Wow, a lot of people really have a problem with this one. While it's almost certainly the worst Christmas episode of the show, it's far from the worst overall. In my opinion, this episode was messy, but had a number of funny parts throughout. With all of the holograms, the CartmanBrah, PewDiePie, etc., it was very cluttered. But honestly the messiness was part of the fun, especially since they liberally made fun of themselves and how little sense the episode was making toward the end. The use of tweets as a meta-commentary on the episode was the best part--lots of great "blink or you'll miss them jokes" in there.
I definitely didn't love this episode. It was far from perfect--but so are a lot of South Park episodes. It has the same problems that a lot of (tomorrow is a) latter-day South Park episodes have been having, which is just trying to stuff too many ideas into one episode, to the point where certain jokes they could explore more are cut short and are just explored at a cursory level. And while I'm sure Matt and Trey's heads are in the right place, the cops' jokes are in that uncomfortable "too soon" realm--but that can often be where South Park's humor lives, and I'm aware that almost nothing has been off-limits for the show before.
I just am not getting how apparently so many people are finding this to be the "worst episode ever" and say they'll never watch the show again. This seems to be akin to the reaction to Matt and Trey's April Fools Joke from 16 years ago--it's almost absurd to me that people cared SO much about finding out who Cartman's father was, they failed to see the humor in Matt and Trey playing a meta-joke on them, on APRIL FOOLS DAY of all things. Similarly, I can't understand how so many fans of the show are failing to see the humor here. Obviously they don't look up to PewDiePie as some sort of savior; it's an ironic, tongue-in-cheek joke like...oh, I don't know, several thousand jokes from this series. I feel like they knew what they were doing, too, that a lot of their fan base would be (THANKS FOR THE CENSORSHIP, IMDb) annoyed. Hey, they've messed with their viewers a number of times before. And maybe they just find the guy funny--is there something really so WRONG about that? It's of course rare for them to have a guest star on the show and it hasn't happened in many years. It sure was an interesting choice.
I don't know, I just figured South Park fans were more easy-going, kick-back-and-laugh-at-the-world type people. That is the whole purpose of the show, after all. Instead, it seems that a number of the fan base are quick-to-jump-ship type of people when they don't find something funny. This is nowhere near the best episode, but it's also nowhere near the lows of "A Million Little Fibers," "I Should Have Never Gone Ziplining," or "Pee," to name a couple. I'm surprised people weren't jumping ship after some of those ones.
