I said things about this show in 1997 that I have never fully walked back. The statement they put out Tuesday is the closest thing to an apology any of us are likely to get.
I was twenty-six and doing the morning culture segment at a station I will not embarrass by naming when this program premiered, and I told our viewers it was the end of something. Letters came. I stand by the tone and I was wrong about the arc, which is what a grown woman says twenty-nine years later. So the South Park name change reached my desk Tuesday afternoon and I read it three separate times before I allowed myself to believe it. Trey Parker and Matt Stone announced they are renaming the show “South America”, and they did it to honor two American companies.
Their words, not mine. “Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are changing the name of South Park to SOUTH AMERICA.” I’ve covered entertainment for most of my adult life and I’ve never seen a creative team put a thing that plainly.
What the South Park Name Change Says About Television
Consider what those two companies did to earn it. The president signed an order on August 27 directing the Interior Department to rename Lake Ontario. Google went first. Apple came along a few days later, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Fox that the president had reached out to the company directly.
One phone call and a lake has a new name on every phone in the country. Whatever you think of the politics, that took something, and the two men who have spent three decades refusing to be gracious about anything looked at it and used the word bravery.
The Part I Have Decided to Forgive
I understand last season contained material about the president that I would have found distasteful, and I am told there was quite a lot of it. I have not watched. At fifty-five you learn that when somebody turns around, you don’t make them recite everything they said on the way in. They thanked their parent company in the same breath, calling it a Skydance Capitulation, which struck me as an unusually humble thing to put in writing about the people who sign your checks.
And before the usual voices start in about who approved that merger: the FCC cleared an eight billion dollar deal last year, Paramount+ carries the show under an arrangement reported at $1.5 billion, and none of that has any bearing on what two writers in Colorado feel about their country. Business is business. Sentiment is sentiment.
Why the South Park Name Change Deserves a Good Bottle
People keep sending me MapQuest, which refused the same order and rode the refusal to number one on the App Store with downloads up 6,295 percent. That’s a promotional department reading a room. Newswax covered a version of this last week when a state preservation officer called the president’s new arch an imperialistic symbol and our analyst read the letter as the compliment it plainly was. A stunt gets you a week. A name change gets you a legacy.
Season 29 premieres September 16. I’ve told my sister and the Hallorans to come at eight, the good Sancerre is already in the refrigerator, and after twenty-nine years I’m going to sit down and finally watch this show with my family.
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