South Park Shockingly Started a New Season, But It’s Continuing the Same Story Anyway

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This listing really threw South Park fans for a loop as not only did this change make Season 27 one of the shortest in the animated series’ history, but the premiere for Season 28 picked up right from where it all left off. The story that had sparked with Season 27’s premiere is now continuing forward through Season 28 as well as there are going to be four more episodes released through the rest of the year that will help to round things out when it’s all done.

What’s Going On With South Park?

Courtesy of South Park Studios

South Park Season 28 officially premiered with the episode, “Twisted Christian” with Comedy Central and Paramount+ earlier this week. While Comedy Central themselves had not revealed this to be the start of Season 28, their promotional materials also never noted the ten episodes released this year would all be part of Season 27. It’s something we all assumed to be the case considering that ten episode seasons was the length of seasons in the series’ past, but now it seems to not be the case. At least as the broadcast habits for South Park continues to change.

South Park’s seasonal schedule has been going through major changes since the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of a regular season, the show came back for a few “specials” instead. Then as it continued to forge a different deal with Paramount, there were a couple of specials released in the years to come alongside six episode actual seasons of the TV series. This ended up being a lot of the reason why there were so many contract issues when it came to the animated series’ rights in the months that followed, and one of the many reasons why it took so long to settle things with Paramount.

Representatives for Comedy Central explained that South Park never outright stated that Season 27 would be ten episodes long (which would be a return to form for the series), and that is the case when going back on their promotional materials for the season thus far. Yet, there’s still no full explanation for why this ten episode run has been broken into two five episode seasons. There might be something more at hand when it comes to its legal licensing rights, but it’s all speculation about that at the moment.

What Does This Mean for South Park Season 28?

Courtesy of South Park Studios

Ultimately, this new Season 28 designation for South Park seems to mean nothing in the grand scheme. South Park Season 28’s premiere does indeed continue the story from the first five episodes seen before, and acts like an “Episode 6” of that season. It’s still building on the wider story between United States President Donald Trump, Satan, and Vice President JD Vance. It has a much larger focus on how Jesus is changing within the newer take on Christianity in the world, and there’s something going on with Cartman that ties him into all of it as well.

There have been a lot of teases that current events are also tied into satanic rituals or visuals from episodes in Season 27, and Season 28 continues to thread that needle with the reveal that the viral “6 7” meme is likely tying into a way to stop the Antichrist as well. The series is still leading towards a climax with its newest episode as more changes are starting to go into effect, so thankfully the season changing doesn’t mean that everything from before will be thrown out because of the new (and relatively arbitrary) number coinciding with it.

South Park Season 28 will be continuing with new episodes releasing on October 29th, November 12th, November 26th, and December 10th. If they can pull this off, then South Park will have technically told a single story across two different seasons. This would be a major milestone for the long running animated series that has been steadily changing its continuity with major moves in the last few years. It just remains to be seen if that’s actually going to be worth it in the end. What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!