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Top 10 On-Screen Depictions of Heaven

To mark our cover this week, "Rethinking Heaven," TIME takes a look at the various ways the afterlife has been depicted on television and in movies

The Week Ahead—10 Things To Watch, Read and Listen To: March 12–18

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Every Monday, for your planning purposes, we lay out the week ahead in entertainment.

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South Park's 1% Solution

SOUTH PARK STUDIOS

Sometimes South Park makes strong episodes out of topical stories that are happening in the news. Sometimes it makes strong episodes out of non-topical stories that involve its main characters dealing with childhood. Given that “1%” was so obviously plotted around the Occupy Wall Street movement, I tuned in hoping for the former. Instead, we [...]

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The Morning After: The Fast Food and the Furious

Quick spoilers for last night’s return of South Park below: Some last-minute deadlines prevent me from giving the longer writeup I was hoping to “Ass Burgers,” which resolved the sort-of-cliffhanger from the midseason finale. I found a lot to like in the episode, like the topical spoof of vaccine paranoia. (Even the semi-insensitive representation of [...]

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South Park's Coming Back for Two More Years! Should It?

The most recent midseason finale of South Park, “You’re Getting Old,” generated a lot of talk among fans about whether it suggested that Trey and Matt were tired of doing the show and were about to call it quits. (The episode, surprisingly poignant for one largely involving poop jokes, focused on Stan’s growing cynicism and [...]

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South Park Watch: The Tao of Poo

Spoilers for the midseason finale of South Park below: So I just cried at the ending of a South Park episode that involved, among other things, a piece of poop pooping on another piece of poop. One more item off the bucket list! “You’re Getting Old” was one of those episodes that managed to combine [...]

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The Morning After: A Bite of Apple

It’s going to be interesting seeing how the 15th season of South Park plays out, now that Trey Parker and Matt Stone are Broadway stars with The Book of Mormon. As it was, the past season or so have felt off, with more and more episodes devoted to parodies of cable reality shows or material–like [...]

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The Daily Show Defends South Park

Jon Stewart ventured into straight-up, kind-of-earnest commentary on The Daily Show last night, on behalf of a pair of fellow comics. Stewart tweaked his network Comedy Central for censoring an episode of South Park that referenced the Muslim prophet Muhammad. But more than that, together with Aasif Mandvi, he took on the New York group [...]

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South Park Watch: What the [BEEEEEEEEEP]?

“201,” the conclusion to South Park‘s two-part 200th-episode celebration, aired last night, and it was an improvement on an already very entertaining first half. Or at least the parts we were able to see and hear were.

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South Park's Bicentennial

How much you loved the 200th episode of South Park last night probably depended largely on how much you love one of the biggest subgenres of that show: Episodes That Make Fun of Celebrities. That’s personally not one of my favorite brands of South Park episode, so the show’s celebration of its own transgressiveness, the [...]

South Park's Chicken Buckets, Ugly Americans' Devil Baby: The Most Demented Hour of Primetime TV

I’m not entirely sure what it was that sent me into hysterics, but there was a distinct moment last night, probably right around 10:45 p.m., when Comedy Central finally wore me down. Bludgeoning my imagination with a blend of twisted satire and outlandish vulgarity, I completely lost it, laughing harder than I have in quite [...]

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South Park: The Meat of the Matter

In the interest of balance today, time to post about some offensive TV on Comedy Central that I liked. South Park’s “Whale Whores,” while not an all-time great, was one of those episodes that hit for the cycle of South Park fixations: pop-culture mocking (Whale Wars, Lady Gaga), stories about the kids and, at the [...]

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South Park Watch: Shut Up, Billy Mays!

[Update: I deleted the embedded video here because it was causing some browsers to crash, and playing unprompted on my own browser, which annoys the crap out of me. But you can see it, other clips—and the full episode—at the South Park Studios website. Apologies.] While we’re on the subject of product placement this morning, [...]