That last fact needs extra emphasis. The multi-month lead time needed for every other scripted show on Television means that South Park is the only show that can pull Ripped-From-the-Headlines commentary without things being dated by the time the episode airs. (Law and Order: SVU is show that is guilty of this to a hilarious degree)
tldr if there is a long term story it is very loose.
There has been long term development of some themes, each of the four characters has a key characteristic that I do think develops over time, but not with the same hidden strong continuity that I expected to find when I set out on this journey.
Most notably Randy's deteriorating marriage to Sharon, Stan's loneliness and insecurity about his family, (and Shelly) progresses from season to season
Cartman's relationship with his mother and his coming to terms with his weight, possible homosexuality, and finding his father progresses from season to season.
I looked to find development in Kyle's moral compass but could not discern anything.
Kenny overcoming his identity as "the poor kid" for lack of a better term seems to progress as well.
I watch the show less often now because that sprint was enough South Park to last a lifetime but I look forward to seeing how the show wraps up and if there is any closure instead of just ending in a fart joke.
Just the facial animation to sync up the mouths with the script, limited as it is in South Park, has to have some interesting automation underlying it. Unless they've got a huge army of animators chained to their desks pushing sprites around that they didn't show.
"Procedural" refers to a specific type of scripted television, typically but not always a legal, medical, or law-enforcement drama. A procedural show follows the same format every episode: a mystery of some kind is introduced (medical, crime, or what have you), and the characters go through the procedures of solving the mystery. Law & Order: SVU can be described as a procedural; South Park cannot, unless you're using a very very loose definition of the term.
If you're looking at this in terms of nested sets or categories:
- Scripted vs. Nonscripted
- Comedy vs. Drama (usually also means half-hour vs. hour)
- Episodic (every episode is self-contained) vs. Serialized (the show follows an overall, evolving storyline that builds each episode)
- Subgenre
So a show like L&O: SVU would be a scripted, one-hour drama in the crime procedural subgenre. (We could also describe the show as episodic, but given that all procedurals are episodic, this would be redundant.)
South Park is a scripted, half-hour comedy in the animation subgenre that typically follows an episodic format, with occasional serialized story arcs spanning multiple episodes (and in the case of this season, the whole season).