This Is the Only Other Time That ‘South Park’ Missed Its Deadline

As many fans feared, it turns out that we’re not getting a new episode of South Park this week. 

After the show raised suspicions by failing to deliver a promotional teaser yesterday, it was just announced that South Park will be taking yet another week off. Why? According to a statement issued by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the duo simply “didn’t get it done in time,” owing to their practice of churning out episodes at the “last minute.”

This delay is particularly noteworthy considering that the next episode will be the first to air since the death of Charlie Kirk, who was recently parodied on the show in an episode that’s now been yanked from Comedy Central. But, to be clear, Parker and Stone aren’t saying that this delay was caused by anything other than production issues.

The announcement is genuinely shocking considering that Parker and Stone have historically been able to make even the tightest of tight deadlines. Perhaps most famously, they were forced to completely re-write the episode “Oh, Jeez,” which aired the day after Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, a development that completely ruined their “First Gentleman” Bill Clinton storyline.

South Park not making a deadline isn’t wholly unprecedented, although it’s only happened once before.

Back in 2013, the episode “Goth Kids 3: Dawn of the Posers” was delayed by a week — seemingly not because Parker and Stone couldn’t handle their wacky schedule, it was due to a blackout, although years later, Parker and Stone admitted that “it was one deadline that we weren’t going make anyway.” “On Tuesday night, South Park Studios lost power,” Comedy Central announced at the time. “From animation to rendering to editing and sound, all of their computers were down for hours and they were unable to finish episode 1704 ‘Goth Kids 3: Dawn of the Posers’ in time for air tonight.”

The incident marked the first time that the South Park team had ever “missed a deadline for a show,” Variety noted. “It sucks to miss an air date,” Parker told the outlet. “But after all these years of tempting fate by delivering the show last minute, I guess it was bound to happen.”

And in lieu of a new episode, Comedy Central aired a rerun of “Scott Tenorman Must Die” but with “live-tweets from the creatives.” And these posts also included some Blair Witch Project-esque behind-the-scenes photos of the crew in their pitch black offices.  

It doesn’t seem as though Comedy Central is planning an X-along for whatever rerun ends up airing tonight.