Trey Parker has a confession to make. "I've started confiding in people, other artists mostly, that I hate making 'South Park' and I always have," he said during a recent visit to New York. He continued: "It's super stressful. I'm always miserable. I want to kill myself every week."
Mr. Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of "South Park," will have that problem for at least the next three years. Over the summer, they signed an agreement with Comedy Central to produce the animated series about four foulmouthed Colorado boys through the end of 2008. (The monetary terms of the deal have not been released.) But the show's enduring success does not mean that making "South Park" has become any easier for its two creators, who met in college at the University of Colorado. Between them, Mr. Stone, 34, and Mr. Parker, 36, write, direct and edit each episode, and they give their voices to most of the main characters. The second half of Season 9 begins tonight at 10. (Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker produce seven episodes in the spring and seven in the fall.)
"South Park" has evolved from a cranky, obscene voice of 1990's slacker culture to a high-profile entertainment brand, in large part because it provides a continuous running commentary on current events. Eight years of tackling up-to-the-minute issues like the search for Osama bin Laden, the controversy over Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ" and the right-to-die questions raised by the court battle over Terri Schiavo have elevated Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone to a position as opinion arbiters: viewers count on divisive, newsworthy topics getting the "South Park" treatment.
Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker bristle at these expectations. "Now it's like, 'What's "South Park" going to do this week about Hurricane Katrina?' " Mr. Stone said. "I don't know what we're going to do. We should do an episode about how the town can't wait to see this show and what they're going to do about Hurricane Katrina." (They may complain, but they can't help themselves: on tonight's episode, a beaver dam breaks, causing a flood in a neighboring town. Assigning blame becomes the top priority.)
Animated series are not known for their timeliness, but "South Park" is different. When the show began in 1997, Mr. Parker, Mr. Stone and their staff would spend two weeks on an episode. Now they create each one, from start to finish, in six days, handing it over to Comedy Central on the morning of the broadcast. The process evolved from what Mr. Stone called "sheer procrastination" and Mr. Parker called "laziness."
Doug Herzog, Comedy Central's president, said: "For Matt and Trey, life is still a term paper. They put it under the professor's door at 11:59."
This crunch is what allows "South Park" to comment in real time on zeitgeist themes, from news headlines to video-game releases, but it's a harried process. Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker begin the Thursday-to-Wednesday week in the writers' room, where they throw around ideas. When they hit on ones that might work, Mr. Parker writes individual scenes so that the animators can begin creating the actual episode. As days pass, those scenes add up to 21 minutes with, eventually, a beginning, an end and a plot. As for how they arrive at an episode's larger narrative, Mr. Parker described the different approaches: "Do we come at it from, 'Remember this from third grade'? Do we come at it from, 'This happened on the news'?"
Sometimes an idea is character-driven. "Like, 'We need a Kyle story, there hasn't been much Kyle this season,' " Mr. Parker said. Those episodes, where the boys are just boys, are Mr. Stone's and Mr. Parker's favorite ones. "It feels very 'Peanuts,' " Mr. Parker said.
With three more years of "South Park" to go, its creators are trying to figure out what they will do after the show ends. They will soon be starting their own production company - probably, they said, with Paramount, for whom they made last year's "Team America: World Police."
"We need to get into producing at some point if we're actually going to have careers in our 40's," Mr. Parker said. "It's really scary, because one of the things we make fun of so much is the Steven Spielbergs, where it's like, 'Dude, stop.' "
What kinds of movies would they want to produce? "We don't know yet," Mr. Stone said. "You don't want to make your 'War of the Worlds.' "
Speaking of movies, will there ever be a sequel to 1999's "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut"? After making a face when asked, Mr. Stone said, "If we came up with a good idea, we'd do it." But with dozens of episodes to plot, they said, thinking of a good story to put aside for a film is difficult. Particularly when they prefer doing the show, anyway. "We're so satisfied with 'South Park,' " Mr. Parker said. "We don't feel the need to do another movie."
The series continues to be Comedy Central's highest-rated show, delivering an average of 2.6 million viewers each week. The eight years' worth of episodes repeat well, also, and Seasons 1 through 6 have sold a total of more than 3.5 million units on DVD.
Mr. Herzog, in a telephone interview from his Los Angeles office, called the show the "center of our prime-time effort." "It remains the heart of the network, along with 'The Daily Show,' " he said.
Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone will not say with certainty that "South Park" will end after the current contract expires. Mr. Parker said: "If somebody actually came to me and said, 'O.K., this is it: write your last "South Park" episodes,' I'd be like, 'No, no, no.' We've worked so hard on 'South Park,' making it what it is. How can we give that up?"
Mr. Herzog said Comedy Central would be willing to extend the show's run into infinity. "If they want to do it, we want to do it," he said. "I say to them face to face that I don't see any reason why 'South Park' can't be on forever."
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