South Park is not your friend

Speaker 1 President Trump has a new adversary.

Speaker 1 And this adversary is really going for it.

Speaker 2 They're hitting him where it hurts.

Speaker 1 They're taking no prisoners. They're depicting the president in bed with Satan.

Speaker 4 Another random commented on my Instagram that you're on the Epstein list.

Speaker 3 The Epstein list?

Speaker 5 Are we still talking about that?

Speaker 1 It's South Park, guys.

Speaker 1 All two episodes of the show's latest season have skewered the president, and it looks like Trey Parker and Matt Stone are going to make it a three-peat tonight. Wow!

Speaker 6 Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 Your reaction, Mr. President?

Speaker 6 I never watched Japan.

Speaker 1 I don't know anything about Japan. I never watched out.

Speaker 1 Don't worry about it, sir. Today, Explain from Vox is going to catch you up.

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Speaker 9 This is today explained.

Speaker 10 Brian Stelter, S-T-E-L-T-E-R, Chief Media Analyst, CNN.

Speaker 1 Great. And are you now or have you ever been a fan of South Park?

Speaker 10 I would call myself a passive South Park fan.

Speaker 11 Fuck you, Cop.

Speaker 10 I was the kind of viewer that, if I saw it on Comedy Central, I would watch, I would enjoy it. But now, in the past month, I am now an active fan.

Speaker 1 Dude, I totally didn't mean that, Kev.

Speaker 10 Like a lot of other people, I'm now going and seeking out the new episodes because this show has defied the odds. I mean, this show is almost 30 years old and it's suddenly more relevant than ever.

Speaker 1 How to do that? How did it defy the odds?

Speaker 10 By speaking truth to the ultimate power right now.

Speaker 10 You know, the creators of South Park have always hated bullies and they seem to believe Trump is the biggest bully of them all right now.

Speaker 10 The very premise of the first episode of this new season is about Trump targeting the media. Eric, the character Eric Hartman, is angry that NPR has been forced off the air.

Speaker 11 What do you mean the president canceled NPR?

Speaker 5 That was like the funniest shit ever. It was seriously the best show.
It had like gay rappers from Mexico all sad because girls in Pakistan got stoned to death.

Speaker 10 From the very first second of the new season, you know that this show has something to say.

Speaker 11 There's some bull crap going on in this country, and I'm not going to let it corrupt the environment in this school.

Speaker 10 You also see how South Park Elementary is being transformed due to Trump's actions.

Speaker 4 There's only one thing that can bring some normalty back to these corrupt times, and that is

Speaker 3 our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 8 What?

Speaker 10 This is, of course, a dramatic exaggeration of what's happening in real life, but it is true.

Speaker 11 I'd like you all to put your hands together in welcoming Christ our Lord.

Speaker 13 Hello, my children.

Speaker 15 I am the light and the way.

Speaker 10 When Trump is introduced in the show, you see him, you know, fighting with the Prime Minister of Canada over tariffs.

Speaker 2 People of Canada will not be devalued like this. Ah, come on.

Speaker 5 You don't want me to bomb you like I did, Iraq.

Speaker 10 I thought you just bombed Iran.

Speaker 5 Iran, Iraq, what the hell's the difference? Relax, guy.

Speaker 10 But most memorably, you see him getting in bed with Satan himself.

Speaker 9 Hey, Satan!

Speaker 9 I don't want to right now. What? Hey, relax!

Speaker 5 Come on, Satan. I've been working hard all day.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to use some words I don't typically use on the show right now to describe that particular scene because Trump derobes before you even see who he's about to get into bed with and has,

Speaker 10 I guess, like a micro penis.

Speaker 1 How do they follow that up? I think like two weeks later.

Speaker 10 The most ruthless jokes in the second episode were about Christy Noome. They were about that old scandal involving her shooting a dog on her farm.

Speaker 16 The reason that the story is in the book, because people need to understand who I am.

Speaker 15 Welcome to the team, recruits. I'm Christy Noam, head of Homeland Security.

Speaker 6 She's in the night, okay, very pretty.

Speaker 10 You saw her over and over again in this episode shooting at dogs.

Speaker 15 A few years ago, I had to put my puppy down by shooting it in the face. Because sometimes doing what's important means doing what's hard.

Speaker 10 This episode was really, really personal in the way it targeted Noam,

Speaker 10 showing her face maybe falling apart.

Speaker 15 Think I can't handle myself because I'm a lady with good looks.

Speaker 10 You know, pushing this idea that she was overusing Botox or other face fillers.

Speaker 10 Also, this idea that she cares so much about photo ops and PR, that she's always out there dressing up in various outfits, posing for photos and videos.

Speaker 10 And as always, there are elements of truth to these critiques or these satires, you know.

Speaker 10 It is true that Noam has tried really hard to be front and center, very visible, playing to the cameras, going out on tours, appearing in the field, you know, showing that she's doing the work, so to speak.

Speaker 11 Another job, well done.

Speaker 10 Noam did not take this episode in stride. She said, it's so lazy to make fun of women and how they look.
For Noam, this was personal, this was ugly, and she wanted to be on the record about it.

Speaker 1 Is this the first time this show has gone after Donald Trump and his administration?

Speaker 10 No, but it is by far the most most direct, the most vicious, I'd say.

Speaker 10 You know, back during Trump 1.0, right, Trump's first term in office, there was this storyline where one of the teachers at the school, Mr.

Speaker 10 Garrison, was becoming president and, you know, over time, acting more and more Trump-like.

Speaker 13 Mr.

Speaker 11 Garrison, you believe the immigration problem is easy to solve? Yes, f them all to death. Let's make this country great again.

Speaker 10 This served as a way for the creators of South Park to ridicule Trump and to speak out about some of his behavior, some of his conduct in the first term.

Speaker 10 But this was not nearly as direct, not nearly as aggressive as what we're seeing now.

Speaker 1 I guess it's not that big a surprise that South Park would go after Donald Trump when he is Donald Trumping harder than he's ever Donald Trumped before.

Speaker 1 But they're not even sparing their parent company in these new episodes, right?

Speaker 10 Madden Trey are like a lot of creators that they like, they love to poke fun at the parent company when they can.

Speaker 10 The timing of this new season has been really extraordinary because Paramount was in the final moments, the final days of this protracted, politically tortured merger approval process when the new season premiered.

Speaker 10 So you literally had this anti-Trump episode, sticking it to the administration, putting the president in bed with Satan, airing on cable at the same time that the administration is having to review and approve this merger.

Speaker 10 The second episode of the season aired on a Wednesday, and then on a Thursday, the new Paramount took shape.

Speaker 17 The FCC just approving that long-simmering merger between Paramount and Skydance, a media company.

Speaker 17 This is a deal getting the green light just weeks after Paramount agreed to settle with the Trump administration for $16 million

Speaker 17 and just days after Paramount fired Stephen Colbert.

Speaker 12 What's more, as part of the deal, Skydance agreed to address the Trump administration's concerns about alleged bias at CBS.

Speaker 10 The merged company Paramount and Skydance came together. There was this big formal press conference on Thursday around lunchtime in New York City.

Speaker 10 And the new CEO, David Ellison, took questions from media reporters about his grand hopes and dreams about this new company. I said to him, so what about this South Park problem?

Speaker 13 You know, what are you going to do about this problem?

Speaker 10 Do you view it as a problem?

Speaker 10 Ellison's response was really telling.

Speaker 10 He started out by saying he's a huge fan of the show. He's been a fan of South Park for his entire adult life.
He's 42.

Speaker 10 And he then went on to praise Madden Trey as being really unique, really, really talented creators. And he said to me, they are equal opportunity offenders and they always have been.

Speaker 10 So I think Ellison was saying, they're not just targeting Trump because they're a bunch of lefties who want to attack the Republicans.

Speaker 10 They have always called out people on the left and on the right, whatever. They are equal opportunity offenders.

Speaker 10 I think he was trying to differentiate South Park from late-night shows like the late show with Stephen Colbert, which was recently canceled.

Speaker 10 I think he was trying to say these two creators are special. They are one of a kind, or we would say two of a kind, and they're going to be protected by Paramount.

Speaker 10 And obviously

Speaker 10 the other context here is

Speaker 10 the new owners of Paramount had just struck a five-year deal to exclusively stream South Park. on the Paramount Plus streaming service.
This five-year deal is worth well over a billion dollars

Speaker 10 for the creators of South Park and for their production company. This is a huge, huge vote of confidence in South Park as a tentpole of the future of Paramount.

Speaker 13 And the whole idea here, it makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

Speaker 10 South Park has a library of 325 episodes going back to the 90s.

Speaker 10 This is a really, really valuable library in the streaming era because people like to go back and watch episodes from 10 or 20 years ago. These episodes have a really long shelf life.

Speaker 10 So it's really valuable on streaming. And that's why Paramount was willing to fork over so much cash.

Speaker 1 I think this might be where some people get confused because you've got everyone from, you know, Brown University to Meta to

Speaker 1 CBS and Paramount themselves

Speaker 1 settling with the president, making, you know, donations to the president's inaugural committee.

Speaker 1 And then you've got Trey Parker and Matt Stone who work for CBS or do business with Paramount Plus or Paramount,

Speaker 1 not only going for the president, not only making fun of his administration, his own manhood, but like making literally a billion dollars while doing it.

Speaker 1 How are they able to get away with something that seemingly no one else is right now?

Speaker 10 This might be a case of business actually trumping politics. of profits actually trumping politics.

Speaker 10 For Paramount, for the Paramount Plus streaming service, for the future of this newly combined company,

Speaker 11 big,

Speaker 10 loud franchises like South Park are key. They are crucial.
They're more important now than they were 10 years ago, and they might even be more important 10 years from now.

Speaker 10 They are the foundation of the house that David Ellison is trying to build.

Speaker 10 And he can't compromise with something like that. And the difference here between South Park and Stephen Colbert

Speaker 10 is that, you know, the late show was losing money.

Speaker 10 So, yeah, Stephen Colbert is a staunch critic of President Trump, one of the loudest Trump critics on TV. He's been canceled.
A lot of his fans worry it's for political reasons.

Speaker 10 CBS says it's purely for financial reasons. And in a way, South Park actually affirms the CBS claim, right? South Park also,

Speaker 10 you know, going for the juggler, taking on Trump directly.

Speaker 10 And yet, because the show is really profitable and crucial for the future of streaming, it's not only back for a new season, it is being praised, it's being celebrated by Paramount for having high ratings.

Speaker 10 Paramount keeps putting out press releases touting how well South Park is doing.

Speaker 10 The show is beating some of its very old records on cable, meaning records that date back to the 90s and the early 2000s in terms of what share of the cable universe South Park is nabbing on Wednesday nights.

Speaker 10 But more importantly, if you add up the cable audience and the streaming audience, you're seeing five, six, seven million viewers tuning in for South Park for these new episodes.

Speaker 10 Those are the kinds of numbers that almost any creator would kill for. Certainly creators of animated comedies.

Speaker 1 Brian, S-T-E-L-T-E-R-C-N-N, check your local listenings. I'm Sean, R-A-M-E-S, W-A-R-A-M.
South Park is not your friend when we are back on Today Explained.

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Speaker 1 Nicholas Kwa, you read about culture for vulture. You wrote about South Park for vulture.
You watched these latest episodes. How are people reacting to South Park's treatment of Donald Trump?

Speaker 2 Well, they're reacting with their eyeballs, right? Dare watch it.

Speaker 2 The first two episodes of the season so far has been drawing the biggest ratings that the show has had in many, many years.

Speaker 2 It's drawing a lot of strong feelings, right? I think a lot of the,

Speaker 2 you know, I can sort of uncharitably call them the Normie Libs or the Trump critics are, you know, responding very positively to this very visceral depiction of the president.

Speaker 1 I did notice more people in my life were texting me about South Park than have ever texted me about South Park ever before.

Speaker 2 Probably a lot of people that you have never heard talk about South Park, maybe ever. So people that you might not expect, like your aunt or your uncle who maybe have more genteel tastes.

Speaker 2 And, you know, this is kind of what's so interesting about this moment. It's seen South Park, which has been part of our lives for, frankly, almost for as long as some of us have been alive.

Speaker 2 Like they're now, they're breaking once again to the culture in a very...

Speaker 2 you know, unexpected way because, look, they're on Comedy Central, but Comedy Central right now is a very small concern in terms of their broadcast and streaming footprint.

Speaker 2 So the fact that they're able to punch through like this, it's it's quite remarkable, frankly.

Speaker 1 But as you point out in your piece for Vulture, which is called South Park Speaks Only for Itself, this show has not been afraid to turn on liberals, to mock liberals viciously in the past.

Speaker 1 In fact, the first episode of this new season, Sermon on the Mount, starts out with the show just ripping on NPR.

Speaker 2 The reason that we decided to work on this piece or that I wrote this piece is because we started noticing that South Park was getting celebrated by the same corners of, you know, the quote-unquote normie liberal

Speaker 2 community, the same kinds of folks that took a lot of pleasure from SNL's satire of Trump.

Speaker 21 Yes, this is real life. This is really happening.

Speaker 21 On January 20th, I, Donald J. Trump will become the 45th president of the United States.
And then two months later, Mike Pence will become the 46th.

Speaker 2 You know, even way back when, like in the John, in the first Trump administration, the way like John Oliver would treat him, it's kind of this critique satire but still ultimately gentle still ultimately very polite donald trump can seem appealing until you take a closer look much like the lunch buffet at a strip club or the nfl or having a pet chimpanzee south park because of the way it's always operated and the worldview and ideology which which it has which is somewhere between libertarian and nihilism, you could argue, or everybody's fair game kind of mentality, they've often been at odds with each other in the past, right?

Speaker 2 So, South Park has constantly drawn controversy over the course of its existence for depictions, you know, left and right. Like, it goes after religions.

Speaker 2 Goes after DeWoke.

Speaker 4 What I'm upset about is a wee little thing called cultural appropriation.

Speaker 6 Ever heard of it?

Speaker 4 That's why we can't wear sombreros on Seiko de Bayo.

Speaker 2 It went after Occupy Wall Street back in the day.

Speaker 4 Sporting from the middle of a protest where two

Speaker 2 And so the fact that we're seeing a lot of Normie Libs like celebrate South Park at this point in time, or specifically and specifically celebrating an episode that, you know, contains elements that they would have found reprehensible in the past.

Speaker 2 It is there's an interesting development there. And it is a suggestion of like some sort of weird kind of coalition, or at least a coalition of aesthetics kind of forming.

Speaker 2 So I wrote that piece to be like,

Speaker 2 South Park's not different. It's doing the same that it's always done.
It is the same that has always been.

Speaker 2 And it would only ever speak for itself. It's not positioning itself as a savior, as some people on social media has been sort of like kind of

Speaker 2 congratulating and celebrating them for.

Speaker 2 And, you know, and that's kind of part of the interesting thing about this. It's that, you know, what unlikely Bitfellows to emerge at this point in time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, you dug up an old interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone in which one of them said after an episode that they got calls from their atheist friends a couple of times saying,

Speaker 1 what the fuck?

Speaker 1 We thought you were on our side. And they said, we're not on anybody's fucking side.

Speaker 1 The takeaway for me was, you know, like South Park is not your friend, whoever you may be.

Speaker 1 Do you think people are forgetting that right now?

Speaker 2 I do think there's a tendency

Speaker 2 when it comes to,

Speaker 2 again, quote-unquote normal expressions of disdain or

Speaker 2 exhaustion over the Trump administration to like find heroes wherever they can.

Speaker 2 And I think part of what I find somewhat uncounterproductive and distasteful about that is that it's just putting way too much emotional stock on

Speaker 2 parties that are just temporary allies.

Speaker 2 And South Park is essentially

Speaker 2 they are somewhat libertarian of flavor in which they really embrace the notion of free speech. They really embrace the notion of sacrificing or cutting down sacred cows.

Speaker 2 And that has not been the dominant political frame for a lot of the past couple of years, at least when it comes to the left or the liberals.

Speaker 2 And so there's a very uneasy tension when it comes to the relationship between those two sides.

Speaker 1 Did you think at all about how

Speaker 1 the politics of Trey Parker and Matt Stone have evolved or have they not evolved over the course of like this period of time in which American politics have certainly evolved or devolved, if you will.

Speaker 2 No, I mean many, many years ago, the writer, blogger Andrew Sullivan tried to coin the concept of the South Park Republican, which is a variation of like

Speaker 2 fiscally conservative, socially liberal.

Speaker 2 My gut feeling is that Trey Parker and Matt Stone reject any and all labels that stone on them. They kind of want the freedom to move around in many senses.

Speaker 2 There are two things that are true at the same time.

Speaker 2 One is that I think they've been ideologically consistent throughout their entire careers, which is they believe very much in saying whatever they want, they believe very much in that everything is worth critiquing, that earnestness is maybe something that they don't prize personally.

Speaker 2 But at the same time, they can also change. They also change in worldview.
And one of the more interesting examples of this is kind of how they handle climate change.

Speaker 2 So there was a talked about episode back in the mid-2000s called Man Bear Pig.

Speaker 3 It is half man,

Speaker 3 half bear, and half pig.

Speaker 2 Where South Park essentially satirized Al Gore's climate advocacy, basically.

Speaker 3 Man Bear Pig simply wants to get you.

Speaker 9 I'm super serial.

Speaker 2 You could read it somewhat uncharitably, but somewhat honestly as them going, you know, this sort of fear on climate change is a little overblown.

Speaker 2 And, you know, gore is in it maybe for the attention, right? That is like one interpretation, one very strong interpretation of that episode, and they just went after gore with it.

Speaker 2 Um, then about like 12 years later, I want to say, uh, they release a sort of a kind of a two-parter that revisited Man Bear Pig, where essentially they're like, Man Bear Pig is real, Man Bear Pig being this sort of creature that Al Gore is like kind of uh warning against, which is a standard for climate change.

Speaker 2 It is real!

Speaker 4 You want to believe it's real, you go right on ahead, Susan. No, it's right there, it's right there behind you.

Speaker 2 That's kind of widely viewed as like, look, they revised your view on

Speaker 2 making fun of people who are advocating around climate change, but it's still grounded in this like core ideology, which is they're essentially still the same people, though they can sort of change their positions on certain things, which is a really, you know,

Speaker 2 it's something that we should be open to when it comes to people and their relationship to politics.

Speaker 2 You get the sense that if Paramount or CBS or Comedy Central were to try to, you know, put the thumb on the scale of what they're able to say or what they're able to depict, that they could walk away and actually be all the more happy or all the more powerful for it.

Speaker 2 And that's something that's kind of rare, I think, in the current political climate. We're seeing

Speaker 2 avatars of quote-unquote free speech or of expression or journalism basically fold their cards because they're worried that they

Speaker 2 will lose their power, will lose their money, will lose money, will lose their position in society.

Speaker 2 These are two guys, this is a team, this is a a show that doesn't seem to give a damn about any of that. And

Speaker 2 it is,

Speaker 2 you know, say what you want, feel what you want about how they have approached certain issues in the past. Say what you want, feel what you want about the crudeness of the humor.

Speaker 2 That is a very refreshing thing to see at this point in time.

Speaker 2 Okay, that's it. Great, you guys.
I'm going home.

Speaker 1 Nicholas Kwa, his friends call him Nick. You can read and support his work at vulture at nymag.com.
Gabrielle Burbay made our show today. Jolie Myers edited Patrick and Andy mixed.

Speaker 1 And Laura Bullard did the facts for today. Explain Feel Better Murph.

Speaker 6 Screw you guys, and we're going to have

Speaker 6 you guys