Politics wasn’t meant to be the main target of the most recent seasons of “South Park” however President Donald Trump’s seemingly boundless affect on America made it unimaginable to keep away from.
“It’s pop culture. It’s not that we got all political. It’s that politics became pop culture,” creator Trey Parker instructed The New York Instances in an interview with co-creator Matt Stone printed on Saturday.
Although Stone and Parker intentionally delayed the present’s twenty seventh season to keep away from the mess that was the 2024 election, “South Park” couldn’t resist riffing on the MAGA macrocosm when it returned this summer season after a two-year hiatus.
For one, the chronically subversive creators mentioned “new taboos” round bad-mouthing Trump had them “attracted to that like flies to honey.”
However behind the scenes, the president’s affect additionally loomed as Parker and Stone have been locked in negotiations with Paramount on the identical time the leisure large’s proposed merger with Skydance made it important for them to remain within the White Home’s good graces.
It was at that time they determined centering their first episode on Trump could be a technique to “show our independence somehow,” in line with Stone.
Mere hours after Stone and Parker signed a five-year, $1.25 billion contract with Paramount, “South Park” returned with an episode that mocked the swing from the identity-forward politics of President Joe Biden’s period to life in Trump’s America.
“We’re just very down-the-middle guys,” Parker mentioned of their political perspective. “Any extremists of any kind we make fun of. We did it for years with the woke thing. That was hilarious to us. And this is hilarious to us.”
As the primary months of Trump 2.0 provided no scarcity of horrors and absurdities, “South Park” had loads of materials, anchoring the plot of seasons 27 and 28 within the president’s relationship with a brawny however delicate Devil, who’s pregnant along with his baby.
Tackling all issues Trump has been a boon for “South Park” rankings, with viewership doubling from its 2023 numbers, in line with Nielsen.
Although White Home representatives known as the present’s Trump pivot a “desperate attempt for attention,” the creators mentioned “South Park” doesn’t want chaos within the capital to maintain itself related.
Telling the Instances they’ll transfer on from the MAGA-verse as soon as they’re “sick of it,” Parker mentioned, “If there’s one thing we know, it is that our show will be a lot longer than theirs. So, we just got to do this for now.”
The duo earlier acknowledged the inventive pitfalls of tackling politics whereas speaking about why they moved away from Trump plotlines in an interview with the Los Angeles Instances within the wake of the 2016 presidential election.
“Dude, we’re just becoming CNN now. We’re becoming: ‘Tune in to see what we’re going to say about Trump,’” Stone mentioned he remembered considering. “Matt and I hated it but we got stuck in it somehow.”
By the 2024 election, Parker instructed Self-importance Honest he thought they’d squeezed all of the comedic materials they might from then-candidate Trump.
“I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump,” he defined.
