‘South Park’ Fans Will Have to Wait Another Three Weeks for the Next Episode

It’s funny how “6 days to air” now needs to be preceded by two straight weeks of dicking around.

Last week, Trey Parker and Matt Stone made the nearly unprecedented announcement that, with just hours until the scheduled airing of the newest South Park episode, they hadn’t yet finished their work on what became “Conflict of Interest” and would need another week to get the episode ready for prime time. Earlier in Season 27, South Park quietly expanded its production schedule to give the show’s creators two weeks to complete each episode, but, after Paramount and Comedy Central granted Parker and Stone a deadline extension for last night’s installment, the notorious and self-admitted procrastinators have apparently decided that they like having triple the time to do the same job that they managed to perform in one week for the previous 26 seasons.

As such, South Park fans can expect to see the seventh episode of Season 27 on October 15th, and if Parker and Stone continue to get their way, the season finale that is currently scheduled for December 10th will air on that day in 2029.

Presumably, South Park will eventually return to its new biweekly schedule as promised in the apologetic announcement from last week that postponed “Conflict of Interest” amid increased political pressure on the show following the murder of right-wing political target and South Park parody target Charlie Kirk. While fans eventually came around to the idea that Parker and Stone really did just procrastinate themselves into a pickle with “Conflict of Interest” rather than backing off from a different planned storyline due to political blowback, neither justification for the three-week gap that preceded the newest South Park episode explains why Parker and Stone now need another extended production schedule for the next one.

Maybe the South Park creators are planning some massive, controversial and politically incendiary storyline to finish out the latter half of Season 27, and their corporate patrons are willing to give them enough time to get it exactly right. Or, more likely, maybe Parker and Stone really are as lazy as they say they are, and, when they learned that they could squeeze out another week of not working from their network, it was a give-an-inch, take-a-mile situation for Paramount.

Or, maybe, the issues that Casa Bonita is having are so serious and pressing that the restaurateurs need to devote their full attention to fixing the problems in Lakewood. Maybe a fat kid led the police on a chase that ended at the bottom of the cliff.