'South Park' Season 27 Premiering In 2025, Skipping Election “On Purpose” And Waiting Out Paramount Merger Drama
'South Park' Season 27 Premiering In 2025, Skipping Election “On Purpose” And Waiting Out Paramount Merger Drama
Series creators, writers and stars Trey Parker and Matt Stone have exhausted what they believe can be said about Trump
We’re not going back just yet. It’s going to be another very special year for South Park. As in 2024 will not be seeing a regular season of the long-running Comedy Central series, returning instead in 2025. Sorry Everybody Still Hates Chris, seems you are definitely going it alone. But at least we know why we hadn’t heard anything about a new season all year to this point.
This means they’re skipping election season, and according to series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, they’re frankly tired of Republican insurrectionist candidate Donald Trump. “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 tells Vanity Fair in an interview with a heavy lean on their upcoming documentary ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!, which comes out September 13 and then by the end of the fall on Paramount+. “Obviously, it’s fucking important, but it kind of takes over everything and we just have less fun.” Parker adds, “I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump.” Notoriously, the storyline for season 20 covered the 2016 election and predicated on the presumed Hillary Clinton victory that tragically did not occur, derailing the show’s storyline for quite a bit since Mr. Garrison was used as their Trump proxy and caused a bit of fan alienation. A mistake not worth repeating.
The duo also said they’re “waiting for Paramount to figure all their shit out.” It’s unclear how much of this is solely about Paramount Global’s currently pending sale to Skydance after the companies reached an agreement in early July reportedly worth $8 billion. Skydance claims the deal has an $28 billion enterprise value, with Skydance itself valued at $4.75 billion.
What else could it be? The legal dispute with Max over how the streaming deal they made encompasses the post-COVID six-episode season era where the equivalent of four episodes became double-length Paramount+-exclusive specials, in their eyes splitting up the ten episodes per season they were expecting to get and only getting part of it. The regular seasons aired over February and March 2022 and 2023, and 7 specials have been made thus far, the most recent being “The End of Obesity” in May. There still should be a second special by the end of the year, but for some reason Variety thinks that the news of the main show skipping the year means the show is done for the year. The second of last year’s specials, "(Not Suitable for Children)", released December 20 with only 11 days remaining in the year.
Sources: Vanity Fair, Variety