South Park Creators Delay New Season Due To Election
In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, South Park co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker revealed that they’ll delay the return of their hit Comedy Central series until 2025 is underway. While the hilarious duo behind South Park cite several reasons for this decision, the one factor that raises the most eyebrows revolves around the 2024 presidential election and one of its two central figures, former President Donald J. Trump. While admitting that the election is certainly an important part of the landscape in the United States, the pair maintains that doing election-based episodes are a lot less fun than the other subject matter that the series tackles week after week.
Politics Have Made South Park A Joyless Endeavor
South Park‘s creators recalled the “36-hour mad dash” to craft a quality episode just after Trump secured a victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election and how they and their crew had to work through the stunning upset of the Democratic party’s favorite. Ever since Trump became a hopeful for the Republican party, the series has hilariously satirized the businessman-turned-entertainer-turned-politician with a fairly heavy hand. However, the number of times that Trump has been the target of the series seems to have made the joy run thin for Parker and Stone.
They Can’t Push The Envelope Any Further
“I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump,” Parker told Vanity Fair about the upcoming election. This makes a fair point, as South Park has worked hard to prove to fans that it’s capable of embellishing Trump’s persona to hilarious levels of ridiculousness, but perhaps at the expense of missing out on jabs it could be delivering to other personalities.
South Park’s Paramount+ Specials
The 27th season of Comedy Central‘s longest running show will begin airing at some point in 2025, possibly marking more than a year in between new episodes. South Park‘s last original endeavor was the May 2024 release of “The End of Obesity,” a special that aired on Paramount+ last spring.
At one point, a South Park episode had satirized Donald Trump as a Canadian politician who was hell-bent on building a wall between the Great White North and the United States so that Canada could keep Americans out. This fan favorite episode aired in the fall of 2015, well before Trump and Clinton had their showdown in the 2016 election.
Too Close To Reality For Comfort
South Park has also used its most volatile character, Mr. Garrison, as a surrogate to embody exaggerations of Donald Trump’s personality. In 2016, the South Park elementary school teacher ran for President against Hillary Clinton, but (as some felt was a real-life sentiment held by the actual Donald Trump) became paralyzed with the fear that he had no idea what he was actually doing during the election cycle. Mr. Garrison tries in vain to get people to vote for Clinton, but ends up winning despite his efforts to back out of the election.
Plenty Of Episodes To Binge While We Wait For More
Until next year, fans have more than 300 regular season episodes of South Park to revisit, as well as one feature film and seven series specials. The real-life issues that the show takes on has always been much more than just political elections, and will assuredly return to fans with its over-the-top satire on whatever might be culturally relevant later in 2025.
Sources: Vanity Fair
