Today, Explained - South Park is not your friend

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

The latest season of South Park has been vicious in its critique of Trump 2.0. But the creators aren't just anti-Trump. They're anti-everyone. This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. A still from South Park's "Got A Nut' episode courtesy Paramount Media Networks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

President Trump has a new adversary. And this adversary is really going for it. They're hitting him where it hurts. They're taking no prisoners. They're depicting the president in bed with Satan. Another random commentated on my Instagram that you're on the Epstein list. The abstain list? Are we still talking about that?

It's South Park, guys. All two episodes of the show's latest season have skewered the president and it looks like Trey Parker and Matt Stone are going to make it a three-peat tonight. Wow, Washington, D.C. Your reaction, Mr. President. I never like that. I don't know anything about stuff, but I never watch. Don't worry about it, sir.

Today, explain from Vox is going to catch you out. Support for this show comes from OnePassword. If you're an IT or security pro, managing devices, identities, and applications can feel overwhelming and risky. Trellica by OnePassword helps conquer SaaS sprawl and Shadow IT by discovering every app your team uses, managed or not. Take the first step to better security for your team. Learn more at OnePassword.com slash podcast offer. That's OnePassword.com slash podcast offer, all lowercase. Support for this show comes from OnePassword.

If you're an IT or security pro, managing devices, identities, and applications can feel overwhelming and risky. Trellica by OnePassword helps conquer SaaS sprawl and Shadow IT by discovering every app your team uses, managed or not. Take the first step to better security for your team. Learn more at OnePassword.com slash podcast offer. That's OnePassword.com slash podcast offer, all lowercase. This is today. Explain. Brian's Delta, S-E-L-T-E-R, Chief Media Analyst, CNN. Great. And are you now or have you ever been a fan of South Park?

I would call myself a passive South Park fan. Fuck you, Kyle. I was the kind of viewer that if I saw it on Comedy Central, I would watch, I would enjoy it. But now, in the past month, I am now an active fan. Dude, I totally didn't mean that, cow. Like a lot of other people. I'm now going and seeking out the new episodes because this show has defied the odds. I mean, this show is almost 30 years old, and it's suddenly more relevant than ever.

How to do that? How did it defy the odds? By speaking truth to the ultimate power right now. You know, the creators of South Park have always hated bullies, and they seem to believe Trump is the biggest bully of them all right now. The very premise of the first episode of this new season is about Trump targeting the media. Eric, the character Eric Cartman, is angry that NPR has been forced off the air. What do you mean the president canceled NPR?

That was like the funniest shit ever. It was seriously the best show. It had like gay rappers from Mexico. So all sad because girls in Pakistan got stoned to death? From the very first seconds of the new season, you know that this show has something to say. There's some bull crap going on in this country, and I'm not going to let it corrupt the environment in this school. You also see how South Park Elementary is being transformed due to Trump's actions. There's only one thing that can bring some normality back to these corrupt times, and that is our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

What? This is, of course, a dramatic exaggeration of what's happening in real life, but it is true. Like you ought to put your hands together in welcoming Christ our Lord. Hello, my children. I am the light and the way. When Trump is introduced in the show, you see him, you know, fighting with the Prime Minister of Canada over tariffs. People of Canada will not be devalued like this. Aye, come on, you don't want me to bomb you like I did Iraq. I thought you just bombed Iraq.

Iran, Iraq. What the hell's the difference? Relax, guy. But most memorably, you see him getting in bed with Satan himself. Hey, Satan. I don't want to right now. Well, I relax. Come on, Satan. I've been working hard all day. And I'm going to use some words I don't typically use on this show right now to describe that particular scene. Because Trump de-robes before you even see who he's about to get. get into bed with and has, I guess, like a micro penis?

Oh, come on, Satan. How do they follow that up? I think, like, two weeks later? The most ruthless jokes in the second episode were about Christy Nome. They were about that old scandal involving her shooting a dog on her farm. The reason that the story is in the book, because people need to understand who I am. Welcome to the team recruits. I'm Christy Nome, head of Homeland Security.

Oh, she seems nice. Okay, very pretty. You saw her over and over again in this episode, shooting at dogs. A few years ago, I had to put my puppy down by shooting it in the face. Because sometimes doing what's important means doing what's hard. This episode was really, really personal in the way it targeted Gnome. Showing her face, maybe falling apart. Think I can't handle myself because I'm a lady with good looks.

You guys need to be? You know, pushing this idea that she was overusing Botox or other face fillers. Also, this idea that she cares so much about photo ops and PR, that she's always out there dressing up in various outfits, posing for photos and videos. And as always, there are elements of truth to these critiques or these satires, you know. It is true that Nome has tried really hard to be front and center, very visible, playing to the cameras, going out on tours, appearing in the... the field, you know, showing that she's doing the work, so to speak.

Another job, well done. Gnome did not take this episode in stride. She said, it's so lazy to make fun of women and how they look. For Gnome, this was personal, this was ugly, and she wanted to be on the record about it. Is this the first time this show has gone after Donald Trump and his administration? No, but it is by far the most direct. the most vicious, I'd say. You know, back during Trump 1.0, right, Trump's first term in office,

there was this storyline where one of the teachers at the school, Mr. Garrison, was becoming president and, you know, over time acting more and more Trump-like. Mr. Garrison, you believe the immigration problem is easy to solve. Yes, f*** them all to death. Let's make this country great again. This served as a way for the creators of South Park to ridicule Trump and to speak out about some of his behavior, some of his conduct in the first term. But this was not nearly as direct, not nearly as aggressive as what we're seeing now.

I guess it's not that big a surprise that South Park would go after Donald Trump when he is Donald Trumping harder than he's ever Donald Trump's before. Yes. But they're not even sparing their parent company in these new episodes, right? Madden Trey are like a lot of creators that they like. They love to poke fun at the parent company when they can. The timing of this new season has been really extraordinary because Paramount was in the final. moments, the final days of this protracted, politically tortured merger approval process when the new season premiered. So you literally had this anti-Trump episode sticking it to the

administration, putting the president in bed with Satan, airing on cable at the same time that the administration is having to review and approve this merger. The second episode of the season aired on a Wednesday. And then on a Thursday, the new parent. The FCC just approving that long simmering merger between Paramount and Skydance, a media company. This is a deal getting the green light just weeks after Paramount agreed to settle with the Trump administration for $16 million, and just days after Paramount fired Stephen Colbert. What's more is part of the deal, Skydance agreed to address the Trump administration's concerns about alleged bias at CBS. The emerged company, Paramount and Skydance, that came together, there was this big form. press conference on Thursday around lunchtime in New York City. And the new CEO, David Ellison,

took questions from media reporters about his grand hopes and dreams about this new company. I said to him, so what about this South Park problem? You know, what are you going to do about this problem? Do you view it as a problem? Ellison's response was really telling. He started out by saying he's a huge fan of the show. He's been a fan of South Park for his entire adult life. He's 42. And he then went on to praise Madden Trey as being really unique, really, talented creators. And he said to me, they are equal opportunity offenders, and they always have been. So I think Ellison was saying, they're not just targeting Trump because they're a bunch of lefties who want to attack the Republicans. They have always called out people on the left and on the

right, whatever. They're equal opportunity offenders. I think he was trying to differentiate South Park from late night shows like the late show is Stephen Colbert, which was recently canceled. I think he was trying to say these two creators are special. They are one of a kind, or we would say two of a kind, and they're going to be protected by Paramount. And obviously, the other context here is the new owners of Paramount had just struck a five-year deal to exclusively stream South Park on the Paramount Plus streaming service. This five-year deal is worth well over a billion.

for the creators of South Park and for their production company. This is a huge, huge vote of confidence in South Park as a tent pole of the future of Paramount. And the whole idea here, it makes a lot of sense when think about it. South Park has a library of 325 episodes going back to the 90s. This is a really, really valuable library in the streaming era because people like to go back and watch episodes from 10 or 20 years ago. These episodes have a really long shelf life.

So it's really valuable on streaming. And that's why Paramount was willing to fork over so much cash. I think this might be where some people get confused, because you've got everyone from, you know, Brown University to META to CBS and Paramount themselves, settling with the president, making, you know, donations to the president's inaugural committee. And then you've got Trey Parker and Matt Stomack. own, who work for CBS or do business with Paramount Plus or Paramount, not only going for the president, not only making fun of his administration, his own manhood, but like making

literally a billion dollars while doing it, how are they able to get away with something that seemingly no one else is right now? This might be a case of business actually trumping politics, of profits actually trumping politics. For Paramount, for the Paramount Plus Streaming Service, for the future of this newly combined company, big, loud franchises like South Park are key. They are crucial. They're more important now than they were 10 years ago, and they might even be more important 10 years from now. They are the foundation of the house that David Ellison is trying to build. And he can't compromise with something like that. And the difference here between South Park and Stephen

Colbert is that the late show was losing money. So, yeah, Stephen Colbert is a staunch critic of President Trump, one of the loudest Trump critics on TV. He's been canceled. A lot of his fans worry, it's for political reasons. CBS says it's purely for financial reasons. And in a way, South Park actually affirms the CBS claim, right? South Park also, you know, going for the juggler, taking on Trump directly. And yet because the show is really, profitable and crucial for the future of streaming. It's not only back for a new season. It is being praised. It's being celebrated by Paramount for having high ratings. Paramount keeps putting out press releases touting how well South Park is doing. The show is beating some of its very old

records on cable, meaning records the day back to the 90s and the early 2000s in terms of what share of the cable universe South Park is nabbing on Wednesday nights. But more importantly, If you add up the cable audience and the streaming audience, you're seeing five, six, seven million viewers tuning in for South Park for these new episodes. Those are the kinds of numbers that almost any creator would kill for. Certainly creators of animated comedies.

Brian S-T-E-L-T-E-R-C-N-N, check your local list, I'm Sean, R-A-M-E-S-W-A-R-A-M South Park is not your friend when we are back on Today Explained. Adio. What is Adio? Adio is an AI native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies. They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model. According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, and within seconds you will have your email and calendars synced. You'll see all your relationships in a fully fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data, and they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle

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How are people reacting to South Park's treatment of Donald Trump? Well, they're reacting with their eyeballs, right? They're watching it. The first two episodes of the season so far has been drawing the biggest ratings that the show's had in many, many years. It's drawing a lot of strong feelings, right? I think a lot of the, you know, I can sort of uncharably call them the Normie Libs

or the Trump critics are, you know, responding very positively to this very visceral depiction of the president. I did notice more people in my life were texting me about South Park than have ever texted me about South Park ever before. Probably a lot of people that you have never heard talk about South Park maybe ever. Some people you might not expect, like your aunt or your uncle who maybe have more genteel tastes. And this is kind of what's so interesting about this moment, it's seen South Park, which has been part of our lives for, frankly, almost for as long as some of us have been alive.

Like, they're breaking once again to the culture in a very, you know, unexpected way because, look, they're on Comedy Central. But Comedy Central right now is a very small concern in terms of their broadcast and streaming footprint. So the fact that they're able to punch through like this, it's quite remarkable, frankly. But as you point out in your piece, Pervulture, which is called South Park Speaks Only for itself, this show has not been afraid to turn on liberals, to mock liberals, viciously. in the past. In fact, the first episode of this new season, Sermon on the Mount, starts out with the show just ripping on NPR.

The reason that we decided to work on this piece, or that I wrote this piece, is because we started noticing that South Park was getting celebrated by the same corners of, you know, the quote, quote, normie liberal community, the same kinds of folks that took a lot of pleasure

from SNL's, you know, satire of Trump. Yes, this is real life. This is really happy. On January 20th I, Donald J. Trump will become the 45th president of the United States. And then two months later, Mike Pence will become the 46th. You know, even way back when, like, in the first Trump administration, the way John Oliver would treat him, it's kind of this critique, satire, but still ultimately gentle,

still ultimately very polite. Donald Trump can seem appealing until you take a closer look, much like the lunch buffet at a strip club. or the NFL, or having a pet chimpanzee. South Park, because of the way it's always operated and the worldview and ideology which it has, which is somewhere between libertarian and nihilism, you could argue, or everybody's fair game kind of mentality,

they've often been at odds of each other in the past, right? So South Park has constantly drawn controversy over the course of its existence for depictions, you know, left and right. Like, it goes after religion. It goes after DeWoke. What I'm upset about is a wee little thing called cultural appropriation. Ever heard of it? That's why we can't wear sombreros on Cinco de Mayo.

It went after Occupy Wall Street back in a day. Reporting from the middle of a protest where two fourth grade students are fed up and have decided to occupy Red Robin. And so the fact that we're seeing a lot of Norway lives like celebrate South Park at this point in time and specifically celebrating an episode that contains elements that they would have find reprehensible in the past. There's an interesting development there, and it is a suggestion of some sort of weird kind of coalition, or at least a coalition of aesthetics kind of forming.

So I wrote that piece to be like, some part's not different. It's doing the same that's always done. It is the same that has always been, and it would only ever speak for itself. It's not positioning itself as a savior, as some people on social media has been. been sort of like kind of congratulating and celebrating them for. And, you know, and that's kind of, that's kind of part of the interesting thing about this. It's that, you know, what unlikely bitfellows to emerge at this point of time? Yeah, I mean, you dug up an old interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone in which one of them said after an episode that they got calls from their

atheist friends a couple of times saying, what the fuck we thought you were on our side? And they said we're not on anybody's fucking side. The takeaway for me was, you know, like South Park is not your friend, whoever you may be. Do you think people are forgetting that right now? I do think there's a tendency when it comes to, again, quote-unquote norm you live expressions of disdain or exhaustion of a Trump administration to like find heroes wherever they can. and I think part of what I find somewhat uncontroproductive and distasteful about that is that like you're just putting way too much emotional stock on parties that are just temporary allies, right?

And South Park is essentially, you know, they are somewhat libertarian of flavor in which they really embrace the notion of free speech, they really embrace the notion of sacrificing or cutting down secret cows, and that has not been the dominant political friends. frame for a lot of the past couple of years, at least when it comes to the left, the are liberals. And so there's a very uneasy tension when it comes to the relationship between those two sides. Did you think at all about how the politics of Trey Parker and Matt Stone have evolved, or have they not evolved over the course of like this period of time in which American politics have certainly evolved or devolved, if you will?

No, I mean, many, many years ago, the writer, blogger, Andrew. Sullivan tried to coin the concept of the self-part Republican, which is a variation of, like, fiscally conservative, socially liberal. I, you know, my gut feeling is that Trey Parker, Matt Stone reject any and all labels that's thrown on them. They kind of wanted a freedom to move around in many senses. There are two things that are true at the same time. One is that I think they've been ideologically consistent throughout their entire careers,

which is they believe very much in saying whatever they want. very much in that everything is worth critiquing, that earnestness is maybe something that they don't prize personally. But at the same time, they can also change. They also change in worldview. And one of the more interesting examples of this is kind of how to handle climate change. So there was a talked about episode back in the mid-2000s called Man Bear Pig. It is half man, half bear, and half pig.

where South Park, essentially, satirized Al Gore's climate advocacy, basically. Man bear pig simply wants to get you. I'm super serial. You could read it somewhat uncharably, but somewhat honestly, as them going, you know, this sort of fear on climate change is a little overblown, and, you know, gore is it maybe for the attention, right? That is like one interpretation, one very strong interpretation of an episode, and they just went after gore with it.

Then about like 12 years later, I want to say, they released sort of a kind of a two-parter that revisited Menber Pig, where essentially they're like Ben Bear Pig is real. Man Bear Pig being this sort of creature that Al Gore is like kind of warning against, which is a standard for climate change. It is real! You want to believe it's real, you go right on ahead, Susan. No, it's right there, it's right there behind you! That's kind of widely viewed as, like, look, they revised their view on making fun

of people who are advocating around climate change, but it's still grounded in this, like, core ideology, which is they're essentially still the same people, though they can sort of change the positions on certain things, which is a really, you know, it's something that we should be open to when it comes to people and their relationship with politics. You get the sense that if Paramount or CB. or Comedy Central were to try to put the thumb on the scale of what they're able to say or what they're able to depict, that they could walk away and actually be all the more happy or all the more powerful for it. And that's something that's kind of rare, I think, in the current

political climate. Like, we're seeing, you know, avatars of quote-unquote free speech or of expression or journalism basically fold their cards because they're worried that they, you know, will lose their power, will lose their money, will lose money, will lose their, there's, position in society. These are two guys. This is a team. This is a show that doesn't seem to give a damn about any of that. And it is, you know, say what you want, a feel what you want about how they have approached certain issues in the past. Say what you want and feel what you want about the crudeness of the humor. That is a very refreshing thing to see at this point in time. I'm going home.

Nicholas Kwa, his friends call him Nick. You can read and support his work at Vulture at nymag.com. Gabrielle Burbay made our show today. Jolie Myers edited Patrick and Andy Mixed and Laura Bullard did the facts for today. Explain. Feel better, Murph. Oh, shit.

Hmm, hmm, hmm. Sick, shit. No way. Screw you guys. Screw you guys. Screw you guys. Well? Jesus.

Screw you guys. I'm a guy. Screw you guys. I'm a going to have. Paid advertisement, Anna Kendrick is not a client of LPL financial LLC and receives compensation to promote LPL. Investing involves risk, including potential loss or principal LPL financial LLC member, FINRA, SIPC. Hey, everybody, it's Andy Roddock, host of Serve podcast for your fix on all things tennis. The U.S. Open's coming up, and we're covering it on our show. Can someone knock off Algarazan Center? Can Cocoa win her second U.S. Open title?

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