Are Harry and Meghan planning to sue makers of South Park?

Harry and Meghan’s lawyers are ‘casting an eye’ over animated sitcom South Park, a royal commentator has claimed, after it launched a series of attacks against the couple.

The satirical series ridiculed the couple’s demands for privacy while on a publicity blitz for the Duke’s autobiography, Spare, and their Netflix series in a brutal episode last week.

Now it has been suggested the broadcast may have ‘legal ramifications’ with the Sussexes’ lawyers.

Royal commentator Neil Sean told Fox News that representatives for the pair are now watching the series closely for any more attacks.

He said: ‘According to sources close to the ex-Royals, it appears that, like so many things with Meghan and Harry, this may have legal ramifications attached.

‘Their legal team are casting an eye over the episode to see what is wrong, and what could be turned into something more sinister.’

Mr Sean added that the makers of South Park have, as yet, received no legal correspondence. 

Last week’s episode depicted the ‘Prince and Princess of Canada‘ – a young royal couple who loudly beg for privacy while drawing attention to themselves. 

The red-headed prince and his wife, who wears the same pink outfit that Meghan wore for Trooping the Colour in 2018, are seen promoting the prince’s book – Waaagh – the cover of which strongly resembles Harry’s memoir Spare. 

The episode is filled with swipes at the Sussexes, with main character Stan branding their cartoon equivalents the ‘dumb prince and his stupid wife’, while Kyle complains about the private jet parked outside their home. 

The show opens with Kyle’s younger brother Ike, adopted from Canada, inconsolable at the news that the Queen of Canada – who resembles the late Queen Elizabeth II – is dead.

The Prince and Princess of Canada are seen at a large state funeral, where they are booed by the rest of the royal family, accused of bashing the Canadian monarchy.

Against the backlash, the couple appear on breakfast television to demand their privacy. 

Arriving on the set of Good Morning Canada with a book to promote, the prince holds aloft a placard reading, ‘we want privacy’, while the princess’s banner reads: ‘Stop looking at us.’

The host asks whether, in reporting on the royal family for his new book, ‘Waaagh’, he has now become a journalist himself, despite hating them.

‘We just want to be normal people – all this attention is so hard,’ the prince replies.

The couple are challenged by the host who questions how sincerely they want privacy, and the royals storm off the set. 

The couple board their private jet and embark on a worldwide ‘we want privacy’ tour – complete with dancing rainbows and a catchy theme tune.

They visit France and India where they chant their pro-privacy slogans to bemused locals – and even a field of kangaroos during a pit stop in Australia. 

Eventually they settle in the quiet town of South Park, Colorado. 

‘If we moved here, people would think we’re really serious about wanting to be normal.’

The royals clash with the locals, arriving with a drum kit and demanding privacy from neighbors. 

Kyle wakes one morning and finds the house has been covered with magazines featuring the princess. 

They include a cover strongly resembling that of The Cut magazine after it ran a cover interview with Meghan last summer.  

When Kyle confronts the royals, the princess yells: ‘He victimised me!’

The prince springs to his wife’s defence.

‘This is an outrage!’ he cries. ‘We’ll see how he deals with my blue penis!’ 

This appears to refer to a case of frostbite detailed in Harry’s autobiography, Spare. 

The prince and princess turn to a crudely-named marketing agency for help protecting their privacy.

‘There’s this horrible spy who lives across the street from us,’ the prince explains.

The branding manager says he already has a file on the princess, which she created several years ago.

‘I have your brand already: Sorority girl, actress, influencer and victim,’ he tells her.

The prince’s brand is decided as: ‘Royal prince, millionaire, world traveler, victim.’

The prince, inside the agency, suddenly has a lightbulb moment and realises that he doesn’t want to be a brand.

‘Trying to make ourselves into a brand just turned us into products,’ the Canadian prince declares.

‘No more magazines and Netflix shows, we can just live a normal life!’

He stands to leave, and walks towards the door – but his wife remains inside the branding company.

‘Come on honey, we don’t need this place!’ he says. ‘Honey?’

The prince leaves alone. Kyle rejoins his friends, who invite him out to play. The prince then arrives, and asks if he can play too, before bringing out his drum kit.

MailOnline has approached representatives of Harry and Meghan for comment. 

From Bill Gates to the Pope, South Park has lampooned dozens of famous names during its 26 series and no one and no subject is off limits 

The animated satire South Park has been a television mainstay world over since its debut in 1997.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are now the latest targets of the show’s no-holds-barred brand of comedy, and join a long list of celebrities and off-limits talking points that have come into the show’s focus over the last 26 years. 

Colorado schoolchildren Eric Cartman, Kyle Broflovski, Stan Marsh and Kenny McCormick have shocked audiences with their vulgarity since the inflammatory first episode, ‘Cartman Gets an Anal Probe’.

But the characters have also provided show creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone with a sandbox environment in which to mock, ridicule and scrutinize famous figures and elements of popular culture.

Roping everybody from Bill Gates to the Pope into their outlandish adventures, the show has received its fair share of criticism as well as praise. It was banned in China after the episode which criticised the ruling Communist Party and was targeted by fanatics for its portrayal of religious figures.

Despite lawsuits, the show has managed to bat off resistance thanks to rights protected by the First Amendment guaranteeing free speech in the United States. More than two decades on, the creators are still going strong despite the backlash.

MailOnline looks back on some of the most high-profile characters the show has satirized over the years.

Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise first appeared in the now famous episode ‘Trapped in the Closet’ in 2005. 

The episode parodied the actor’s relationship with the Church of Scientology, one of the religions that the creators have targeted for satire, as well as Christianity, Islam, Judaism and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In the episode, Cruise traps himself in a closet and refuses to come out, later joined by John Travolta and R Kelly.

When Stan denounces the church as a scam, the Scientologists and celebrity followers threaten to sue. Stan dares them and the episode ends, with the closing credits naming only ‘John Smith’ and ‘Jane Smith’ – poking at the church’s precedent for suing.

The episode was controversial, as intended, and Cruise reportedly tried to pull it from circulation. In response, the creators included him in the milestone episode #200, in which Cruise and many other celebrities parodied by the show sought revenge against the show’s creators.

One thing leads to another and the town of South Park is threatened with a lawsuit from Cruise unless they can help him meet the Prophet Muhammad.

To avoid depicting the Prophet, the children take him across town dressed in a bear suit. The episode drew further criticism from audiences and the creators received threats of violence for the depiction.

Kanye West 

Kanye West has also been on the receiving end of Trey and Matt’s animating stick.

The singer was portrayed in a 2009 episode called ‘Fishsticks’, in which a character based on Kanye is confused as he is the only one not to get a play on words between ‘fishsticks’ and ‘fish d**ks’.

Kanye is portrayed as narcissistic and overly sensitive, but took it well and sampled a track from the South Park soundtrack for his song ‘Gone’ that year.

South Park showed less love and, in 2013, painted him as a self-absorbed hobbit trying to control Kim Kardashian.

Xi Jinping

In 2019, South Park’s creators wrote and aired an episode called ‘Band in China’, which parodied censorship in China.

The episode also looked at some of the ways American artists and brands sidestepped moral obligations to benefit from lucrative Chinese markets.

When imprisoned in China for selling marijuana, Randy Marsh meets Winnie the Pooh and Piglet, who have been banned in China in response to memes circulated comparing CCP leader Xi Jinping to the bear.

The parody refers to a real-world law in China after censors banned the release of a Winnie the Pooh film in 2018.

South Park was banned in China for the broadcast of its episode, ‘Band in China’. 

Trump and Hillary

The exact political ideology of South Park is still something of a mystery. The creators do not toe a strict party line and have been known to ridicule and scrutinize all from left to right, at home and abroad. 

Inevitably they were confronted with the 2016 U.S. election, which they said was funnier than anything they could have dreamed up and made satire difficult to write.

The show used local teacher Mr Garrison as a stand-in for Trump, who became tired of Canadians migrating to America and battled against a new wave of political correctness to garner support.

Garrison has a change of heart in the show and tries to sabotage his election run, but his opponent, Hillary Clinton ‘gets in her own way’ and inadvertently builds support for Garrison. 

Both received a fair share of criticism, dubbed the ‘T**d Sandwich’ and the ‘Giant Douche’ by media in the show.

Britney Spears

Britney Spears came under the scrutiny of South Park’s creators way back in 2002, when the episode ‘Britney’s New Look’ portrayed the singer as a victim of media harassment. The children of South Park try to help hide the artist from paparazzi.

The show’s creators said she is one of few celebrities who ‘really get what we do’.

Ben Affleck 

Ben Affleck became something of a regular punching bag for South Park, with the show going after the Gone Girl actor multiple times. 

Famously, Affleck appeared in the series five episode titled ‘How To Eat With Your Butt’. In the episode, Cartman discovers two people suffering from Torsonic Polarity Syndrome, a fictitious medical condition which means they have posteriors for faces. The punchline to the joke is that they are looking for their long lost son, Ben Affleck.

In a later series, when Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were very much a tabloid couple – before their split and subsequent reunion in 2021 – Cartman draws a depiction of JLo on his hand. Affleck then falls in love with the hand puppet with drawn-on lipstick.

Bill Gates

As one of the world’s richest men, Bill Gates is certainly not free from South Park’s mockery.  

The 67-year-old Microsoft founder has appeared several times in episodes. Back in 1999, a depiction of Gates was shot in the head by a US army officer after he raged at the Windows 98 operating system not being fast enough. 

In a call back to the episode, Gates appeared in a later series in which he has a bandage to cover his rather brutal gun-shot wound.

In series seven, in an episode entitled ‘A Song of Ass and Fire’, Gates returns to Microsoft to kill his CEO successor. He proclaims himself as leader of the Xbox One supporters for the imminent ‘console wars’ between PlayStation supporters.

Pope Benedict XVI

Parodies of the late Pope Emeritus showed South Park was not scared of veering into religion. 

An episode depicted the former head of the Catholic Church arriving in Park County, where the adult comedy cartoon is set, to inspect a bleeding Virgin Mary statue.

After inspecting the statue, the former pontiff determines that the statue is bleeding from the vagina, and says it is not a miracle because it is natural for a woman.

South Park also depicted the return of Jesus. Following the second coming, the pontiff stepped back from his role as head of the Catholic Church. 

He then retook the throne but resigned again after the South Park creators showed Jesus in a doping scandal. 

Tom Brady

He may be, arguably, the greatest NFL player of all time, but that doesn’t seem to stop you from being depicted as having a faecal accident on South Park. 

Tom Brady appeared in the season 17 episode ‘Taming Strange’ where he accidently received the wrong medication and proceeded to soil himself during a football game.

South Park has also made numerous references to Brady throughout the show. In season 19, main character Cartman proclaims that he is going to ‘Tom Brady this thing’ after receiving detention for four days. 

The incident references Brady being caught up in the ‘Deflategate’ controversy in which the then Patriots quarterback was accused of ordering the deliberate deflation of the ball, and was subsequently given a four-game suspension.