I’ve been watching South Park since it first debuted in 1997 and have become used to the 14 episodes release schedule a year of 7 in fall and 7 in spring, so I was very excited the the 17th season was only a month or so away. At least I was.
In an interview with The New York Times, co-created Matt Stone made the announcement that not only are they shortening this new and future seasons to 10 episodes each, they will also not air any of them until September 25, 2013. When asked why they were making the change, Mr. Stone replied,
Why did we do seven and seven to begin with? We just sort of made that up. And we are switching to 10 for the same reason. It just sounded like a good number, and we won’t break up the year so we can more easily do other stuff … In our first season, you had to show up on Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. on the comedy channel to catch the show. Now, I don’t even know where or how people watch our show. We sort of don’t really care about ratings. It’s more important to come up with work that will add to the library in a way that we’re proud of and will make people want to catch the show wherever they want to.
As anyone who has been a long time fan can attest, the last season or so of South Park, while still full of funny and sharp satire, haven’t exactly been on par with the glory days of a few years ago. So, while I’m definitely disappointed that there is that much longer to wait for new South Park, I am firmly on the side of Matt and Trey taking more time to create a quality product than dumping whatever crap they can come up with just to meet a quota.
How about the rest of you South Park fans? What do you think about this new release schedule?