The all-familiar opening gambit that doubles as a disclaimer: I have seen two episodes of “South Park” in my life. I grew up in a household where my mother was hesitant to let me watch “Bring It On,” let alone the paper-animated midgets that light up Comedy Central with their neon-colored hoodies. My greatest familiarity with Comedy Central programming is that its channel lies between Bravo and GSN in my home region.

Two weeks ago, “South Park” aired its 200th episode and its third to animate the Muslim prophet Muhammad. All three instances include the religious figure in the “Super Best Friends,” also featuring Buddha, Krishna and Moses. The show parodied the tenet of Islam that Muhammad not be represented pictorially, hiding him in a U-Haul and a bear suit. From the brief clips I’ve seen (the episode has since been taken off the Internet by Comedy Central), it was pretty funny.

The radical website revolutionmuslim.com responded to the episode and its controversial premise with “subtle” death threats aimed at the show’s creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Enter drama and free speech issues stage left.

The 201st episode that followed continued this plotline, but this time, Comedy Central chose to censor visual and auditory references to the prophet.

So that’s the recap. Following these events, “The Simpsons” began its next episode with Bart writing on a chalkboard, “‘South Park’–we’d stand behind you if we weren’t so scared.” This commentary by the yellow people at Fox reflects how unique “South Park” is–for that lack of fear and its divergence from the rest of the television community.

The show performs for a small, late-night audience on a basic cable channel, and yet, when it takes a risk, the ramifications and aftershocks are more visible and immediate than those related to any other medium. Clips go viral on the Internet, chat rooms explode and Muslim extremists join the conversation. Television, even more than the Internet, sparks a passionate response because you can’t take back what you put on TV (Janet Jackson can relate) and because animated actions speak louder than words. I’m assuming that, somewhere in the bowels of the Internet, what happened in that episode of “South Park” happens every hour of every day.

If the Internet is so openly full of hate and absurdity, why can’t that discourse exist on TV? The articles I have read about this incident address separately the free speech rights of revolutionmuslim.com and of Parker and Stone. Comedy Central’s action was, presumably, in the interest of protecting its employees, but to what end?

This event is emblematic of the disconnect between network and showrunners for certain shows such as “South Park.” Parker and Stone have created such a personal, successful and unique program that the regulation of that half hour is equally idiosyncratic. These shows, where the original creators stay attached and run it independent of the network, are often the best: “Mad Men,” “The Wire,” etc. In this case, such a show is susceptible to particularly contentious, invasive and obvious third party intervention.

I’m not sure how I feel about representations of Muhammad in general, but I do think that “South Park” has a right to expose whatever risk it dares to provoke and to draw whatever it pleases. One representative of revolutionmuslim.com said in an interview that, “[Americans are] worried more about missing their favorite TV show than they are about the world.” He doesn’t seem to realize that in America, our world is refracted through and symbiotic with our popular culture. Boob tube no more.