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While the latest South Park premiere didn’t manage to tank Paramount’s merger, those rascals Trey Parker and Matt Stone managed to ruffle feathers from the studio’s C-Suite all the way to the Oval Office. Yesterday, it was reported that President Donald Trump was “seething” over the vicious episode, which prompted the White House to release a statement calling the long-running animated comedy irrelevant, uninspired, and desperate. Asked during a Comic-Con panel on Thursday if they anticipated the reaction to the particularly incendiary episode, an unruffled Parker said simply, “We’re terribly sorry.”
Think he means it? Deadline reported after “Sermon On The ‘Mount” aired that Paramount and the White House had both been given a heads up about the premiere’s content. Matt Belloni provided additional details in his Puck newsletter, revealing that incoming boss David Ellison didn’t watch the episode but was told it would be “disparaging” (there are jokes about the Paramount settlement and Stephen Colbert’s firing in the premiere). Belloni reports that a South Park producer did flag it to a Paramount exec who sent it all the way up to current co-CEOs Chris McCarthy, George Cheeks, and Brian Robbins, who watched the episode and then described its contents to outgoing Paramount chair Shari Redstone. “Shari Redstone had not seen the episode, so she told the C.E.O.s that she trusted their judgment and would support their decision,” a representative for Redstone told Puck. Ultimately, they allowed the episode to hit Comedy Central airwaves.
Puck does, however, report that the South Park episode was “way more incendiary until some late trims.” At Comic-Con, Parker revealed one of the notes they received from producers about depicting Trump’s nude form. “They said, ‘OK, but we’re gonna blur the penis,’ and I said, ‘No you’re not gonna blur the penis,'” he shared (via The Guardian). Stone explained that their workaround was to turn the member into a character. “If we put eyes on the penis, we won’t blur it,” he said. “That was a whole conversation with grown-up people for four fucking days.”
