Wednesday night’s new episode of South Park was about Tuesday night’s Presidential election. Only, not really. The episode does depict all the primary players (Obama, McCain, Palin, etc.) and also the outcome of the election. Which has caused some to wonder, “how did they do this?” But if you really watch the episode carefully, you’ll realize that the outcome of the election is a fairly insignificant part of the story. The episode takes Obama and McCain, and turns them into a crackerjack heist team in an homage to Ocean’s 11. The winner of the election is a small aspect of the story, which could have easily been swapped at the last minute. South Park is notorious for 11th hour episode production (during a panel in Austin recently, show co-creater Matt Stone blamed laziness more than timeliness). The stroke of genius here was the crew’s ability to seemingly write almost the entire episode without any basis on who would become the President-Elect.
UPDATE: John Pierson sent a link to this article from a Hollywood Reporter blog, which gets a behind-the-scenes dish from the show’s creators. Their claim: they didn’t rush the episode, but they did roll the dice.
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