‘South Park’ Fans Are Worried This Will Be Another ‘First Gentleman’ Season
The 21st century will be defined by plenty: a decline in literacy, a rampant rise in fascism, the Eagles winning two Super Bowl championships. One of the less obvious things that characterized the last two-and-a-half decades has been how much current events impact television programming.
We’ve been seeing it all season long with South Park — the first episodes were in direct response to the Jeffrey Epstein-Donald Trump news cycles and the associated characters in the Trump universe. There was Kristi Noem murdering puppies and Cartman as the “Master Debater” styled after Charlie Kirk.
Don't Miss
South Park isn’t entering into current events for the first time, and is far from the only show that’s been shaped by the volatility of our modern era. In 2001, 9/11 changed television. In 2016, it was Donald Trump getting elected as President of the United States. In 2020, it was COVID and the Black Lives Matter movement. (The COVID season of Law & Order: SVU is an unbelievable time capsule.)
As 2025’s continues to churn unpredictably, South Park has announced it will be delaying the release of its next episode, which was slated to be released yesterday. While Trey Parker and Matt Stone say it’s because they didn’t finish the episode in time for release, some fans have speculated that the real reason for the delay is due to Charlie Kirk’s murder on September 10th. This is somewhat supported by the fact that South Park pulled a recent episode depicting Cartman’s “Master Debater” plot line.
Now fans are speculating that there will be a major change in the rest of Season 27 due to recent events. It wouldn’t be the first time reality interfered with plans for the show. In a Reddit thread discussing the delay of the upcoming episode, fans recalled the last time major news upset a season-long story arc: Season 20, with First Gentleman.
“They really wanted to do something ambitious and interesting with Season 20 being wrapped around one long arc,” one Redditor wrote. “Then real life changed their plans and now that’s a season I always skip because it’s last third feels so forced and confusing and doesn’t even say anything, because the statement they thought they were going to make didn’t reflect reality.”
The “statement” of the season was interrupted by the then-shocking election of Donald Trump in 2016.
“They were assuming that Hillary would win and made the episode to reflect that with Bill becoming the first, First Gentleman instead of First Lady,” another Redditor wrote. “I don’t know what they were trying to say with it, as of course Hilary didn’t win, so they had like 2 days to try to correct it and the resulting episode made no sense.”
Of course, other fans in the thread had different interpretations of Season 20, but much of the conversation and speculation online has considered whether South Park will abandon some of the plot lines introduced so far in light of Kirk’s assassination.
Is there a season-long arc to disrupt this time? It’s too early to tell.
