South Park’s 15 Worst Episodes, Ranked

For decades, “South Park” has provided delightfully crude humor and upset those with delicate sensibilities. The show hasn’t lost any of its edge, as Season 27 even garnered a statement from the White House, declaring that the show “hasn’t been relevant for 20 years.” On the contrary, few shows have managed to make headlines like “South Park” this far into its run, but that doesn’t mean it’s always been effective.

“South Park” isn’t afraid to make fun of anyone, but the satire can occasionally fall flat. Sometimes it’s unclear what grander point “South Park” is trying to make, or there just isn’t enough to make fun of the subject with. Throughout much of the show’s run, many episodes have been created over just six days, so perhaps that’s another explanation — the team just didn’t have enough time to crank out a really great episode. Regardless of the reason, these are the worst “South Park” episodes based on overall quality, not because they personally offended us. 

Sometimes, “South Park” casts too wide a net for its own good. That’s the chief problem with Season 22’s “The Problem With a Poo.” The title takes its name from the documentary “The Problem with Apu,” which examines how problematic Apu from “The Simpsons” has been for the Indian community. “South Park” tries to cancel its own controversial character by making Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo, the source of public scorn, but it doesn’t just end at a “Simpsons” nod.

The episode also makes Mr. Hankey akin to Roseanne Barr (after her racist tweets on social media) and Brett Kavanaugh’s hearings, which included allegations of attempted rape. As all this is going on, PC Principal and Strong Woman (“South Park” really gave up on coming up with clever names after a while) have their own PC Babies who seem to be offended by everything. It feels like too many topical references at once without making a clear thesis about how “South Park” feels about all of these people deemed “canceled.” It also ruins Mr. Hankey’s character, who’s always been one of the more cheerful South Park residents, and it seems like we’re never going to see him again. 

The way the media treated Britney Spears in the 2000s was awful, as that period has been reappraised through Spears’ own memoir and documentaries like “Framing Britney Spears,” which even got Justin Timberlake to apologize for his behavior toward her. To its credit, “South Park” tried to come to Spears’ defense during that time with “Britney’s New Look,” in which the media are obsessed with capturing every embarrassing moment, causing her to blow off the top of her head. This results in her walking around most of the episode as a gurgling husk.

Although the episode is a parody of Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” it’s hands-down one of the most unpleasant, unwatchable pieces of television ever. It’s hard to laugh at any of the jokes when you feel like you’re about to vomit from watching a corpse. “Britney’s New Look” almost redeems itself by the end, with lines that highlight how society will always mistreat female pop stars. But it’s not an episode we have any interest in revisiting … ever. 

“South Park” often offers real biting satire, but it’s absent for “Poor and Stupid.” Cartman wants to become a NASCAR driver but believes he needs to become poor and stupid to do so, and once he finally gets his own racecar, it’s revealed that all of the NASCAR drivers and fans are perfectly intelligent. It’s Cartman making a mockery of everything and upsetting Kenny over his stereotypes concerning people who enjoy the sport.

The message seems to be, “Hey, people who like NASCAR aren’t dumb.” That’s absolutely true, but there’s just not enough meat on that concept to fill out a 22-minute episode. Cartman’s schtick of talking like an idiot gets old fast. Honestly, the true MVP of the episode is Kenny, who wants to keep Cartman out of his favorite sport. We wish more time could’ve been spent with him or bringing Kyle and Stan more into the mix, but this is mostly just a one-joke affair. 

Remember when there were some minor technical difficulties when the HealthCare.gov website launched in 2013? No? Well, then, half of “Taming Strange” is pretty much a moot point these days. An issue with a TV show being extremely topical is that it’s hard to remember what certain jokes and plot points are even meant to be about, and Mr. Mackey launching a new school website to parody HealthCare.gov detracts from what’s otherwise a pretty good story.

Elsewhere, Ike’s prematurely going through puberty due to a mix-up with his medication and decides to turn Foofa from “Yo Gabba Gabba!” into a more adult act (mirroring child stars transitioning into more adult-centric entertainment a la Miley Cyrus). Even without the topical reference, it works as a fairly sweet story between Kyle coming to terms with the fact that Ike’s going to grow up eventually, and he’ll always be there to protect him. The B plot just takes too much time away from a pretty interesting main story that would’ve worked fine without it. 

You can feel the utter disdain “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have for Jar Jar Binks with the “Jakovasaurs” episode. The titular Jakovasaur is an incredibly annoying, nearly extinct dinosaur who winds up mating with a female Jakovasaur and has a litter of babies, all of whom are just as annoying as Jakov. 

Jakov may have been created to poke fun at Jar Jar Binks, but in the process, he became insufferable in his own right. Maybe the episode would work better if there was more to talk about, like if Parker and Stone used Jakov as a stepping stone to address some of their larger issues with “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace.” In the episode’s audio commentary, they mention how many fans don’t like the episode because it’s annoying, but that’s the point. Still, Cartman being the only one amused by the Jakovasaurs’ antics is a pretty good bit. 

Some of the best “South Park” episodes aren’t trying to be topical at all. “Moss Piglets” initially fits that bill, and at first, it seems like we’re getting another Jimmy and Timmy episode where their nemeses, Nathan and Mimsy, engage in some Looney Tunes-esque antics to sabotage their science fair experiment about tardigrades, only to make the water bears smarter. This back-and-forth of Nathan and Mimsy failing could’ve carried an entire episode all on its own, but halfway through, they take a backseat so that we can see Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones co-opting the water bears to turn them into NFL fans to counteract declining attendance. 

One issue with the later seasons in general is how everyone seems to expect “South Park” to be topical. Early on, it was kind of nice just to get some silly adventures without some sort of larger social commentary. A straightforward Nathan and Mimsy episode would’ve been welcomed, but Jerry Jones had to get in the way.

“South Park” being able to make episodes about things that literally happened within the last week has made for some great episodes. But then 2016 happened. Season 20 was already a massive experiment for the show, as it’s completely serialized, and you can kind of tell throughout the season that Trey Parker and Matt Stone expected Hillary Clinton to win the election over Donald Trump. That didn’t happen, and maybe that’s why the series decided to sit out the 2024 election. 

Granted, much of the episode doesn’t have anything to do with the election because there are continuous storylines of Kyle’s dad, Gerald, trying to hide his online trolling, as well as Cartman trying to hide his prior online trolling. Unlike earlier election episodes like “Douche and Turd” and “About Last Night…,” there’s not much in the way of larger commentary surrounding that year’s monumental election. If you hadn’t been watching the rest of that season, you’d find yourself completely lost. It’s a mishmash of ideas and feels like the show is trying to adjust course to round out the season.

“South Park” tried to do something different with Season 20 by having a completely serialized story. It’s an admirable attempt to keep a long-running animated sitcom feeling fresh, but in the end, it just didn’t work well. It seems those behind the scenes realize that, as the title “The End of Serialization As We Know It” is a self-deprecating admission that sometimes doing something new isn’t always what’s best, especially when so much of the storyline depended on certain real-life events panning out differently.

The member berries plotline is really the only thing with a decent throughline, but Gerald Broflovski isn’t a strong enough character to carry a full season largely on his own. Then there’s the Cartman storyline where he’s trying to escape to Mars with the help of Elon Musk, who voices himself and brings the story’s energy way down. 

“South Park” still occasionally toys with serialization, but to a lesser degree. Episodes have certain things carry over, but they largely focus on one idea and stick with that. It’s for the best, as we’d prefer not to ‘membah Season 20.

It’s a common tenet in comedy that if you have to explain a joke, then it’s not funny. “Funnybot” is nothing but one long commentary on the current state of comedy and becomes a pretty joyless affair after a while. After Jimmy offends the Germans at a comedy awards show, they construct Funnybot, which punctuates its Mad Libbed jokes with “Awkwaaaard!” The whole point of Funnybot is that it isn’t funny, but this anti-comedy fails to work because at the end of the day … it’s not funny. 

The show’s also fairly inside baseball, as there’s a lot of commentary on the Comedy Central Comedy Awards, which only ran for two years in 2011 and 2012. “South Park” thinks a comedy award show means people are taking comedy too seriously, which tracks for the show’s sensibilities. But deconstructing the concept of comedy is ironically not a very funny endeavor. “South Park” may care about yet another pointless cable TV award show, but it’s unlikely audiences were that invested. 

“Spring Break” is probably the closest “South Park” came to commenting on the 2024 election, even if the episode debuted in 2023. It seems Mr. Garrison, who at this point is the show’s Donald Trump stand-in, wants to live a normal life but feels the pull of running again because his supporters love his rallies and rage. Meanwhile, Randy’s worried that Stan isn’t manly enough, which culminates in him bringing an Andrew Tate-esque figure into his home to espouse the ideology of toxic masculinity.

The Tate parody, in particular, really lacks any bite. There’s a lot to comment on there, but the episode more examines Randy’s need to party while Stan and Tolkien just want to focus on Warhammer 40,000. The Garrison plotline is kind of interesting for examining how rage is addictive, leading into a recreation of the January 6 insurrection, but again, it feels lighter than it should. It feels like the show’s holding back, which should’ve made fans worried about whether “South Park” would lose its bite. Fortunately, Season 27 and 28 proved that wouldn’t be the case. 

The basic recap of “White People Renovating Houses” is that Randy’s hosting a new home improvement show, but grows tired of protests from rednecks who are making white people look bad. The episode came out a month after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, with the rednecks (who are regulars on “South Park”) being stand-ins for full-blown white supremacists. Their ideology gets boiled down to anger at losing their jobs, so they become the show’s stand-ins for Alexa devices. 

Like “Spring Break,” “White People Renovating Houses” severely lacks the necessary bite to tackle its source material. That’s probably due to it being tough to find comedy out of an event surrounding neo-Nazis that left one woman dead. The boys playing with Alexa speakers, which impacted real viewers’ devices in the vicinity, is a great gag. But anyone who tuned into “South Park” that year hoping for something of substance to say on the current political climate would’ve been disappointed. 

“Goth Kids 3: Dawn of the Posers” is mostly notable for being the first time in “South Park” history that the show failed to meet a deadline – something that wouldn’t be repeated until Season 27’s “Conflict of Interest.” One might assume that having an extra week to work on it would improve the overall quality, but the central premise just falls flat. 

The focus is on the South Park Elementary goth, emo, and vampire kids, poking fun at the new aesthetic that came about in the early-mid 2000s with bands like My Chemical Romance and late 2000s with the “Twilight” movies. The main issue with this is that the episode premiered in 2013, several years after this kind of topic was at its heyday. Some episodes age poorly, but this one felt dated as soon as it came out. Poking fun at the minor differences between goth and emo kids is funny, but it had already been done in Season 12’s “The Ungroundable,” and that one had the benefit of keeping Butters front and center. There’s too much “been there, done that” with “Goth Kids 3” to make it stand out. 

Cartman once referred to Towelie as “the worst character ever,” but the little cloth can be pretty hilarious. His episodes are usually pretty funny, even if he only stops by for a quick joke, but there’s nothing all that redeeming in “A Million Little Fibers.” Towelie writes a memoir but lies about being a human so that people will actually read it, leading to a confrontation with Oprah Winfrey, who endorsed the book. And while all that’s going on, Oprah’s vagina and anus, which are anthropomorphized, scheme to get her fired from her show so that she can spend more time with them. 

Trey Parker and Matt Stone admit on the commentary track that the episode probably would’ve worked better as two separate episodes: One about Towelie’s addiction and the other with the Oprah stuff, but with the main cast of boys. As it stands, there’s too much absurdity going on for anything to truly stand out. But that’s the problem with making episodes in six days; sometimes, you have the components of good ideas, but they don’t come together in any meaningful way. 

Cartman may have called Towelie the worst character ever, but honestly, it’s probably Pip. The early seasons of “South Park” tried very hard to make the boys’ British classmate Pip a thing, and it just never really worked. He even got his own episode with Season 4’s “Pip,” which is a retelling of Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations,” only with Pip at the center (as well as robot monkeys and a body-swapping device). 

The best thing about “Pip” is that the team somehow got Malcolm McDowell to narrate the episode. Everything else is painfully unfunny. Maybe it would’ve worked better if they brought in more “South Park” regulars. How would the episode play if Estella were played by Wendy, or if Miss Havisham were Sheila Broflovski? It may have also worked as part of an anthology setup like a “Simpsons” Treehouse of Horror episode, where there are three different book adaptations, and “Great Expectations” is only one of them.

Then again, “South Park” literally had an episode called “Simpsons Already Did It” where it bemoaned how its predecessor already did a bunch of its plot ideas, but it doesn’t forgive what “Pip” became. 

“Stanley’s Cup” should’ve been a slam dunk. It’s similar in premise to “You Got F’d in the A” and “Asspen,” where one of the boys reacts stone-faced to some absurd sports movie parody. For “Stanley’s Cup,” it’s a straight riff on “The Mighty Ducks,” where Stan’s tasked with coaching a pee-wee hockey team to get his bike out of impoundment. All the while, Stan feels like he needs to win a game so that one of the team’s players, Nelson, who’s dying of cancer in the hospital, will be inspired to live. Spoiler alert: The pee-wee team loses horrifically to the Detroit Red Wings, and Nelson dies.

Dark endings aren’t inherently bad, as evidenced by “Scott Tenorman Must Die” being one of the best and most offensive “South Park” episodes ever. But here, the ending just leaves us cold. Usually, Stan has a level of disconnect from the absurdity around him, allowing some level of detachment from any of the darker jokes. But here, he’s invested; he wants to save Nelson, and he fails. “Stanley’s Cup” is definitely a divisive episode. Some think it’s a hilarious deconstruction of feel-good sports movie tropes, while others think it’s just plain unfunny. “Stanley’s Cup” sees “South Park” reheating its nachos to diminishing returns, and we’d rather see the show try something new and fail than continue to do what it’s done before in worse ways.