Why ‘South Park’ Trumped Colbert

Plus: A ‘Dirty’ Assignment!

Donald Trump on South Park (Paramount+ screenshot)

One thing I constantly harp on—the reason this newsletter exists, in a way—is that you can’t understand what is being made in the entertainment industry if you don’t understand why it’s being made.

This is why, for the first five or so minutes of this week’s Across the Movie Aisle, I laid out the economic case against Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. Yes, yes: I understand all the political implications of canceling The Late Show on the heels of the legal settlement between Viacom and Donald Trump meant to grease the skids for the company’s sale to David Ellison’s Skydance. As I said in that episode and elsewhere, it was a horrible decision and one that clouds the entire news operation at CBS. It hurt them badly because it cost them credibility.¹ But the simple fact of the matter is that The Late Show loses money, and lots of it, because the economics of linear TV in general and late-night TV in particular are in freefall, and also because the average age of his viewers is 68, well out of the coveted 18–49 demo.

On top of that, there is no extended value for the show or the host. Colbert’s YouTube numbers are much worse than either Jimmy Fallon’s or Jimmy Kimmel’s; he doesn’t do viral gimmicks, so his social media presence is limited. When ABC needs a host for something like the Oscars, either for the ceremony itself or an after-show on ABC, Kimmel is often the guy they call. CBS doesn’t call on Colbert in that way. And late-night programming doesn’t have much library value for streaming services. Old clips of Johnny Carson are of historical significance, but no one is signing on to Peacock in the hopes of killing time by watching a Jay Leno monologue from The Tonight Show that first aired in 1998. (Ironically, late-night shows were the original efforts by media companies to “win the war on sleep,” to paraphrase Netflix’s Reed Hastings’s description of his company’s mission. But people now spend that last hour in bed scrolling through Instagram before turning the nightstand lamp off and hitting the hay.)

South Park, on the other hand, is incredibly valuable to Paramount+ because South Park is a show that folks will sit around and binge when they need to watch something to kill time. As Matt Belloni noted in his breakdown of the negotiations, South Park has accumulated the 20th-most hours streamed in 2025, according to Nielsen, an impressive feat considering there hasn’t been a new season of the show since March of 2023 (though there have been a handful of one-off specials). I couldn’t say for certain that South Park is “worth” $1.5 billion over the next five years—the economics of streaming remain somewhat vague and mysterious to me—purely in terms of signups and retentions, but it’s clearly valuable in a way The Late Show simply is not. Some number of users will ditch HBO Max for Paramount+ for South Park. No one really cares if The Late Show is on streaming at all.

And that gives Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the mad geniuses behind South Park, leeway that Colbert simply doesn’t have.² They can do a whole episode about Donald Trump (allegedly) having a micropenis while treating him like they treated Saddam Hussein and Paramount can’t do a darn thing about it because Paramount needs South Park. It helps that Parker and Stone—who have long railed against efforts to police speech on the right and left alike over the show’s nearly thirty years of existence—have the cultural capital to criticize the nascent woke right’s urge to tamp down on speech critical of the president via both lawsuits and government regulation.

Either way, the FCC (finally) cleared Paramount’s merger with Ellison’s Skydance yesterday. But something tells me Parker and Stone aren’t about to take their foot off the gas.

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For a little more on South Park vs. Trump, check out my conversation with Tim about the episode yesterday:

(Bulwark+ members can watch here without the ads! Membership has it’s privileges!)

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The Fantastic Four: First Steps Review

THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS CALLS TO MIND the early days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that first run of (largely) standalone films that introduced us to Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor. It’s competent and charming, well-acted with some fun set pieces, and relatively succinct at just under two hours. Like Superman, released two weekends ago, it’s not quite an origin story—just as with the caped Kryptonian, we’ve seen the FF origin on film several times already—but it is a story that gets to the essence of the characters and introduces us to them and their world with skill and ease. …

Director Matt Shakman has a good handle on the Fantastic Four’s family dynamics, the hotshot Johnny and the semi-morose Grimm bouncing nicely off the goofy H.E.R.B.I.E. robot that does most of the scut work around the house, like a well-trained iteration of Krypto. Three cheers for production designer Kasra Farahani, set decorator Jille Azis, and supervising art director Nick Gottschalk, who do a wonderful job of bringing the sort of Art Deco, mid-century modern look to life without making anything feel kitschy.

That said, the film doesn’t wrestle with any of its ideas about techno-optimism and world’s fair-style futurism, the promise and the peril of a post-conflict society. As solid as The Fantastic Four: First Steps is, one can’t help but feel as if there’s a spikier, more complicated movie just under the surface, one that got sanded down by the Marvel factory to make it palatable to as many people as possible by a studio that’s desperately in need of a big hit.

Click here to read the full review.

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THIS WEEK ON THE SHOW:

You know those videos that are like “Charlie Kirk DESTROYS 20 College Kids?” and “Mehdi Hasan VERSUS 20 Fascists?” I didn’t realize until recently that these were the brainchild of a single company. I talked with Puck Media Correspondent Julia Alexander about Jubilee and the disastrous impact it is having on the body politic and why they’re perfectly calibrated to dominate attention on YouTube.

Follow Bulwark Goes To Hollywood to your player of choice:

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | More

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ICYMI: BONUS FOR BULWARK+

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Assigned Viewing: Dirty Work (Prime Video)

Dirty Work (MovieStillsDB)

Boutique Blu-ray distributor Vinegar Syndrome earlier this year released Norm Macdonald’s Dirty Work with a limited edition set including a reconstruction of director Bob Saget’s original, more caustic cut of the film. The “Dirtier Cut” isn’t a director’s cut, per se, as Saget died a few years back and couldn’t put it together himself. If you can find a copy of this release, I recommend picking it up; it’s sold out on the Vinegar Syndrome website, but some third-party retailers have it and I imagine the non-limited version of the set will get a reprint sooner or later.

However, the original cut of the film is available to stream on Prime, and I really can’t recommend it enough. Is it high art? No. But it is a classic of that era of ’90s SNL-inflected comedy featuring Macdonald’s friends and collaborators like Chris Farley and Jim Downey and some great moments of Macdonald comedy, as when Macdonald, who has been impersonating a police officer and is wearing a police officer costume, calls up the actual police and addresses them as “Hello, real cops?” It’s a perfect setup-is-the-punchline gag, just a tossed-off bit of silliness read with a totally straight face that made me lose it on my couch.

1. A fact brilliantly satirized in this week’s South Park, it’s worth noting.

2. It helps that they are, simply, funnier than Colbert, whose big rejoinder to Trump was to shout “go fuck yourself” while the guys in Colorado put together an entire episode highlighting the bullying faux-Christianity of Trump and his supporters, culminating in a PSA that showed Trump wandering through the desert naked as his miniaturized member said that he approved this message. Then again, I’m out of Colbert’s target demo and perfectly suited for South Park’s, so maybe it’s just a matter of taste.