I agree, Kris. The 'Earl-30 Rock-Office-Scrubs' corridor of NBC Thursday is just about the best of TV, conveniently lumped together for me.
As for South Park... combining last night's episode (Guitar Hero was the theme) with the World of Warcraft one, I think the message is that if you a play a game too much you're a douche? I'm mean, sure, I buy the message, but this is what you come up with given the subject matter? A bit lame. But it is funny to see how the parent companies implicitly play along while the show skewers their games and the people who play them (Blizzard helped the South Park guys make the warcraft episode, and it seems to me the Guitar Hero folks helped with last night's, or at least they ran a commercial spot during it).
Coupled with the the Imagination Trilogy of the past month, it doesn't seem to me like these guys have much of anything to say anymore.
Increasingly South Park has fallen into two categories, one of which is 'Libertarian moralizing' as someone I can't remember coined it, and the second is immediate quick and dirty cultural/social commentary (as in X event happens on the weekend... we will satirize and spoof it by Thursday night). I sympathize with the former, and sometimes the latter is extremely witty, but neither is really a good vehicle for bringing the funny.
