This Day in American History: South Park Debuts
- For America
- Aug 13
- 2 min read
On this day in 1997, a crudely animated show nobody expected to survive premiered on a tiny cable channel with basically no marketing -- and Comedy Central quietly hoped 200,000 people might show up to watch.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone met in film class at the University of Colorado Boulder, bonding over a shared taste for absurd, boundary-pushing comedy. In 1992, using construction paper cutouts and an old camera, they made a crude five-minute short in which foul-mouthed grade-schoolers bring a demonic snowman to life. A 1995 follow-up short spread across college campuses on VHS tapes and, once early internet video became possible, became one of the first pieces of content to go viral online -- landing on the desk of Comedy Central executive Brian Graden, who commissioned a full series.
The pilot episode tested so poorly with focus groups, particularly with women, that the show nearly got shelved before it ever aired. Comedy Central ordered a cautious run of just six episodes. On August 13, 1997, the series premiered with virtually no marketing behind it -- Graden later said he'd have been happy with 200,000 viewers on the tiny channel. The premiere pulled in 889,000.
Nobody at Comedy Central understood why at first. It turned out college dormitories across the country were just getting high-speed T1 internet connections that fall, and students were discovering and sharing the show en masse. Ratings kept climbing through the season, eventually reaching as many as 5.6 million viewers for a single episode -- staggering numbers for basic cable at the time. The initial six-episode order quickly expanded to thirteen.
Nearly three decades later, the show is still airing new episodes on the same network, has earned multiple Emmys and a Peabody Award, and has spawned a hit Broadway musical in The Book of Mormon. Parker and Stone signed a deal in 2025 extending the show for 50 more episodes -- proof that a show almost nobody expected to survive its first season turned into one of the longest-running scripted series in American television history.
Also on this day:
1961 -- East Germany begins sealing the border between East and West Berlin, the first step toward building the Berlin Wall.
1967 -- "Bonnie and Clyde," starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, has its U.S. premiere.
2016 -- Swimmer Michael Phelps wins his record 23rd and final Olympic gold medal in Rio de Janeiro.
A show Comedy Central hoped 200,000 people might watch pulled in nearly a million on night one, and it's still running new episodes today. Sometimes the little cartoon that could just keeps going.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter, Television Academy, Wikipedia. Photo: Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
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