South Park Season 29 will return on Sept. 16, and Comedy Central says new episodes will follow every two weeks through late November. The run is set for Sept. 30, Oct. 14, Oct. 28, Nov. 11 and Nov. 25.
The new season puts the long-running animated series back on air after a stretch in which it has leaned hard into politics, especially parodies of President Donald Trump and members of his administration. The show first debuted in 1997 and is now entering its 29th season.
That schedule matters because South Park is famously made on a tight timeline, with episodes often not finished until shortly before they air. Trey Parker has said he and Matt Stone would not go back to work on the show until the last week of August, a sign that the production machine was still moving late in the summer ahead of the premiere.
The series has spent much of its recent run turning current politics into punch lines. In Season 27, it introduced a scathing parody of Trump, and a December finale built to a showdown involving Trump, J.D. Vance, Satan and Jesus. The show also depicted Vance as Trump’s servant and Kristi Noem as a gun-toting dog killer, drawing an immediate response from the White House, where a spokesperson said the series had not been relevant for over 20 years and was hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention.
Parker has defended the direction by saying the target has changed with the moment, not the show. “We’re always doing pop culture, and they’re pop culture now,” he said. Stone has sounded less enthusiastic about the subject matter, saying, “You don’t want to do this political stuff,” and then, “We don’t want to do it, either. We would rather not!”
The contrast is the story heading into September: a series that says it would rather not live inside politics, but has found its biggest recent audience in doing exactly that. The next test is whether South Park Season 29 keeps pushing that line, or uses the new batch of episodes to move somewhere else while the country is still watching every joke for a target.
