Trey Parker and Matt Stone had only intended for one episode of South Park to focus on the show’s depiction of President Donald Trump, but the high-profile pushback led them to double down throughout the rest of the year.
The co-creators of the Comedy Central program sat down with Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group co-chair and CEO Mike De Luca for a conversation during the South Park Emmy Official FYC event in Los Angeles on Tuesday. A self-proclaimed South Park super fan, De Luca chatted with the pair about last year’s seasons 27 and 28, which marked record ratings and made national headlines for the show as it took aim at President Donald Trump and his cohorts.
“We were just going to do that first show with the Trump stuff,” Parker said. “We laid into him so hard, and the thing became: ‘Well, who’s the bully now?’ It became this just totally juvenile joke of like, ‘We’re not gonna stop. We’re going to do it every single week.’ Even when everyone’s like, ‘OK, guys, move on,’ [we’re] like, ‘Nope, we’re not moving on. We’re going to keep going, going, going.’” As the audience broke into applause, he added, “That became the joke.”
After a two-year hiatus, South Park aired its first season 27 episode in July and debuted its version of Trump, who was in bed with Satan when the show featured a deepfake version of the commander in chief with an exposed penis. In a statement the next day, the White House publicly voiced disapproval in declaring that the show “is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention.”
Parker said of uproar from Trump’s supporters, “To me, that was the whole season, was that they kept reacting, and we were like, ‘Well, God damn it. All right, we’ll do it some more.’”
Stone concurred, noting that he and Parker have been clear since the boundary-pushing show first premiered in 1997 that they would rather lose everything than play it safe. “It was a bully mentality,” Stone told the crowd about the mindset of the duo, who are longtime friends, dating back to their Colorado roots. “We don’t care. We don’t give a fuck. We say it all the time. We’re not irresponsible, but we’ll go back to Colorado. We don’t give a fuck.”
He also noted that the pair were willing to use their platform to voice frustrations with the political climate, despite a potential risk of losing the show: “[With] last season, the thing that felt powerful about it wasn’t just that we’re going to say this thing or we’re going to go there [but] that we’re going to throw our show on the table.”
Parker pointed out that the start to season 27 was particularly fraught, given that the release of new episodes was delayed as the pair worked out a new deal with Paramount amid a tense dispute over streaming rights. The season premiere aired July 23, mere hours after news broke about Parker and Stone’s production company, Park County, inking a deal with the studio for a reported $1.5 billion.
“South Park was either going to be done — right then and there, that was it — or we were going to get like a $1.5 billion deal,” Parker quipped, leading to audience laughter. “Stressful, is what it was.”
The duo appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! earlier this week, where they revealed that South Park season 29 will premiere Sept. 16 on Comedy Central. Given that an episode of the show famously gets made just days before it airs, the co-creators admitted that they wouldn’t have a plan for the new six-episode season until much closer to the deadline. Parker elicited laughter when he said, “We’ll start thinking about it Sept. 2nd-ish.”
During a conversation last summer at San Diego Comic-Con, Parker recalled getting feedback from network brass on the season 27 premiere showing Trump’s anatomy: “They were like, ‘We’re gonna blur the penis,’ and we’re like, ‘No, you’re not gonna blur the penis.’”
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