‘South Park’s Original Focus Groups Did Not Go Well, Especially With Women

These days, South Park is still popular enough to justify a $1.5 billion streaming deal, elicit snide statements from White House officials and inspire fans to proudly dress up like giant pieces of shit in public.

But the show came surprisingly close to being axed before a single episode had even aired, purely due to the opinions of a handful of randos. 

As Trey Parker and Matt Stone explained on the DVD commentary for the pilot, “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe,” after finally completing the episode’s laborious cut-out animation, the next step was to show it to some random strangers. “When we did the pilot, and we sort of handed it in after those four months, Comedy Central looked at it, and they did a focus group on it,” Parker explained. “And it didn’t focus group very well.”

According to Stone, while the show did okay with “men in their 20s,” female participants didn’t love what they saw. “Women it rated, like, below zero. They hated it,” he noted. “They didn’t just say it’s a bad show,” Parker clarified, “they said, ‘Don’t you dare put this on television.’”

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, former Comedy Central President Doug Herzog said that participants were asked to “rate the pilot on a scale of 1 to 10” and the results had “1s, and 2s, and 3s everywhere.” Even worse, the episode “made three people cry.”

“They were saying that it’s inappropriate for children to say those kinds of things,” Herzog told the outlet, adding, “I’ve never seen a worse focus group.”

In fairness to these anonymous viewers from 28 years in the past, they were likely plucked off the street and shown, with zero context, a crude 22-minute animation in which a third grader gets murdered by aliens 12 minutes into the episode.

As a result of the episode’s poor reception, the cable channel behind the project began to rethink its potential. “Comedy Central suddenly started to sort of back down and think maybe they didn’t want to make this into a show,” Parker said. “And they told us they weren’t going to make it into a series. They basically told us it just didn’t focus group well. And so it probably wouldn’t work as a show, and (they) started talking about other stuff we might want to do (instead of South Park).”

Weirdly, what ended up saving the show was Comedy Central’s annoyance that Parker and Stone went and starred in a Mormon sex comedy without them. “We said, well if we’re not going to do this show, we’ve got some money to go do this independent film called Orgazmo,” Parker recalled. “And so we went off and made that, and I guess that sort of got Comedy Central hot under the collar — that we sort of left and were doing things with other people. So eventually they said, ‘Well, we’ll give it a try, write another script.’”

Of course, they ended up writing more than 300 scripts after that.