“South Park” returned Wednesday with “Conflict of Interest,” the fifth episode of Season 27, following a one-week delay. The episode, originally scheduled to air Sept. 17 on Comedy Central, was postponed just hours before broadcast. “Apparently, when you do everything at the last minute, sometimes you don’t get it done,” said co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone in a statement posted to Instagram regarding the skipped week. “This one’s on us. We didn’t get it done in time.”
The delay was unusual for the long-running series, which produces episodes week by week. Some speculated Comedy Central postponed the episode out of caution after conservative pundit Charlie Kirk was assassinated on Sept. 10. The network had previously pulled a repeat of Season 27’s second episode, “Got a Nut,” which parodies Kirk. (“Got a Nut” remains available to stream on Paramount+.) Stone dismissed concerns of censorship, saying, “No one pulled the episode, no one censored us, and you know we’d say so if true.”
“Conflict of Interest” takes aim at FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who recently pressured ABC to take Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air. The episode places Carr in a string of slapstick misadventures involving President Donald Trump, who is trying to abort a child he is having with Satan. Carr falls down stairs, eats a poisoned meal and contracts toxoplasmosis, which the show jokes could threaten his “freedom of speech.” In one scene, the JD Vance character directly references Carr’s real-world warning to ABC: “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way.”
The Chairman of the FCC might lose his freedom of speech. pic.twitter.com/9aGiHHaWmp
— South Park (@SouthPark) September 25, 2025
“South Park” is expected to return to its bi-weekly schedule, with new episodes airing every other Wednesday from Oct. 15 through Dec. 10.
