3/5, saying there was "too much Facebook" in the episode and that "it was a great parody, but just a decent episode that could have had more LOL moments."[8]
"You Have 0 Friends", along with the thirteen other episodes from South Park's fourteenth season, were released on a three-disc DVD set and two-disc Blu-Ray set in the United States on April 26, 2011.[9]
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||