South Park will be absent for the remainder of this year’s election cycle, as the enduring animated series’ creators have revealed this week that Cartman, Stan, and the rest of the gang will not return to Comedy Central with new episodes until 2025.
Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone broke the news to Vanity Fair during a rare interview while promoting the new documentary in which they star, ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!, at the Telluride Film Festival this week. While the dual reason for the delay includes, as Parker says, “waiting for Paramount to figure all their shit out,” they conceded that they are ultimately done with parodying GOP nominee Donald Trump.
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“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 told the magazine.
Parker is blunt when speaking of the fatigue that sets in with a third cycle of parodying Trump and kicking the new season down the road and giving the 2024 election a miss, telling the magazine that, “honestly, it’s on purpose.”
“Obviously, it’s fucking important, but it kind of takes over everything and we just have less fun,” he said. “I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump.”
The duo would instead prefer to focus on other cultural moments or the ever-fruitful “what if?” storylines, which have produced some of South Park’s most memorable plotlines.
“It’s just way more fun to be like, ‘Oh, Cartman’s going to dress up like a robot,’” Stone says.
Such freedom from the political story du jour allowed the duo to create plotlines around other hot topics that draw on their personal experiences, as well. Case in point: the South Park special that aired in May drew from Parker’s experience taking Ozempic, the semaglutide-based weight loss drug. The special, which marked the show’s 328th episode, satirized the craze around the drug, America’s labyrinthine health care system and the body positivity movement, to name a few targets.
“I got on it. I lost, like, 25 pounds, but I was, like, I hate this. I feel different. I feel like something’s different,” Parker told Vanity Fair of his time on Ozempic. “Like, yes, I want to eat less, but I also want to do everything else less. And that’s where that whole show came from.”
The duo, now just an Oscar shy of EGOT status, also shared what they’re finding inspiring as the comedy landscape shifts away from television and onto phones.
“The stuff I’m jealous of is TikTok — like, ‘That’s a great joke, that looks like they had fun doing it,’ and then you move on. We both just have endless respect for that,” Stone said, but conceded that a TV series allows for much more complexity and craft. “Writing a story and building a frame so that you can do more complicated stuff.”
Stone added that sentiment, telling the outlet: “We’re the Rolling Stones, man—we’re trying to get out five, six nights a year. We could do more, but I don’t think it’d be better.”
In the meantime, fans can get their Parker-Stone fix with ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!, which documents their struggles as they purchase and reopen the Denver-area Mexican restaurant where they met. The kitschy local landmark may be familiar to South Park fans (recall Cartman rushing arrest to dine there).
