LOS ANGELES — The Emmy arrived at the Wiltern in Los Angeles on September 6. Trey Parker and Matt Stone did not need long to decide what to do with it.
Twenty-four hours after the Television Academy handed South Park Outstanding Animated Program at the 78th Creative Arts Emmy ceremony, the show’s official account posted an image of the animated Trump character, trousers around his ankles, clutching a statuette. The caption: “You finally got your Emmy.”
The context required no explaining for anyone who had tracked Trump’s relationship with the Television Academy. As an executive producer of NBC’s The Apprentice, Trump shared in two nominations for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program in 2004 and 2005, losing both years to CBS’s The Amazing Race. He complained about the slight publicly for years afterward. South Park had now won the category for “Sermon on the ‘Mount,” an episode from Season 27’s premiere that depicted the president in bed with Satan, wandering a desert naked, and connected his administration’s conduct to the Jeffrey Epstein files. The cartoon version of the trophy he never received was deployed as the punchline.
The trolling was not the end of it. Days later, Parker and Stone released a statement announcing that South Park would be changing its name, for its upcoming twenty-ninth season premiering September 16 on Comedy Central, to SOUTH AMERICA. The announcement, published on the show’s official website, read: “Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are changing the name of South Park to SOUTH AMERICA. We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount, a Skydance Capitulation.”
Each clause targeted a different institution. Apple and Google, earlier in Trump’s term, had drawn criticism after both companies updated their mapping applications to reflect his executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Parker and Stone’s “inspired by the bravery and patriotism” framing transformed corporate compliance with a presidential geographic mandate into the animating principle behind a fake rebrand. Paramount, acquired by Skydance Media in 2025, received its own parenthetical: not Paramount, but “a Skydance Capitulation.” The show’s own corporate parent did not escape the roster of targets.
The satire works differently depending on which layer is being read. At one level, it is a joke about Trump’s tendency to rename things, from the Gulf of Mexico to Denali and other geographic features whose names existed for centuries before his administration. At another, it critiques the corporate reflex that allows such renamings to take hold, and the speed with which major companies incorporate presidential preferences into their products without apparent resistance. Parker and Stone are not simply mocking Trump; they are also mocking those who accommodated him before resisting him became commercially acceptable.
Season 29 will run six episodes through November 25, releasing new installments every two weeks on Comedy Central and arriving on Paramount+ the following day. It is the first season to air since South Park secured its sixth Emmy in the Outstanding Animated Program category.
The show’s political saturation over the past two seasons drew direct engagement from the White House. After a Season 27 episode, press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the program “desperate for attention.” Parker later said in an interview that the White House’s decision to respond had clarified the creative direction rather than complicated it. The Hollywood Reporter reported the full “South America” announcement, noting that Parker and Stone released the official statement and renamed title graphic simultaneously with the September premiere campaign.
What the “South America” announcement does not settle is how literally to take it. The formal statement did not specify whether the new title would appear in on-air graphics, Paramount+ metadata, or promotional materials for the full season run, or whether it dissolves after the premiere episode. Parker and Stone have executed similar misdirections before, including extended fake apologies, surprise hiatuses, and episode-length tonal experiments, with no advance clarity on whether a gag was structural or a one-off. The premiere on September 16 will answer the question.
The Emmy win came during the same week the 78th Emmy Awards Creative Arts ceremonies honored other notable recipients, including Mariska Hargitay’s two prizes for her documentary on Jayne Mansfield and Sabrina Carpenter’s four trophies as executive producer of The Muppet Show’s Disney+ revival. In both cases, the award carried biographical weight its recipients did not manufacture in advance. South Park’s sixth Emmy arrived differently: Parker and Stone built the condition for winning it across two consecutive seasons of deliberate provocation, then handed the trophy back as a prop the moment it landed.
Trump has not publicly responded to the Emmy or the name change. South Park premieres as SOUTH AMERICA, or as whatever it ultimately decides to call itself, on September 16.
