South Park’s Missed Deadline
…but don’t worry Twitter is to the rescue
Trey seemed to shrug it off, “It sucks to miss an air date but after all these years of tempting fate by delivering the show last minute, I guess it was bound to happen.” For the first time since 1997 South Park Studios missed their deadline to deliver a new episode. This may seem like a pretty inexcusable faux pas for a show at any network, but then again this is South Park. Trey Parker and Matt Stone don’t do anything conventional and have stuck to an insane 6 day production deadline per episode (check out the documentary 6 Days to Air,one of their video blogs, or this 60 minutes clip for more on the process). Normal scripted television shows go through a 6 week writing process per episode, not including production, and here the South Park Studios guys have been going from ideation to ready-to-air in less than a week. It wasn’t really surprising, then, that something as simple as a power outage derailed the team. While I’m sure the Comedy Central guys upstairs were not too pleased initially, they may have made up for it with the power of social media.
Instead of the planned episode ‘Goth Kids 3: Dawn of the Posers’, we got a live-tweeted rerun of the classic ‘Scott Tenorman Must Die’ after last week’s ‘World War Zimmerman’ episode. What does a “live-tweeted” episode entail? Honestly, not much- occasionally an overlay will pop up on the bottom of the screen with a tweet responding to some question. Not terribly exciting or insightful. The real magic is not in the input from the production staff or creators, but the buzz this created on Twitter. The hashtag #SouthParkBlackout started trending, which combined with the US government planning to reopen made it easy to spit out 140 characters or less:
The hashtags #SouthPark, #SouthParkBlackout, #ScottTenorman, and #Cartman flooded millions of timelines during the show, and suddenly an episode from 2001 becomes more relevant than the one they were planning on airing.
This isn’t to say some fans weren’t mad- plenty were genuinely tweaked, but with less than a day before the episode was to air it could have been so much worse. I can’t imagine they lost many (if any) fans, and the publicity this stirred did nothing but bolster the brand. While this rare occurrence for a production team known to push the envelope on and off the screen was easy news fodder, I believe using Twitter as damage control serves to show the power of the platform. Having the ability to spin what would normally be a disaster into a legitimate engagement opportunity is a powerful tool we will continue to see evolve, especially for networks where ratings matter…if you need another example just look at ‘Sharknado’.
Sub
