Doug Herzog
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Doug Herzog is the president of Comedy Central. He rejoined Comedy Central in 2004, after working there during the 1990s, when he was instrumental in introducing South Park and The Daily Show, now Comedy Central's two highest-rated shows.
In 2005, Herzog was responsible for signing a new three-year contract with South Park, saying he hoped to continue airing South Park on Comedy Central forever; and for agreeing to introduce The Colbert Report, reportedly after hearing a one-line pitch, "Our version of the O'Reilly Factor with Stephen Colbert," from producers Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Ben Karlin.
Herzog is also focused on an aggressive slate of new original programs for 2006, including a second spin-off of The Daily Show featuring Lewis Black, entitled Red State Diaries.
Herzog is also infamous for being the man behind the cancellation of Mystery Science Theater 3000 from Comedy Central. After giving the producers a six episode contract (with an option for three more episodes which was not exercised) for their seventh season, he didn't renew the show. The show moved to the Sci Fi Channel the next year.
Between his two stints with Comedy Central, Herzog held senior positions with USA Network and Fox, where he helped introduce Monk and Malcolm in the Middle, respectively. Prior to his first association with Comedy Central, Herzog had been an associate producer on CNN and TBS, and a senior manager at MTV for eleven years, where he helped introduce MTV News, The Real World, Road Rules, Beavis and Butt-head, The MTV Movie Awards, and The MTV Video Music Awards.
As a side note, in episode 4 of season 10 on South Park (Cartoon Wars 2), Kyle calls out Doug Herzog by name when confronting The President of Fox Television about caving into political pressure and fear for not depicting the Prophet Mohammed. Kyle explains that doing so would infringe on the rights of the 1st Amendment and play into the hands of terrorism. In this episode (a continuation of Cartoon Wars) the popular Fox Television Show, "Family Guy", is parodied and used as a metaphor for South Park, while "Fox 11" is a metaphor for Comedy Central. Trey Parker and Matt Stone (the creators of South Park) announced to the world that they will caricature Mohammed next week, and dared Comedy Central to stop them. South Park first depicted the Prophet Mohammed 5 years ago in an episode where Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed and other religious figures form a group of "Super Friends" to battle it out against the cult following of street magician David Blaine. Comedy Central did pull a controversial episode of South Park in which Tom Cruise and the Church of Scientology are lampooned.
External links
- [Doug Herzog bio] at Comedy Central
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