The follow-up to South Park’s premiere brutally mocking a naked Donald Trump has been delayed.
Season 27 of the long-running show premiered last Wednesday and featured extensive jokes about the president’s “teeny-tiny” manhood and even an AI-generated sequence that showed Trump fully nude. The president hit back last week with a statement from a White House representative calling the show “fourth-rate” and his depiction “a desperate attempt for attention.”
Now this week, a teaser has been uploaded to the show’s YouTube page informing fans that there will be no new episode. Comedy Central will play an encore of the season premiere in its place.
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The Daily Beast has reached out to Comedy Central and Paramount for comment and did not receive any on-the-record response. A source close to the show indicated that the week two hiatus was “pre-planned” but that does not appear to have been communicated in any of the show’s promotional materials.
The 27th season itself was delayed two weeks due to issues surrounding the Paramount-Skydance merger, which ended up getting approval from Trump’s FCC the day after the premiere. Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone signed a $1.5 billion streaming deal with Paramount just before the Trump episode aired.
The teaser promises a new episode next Wednesday, August 6, that has no intention of letting up on Trump. One scene shows Trump flirting with Satan at a black tie dinner, smirking and rubbing the character’s thigh until he says, exasperatedly, “Stop.” Like the premiere, the second episode will also mock Trump’s fiercest supporters. The teaser seemingly reveals Cartman playing a version of MAGA podcaster Charlie Kirk.
Still, the strangely-timed break seems unusual. While Trump has threatened other shows will be “next” to be canceled for criticizing him after Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, the White House’s statement last week settled for a series of insults and stopped short of threatening revenge. That omission from the White House’s response was out of step with Trump’s pattern, considering how brutally the episode mocked the president.
Parker and Stone actually toned it down, as they’d wanted an even more graphic version of Trump’s naked character. They compromised by putting eyes on Trump’s penis to get around the network’s request that they blur it. And while weekly TV shows take a week off all the time, a hiatus following a one-episode season premiere—especially one as explosive as last week’s—is highly unusual.
That said, Parker and Stone showed absolutely no remorse for their brutal Trump takedown even before the teaser for the next episode dropped on Tuesday. “We’re terribly sorry,” Parker sarcastically told a crowd at a San Diego Comic Con panel last Thursday after Trump’s White House fired back at them.
“This show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread,” the White House statement also read, before saying the show has “uninspired ideas.”
There do seem to be quite a few new ideas coming down the pike, however, if the new teaser is any indication.
