If you sow the wind, the saying goes, you reap the whirlwind; it’s a thought that must be keeping Paramount executives up at night. On Monday, the media giant agreed to a reported $1.5 billion distribution deal with Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of the anarchic cartoon series South Park, that keeps the show on Comedy Central through 2030 and brings its massive archive to Paramount+. On Wednesday, South Park opened its 27th season with an episode ridiculing Paramount into oblivion for its recent habit of toadying to Donald Trump. Imagine being such a business genius that you paid someone $1.5 billion to yank your pants down on national television. You sow the global streaming rights to a gleefully juvenile, antiauthoritarian comedy show, you reap the sound of Eric Cartman laughing in your face.
To understand the full strangeness of the Paramount–South Park situation, including its potential implications for the future of free speech in America, we'll have to run through some backstory. Parts of this will already be familiar to you if you've turned on a TV in the past two weeks.
Paramount, which owns CBS as well as MTV, Nickelodeon, and a slew of other television networks, has spent most of the past year trying to bring about an $8 billion merger with Skydance, a production company owned by David Ellison, the son of the right-wing tech billionaire Larry Ellison, who’s the fourth-richest person on earth. To accomplish this merger, Paramount needed the government's permission, in the form of regulatory approval from the Federal Communications Commission. It's exceedingly easy to conclude that to gain this permission—which finally came through on Thursday—Paramount has been bending over backward to suck up to Trump. I don't know whether it's even anatomically possible to suck up while bending over backward, but Paramount's apparently been giving it the old college try.
Here's some pretty damning evidence that it's been sucking up. Earlier this month, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to Trump's future presidential library to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump back in October. The lawsuit accused 60 Minutes—which airs on CBS—of deceitfully editing an interview with Kamala Harris, Trump's rival in the 2024 presidential election. Legal experts viewed the suit as comically flimsy and as a direct attack on the First Amendment. Paramount settled anyway. Now, I am definitely not saying that the lawsuit was a flimsy pretext designed to help Paramount launder a bribe to secure the president's support on the Skydance merger. If you want to say that, I can't stop you.
Here's another way it sure seemed to be sucking up, and this one you've definitely heard about. Shortly after the 60 Minutes settlement was announced, Stephen Colbert, the host of CBS's Late Show, called the settlement "a big, fat bribe." (I couldn't stop him, either.) He did this on his show. His show is the most popular late-night talk show on television. Two days after his comment, Paramount canceled it. Paramount's leaders claimed that they axed Colbert purely for financial reasons and not at all to curry favor with Trump. If you want to say that this claim is an obvious lie that wouldn't fool a child, alas, I am once again powerless to stand in your way.
More on Paramount, Colbert, and Trump
This was the context in which the South Park premiere dropped, and this is why the timing of the episode was so tragic for Paramount executives. They worked so hard! They certainly seemed to be doing everything in their power to make the president like them. Their actions implied that they had no problem with selling out the First Amendment. What resulted was a template for media organizations to cave to MAGA harassment. They torched one of their most iconic shows and knifed one of their most beloved talents. They did all this terrible stuff, and it was succeeding—Trump was happy with them! And then hours after they dropped nine figures on South Park, Stone and Parker thanked them by releasing a scorched-earth assault almost guaranteed to make the president mad at them again. They got their merger, sure, but Trump's crosshairs are an expensive place to be, and South Park threatened to land them right between the hash marks. A morally vacuous boardroom just can't catch a break these days!
I'm not usually a South Park guy, but in an environment where the media is increasingly being treated as the toy of a handful of right-leaning oligarchs, the thermonuclear disdain of this episode was a beautiful thing to see. It wasn't subtle—at one point it depicted a nude Donald Trump lying in bed with Satan—but it was merciless. (Again: At one point it depicted a nude Donald Trump, lying in bed with Satan.) Trump has bragged that Skydance will give him $20 million in free advertising and/or PSAs on top of the $16 million payout from Paramount; the South Park premiere concluded with a fake, AI-generated PSA in which a naked Trump roams through the desert, waving around a "teeny-tiny" penis. There are lines that call out Paramount by name. There are jokes about the 60 Minutes lawsuit. There are jokes about the president being behind the cancellation of Colbert and jokes about Trump's name being on the Epstein list. I'd summarize the whole thing for you, but with a seven-day free trial, you can stream the whole thing on Paramount+.
Here's what I keep thinking about when I look at the Paramount mess: In the spring of 2000, shortly after he became president of Russia, Vladimir Putin went to war against a puppet. There was an independent television station called NTV in Russia; NTV ran a wildly popular satirical show called Puppets, which routinely made fun of politicians. Putin was reportedly infuriated by the Putin puppet that appeared on the show. This fury was reportedly behind his decision, just four days after his inauguration, to order the police to raid NTV headquarters and, within a month or so, arrest the network's founder. The Russian government demanded that NTV withdraw the Putin puppet; in the end, despite large public protests, the network was taken over by a state-controlled company, a move that heralded the sharp, and ongoing, restriction of free speech in Russia.
It's easy to see comedy as peripheral to more serious issues in society—after all, it's unserious by definition—but comedy is often the first thing to be targeted by authoritarians in their efforts to clamp down on dissent. Which is why Paramount's apparent race to comply in advance by firing Colbert has been so disgraceful, and why it's so satisfying when the puppets, or the cartoons, manage to fight back.
The White House is currently throwing a fit over the South Park premiere, more or less as you'd expect. “The Left’s hypocrisy truly has no end," spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement. "For years they have come after ‘South Park’ for what they labeled as ‘offense’ content [sic], but suddenly they are praising the show." Yes, oddly, I tend to criticize a show when it does things I think are bad and praise it when it does things I think are good. This is a mark of my hypocrisy.
Still, taking on Parker and Stone could be more of a risk for Trump than you might think. South Park prints money, and its creators, who've just signed a gargantuan new deal, are in a far stronger position with Paramount than Colbert ever was. Moreover, unlike Colbert, whose core fan base is basically Daily Show liberals, South Park has enormous credibility among the very online, politically disaffected young white men who form one of Trump's key constituencies. And this is happening at a moment when Trump's weird cultural coalition of manosphere podcast listeners, internet conspiracy theorists, wellness influencers, and Elon Musk stans is already fraying in several places. He may be losing Joe Rogan. The conspiracy theorists are turning on him over the Epstein case. Measles outbreaks are rising, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's health secretary, is being sued by a group he himself founded, essentially for not weakening vaccine protocols enough. As for Musk stans—well, you know that one already.
Trump could go after Colbert without alienating his own followers. But to go after South Park in the same way could piss off his army of 8chan-adjacent boy meme artists, at a moment when his polling is underwater and his base is closer to splintering than it's ever been. If the stakes weren't so high, it would be a great scenario for a comedy. Trump rose to power by harnessing some of the most violent and irrational forces in American society. By their very nature, those forces are unpredictable. Eventually, they tend to turn on whoever tries to control them. You reap what you sow.
