As we’ve mentioned once or twice before, South Park’s production process is highly unusual and likely ulcer-inducing. Trey Parker, Matt Stone and company are famous for assembling episodes in a matter of days, with them often completing shows at the 11th hour.
This sounds like it might be stressful for the staff, but it’s likely working out great for whichever store closest to South Park Studios sells caffeine pills and Pepto Bismol.
When a trailer for season 27 dropped way back in April, months before the date of the premiere, some fans speculated that Parker and Stone had abandoned their hectic workflow and produced several episodes in advance. Judging from the promo, the season would focus on topics ranging from Trump’s beef with Canada to deadly plane crashes to the bird flu virus. Also, there was a scene in which Starvin’ Marvin travels through outer space while pursued by Diddy.
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Parker later clarified that the footage was made exclusively for the trailer, and wouldn’t appear in any of this year’s episodes. “We made it all up for the promo,” he told the crowd at San Diego Comic-Con this past July. “And everybody was going ‘Aw man, those guys, now they’re just front-loading shows, they’re not going to be topical anymore.’ It’s like, you seriously think we went and made a bunch of shows ahead of time, and we’re, like, banking them for later? So we just made something up, and were like, ‘This is what we’re doing.’ And we’re not doing any of that.’”
Although, to be fair, Randy did end up becoming a ketamine freak. But perhaps that was inevitable.
The reason why South Park doesn’t bank episodes is because they’ve tried it in the past, and it simply didn’t work.
Back in 2020, Parker guested on the Geffen Playhouse Unscripted podcast hosted by Rory O’Malley, who was part of the original Broadway cast of The Book of Mormon. During their chat, the Orgazmo creator stressed that the South Park schedule is a creative necessity.
“There’s an energy to it,” Parker explained. “Part of it might have started out (as) a bit of procrastination… but for me especially, and I think it’s true for a lot of people, trying to be really creative (while) you’re just kind of doing a 9-to-5 job, it’s really hard to do. When it’s like, ‘Alright let’s all get in a room together, there’s a show going on on Saturday night,’ shit goes fast and it’s all about momentum to us.”
“Even with South Park, there’s times where we think of a funny show and we start and we’re like, ‘Oh this is really funny, you know what, let’s bank it. Let’s make some of it before the season starts, so that somewhere in the middle of the run we can take a few days off because it’s so crazy.’ Take the banked show, finish it up and do whatever,” Parker recalled.
“And every single time, every time those banked shows are our worst shows,” he admitted. “Even though they’re really funny ideas and things like that. But it’s just because we put it down and we do some other stuff and we come back to it and we’re like ‘Why was that… ? What is that?’ Trying to refigure it out. And I’ve just really learned that, for us, momentum is everything.”
So it seems unlikely that anything will change – at least not until Parker and Stone decide to let A.I. take over the show so they can spend more time on luxury yachts.
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