To me, nothing is more fascinating or theatrical than real life. These people are in dire situations, where something extreme has happened in their lives. ↗
I think part of that is to create an environment where it's like real life, where you don't really know what's going to happen to you in a certain scene. ↗
You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses. ↗
We made this really dumb decision to put on the cover nothing from South Park but just a real life photo of a piece of pooh dressed up like Mr. Hankey, and a lot of people didn't, they didn't even know what it was. ↗