When Paramount+ debuted the last South Park streaming special, The End Of Obesity, we wondered aloud why we hadn’t heard anything about the next official season of the show, and speculated the reason could be Matt Stone and Trey Parker were preparing to time it with the US election. Turns out we were both right and wrong: the election IS influencing the return of the show….by keeping it away.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, the pair revealed South Park will remain on hiatus until 2025. Part of it, according to Parker, is “waiting for Paramount to figure all their **** out” (possibly referring to the Skydance buyout) but election fatigue is also playing a role.
“We’ve tried to do South Park through four or five presidential elections, and it is such a hard thing to — it’s such a mind scramble, and it seems like it takes outsized importance,” Stone said. “Obviously, it’s ******* important, but it kind of takes over everything and we just have less fun.”
Of course, if you handled the election season the way Matt and Trey tend to, you’d wear yourself out as well. They tend to pull things together at the last minute, and it’s doubly so here. Obama’s first election to office in 2008 was followed lightning-fast by an episode one day later directly quoting his victory speech and involving him in the general plot. They admitted much of it was animated ahead of time and they would’ve been stuck if the results leaned Republican.
The words proved prophetic when eight years later, Matt and Trey had just 24 hours to turn around a mostly completed episode that assumed Hillary, not Trump, would win the 2016 election. The result was a half-hour that took the startling results into account, but was mostly about the losing candidate for some reason.
Our verdict: As much as America needs a JD Vance “couch” episode right now, these two have earned a vacation. South Park will return to sort out the events of the next few months sometime next year.
