Reception
This episode won a 2005 Emmy Award in the category of "Outstanding Animated Program (for programming less than one hour)". This is the first time the show has beaten other nominees, such as The Simpsons and other winners. It also becomes the fourth prime time animated cartoon, and the first cable TV series, to win the award, behind The Simpsons, King of the Hill and Futurama.
"Best Friends Forever" generally received positive reviews for its portrayal of the Terri Schiavo case. In his book "The Deep End of South Park", Leslie Stratyne applauds the episode for its ability to "tackle such challenging issues as...right to die in 'Best Friends Forever'...its 'devil-may-care' attitude that has brought a fair amount of acclaim". On a different aspect of the controversy, Jonathan Gray commented that the "twist at the end with Kenny's final page of the will...illustrates just how crazy people become about everyday issues. The only thing Kenny didn't want came true as a result of those two sides". Writing for the Chicago Sun Times, Jeff Shannon described the episode thus: "Clearly aware that taking sides in the right-to-life debate would be a divisive, no-win strategy, Parker and Stone aimed their satirical arrows at the one aspect of the Schiavo case that's indisputably offensive: the horrendous media circus that turned a private matter into a shamefully public spectacle." Jefferey Weinstock, in Taking South Park Seriously, praised the episode for its parody of the government and how it "derides the use of government to enforce a narrowly-defined 'right-to-life' moral agenda presented as representative of God's will, a tactic predominantly associated with right-conservatives."
Read more about this topic: Best Friends Forever (South Park)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)