Seeing that his decision has backfired, PC Principal tells fourth grader Wendy Testaburger her class must resolve this problem, resulting in a schism among the local workforce, and arrests of people who refuse to wear pajamas, as well as those who engage in criminal behavior in their attempts to shame them.
The season premiere ranked number one on cable that evening among the 18-to-49 demographic with a 0.44 rating, beating out NBA telecasts on ESPN, All Elite Wrestling on TBS, and a FIFA World Cup qualifying match on Fox Sports 1 featuring the United States men's national soccer team.
Club gave it a C+ rating, criticizing it as a "tired COVID joke", saying "It feels uninspired and just plain odd to see South Park symbolizing pandemic hysteria when the show tackled it in a much more literal fashion less than two months ago."
"[4] Charles Bramesco with The Guardian was critical of the episode, stating in his review "Parker and Stone continue to thrive on the non-commentary that their strategy of partial metaphor affords them, hiding behind the joke once it comes time to make a statement beyond the broadly agreeable.
In her review, she commented "What makes this such an effective season opener, though, is the fact that those touches of old-school South Park are accompanied by the usual sorts of evidence that this episode was written extremely recently...Hearts have been broken and lives ruined in the quest to do what's achieved here so easily: A funny story, well told.