This Comedy Show Took The Biggest Step Forward In 2025

Many comedy TV shows stepped up their game this year, but only one stomped on the gas so hard that it earned an official condemnation from the White House.

As we enter the end-of-the-year superlatives season of entertainment media, critics and commentators across the internet are in a fierce debate over which hot new comedy show will take over the TV industry in 2026. The Studio left the 77th Emmy Awards with 13 statuettes, Adults earned its modest-but-devoted following and The Chair Company brought Tim Robinson’s beguiling absurdity to the big leagues of HBO.

All of these are great new shows with promising futures, of course, but let’s not forget to honor the preposterously long-running comedy institutions that showed the world how, even at the ripe old age of 28, they’re still able to reinvent themselves and find new ways to trigger fans and haters alike.

With its first full season(s) since 2023, South Park burst back into the conversation over the greatest comedy shows currently on television while earning the ire of every Trump administration official and conservative commentator in the country, proving that Trey Parker and Matt Stone will never stop finding new ways to piss off the proud and powerful.

With its constant digs at the Trump administration and its supporters, South Park Season 27/28 was the single most political string of episodes in the show's history, which proved to be divisive in the South Park fandom. Up until this year, the political philosophy of South Park – if you could even call it that – was that both sides of every issue are equally deserving of ridicule, and caring about any hot-button issue too much makes you a walking joke.

Compare the Season 27 premiere “Sermon on the ‘Mount” to the 2004 South Park episode “Douche and Turd,” in which South Park satirized the very institution of a two-party democracy and implied that there are next to no material differences between President George W. Bush and failed presidential hopeful John Kerry. For decades, Parker and Stone's vaguely libertarian sensibilities manifested as a “both sides are equally stupid” approach to satire, but, when the show depicted the sitting President as a corrupt, tiny-dicked, middle-Eastern dictator who is hell-bent on destroying free speech in America, they cast off the aloof nihilism for which South Park was so famous and called out true, shameless evil exactly where they saw it.

Suddenly, South Park was front-page news in the conservative and liberal machines alike, and the show found fresh new political enemies, both in the government and in its own fandom.

As anyone who stays abreast of South Park Twitter or the South Park subreddit can attest, Parker and Stone's decision to devote an entire season (well, two seasons, really) to such an aggressive parody of the President created a backlas firestorm, both from conservative South Park fans who previously saw Parker and Stone as anti-woke agitators and from the detached centrists who treat South Park as their primary news source while claiming intellectual superiority over anyone who picks a political side.

Meanwhile, South Park shattered Paramount+ streaming records and placed itself directly into the center of our greater cultural conversation about the role of and responsibilities of comedians during periods of political turmoil. Whether Parker and Stone decided to finally decided to take a stand or simply followed the shifting tides of humor and politics, their decision to go harder than ever against the federal government brought South Park to a new level of artistic maturity that will set the standard for all political comedy through the next three years of Trump's America.

And they did it without rehashing the infamous President Garrison arc, too, which deserves some kind of trophy on its own, maybe for Biggest Bullet Dodged in 2025.