By Matt Reigle
Copyright outkick
It has been announced that South Park will not air a new episode this week, just days after an episode parodying late political activist and media personality Charlie Kirk was pulled from Comedy Central’s rotation. The long-running animated sitcom famously operates on an incredibly tight schedule that is highly unusual in the animation industry. For years, shows were created from start to finish in just six days, and that allowed creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone to comment on current events, unlike other animated series that often take nine months or more to produce an episode. And in the 28 years since South Park premiered, they only missed a deadline once. According to Screen Rant, it happened back in 2013 and was because of a power outage. That’s why fans aren’t buying the claim that Parker and Stone — who have been taking two weeks between shows this season — missed a deadline a week after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. This comes as the show has faced criticism over its lampooning of Kirk, even though Kirk himself liked it and thought it was funny. The episode is called “Got a Nut,” and aired back on August 6, but after Kirk’s murder at a Turning Point USA event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, it was yanked from the rerun rotation. It is, however, still available to stream on Paramount+. We may never know exactly why Parker and Stone announced this delay just hours before the episode was set to premiere. However, you can understand why the timing is way too conspicuous for most people to buy. The idea that Parker and Stone simply missed a deadline for only the second time in over 300 episodes does seem a little absurd, and it makes you wonder if the episode needed to be changed following what happened last week. Perhaps we’ll know more when the episode that was supposed to air on Wednesday airs on September 24.
