Trey Parker Seriously Believed That One of the Best ‘South Park’ Episodes Ever Would Destroy the Series

In 2006, South Park asked the question, “How do you kill that which has no life?” while series co-creator Trey Parker pulled out his hair thinking that he had just learned how he would kill his show.

Simply by its premise, it’s easy to see why Parker thought that the iconic South Park Season 10 episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft” wouldn’t work. In addition to its profanity and its ruthlessly iconoclastic takes on pop culture, South Park is best known for its simple art style, inspired by the construction paper models that populated the show’s pilot episode. Animating most of a South Park episode within the massively popular MMORPG World of Warcraft and writing the entire episode based on the assumption that South Park’s audience was as enthralled by both the video game and the nerd culture surrounding it as its writers was a huge risk, but it paid off in spades as it earned South Park the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program.

Today, “Make Love, Not Warcraft” is one of the most quoted, most watched and most beloved episodes in the entire South Park catalog. But in the week leading up to October 4, 2006, Parker pleaded with his producers to pull the episode before it could air and possibly kill both South Park’s integrity and its following in one fell swoop like they were a couple of level 5 boars.

Back in 2016, Parker and Matt Stone allowed the Australian current affairs TV series The Feed to peek behind the curtain of the notoriously tight workweek during which Parker, Stone and their team created each South Park episode from pitch to final cut in just six days. During the interview, Parker admitted that, thanks to the stressors that come with such a rushed production schedule, he constantly finds himself worrying that the South Park episode they’re working on that week will be the end of the series.

“You get to Monday, and you’re like, ‘Oh my god,’” Parker said of his scheduled panic attack, “‘Dude, we’re going to have to call the network and tell them there’s no show.’ Every week.” Parker continued, “Every show I’m like, ‘This is a horrible show, I don’t want anyone to see it.’ There’s one episode we did, it was the first show of the season, and I’m like, ‘I’ve lost it. I don’t know how to do this anymore.’”

Parker recalled of his particularly powerful weekly scare, “I was begging Anne (Garefino, South Park executive producer), ‘Do not let this go on the air, because I don’t want the South Park legacy to be ruined, and this show is going to ruin it, because it’s so bad and I’m just going to feel terrible.’” 

Garefino declined Parker’s request, and the episode aired in its regular timeslot. “I just went home and was depressed and couldn’t sleep, and I got in the next day and they’re like, ‘Dude, people really like that show.’ And it was the show about World of Warcraft.”

Not only was “Make Love, Not Warcraft” a hit with South Park fans (and Emmy voters), but it also became the single most celebrated and embraced parody of World of Warcraft among the game’s massive player base. Today, the game isn’t nearly as omnipresent in nerd culture as it was when “Make Love, Not Warcraft” premiered, but the impact of the South Park episode ensured that, on the rare occasion that a WoW player leaves the house, they’ll never be caught dead wearing a gray T-shirt.