South Park Postpones New Episode Hours Before Airing; Creators Say “This One’s On Us”

Comedy Central announced that a new episode of South Park has been postponed just hours before its scheduled broadcast. The fifth episode of season 27 was set to air on Wednesday, September 17, but was delayed by a week. This marks an extremely rare instance of the show missing a production deadline in its long history.

In a statement posted on the show’s official X account, co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone took responsibility for the delay. “Apparently when you do everything at the last minute sometimes you don’t get it done,” the statement read. “This one’s on us. We didn’t get it done in time. Thanks to Comedy Central and South Park fans for being so understanding. Tune in next week!”

The show is known for its quick-turnaround production schedule, which allows it to remain highly topical. A 2011 documentary, Six Days to Air, detailed this process, revealing that episodes are often completed just hours before their scheduled airtime. While the show has a history of fast-paced production, this is a rare instance of a missed deadline, with a previous notable delay occurring in 2013 due to a power outage.

The postponed episode is now scheduled to air on Wednesday, September 24. After this episode, the season will continue on a bi-weekly schedule, with new episodes airing on October 15, October 29, November 12, November 26, and the season finale on December 10. The shift to a bi-weekly schedule this season was reportedly designed to give the creators more time to work on each episode.

The delay comes a week after Comedy Central removed a rerun of a previous episode from its cable schedule. That episode, titled “Got a Nut,” parodied Charlie Kirk, a prominent conservative activist who was killed on September 10. In the episode, the character Eric Cartman cosplays as Kirk and becomes a right-wing podcaster. The rerun was pulled in the wake of Kirk’s death to avoid controversy, but the episode remains available to stream on Paramount+.

While the official reason for the delay was a missed deadline, speculation on social media has suggested that the recent news regarding Charlie Kirk may have influenced the production of this week’s episode. Some fans speculated that the creators may have changed the episode’s storyline or altered its focus. However, the official statement from Parker and Stone attributed the delay solely to production issues.