"South Park" premiere season is nearly upon us. The "South Park" season 17 premiere - wow, that show's been running for a long time - is set for September 25, 2013. The release date for the video game, "South Park: The Stick of Truth," is much less clear, but still expected - with increasing uncertainty - for this holiday.

We don't know much about the "South Park" season 17 premiere yet, beyond the large amount that more than two hundred episodes of the cardboard kerfuffery have taught us. But we do know its premiere date is definitely September 25, 2013. That's right on South Park Studios, the show's online World Wide Web site, which airs basically every full episode of the show.

The "South Park" season 17 premiere will end the longest gap in "South Park" history. Season 16 ended at the normal time, at the end of a fall. But "South Park" seasons normally have weird schedules - they were fourteen episodes, broken into two seven-episode halves, the first half airing in the spring and the second half in the fall. It was essentially the reverse of the normal television season. I actually worked at Comedy Central, and I know the reason: there wasn't one. Matt and Trey just vaguely liked it that way and had always done it that way. But it wasn't actually like that for a real reason.

Regardless, the "South Park" season 17 premiere is different. That's because it's the shortest season in "South Park" history - only ten measly episodes - and they will all run in the fall. From September 25 until whenever ten weeks after that is. Nobody could do that kind of math. So we'll get slightly more "South Park," all in a row. But then we'll go more than six months without a smidgen of "South Park."

That means Matt and Trey get basically eight months of the year off, and except for the ten weeks penciled in for the "South Park" season 17 premiere and nine other episodes, they can do whatever they want. They can work on "Book of Mormon" (which is great) and their other animation projects. They can reinvent themselves. They've been doing "South Park" since they were very young, and they deserve the break from that relentless schedule.