South Park
American animated sitcom

South Park is an American animated sitcom created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone for Comedy Central. The series revolves around four boys—Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman, and Kenny McCormick—and their adventures in and around the title's Colorado town. South Park also features many recurring characters. The series became infamous for its profanity and dark, surreal humor that satirizes a large range of subject matter.
Parker and Stone developed South Park from two animated short films, both titled The Spirit of Christmas, released in 1992 and 1995. The second short became one of the first viral Internet videos, leading to the series' production. The pilot episode was produced using cutout animation; the remainder of the series uses computer animation based on the cutout technique. Since the fourth season, episodes have generally been written and produced during the week preceding their broadcast, with Parker serving as the lead writer and director.
Since its debut on August 13, 1997, 339 episodes of South Park have been broadcast. It debuted with great success, consistently earning the highest ratings of any basic cable program.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16538. VIAF identifies the subject as 292708258. The Library of Congress control number is no00073388. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1992, 1995 and 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “South Park” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.