South Park

• 1. Introduction

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  South Park debuted on Comedy Central on the 13th of August 1997, and within three months, the ratings for a single cable show had tripled. By the time the second season aired, eight of the ten highest-rated programs on all of basic cable were South Park episodes. A 30-second commercial slot that Comedy Central once sold for $7,500 was going for $80,000 during the show's second season. Something unexpected had arrived on American television.

  At the center of it all: four elementary school boys in a fictional Colorado mountain town, created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The show they built would earn five Primetime Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, and an Academy Award nomination for its feature film. College students would write doctoral theses about it. Scientists would name genes after its characters. A Brooklyn college would offer a course called "South Park and Political Correctness".

  How did an animated short made from construction paper cutouts become one of the longest-running programs in Comedy Central history? What makes a show built on profanity and toilet humor earn a Peabody for "undeniably fearless lampooning of all that is self-important and hypocritical in American life"? And what happens when a cartoon about eight-year-olds becomes a genuine force in American political discourse?

• 2. Two Shorts, One Phenomenon

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  Parker and Stone met in film class at the University of Colorado in 1992. They discovered a shared love of Monty Python and made an animated short called The Spirit of Christmas, animating construction paper cutouts with stop motion. The film featured proto-versions of the main characters: something resembling Cartman but named "Kenny", an unnamed character who would become Kenny, and two near-identical figures who would become Stan and Kyle.

  A Fox Broadcasting executive named Brian Graden, a mutual friend, commissioned a second Spirit of Christmas short as a video Christmas card. Created in 1995, this second film resembled the later series far more closely. Graden sent copies to friends, who copied and passed it along further. It landed on the internet, where it became one of the first viral videos in the medium's short history. To tell the two shorts apart, fans and the creators began calling them Jesus vs. Frosty and Jesus vs. Santa.

  As Jesus vs. Santa spread, Fox agreed to meet about a potential series. The meeting took place at the Fox office in Century City, but it broke down over a single character: a talking stool named Mr. Hankey, which the network and its production arm, 20th Century Fox Television, refused to include. Parker and Stone walked away from the deal entirely and shopped the show to MTV and Comedy Central. Parker feared MTV would turn it into a kids program. Comedy Central executive Doug Herzog watched the short and commissioned the series. Parker and Stone spent three months making the pilot episode, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", which tested poorly with audiences, particularly women. Comedy Central ordered six episodes anyway, and the pilot aired on the 13th of August 1997.

• 3. The Town and Its Boys

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  South Park is set in a fictional small mountain town located within the real-life South Park basin in the Rocky Mountains of central Colorado, roughly an hour's drive from Denver. The town's visual layout is modeled on Fairplay, Colorado, and the show draws on the genuinely distinct culture of the Mountain West: cattle ranchers, Old West theme parks, heavy snowfall, mountaineering, Mormon communities, and real Colorado landmarks including Casa Bonita and Cave of the Winds.

  Stan Marsh is modeled after Parker and Kyle Broflovski after Stone; their friendship mirrors the creators' own. Stan is written as an average American boy prone to mishap. Kyle, who is Jewish, finds his identity frequently satirized in a town where he is one of the few Jewish residents. Eric Cartman is amoral and increasingly psychopathic, functioning as an antagonist whose antisemitism places him in an escalating rivalry with Kyle. Kenny McCormick, from a poor family, wears his parka hood so tightly that it muffles his voice and hides most of his face. During the first five seasons, Kenny died in nearly every episode, only to reappear in the next with no explanation. He was definitively killed in the fifth season episode "Kenny Dies", then brought back in the sixth season finale, "Red Sleigh Down".

  The children remained in third grade for the first three seasons and have been in fourth grade ever since. Parker and Stone have described the show as still being primarily about "kids being kids", and Time described the boys as "sometimes cruel but with a core of innocence". Early episodes typically closed with a character delivering a short moral monologue, usually beginning with some variation of "You know, I've learned something today..."

• 4. Making Television at Speed

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  All episodes after the pilot are produced using computer animation software, primarily Autodesk Maya. The pilot took three months to complete using physical cutout animation. Traditionally animated series, hand-drawn at studios in South Korea, take roughly eight to nine months per episode. South Park's production staff got that time down to about three weeks during the early seasons, and the current staff of around 70 people typically completes an episode in one week, sometimes in as little as three to four days.

  The entire production occurs within a single set of offices, originally at a complex in Westwood, Los Angeles and now at South Park Studios in Culver City, California. Production begins on Thursday, with writing consultants brainstorming alongside Parker and Stone. Parker writes the script, and the full team of animators, editors, technicians, and sound engineers each typically works between 100 and 120 hours across the following week. A completed episode is sent to Comedy Central via satellite uplink on Wednesday, sometimes only a few hours before its 10 PM Eastern air time. Each episode once cost $250,000 to produce.

  The one-week window is not simply a constraint. Parker and Stone argue it creates spontaneity that results in a funnier show. More concretely, it allows South Park to respond to breaking news faster than any other satirical animated series. The season four episode "Quintuplets 2000" referenced the U.S. Border Patrol's raid during the Elian Gonzalez affair only four days after it happened. The season nine episode "Best Friends Forever" referenced the Terri Schiavo case and aired less than 12 hours before she died. The season seven finale referenced Saddam Hussein's capture from his "spider hole" three days after it occurred. The season 12 episode "About Last Night..." revolved around Barack Obama's 2008 election victory and aired less than 24 hours after Obama was declared the winner, using dialogue from his actual victory speech. The sole exception to the deadline came on the 16th of October 2013, when a power outage the previous day at the production studio prevented "Goth Kids 3: Dawn of the Posers" from airing; it was rescheduled to the 23rd of October 2013.

• 5. Animation Built to Look Cheap

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  The show's visual style was directly inspired by Terry Gilliam's paper cutout cartoons for Monty Python's Flying Circus. After the pilot, physical construction paper gave way to computer animation designed to replicate the homemade cutout look rather than replace it. Before computer artists begin an episode, storyboard artists provide animatics drawn in Toon Boom.

  Characters are composed of simple geometrical shapes and primary and secondary colors. Most children are identical in size and shape and are distinguished only by their clothing, hair, and headwear. Movement is deliberately jerky. Some real-world figures appear as photographic cutouts of their actual faces placed on animated bodies. Canadians in the show are rendered in an even more stripped-down style: simple beady eyes and a top half of the head that flaps up and down when the character speaks.

  The technical pipeline has evolved considerably. Early on, cardboard cutouts were scanned and redrawn with CorelDRAW, then imported into PowerAnimator running on SGI workstations. Those workstations were connected to a 54-processor render farm capable of producing 10 to 15 shots per hour. Beginning with season five, the team switched from PowerAnimator to Maya. As of 2012, the studio ran a 120-processor render farm producing 30 or more shots per hour. Co-producer and former animation director Eric Stough noted that PowerAnimator was initially chosen because its features helped retain the "homemade" look Parker and Stone wanted to preserve even as the technical infrastructure grew more powerful.

  The show has also experimented with other visual modes when the story calls for it. Portions of the season eight premiere "Good Times with Weapons" were rendered in anime style. The season 10 episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" incorporated machinima. The season 12 episode "Major Boobage", a tribute to the 1981 film Heavy Metal, used rotoscoping.

• 6. Ratings, Records, and Controversy

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  "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" earned a Nielsen rating of 1.3, representing 980,000 viewers, considered high for a cable program at the time. The show generated immediate buzz, with viewing parties assembling on college campuses. By the eighth episode, "Starvin' Marvin", ratings and viewership had tripled. When the tenth episode, "Damien", aired the following February, viewership increased another 33 percent, earning a 6.4 rating that was then more than 10 times the cable prime-time average. The all-time peak came with the second episode of season two, "Cartman's Mom Is Still a Dirty Slut", on the 22nd of April 1998: an 8.2 rating and 6.2 million viewers, setting a record as the highest-rated non-sports show in basic cable history.

  The ratings surge transformed Comedy Central. The number of households carrying the channel jumped from 9.1 million in 1997 to 50 million by June 1998. Herzog later credited South Park with putting the network "on the map".

  Controversy arrived alongside the success. In 1999, parents at a UK public school were asked not to let children watch the show after eight- and nine-year-olds voted Cartman their favorite personality in a poll. The Parents Television Council and the founder of Action for Children's Television both condemned the program, the latter calling it "dangerous to the democracy". The season five premiere "It Hits the Fan" said the word "shit" 162 times without censorship, prompting 5,000 critical emails to Comedy Central in the days following broadcast. The season 11 episode "With Apologies to Jesse Jackson" used the racial slur "nigger" 43 times uncensored, yet generated comparatively little backlash; the NAACP and many in the Black community praised the episode for its framing. The season 14 episodes "200" and "201" prompted the group Revolution Muslim to post what it called a warning to Parker and Stone, referencing the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Comedy Central censored the broadcast in response. The season 23 episode "Band in China" led to South Park being banned outright in China, with the show's presence scrubbed from Baidu, Weibo, Douban, Bilibili, and WeChat. Parker and Stone issued a sarcastic apology.

• 7. Cultural Reach and Political Taxonomy

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  Cartman's catchphrases "Respect my authori-tah!" and "Screw you guys...I'm going home!" entered the everyday vocabulary of American viewers during the show's earlier seasons. His exclamation "Hey!" was included in the 2002 edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Catchphrases. Stan and Kyle's lines upon Kenny's death, "Oh my God, they killed Kenny!" and "You bastard(s)!", became among the most recognized running gags in modern television.

  Two concepts coined within episodes have traveled beyond pop culture into academic and professional discourse. The "Chewbacca defense", introduced in the season two episode "Chef Aid", describes a legal strategy of confusing jurors with irrelevant arguments; the term has since been used by criminologists, forensic scientists, and political commentators in discussions of actual legal cases. The "underpants gnomes" from the season two episode "Gnomes", whose business plan skips from "collect underpants" to "profit" with a question mark in between, became a widely used internet meme and a shorthand in economics and politics for plans that skip over crucial missing steps.

  Sophie Rutschmann of the University of Strasbourg named a mutated gene kep1, after Kenny, when she discovered it caused adult fruit flies to die within two days of bacterial infection. A separate research team named another mutated gene Tweek, after the South Park character, when they found it caused fruit flies to lose the ability to stand, walk, or avoid seizures.

  Political commentator Andrew Sullivan coined the term "South Park Republicans" to describe center-right viewers, primarily younger ones, who embraced the show for mocking liberal targets while holding socially liberal positions themselves. Parker and Stone have consistently rejected any partisan label. Stone has been quoted saying, "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals." The duo have reluctantly described themselves as libertarians, and Parker has said the "South Park Republican" label implies adherence to only one set of fixed viewpoints, which does not reflect how they approach the show. After taking on Donald Trump directly in season 27, South Park drew more than 6.2 million cross-platform viewers, the show's highest figure since 2018.