Doug Herzog

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Doug Herzog

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.

Herzog began his career at MTV, eventually becoming its vice-president of programming. One of his programming ideas was 1989’s Camp MTV, in which the then-current personalities of the channel invaded Camp Scatico, a sleep-away camp in upstate New York. Along for the trip were the stars of the film UHF, who used this programming block to promote its premiere later that month. Camp Scatico was selected because Herzog attended the camp as a youth in the 1970s.

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 Islamic prophet Muhammad. 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 Muhammad 5 years ago in an episode where Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad 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 show the Prophet in the episode "Cartoon Wars 2" when it first aired, yet refused to show him again and has even censored the iTunes download-able version, with a disclaimer stated during the controversial depiction as followed: "In this shot, Muhammad hands a football helmet to Family Guy. Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Muhammad on their network." Comedy Central did pull a controversial episode of South Park in which Tom Cruise and the Church of Scientology are lampooned. The kids from South Park, and assumedly the creators Matt and Trey's line of reasoning is that if you pull one show, then a trend will start where more and more shows will have to be pulled, ultimately ending a show, just like in the case of Laverne & Shirley.