‘South Park’ Creator Matt Stone Perfectly Explains the Problem With the TV Business From the Audience’s Perspective
With the way streaming services handle their most beloved shows, South Park creator Matt Stone almost misses the time when the biggest problem with TV was some nipple-rubbing a-hole at the cable company.
When South Park first premiered on Comedy Central in 1997, Trey Parker and Stone saw plenty of examples out there for how to do an animated, adult-friendly comedy show right. Parker and Stone looked up to the comedy geniuses behind The Simpsons, and they revered Mike Judge for what he managed to do with Beavis and Butt-Head. And, ultimately, the business model behind these shows was simple, effective and easy for Parker and Stone to imitate: pump out roughly 20 solid, inspired and consistently funny episodes per year, keep the ratings high and secure that season extension at the end of it all.
As long as the show was funny every week, people would keep tuning in, the show would stay on the air and the showrunners got to try and meet the bar they set for themselves the next year — lather, rinse and repeat.
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Then, the streaming revolution massively disrupted the business of television, and rather than networks putting out consistently high-quality weekly shows to maintain their viewership and make their money, the complicated economics of streaming now dictate the quality of the product and the creative decisions of the showrunners in unpredictable and often unsatisfying ways. Speaking at a Bloomberg Live event last week, Stone reflected on his experience attempting to get into the hottest new streaming shows and delivered a summary of the sorry state of TV that struck a chord with TV-watchers everywhere:
“I don’t watch any television,” Stone admitted in the full interview. “I got kids, I got work. … I’m not a TV person. I never have been, personally, and now I find the whole thing bewildering.”
“I feel burned (by) the last couple TV shows that I’ve gotten into,” Stone continued, “and I do feel like this has been a casualty or a problem with the streaming revolution is that, like, someone will say, ‘You gotta watch this show, you gotta watch The Mandalorian, you’ve gotta watch Battlestar Gallactica. And I’ll go on, and I’ll start watching it, and, goddamn, it’s great! And I’m like, I am missing something!”
Then, of course, the show begins to break down. “Then, you get into the second season, and there’s that episode that’s bullshit. And I feel so betrayed,” Stone said of the inevitable drop in quality during that extended break between shortened seasons. “I don’t have a rational (response). I’m not like, ‘Oh, well, you know what? The economics, they really tried.’ I don’t do that. I go, ‘Fuck you, you’re wasting my time.’”
Stone went on to opine, “The business that the streaming revolution has created is screwing with people’s heads and destroying the art,” concluding, “As soon as I feel like you’re wasting my time, I feel completely betrayed. Because I fell in love with something, and now I know you’re screwing with me, and you’re screwing with my heart, and I have a short fuse, and that’s that. Shut the computer, and then I don’t watch TV for three more years.”
Whether it’s streamers hyper-fixating on viewership metrics, refusing to staff competent writers for multiple seasons or losing track of what made shows work in the first place, the end result gives Stone a feeling that many other spurned TV-watchers have felt — TV shows today feel engineered to waste time rather than tell a good story.
But, hey, it’s easy to point fingers when you’re as successful as Stone. Not every TV show can put out six banger episodes every two years.
