When Trey Parker and Matt Stone started writing new episodes of South Park last summer, they quickly realized that politics was inevitable. In an interview with the New York Times, Parker summed up the situation: “It’s not that we’ve become political, it’s that politics has become pop culture. »
The two creators, fascinated by the “new taboos” imposed by the MAGA era, decided to make President Trump the central character. “Trey and I are interested in disturbing things,” says Matt Stone. In this season, Donald Trump is featured in a crazy plot where he is expecting a child with… Satan. A provocation in the purest tradition of South Park, which revives the cult episode of the 1990s in which the devil shares a bed with Saddam Hussein.
According to figures reported by the New York Times, South Park’s audience more than doubled compared to 2023, the last year the series aired. Each new episode now causes a surge in viewership and activity on social networks, to the point where entertainment sites closely follow the slightest broadcast adjustments.
This success is all the more striking because it occurred in the tumultuous world of television. Paramount, Comedy Central’s parent company, recently canceled Stephen Colbert’s Late Show and temporarily shelved Jimmy Kimmel films under political pressure, decisions that left a void in American satire. South Park gets into it.
From wokism to MAGA, criticism changes
Doug Herzog, a former Viacom executive quoted by the Times, believes that Parker and Stone “knew how to seize the moment as only they knew how,” by returning television satire to its original spirit.
The decision to include Trump in the series also happened behind the scenes. At the time of filming, Paramount was negotiating a $1.25 billion deal and a tie-up with Skydance, a company whose executives have ties to the Trump administration. The creator of South Park wanted to assert its independence by targeting the president from the very first episode.
If the crowd is good, it’s a place that doesn’t add to the ambient oomph. The White House reacted with disdain: a spokesman deemed the series “irrelevant in twenty years.”
Both authors say they are aware of the polarization they are causing. In New York, Matt Stone said he was congratulated by viewers who had not seen the series in a long time; in Colorado, Trey Parker said he heard the opposite: “Everyone asks me when we’re going to bring the kids back and stop the politics. »
For them, South Park entered what they called the “disco era” – an experimental phase in which everything became political, as everything became a spectacle.
After mocking “woke” culture, South Park now turns to the MAGA world with the same irreverence. And as long as Donald Trump continues to occupy the stage, the series will continue to thrive.
