“South Park” arrived on Comedy Central on August 13, 1997, and it has not left. Created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the animated sitcom follows four grade-schoolers — Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman and Kenny McCormick — through the quiet, dysfunctional town of South Park, Colorado. It is crude, fast, and far smarter than its surface suggests.
Trailer, via South Park Studios.
Four Boys From a Colorado Basin
The premise is simple. Four kids, one small mountain town, and a rotating cast of students, families and elementary school staff around them. The show has run 29 seasons and 337 episodes, with its last airing dated September 16, 2026. It is one of Comedy Central’s longest-running programs.
The town is fictional, but the setting is not. South Park sits in the real South Park basin in the Rocky Mountains of central Colorado, roughly an hour’s drive from Denver. The show leans on that region — cattle ranchers, Old West theme parks, snowy weather, mountaineering, Mormons, and real landmarks like Casa Bonita and Cave of the Winds.
Parker and Stone, the Voices and the Friendship
Parker voices Cartman and Stan. Stone voices Kyle and Kenny. Mona Marshall voices Sheila Broflovski, and Jennifer Howell voices Bebe Stevens.
Stan is modeled after Parker; Kyle after Stone. The two are best friends on screen, and the pairing is meant to mirror the creators’ own friendship — a thread that runs through the whole series. Stan is written as an average American boy who keeps stumbling into mishaps, and between the twenty-second and twenty-seventh seasons his family lived at Tegridy Farms before selling it in “Sickofancy.” Kyle is Jewish, and the show satirizes how few other Jewish people live in South Park.
Cartman, the Antagonist at the Center
Cartman is amoral and increasingly psychopathic, and he is usually played as the antagonist. His antisemitism is a defining trait, and the show treats it as a punchline and a warning at once. This is where the series earns its reputation for profanity and dark, surreal humor that satirizes a huge range of subjects.
Two Shorts and a Viral Video
Parker and Stone built the show from two animated shorts, both titled “The Spirit of Christmas,” released in 1992 and 1995. The second became one of the first viral internet videos and led to the series being produced.
The pilot used cutout animation. Everything after it uses computer animation built on that cutout look. Since the fourth season, episodes have generally been written and produced in the week before broadcast, with Parker as lead writer and director. That schedule is the show’s real engine — it lets South Park answer the news while the news is still warm.
The Numbers Behind the Run
- First aired: August 13, 1997
- Last aired: September 16, 2026
- Network: Comedy Central
- Seasons: 29
- Episodes: 337
- Renewed through 2027 (August 2021)
- TMDB audience score: 8.3/10, 5138 votes
What Holds Up and What Doesn’t
The week-long production cycle explains both the best and worst of South Park. It keeps the satire current and vicious, but it also means episodes can age into a time capsule of a news cycle nobody remembers. The early cutout seasons still look like nothing else on television; the later computer-animated ones are cleaner but less strange.
The bigger achievement is the friendship at the center. Parker and Stone turned their own partnership into Stan and Kyle, then handed the show’s id to Cartman and let him run. That structure has carried 29 seasons without collapsing.
South Park is not subtle and never wanted to be. Its 8.3 score is fair — high enough to credit the craft, low enough to admit the misses. What matters is that a show built from a viral short in 1995 became one of the longest-running programs on basic cable, and it did it by staying willing to offend.
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