Fans Are Shocked By How The Creators Of 'South Park' Write The Show
$900 million was the final price for six more years of South Park fun. That means multiple more seasons, and even more "Pandemic Special"-length movies. According to Decider, two of these movies will air on Paramount+ before the end of the year. All of this was part of the deal of a century. The 2021 Viacom deal is one of the most profitable in all of TV history, proving that the Matt Stone and Trey Parker show is very much alive. For a cartoon satire that was born out of a dislike for filmmaking, this is nothing short of a massive success story.
But with all the success comes an incredible amount of work. In fact, fans are shocked by just how much work it takes to make an episode of South Park. Sure, animating anything is hard. But Matt and Trey make things even more challenging for themselves by adhering to a brutally tight release schedule.
Each Episode Of South Park Is Made In Less Than A Week...
Unlike The Simpsons or South Park's mortal enemy Family Guy, which spends months perfecting their scripts and animation before a fall release, Matt and Trey's show is done in less than a week. We're talking about writing the script, animating, doing the voices, and handing it to the network to air... in just over 6 days.
"The way we've always done the show, but now [in the later seasons] we've got it down to an art form of," series co-creator Trey Parker said in an interview. "The show airs on Wednesday. The Thursday before that, Matt [Stone] and I go to work early in the morning with the writers and we go 'Okay, what do we do this week?' I mean, it's a weekly... it's just like Saturday Night Live, basically."
"We don't know what we're doing. Start at the beginning of every week. Don't know. Don't plan ahead at all," Matt Stone added.
In their Thursday morning meeting with their writer's room, ideas start flying, and at about 12 PM they have a couple of funny ideas for scenes that they put into animation right away. This is because they want to get their animation team working as fast as possible. But the writing continues through Friday and Saturday. But by Sunday and Monday, the team is up all night trying to work out the script kinks and all of the animation requirements.
"We just about kill ourselves every week," Matt said.
Both Matt and Trey are in things together the whole way through. They are both in the writer's room and they both do voices. The only difference is that trey tends to direct most of the episodes himself. This includes the bulk work of the editing.
"It's very concentrated around the two of us, so we can do a very tight production," Matt explained.
Unlike most productions, every department that works on South Park works in the same building. This means that Matt and Trey can move from the writer's room to the editing suite or the voice recording studio with ease.
"We always deliver the show on Wednesday morning and on Tuesday night we're always there at three in the morning going 'Oh, how we can change this, change that'. Animate the voice. Put it in," Trey said.
The Real Reason Why South Park Needs To Be Made So Quickly
So, all of this begs the question... why do Matt and Trey do this? They could easily produce their show like every other animated show. But that would defeat much of the purpose of South Park. The show was designed to be a reflection of America. That's what the town of South Park is. And to properly reflect whatever America is going through, the show needs to be relevant. So pop culture and news stories, as well as general themes that society is dealing with are always worked into each episode of the show then aired that week so that audiences truly connect with the show.
"The hard part that really goes into that is, at the end of the day, we really do have to come up with 'what's our take on all this'", Trey explained, referring to any given news story, tragedy, controversy, or pop culture reference that South Park deals with on any given week. "\what's our philosophy on this that's not just what everyone else is talking about."
Here lies Matt and Trey's greatest genius. Not only do they deal with relevant topics but they find unique ways of dissecting them much as a modern-day philosopher would. However, they're also doing the incredibly hard task of also making it funny and fit within their story world.
Ultimately, they boil almost every debate down to one ethos, "The people screaming on this side and the people screaming on that side are the same people and it's okay to be someone in the middle laughing at both of them."
The Stylistic Choices Have Aided Their Tight Schedule
Two of the most stylistic choices of South Park, the similar voices and the signature sloppy animation is actually there out of necessity. While it's made the show downright iconic, it's, more importantly, made things easier for the creators. They don't need to make the animated mouths move perfectly nor do they even need to animate legs walking as all the characters just sort of hobble around. There's also no need to work with a large cast as Matt and Trey voice the vast majority of the characters on South Park.
But when Matt and Trey started out making their show, they did it because they thought it was funny. They were a fan of the very simplistic approach to animation and they thought doing all the voices was entertaining. Little did they know that these decisions would end up being incredibly helpful for the show's demanding deadline schedule. Of course, when Matt and Trey first started out the networks absolutely hated South Park... And now it's one of the most successful television shows of all time.
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