South Park Officially Starts Its Most Important New Era In 8 Years

Published Sep 2, 2026, 1:00 PM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

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While South Park season 29’s arrival was already exciting, the prospect of a new era for the long-running series makes this upcoming outing uniquely thrilling. South Park has been around for a long time, despite how much the show’s timely satire might make it feel au courant. The show first began airing on Comedy Central way back in 1997 and became an instant hit, with its feature film spin-off South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut arriving in cinemas two years later in 1999.

Since then, South Park has enjoyed a bizarre trajectory that isn’t shared by its main competitors, the even longer-running The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, King of the Hill, or Bob’s Burgers. Most of those shows provided viewers with standard network TV seasons of around 22 new episodes a year, but South Park cut back its production as early as season 3. Seasons 3-16 of South Park had as many as 17 and as few as 14 episodes each, while the show reduced its output to only 10 episodes per season from seasons 17-23.

This was already a surprise in the highly regimented world of TV scheduling, but the ever-controversial South Park upset the proverbial apple cart even further during the COVID-19 pandemic and the industry strikes of 2023. In 2021, South Park released two feature-length specials in lieu of a season, followed by a six-episode season 25 in 2022 and another six-episode season 26 in 2023. Just when viewers thought they were familiar with the show’s modus operandi, 2025 saw the series release South Park seasons 27 and 28 back to back, with both including five episodes apiece.

South Park Season 29 Is The First Post-Tegridy Farms Season

This chaotic release schedule is likely due to the fact South Park’s creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone write and create each episode along with the production crew in the week between their release dates, a practice that is almost unheard of in the world of TV production. However, South Park season 28’s series finale signaled an end to the instability by closing off the show’s longest lasting storyline in history.

Since season 22 back in 2018, South Park’s storylines have revolved around Randy Marsh’s ill-fated marijuana business, Tegridy Farms. Season 22, episode 4, “Tegridy Farms,” saw Randy set up the business in an attempt to get back to his roots, and the following eight years followed the highs and lows of this arc at the expense of less screen time for the show’s original main characters.

Although South Park had taken to focusing on Randy more than its original stars Kenny, Kyle, Cartman, Stan, and Butters since around season 12, the Tegridy Farms plot doubled down on this approach in a way that would have been almost unthinkable only a few seasons earlier. There was a time when South Park episodes that didn’t feature the boys, such as season 2, episode, “Terrance and Phillip in Not Without My Anus,” and season 4, episode 14, “Pip,” were seen as attempts to intentionally troll its fan base.

With the Tegridy Farms storyline, the show began experimenting with an unprecedented level of narrative focus on Randy, something that South Park fans criticized at the time. Although some of these episodes were funny and some found room for subplots involving the original main protagonists, just as many of the Tegridy Farms episodes were guilty of over-relying on the one-note gag and Randy’s tiresome sidekick Randy.

South Park’s Tegridy Farms Arc Was The Show’s Longest Storyline Ever

The sheer duration of the subplot was almost an experiment in anti-humor itself, as South Park’s creators sometimes seemed aware of its mixed reception. In 2022’s streaming special The Streaming Wars Part 1, the song “We Miss You Randy” saw South Park itself ask what happened to the original characterization of Stan’s mild-mannered geologist father, and question whether he would ever return to his old self.

Of course, the concluding chapter of that same special instead saw Randy double down on his latest absurd scheme, and it would be three long years and three seasons before the show finally put Tegridy Farms to bed for good. In a bizarre South Park Christmas special that brought back characters from throughout the show’s long, anarchic history, season 28’s finale saw Stan wish that his family could return to their old home and things might finally return to normality.

South Park’s Return To Normality Will Redefine The Long-Running Show

South Park Studios/YouTube

As anyone who has seen a single episode of the series can attest, South Park has never been a normal series by any means. The show’s version of normality is one populated by talking turds, the Devil and Jesus themselves, and a running gag wherein one of the show’s ten-year-old heroes is regularly gruesomely killed and returns to life in the next episode.

However, viewers still shouldn’t underestimate just how much of a massive change the end of the Tegridy Farms arc represents for the series going forward. Everything from the feature-length specials The Streaming Wars Parts 1 and 2, Joining the Panderverse, and The End of Obesity to the entire Donald Trump storyline in seasons 27 and 28 was centered on Tegridy Farms. Thus, the end of this plot marks a massive change for the series.

South Park is now in a tricky double bind. On one hand, the Tegridy Farms gave the show a valid narrative reason to parody Trump and his vice president via Towelie’s trip to Washington DC in season 27, meaning this subplot didn’t feel like an aimless digression. On the other hand, South Park’s funniest episodes ever almost all focus on the show’s original heroes, not Randy, so there is a valid argument for season 29 renewing this approach.

For South Park to feel more like its classic, pre-season 22 self, the show needs to steer clear of giving Randy Marsh another subplot that makes him central to season 29 now that the Tegridy Farms story has come to an organic end. At the same time, South Park’s hilarious and cutting jabs at the current administration worked in large part because of the otherwise divisive Tegridy Farms subplot. Thus, South Park’s upcoming era now needs to balance these two considerations in the show’s new episodes.

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  Trey Parker

  Eric Cartman / Stan Marsh (voice)

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  Matt Stone

  Kyle Broflovski / Kenny McCormick (voice)