 |
Ed Robinson, vice-president of programming for cable TV's Comedy Network, chooses slightly more delicate wording: "We're very happy."
The reason for these expressions of delight? After months of talks, the Comedy Network has secured the Canadian cable rights to South Park, the immensely popular, stupendously crude animated series about four foul-mouthed third-graders and their fictional home town in the Colorado Rockies.
Robinson has reason to be happy. South Park has shattered every ratings record for a cable television series in the United States, regularly drawing more than five million viewers to Comedy Central and even beating out its time-slot competition on the major networks.
Beginning Aug. 4, the show will make its Canadian cable TV premiere on the Comedy Network, seen locally on Cable 34 and 41, with all of the first-season episodes being shown back to back over 13 nights.
After this South Park-o-rama, the Comedy Network will air the program in a regular 10:30 p.m. time-slot on Fridays, 90 minutes earlier than it currently airs on ITV.
Possibly the most explosive pop-culture phenomenon of the late '90s, South Park is the offspring of a pair of twentysomething Colorado natives who created a five-minute "pilot" episode as a video Christmas card commissioned by a television executive.
The core quartet of pals in this Peanuts on acid is made up of Stan, the de facto leader; Kyle, the sensitive Jewish kid with a conscience; Cartman, the self-centred fat boy; and dirt-poor, parka-clad Kenny, who suffers a horribly violent death in each episode.
Using a technique that mimics construction paper cutouts animated through stop-motion photography (it's actually all done on computers now), South Park's outrageous, taboo-busting humor has attracted legions of rabid fans, mostly in their teens and twenties.
Robinson said the show is a natural fit for the Comedy Network's adult-oriented late prime-time schedule, which also features such profanity-sprinkled fare as The Larry Sanders Show and Dream On.
"We've always said we're going to be irreverent and we're going to be adult," Robinson said of the network's post-9 p.m. lineup.
South Park has been broadcast on Ontario-based Global TV since September. Ironically, the show originally aired at 9:30 p.m. - the same time it will be shown on the Comedy Network in that market - but was bumped to midnight after Global fielded dozens of complaints.
Having been labelled - generally unfairly - as everything from homophobic to anti-Semitic, the show has no sacred cows when it comes to seeking laughs.
Episodes have featured everything from alien anal probes to gay pets to Jesus fighting Satan on pay-per-view to an elephant having sex with a pig - an encounter which prompts Chef, a character voiced by legendary soul singer Isaac Hayes, to remark, "Now I know how all those white women must have felt."
But Robinson points out that cable television is proving itself as a home for more adult-oriented fare that viewers don't want to have to stay up to the wee hours to watch on the regular networks.
"We've been showing Larry Sanders at 9 p.m. and Dream On (with its occasional flashes of bare-chested women) at 9:30 p.m.," said Robinson "I actually think in some respects it (South Park) is less risque than those shows."
The Comedy Network is currently seeking the Canadian cable TV rights to the 20-episode second season of the series. Regardless of their success, episodes 14 and 15 - which deal with the identity of Cartman's father - will be shown in November.