There are business deals, and then there's whatever the hell Trey Parker and Matt Stone just did. You take $1.5 billion from Paramount, a sum that could float a small nation, and your first move—less than a day later—is to deliver a piece of television so unrelentingly ugly and unhinged it feels less like a premiere and more like a hostage tape.
I've seen artists bite the hand that feeds them. I was there when Brando sent Sacheen Littlefeather to the Oscars. This is different. This is lighting a nine-figure contract on fire and using it to illuminate a naked Satanic orgy.
The episode, titled “Sermon on the Mount,” which premiered last night, is ostensibly about… well, it's not really about anything. It's a fever dream. A frantic, hallucinatory montage of grotesque imagery targeting Donald Trump with a kind of nihilistic fury that makes their old Scientology episode look like a gentle ribbing. But the chatter isn't about the usual shock-value gags. It's about the last ninety seconds.
That's when the episode abruptly shears away from animation. We're suddenly watching what looks like live-action footage, a photorealistic deepfake of Trump wandering a desert, stripping naked, and delivering a broken, glitching monologue. His skin glows with an unhealthy digital sheen, his voice cuts out, his eyes flicker. It's not comedy. It's something closer to experimental horror, a piece of tech-driven surrealism that belongs in a midnight screening at a forgotten festival, not on basic cable.
And that, it turns out, is precisely the point. A source with knowledge of the production confirmed to me this morning that the sequence is not new. It's salvaged footage from Parker and Stone's long-abandoned 2022 film project, Deep Fake: The Movie.
Remember that? Barely anyone does. It was a secretive feature, their first since 2004's Team America: World Police, that was built entirely around AI-generated political impersonations. The project was quietly shelved at the start of the pandemic, another cinematic ghost. Until now. They've resurrected a fragment of it and stitched it onto the end of their season premiere like a Frankenstein's monster.
What's fascinating here isn't the politics of it. Yeah yeah, the commentary is there for those who want it. What's interesting is the method. In a September 2024 interview, the duo stated they were done satirizing Trump directly. Then they do this. It's a deliberate contradiction, a middle finger not just to their new corporate parents at Paramount, but to anyone who thinks they can predict their next move.
Their last real film was two decades ago, a masterclass in puppet-based satire. Now, they've unveiled a piece of a film built on a technology that barely existed then. It makes you wonder what else is sitting in that vault. Deep Fake: The Movie was meant to be their next major artistic statement. Instead, it died on a hard drive somewhere in Marina del Rey.
The question isn't whether this episode was funny. It's uncomfortably funny, in the way a car crash is compelling. The real question is why they chose to show us this now. Are they simply emptying their notebooks, using their television show as a graveyard for dead ideas? Or are they testing the waters to resurrect a project that was too volatile even for them?
After a deal this size, most creators would play it safe. They would deliver a reliable, palatable version of what made them famous. Instead, Parker and Stone dug up the corpse of a dead movie to prove a point. They don't have bosses anymore. Maybe they never did.
