The creators of the Emmy-winning series South Park intend to ignore Donald Trump when the irreverent animated show returns for a 27th season in 2025, they said in a rare interview.
“I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump,” Matt Stone told Vanity Fair in reference to the former US president whose life is seemingly consumed by unadulterated drama.
Stone added that part of the strategy for intentionally avoiding mention of the current Republican nominee for November’s presidential race is how much of “a mind scramble” it can be to satirize such a contest.
“We’ve tried to do South Park through four or five presidential elections, and it is such a hard thing,” said Stone, who launched the series in 1997 alongside Trey Parker on Comedy Central. “And it seems like it takes outsized importance.
“Obviously, it’s fucking important, but it kind of takes over everything and we just have less fun,” he added in the interview, which was posted on Thursday.
Part of the reason that South Park’s latest season received a tentative 2025 release date was to give time for Paramount+ – the platform which now streams the show – “to figure all their shit out”, Stone remarked. But Stone also said, “honestly, it’s on purpose,” that he and Parker were skipping the electoral showdown between Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice-President Kamala Harris.
The posture that Stone laid out to Vanity Fair strikes a marked contrast with how South Park addressed the 2016 presidential race that Trump unexpectedly won against former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. In the show, an elementary school teacher character voiced by Parker ran for president, defeated Clinton and served in the Oval Office for multiple seasons, adopting a look and style that was clearly inspired by Trump.
Thursday’s interview in Vanity Fair described how Stone and Parker mounted a “36-hour mad dash to make an episode about the 2016 election after being stunned (like most of the rest of the country) about Trump’s victory”.
Trump has offered commentators – satirical or otherwise – plenty of more material since, including by losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden and being convicted in May of criminally falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with him.
Among numerous other legal problems, he is facing three more criminal indictments stemming from his efforts to nullify his defeat to Biden as well as his retention of government secrets after his presidency – and he survived an assassination attempt at a political rally in July.
South Park centers on the adventures of a group of four, mostly foul-mouthed boys who are growing up in a town in Colorado. The show has profanely satirized an overwhelmingly wide range of topics, managing to win critical acclaim and establish itself as an unusually long-running program despite some viewers finding its content too offensive.
Its creators are also famous for The Book of Mormon – their Tony-winning musical – along with the cult classic films BASEketball and Team America: World Police.
