Now ‘South Park’ Fans Really Do Believe Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Explanation for the Last Week’s Episode Delay

Trey Parker and Matt Stone remain insistent that they are much more likely to procrastinate past a crucial deadline than to cave to political pressure — let alone cave quietly.

Last Wednesday, with the anxiously awaited fifth episode of South Park Season 27 scheduled to air that night, Parker and Stone suddenly announced that they would have to postpone the episode for one week after failing to finish it in time for its usual 10 p.m. ET time slot. Even in a vacuum, this kind of announcement would have been nearly unprecedented. In the previous 26 seasons of the show, South Park had only ever missed one deadline, and that was due to a catastrophic power outage at South Park Studios. And, in those first 26 seasons, Parker and Stone famously only had six days to complete each South Park installment, as opposed to the luxurious two-week production schedule they enjoy today.

However, given the greater cultural context surrounding the second-ever South Park deadline extension — the murder of right-wing political activist and South Park parody target Charlie Kirk on September 10th placed the show under intense public scrutiny — many South Park fans refused to believe that Parker and Stone just-so-happened to drop the ball during the most dangerous political moment of the show’s entire existence.

Then, late last week, Parker and Stone implored South Park fans to consider that, maybe, the fact that they’ve finished over 300 episodes on time with their infamous work ethic is much more unbelievable than the two times they fell short. 

In a conversation with The Denver Post on Friday, Stone shot down the rumors that the new episode of South Park was pulled, canceled or re-written in response to the death of Kirk and the political blowback that ensued following the shocking murder. “No one pulled the episode, no one censored us, and you know we’d say so if true,” Stone insisted, reminding his fans of how the South Park production process really works. “We just didn’t get it done. When you always cut it close, sometimes you mess up. That’s the price of being a procrastinator.”

And, while fans initially expressed skepticism about the official story behind the episode delay, Stone's follow-up comments seemed to remind the online South Park community that these are still the exact same guys who openly blamed Paramount's “shit show” merger when the parent company pushed back the start of Season 27 before releasing a premiere episode that was basically one big middle finger to the media giant.

In a viral Reddit thread about Stone's comments, one fan implored South Park conspiracy theorists to consider everything else that Parker and Stone have done in Season 27 without batting an eye at political pushback. “They have literally made an episode of A.I. Trump getting naked with his tiny penis talking. Then they had Kristy Noem shooting puppies while her face melted off,” the fan wrote of Parker and Stone. “These guys have no fucks nor chill. They may not make fun of Kirk himself, but I’d wager they are going full in on how people are trying to make political points off it and get people canceled.”

Other users mocked the distrustful skeptics of the South Park fandom, as one commented, “It’s really been eye opening how many people just took what happened most recently in the news and immediately applied it to the delay. Just because you can think of a connection between two things doesn’t mean there is one.”

On Twitter, however, the South Park fandom was less unanimous in accepting Stone's explanation, and even fans who took the delay at face value aren’t thrilled that South Park would drop the ball at such a critical moment for culture and comedy. “You would think only releasing one episode every two weeks and getting 1.5 billion would make them not miss episodes, but here we are,” one Twitter user complained.

Ultimately, the litmus test for the official story behind this all-too-convenient delay will come when the new South Park episode premieres on Wednesday and we see what Parker and Stone have supposedly been working on for three weeks. If Paramount and Skydance still aren’t calling the shots at South Park, then the show will probably tackle the Kirk controversy head-on as it usually would. But, if Parker and Stone have been compromised by their corporate partners and political pressure, then, well, get ready to return to Tegridy Farms until at least 2029.