God’s Legal Department

The cartoon had a pope who was basically a toddler—rolling around on the floor, oblivious to the cardinals scheming around him—and Germany promptly lost its mind. Popetown was produced by the BBC, who quietly shelved it rather than deal with the fallout. When MTV Germany announced they’d broadcast it in 2006, the conservative CDU party filed an actual police report against the channel. The church demanded the whole thing be pulled from the schedule entirely.

MTV blinked halfway. They offered to air a single episode as part of a live panel discussion in Berlin, with church representatives and figures from media and culture sitting together to argue about a cartoon pope in real time. Which honestly sounds more interesting than the cartoon itself.

The thing is—the church was right that this would reach a massive audience, just wrong about why. Every major outlet in the country covered the controversy. Every person who hadn’t heard of Popetown now knew exactly what it was and wanted to watch it. Whatever MTV’s promotional budget looked like before this, the outrage did more work than any campaign could have. Sacred indignation as free advertising. It writes itself.

Satire of religious institutions doesn’t violate anything worth protecting. A cartoon pope acting like a five-year-old isn’t blasphemy, it’s observation. Whether the show was actually funny is a separate question entirely—but the right to find out should never have been in doubt.