We refer to a conversation Parker and Stone had (per THR) at the show’s recent Emmy FYC event this week, where they re-confirmed that their initial plans for the show’s 27th and 28th seasons (which ran without any interruption between them last fall) were to only do a single episode about Donald Trump, and then move on to other topics. Admittedly, they went hard in that first episode, showing the current White House incumbent fucking the devil and then running a deepfake of his exposed penis. But, still: One and done, right?
But the thing about targeting the humorless and thin-skinned for satire is that they tend to take it pretty poorly; White House spokespeople fired back with accusations that the show was “hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention,” and the game, as they say, was on. “To me, that was the whole season,” Parker said. “Was that they kept reacting, and we were like, ‘Well, God damn it. All right, we’ll do it some more’… 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.’ That became the joke.”
Indeed, South Park ended up building both seasons’ plots around a running story involving Trump’s sexual dalliances with both Satan and J.D. Vance (while various administration figures, notably Kristi Noem and Brendan Carr, came in for specific mockery). It wasn’t the only material in any given episode, which also touched on everything from Peter Thiel’s doomsday prophecies to the ongoing violence in Gaza. But it was extremely consistent, with Stone noting that he and Parker believe firmly in a “bully mentality” for the show. “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.” (Of course, that’s a lot easier when you’re both billionaires; Stone and Parker also talked at the event about the last-minute dealings that went down to the wire ahead of the show’s 27th season premiere, with Parker saying, possibly in jest, that “South Park was either going to be done—right then and there, that was it—or we were going to get a $1.5 billion deal.” They got the deal; the rest is extremely spiteful history.)
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