10 Seriously Underrated South Park Episodes You Need to Binge Tonight

With 28 seasons and 332 episodes, there is no shortage of content for South Park fans. And, even when an episode isn’t one of the best examples of the series, it still typically has at least one moment that is laugh out loud hysterical. For instance, in the flop of an episode “Funnybot,” there’s Sandy Cervix, host of the Entertainment Tonight-like The Hollywood Minute who kicks off his show by yelling that he’s deaf in one ear. And, of those 332 episodes, there are plenty that are universally deemed classics, e.g. Season 5’s “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” Season 10’s “Make Love, Not Warcraft,” and Season 6’s “The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers.” All are classics, and all rank extremely high on IMDb’s list of every single episode.

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But the following episodes? They don’t rank high. In fact, they’re in the bottom half of that 332 total. The question is, do they deserve that? Are they really worse than Season 18’s “Grounded Vindaloop,” which ranks 12th? Or how about “200″ and the network-butchered “201,” which rank 34th and 35th? We’re not saying those are bad episodes, but are they really, truly exemplary examples of this show?

10) Cow Days

You’re going to see Season 2 a few times on this list, because it’s apparently the most underrated season of them all. Trey Parker and Matt Stone may have regretted hiring out the writing gig for much of this season, but they’re honestly being too hard on it. Even more than the debut season, the sophomore year best encapsulates what made early South Park such a ’90s delight.

To that point, “Cow Days” ranking at 255 is a crime. The A-plot of the boys trying to win flimsy Terrance and Phillip dolls works great, the Full Metal Jacket reference involving Cartman is a hoot, and the fact that contest winners Tom and Mary are only there to witness the bizarre cow-focused carnival and have their skin and eyes eaten by rats is just a comedic chef’s kiss. So innocent, so supportive of one another, and so ill-fated all because the people of this Colorado town are dumb as dirt.

9) Mecha-Streisand

It’s amazing that episodes from Season 19, the nadir of the series, can rank high (“Sponsored Content” is at 47) yet the first instance of a Season 1 episode is all the way down at 90, and that’s the masterpiece “Pinkeye.” That’s Top 10 or at most Top 20 stuff.

Then there’s the baffling fact that “Mecha-Streisand,” the iconic but apparently extremely underrated penultimate episode of the first season, is all the way down at 257. Similarly, the episode at position 258, “Weight Gain 4000,” is the episode that endeared the show to audiences after the so-so “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe” and “Volcano.”

8) Roger Ebert Should Lay Off the Fatty Foods

“Roger Ebert Should Lay Off the Fatty Foods” is another example of wonderfully classic South Park. It starts out with a gag about Mr. Garrison spending days “Teaching” the students via episodes of Barnaby Jones.

This episode was greatly influenced by the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Dagger of the Mind,” and it works perfectly. The villain, Dr. Adams, is peak early South Park villainy, and the way he pronounces the word “planetarium” is sublime, as is the irritation felt by a reporter when he hears Dr. Adams say it. This is one of the most rewatchable episodes of the series, hands down.

7) Sarcastaball

Regardless of whether you think football is remotely entertaining, Season 16’s “Sarcastaball” is pretty great. It’s always fun to see Randy be a manchild, at least up until the Tegridy Farms running thread beat it into the ground.

There are a few moments that stand as some of the funniest scenes the season had to offer. The quickness with which Randy recognizes “Buttery’s Creamy Goo” for what it really is couldn’t be better timed. The random kid getting run over out of the blue as Randy and Sharon drive across the Sarcastaball field (and how neither of them so much as acknowledge the boy) is hysterical. And, finally, if there’s a better burn on CeeLo Green, it’s hard to imagine what that might be.

6) A Very Crappy Christmas

It makes sense that Season 3’s “Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics” ranks as low as it does (297). The same goes for “#HappyHolograms” and “The Crap Out,” but Season 4’s “A Very Crappy Christmas” at position 271? That’s ludicrous.

This is one of the fourth year’s best episodes. It’s also a testament to just how far the show had come even as far back as 2000. After all, it features footage from Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s short film “The Spirit of Christmas,” which is what got them the show.

5) An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig

Another Season 1 winner that doesn’t get the credit it deserves, “An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig” is a classic. It’s also the best use of what is arguably the show’s most underrated character: Mephesto.

From Fluffy the pig to Trey Parker’s amazing impersonation of Elton John, this one fires on all cylinders. This is also where we meet Shelley Marsh. And, while she ended up being a bit one note down the line, here she’s a nice foil for the boys, and her moments with Stan towards the end of the episode are nice and heartfelt (right up until she runs him over with a lawnmower).

4) Mexican Joker

Season 23, the final season before COVID basically took the show out of commission for two years (there was only “The Pandemic Special” in 2020 and “South ParQ Vaccination Special” in 2021), is a mixed bag. That said, it had serialization worked out a bit better than in the previous few seasons.

The Tegridy Farms thing was starting to feel played out by this point, but Randy’s destroying South Park residents’ personal grow stashes is pretty good. Even better, though, is the plotline implied by the title. This was 2019, and its warnings about ICE, what they’re doing to kids, and what the result of that is going to be have only grown more startlingly accurate today.

3) Summer Sucks

The lowest ranking episode of Season 2 is “City on the Edge of Forever” and, even for a mega fan of that season, it’s hard to disagree with that. It was way too early for a clip show, even if South Park at least did it in a quasi-unique way. But the second-lowest rated being “Summer Sucks” is pure hogwash. This is simple, good ‘ol days South Park at its best.

The early days episodes were at their best when there was some big threat on the verge of destroying the town that the boys are more or less just witnessing. For instance, the turkey attack in “Starvin’ Marvin,” the aforementioned “Mecha-Streisand,” and this episode’s giant fireworks snake. Does the Cartman being afraid of first grader pee in the pool B-plot go anywhere? No, but that’s the appeal of Season 2. It’s infinitely rewatchable late ’90s humor with a ton of charm. Plus, Chef’s song “Simultaneous” may be his best.

2) I Should Have Never Gone Ziplining

Granted, the live action sequence in “I Should Have Never Gone Ziplining” does not work. Not even a little bit. But is it bad enough to knock this episode all the way down to position 306? No.

Season 16 absolutely had some episodes that were worse than this one. Some of them, like “Jewpacabra” and “Going Native,” are rightly positioned lower on IMDb. Others, like “Obama Wins!,” “A Scause for Applause,” and “Faith Hilling,” are not. At the very least the Double Dew jokes are scatological humor at its best and the “Long story short” gag rings incredibly true. Hearing that makes you wish you were holding a pencil just so you could snap it in half.

1) Terrance and Phillip: Behind the Blow

At position 314, it’s amazing how low Season 5’s “Terrance and Phillip: Behind the Blow” ranks. It’s a great episode. Even for those who don’t take to Terrance and Phillip it’s a winner, be it during the scenes where there’s an E! True Hollywood Story-esque special on the duo or when it’s focusing on the boys trying to recruit them for some extra intense environmentalists’ Earth Day event.

The low rating probably comes down to the fact that it’s making left wing environmentalists look unstable. Of course, as it turned out, the ones warming of climate change were the ones who were right on the money. But even putting that aside this episode is great. Terrance and Phillip’s dynamic has never felt deeper, the Canadian Shakespeare scene is a great example of a scene dragging on for a while and dropping the joke before it becomes genuinely irritating (that requires extremely specific comedic timing), and the Goat People gag is hysterical.

What do you think is the most underrated episode of South Park? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!