South Park: Ranking Every Season 23 Episode | ScreenRant
The 23rd season of South Park recently wrapped up its 10-episode run on Comedy Central. Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s cutting-edge animated satire has been one of the funniest shows on the air for almost a quarter of a century now, and with renewals up to season 26, it’s not going away any time soon. The latest season shook up the formula, with all-new opening credits for every episode except the finale. Randy’s escapades on Tegridy Farms took up the first half of the season, with diminishing returns, but the season picked up on the back end. So, here is Every South Park Season 23 Episode, Ranked.
10 Tegridy Farms Halloween Special
The Tegridy Farms storyline had well and truly run out of steam by the season’s midpoint, “Tegridy Farms Halloween Special,” and even the show itself seemed aware of this, with Sharon and the kids constantly telling Randy that no one cares about the farm as much as he does and they just wanted to go back to regular South Park.
So, it was strange that the show continued to drag it out. The B-plot involving Butters being trapped in a manipulative relationship with a mummy was sort of a non-sequitur, but it was funny enough to elevate what could’ve been dull rehash of earlier episodes.
9 Season Finale
While “Season Finale” wasn’t actually the season finale, it did act as a finale for the Tegridy Farms story arc. Randy suddenly found himself facing consequences for bombing all the private weed farms in South Park. He enlists the help of President Garrison and his attorney Rudy Giuliani. (Season 23 finally figured out the right balance of Trump-based humor.)
The Whites are always good for a few laughs. Here, they adopt a couple of kids from an ICE detention center like they’re adopting dogs from a pound. This tied into the “Mexican Joker” storyline from the season premiere. It was pretty clunky, which can be expected when the writers are making it up as they go along, week by week, but it was far from disappointing.
8 Board Girls
This episode was extremely controversial when it first aired, with many viewers claiming the character of Heather Swanson, a transgender athlete whose appearance was clearly based on Randy Savage, was transphobic, especially with the suggestion that she’s lying to blaze through women’s athletic events. Every aspect of the premise is based on an outdated and negative assumption about gender.
The subplot sees the boys of South Park Elementary trying to keep the girls out of their gaming club. However, as it turns out, the boys just like pretending to be wizards and dragons, whereas the girls are actually interested in strategy and are much better gamers than they are. This was a lot funnier and hit the mark a lot more than the A-plot.
7 Mexican Joker
The season got off to a pretty weak start with the premiere episode, “Mexican Joker.” The central thesis of explaining what’s wrong with ICE detention centers through the lens of superhero movies didn’t quite land, especially since the controversies surrounding the Joker movie turned out to be unfounded.
Still, the show’s critique hit the right targets and portrayed the separation of Mexican children from their parents as suitably deplorable. And the glee on Cartman’s face as he watched ICE officers drag Kyle and his family out of their home was hilariously in-character. Plus, the novelty of Tegridy Farms taking over the show was fun at first, before repetitive jokes ran it into the ground.
6 Turd Burglars
Trey Parker and Matt Stone really turned up the grossout in “Turd Burglars,” season 23’s eighth installment. It involves Kyle’s mom Sheila getting a fecal transplant and making her friends jealous with how healthy she is. So, they decide to do their own D.I.Y. fecal transplants, ending horribly. One of them even bribes Stan, Cartman, and Kenny to steal Sheila’s feces with a copy of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
Meanwhile, Kyle becomes terrified of the millions of nasty microbes crawling all over his body, and by the end of the episode, we can totally relate. It wasn’t a particularly memorable episode, but we had ourselves a time.
5 Shots!!!
The 200th episode of South Park saw every public figure the show has ever satirized arriving in town to sue its residents. The episode also revealed the truth about Cartman’s father and showed an uncensored image of the prophet Muhammad, which got it banned (you can’t find that episode anywhere online to this day).
With this in mind, the series’ 300th episode, “Shots!!!,” was pretty disappointing. It was just a run-of-the-mill episode, with Randy celebrating his farm making $300,000 when no one cares. However, the B-plot, which tackles anti-vaxxers as Cartman is afraid of needles and refuses get vaccinated, was as sharp as the show at its best.
4 Christmas Snow
South Park rounded out its 23rd season with a holiday-themed episode, and it saw the long-awaited return of the show’s classic opening title sequence. Pairing the shocking statistics about drinking-related accidents that happen at Christmas with the idea that alcohol is the only thing that makes Christmas fun was pretty hilarious, as was Randy proving that in 2019, all it would take is a day of protesting to get cocaine legalized across the board.
All in all, “Christmas Snow” was a satisfying finale episode that made up for a couple of so-so trips to Tegridy Farms earlier in the season.
3 Band in China
This is the appropriately titled episode that got South Park banned in China. Randy heads to China to sell his weed when he realizes there’s a billion potential customers there, only to find that every Hollywood studio and sports franchise already had the exact same idea. When he arrives in China, he’s promptly locked in a labor camp where he’s worked to the bone.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s criticisms of the Chinese government would only get more incisive as the season went on, when they realized the Chinese government was actually paying attention, but Randy assassinating Winnie the Pooh was a strong start.
2 Let Them Eat Goo
The first truly great episode of the season, “Let Them Eat Goo” hilariously lampooned the plant-based food industry. This was the only time in the six-part Tegridy Farms storyline that Tegridy Farms actually fit seamlessly into the satirical subject matter, as Randy combatted declining weed sales by making vegan burgers out of the stems.
The running gag of Cartman having a heart attack every time he found out he was eating meat-free meat products was hysterical. The “goo man” featured in this episode is a pitch-perfect parody of Daniel Plainview from Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, and there were some jabs at LeBron James’ confusing comments about free speech for good measure.
1 Basic Cable
Possibly South Park’s most self-aware episode ever, “Basic Cable” examines the effect that the ongoing onslaught of streaming services will have on the television landscape. Scott Malkinson futilely tries to get his dad – a cable guy who’s struggling to hold his job in the age of streaming – to buy a subscription to Disney+ in order to woo Sophie, the new girl.
Amid meditations on the popularity of The Mandalorian’s meme-happy “Baby Yoda” and the absurd amount of content available to stream is a meta-commentary on the sale of South Park’s own streaming rights to HBO Max for $500 million.