Running for nearly three weeks straight, the TCA (Television Critics Association) summer press tour is a major endeavor, where nearly all the biggest channels -- from the broadcast networks to popular cable stations -- have presentations and panels discussing their upcoming programming, including new and returning series.

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One of the most interesting events during the first week of the TCAs was a press conference given by South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker . This was quite a notable and controversial year for the pair: Their Tom Cruise/Scientology parody episode "Trapped in the Closet" led to cast member Isaac Hayes quitting the show, and was subsequently pulled from reruns by Comedy Central. And on the "Cartoon Wars" two-parter, they lost a battle with Comedy Central to portray an image of Mohammed. On the heels of an Emmy nomination for "Trapped in the Closet", and the recent decision by Comedy Central to allow the episode to finally re-air, Matt and Trey had plenty to say about everything that occurred this past year, in their typically blunt way.Trey started the press conference off by saying, "So first of all, there can't be any questions about Tom Cruise or Scientology or South Park ." The first question, naturally, was regarding how much of a struggle it was to get an episode on the air that tackles Scientology and Tom Cruise. Matt remarked, "Did he just say that?" Trey deadpanned, "Since that pertains to South Park, we can't answer the question."The duo eventually stopped joking for a bit, and Matt gave a serious answer to the question. "Getting that episode on the air was no problem at all. We were actually really surprised. We kind of avoided doing one for a long time because of Scientology's reputation for taking you to court. And when we ran the idea past Comedy Central, the lawyers at least, they said, 'Yeah, that's cool.' So getting it on the air wasn't really a big deal. It was kind of after it aired that the s**t hit the fan, so to speak."Trey said, "It's kind of nice because, since we do a show basically the week of, it was really the Wednesday before that show aired was the day that we said, 'Let's do a Scientology show.' And so rather than doing a show and people start hearing we're going to do a Scientology show and, you know, lawyers have time to start talking… It's pretty much, the way our show is, by the time it got to be, you know, Thursday, Friday, the show was going and it was going to be on the air in four days. So it was kind of like nobody knew about it until it came out."Matt added, "If we did a normal show, if the show sat on the shelf, so to speak, for a couple months before it went on the air, I don't think it would have ever made it to air. So we kind of lucked out that we do the show like we do."Matt and Trey were asked if they're going to take on the topic of North Korea this season. Trey replied, "We have no thoughts about what's going on there. We kind of so did that in Team America. We talked about if we could actually have Kim Jong-il on South Park now, but it would sort of be the exact same character."Trey talked a little more about South Park's short development cycle and why that makes it difficult to talk about future episode topics. "But it's really funny because even at an event like this, we would love to be able to sit and say, 'Oh, these are the things we're thinking about,' but we've never done a South Park season where we even think about what we're going to do more than a month ahead of time. And you know, the [new] shows don't air until October, which means we'll start working on them -- I'm not kidding -- September 10th-ish. We'll go to the office and what happens -- it's pretty interesting because after doing it for ten years, it just happens every single time. We come back and we really over-think things, and we spend, like, three weeks trying to make the first episode. And then by the time we're in the fourth, fifth episode, it's just like athletics or anything, where you just get to the point where you're in that groove. And for the first month, we just second-guess ourselves too much. And so we've learned to not even talk about the show. This is the first time we've talked about the show at all since [the last season ended]."Matt and Trey are both surprised that South Park has made it to ten seasons. Trey remarked, "We were surprised it made it to seven episodes." Matt added, "We got six episodes in the very beginning. For us, that was a big deal. Just to get a show on television was a huge deal. Really we never thought it would get past that first six. So yeah, we're totally surprised."