Blame Canada!

Now running into its tenth season, South Park has still not "jumped the shark". Satricially edgier than The Simpsons, South Park responds immediately to cultural controversies: four days after Saddam Hussein's capture an episode lampooned it, and the show has no fear in tackling subjects like Terri Schiavo, The Passion of The Christ, and Michael Jackson, while co-opting disparate elements such as Kill Bill and Janet Jackson's nipple into one episode. Its mixture of iconoclasm, cultural referents, and intertextuality makes it the perfect lens through which to examine contemporary popular culture in America - and television's role in the creation of that culture. Blame Canada! is a smart, readable book that will appeal to the show's many fans as much as to scholars and researchers of contemporary television.