South Park: Ranking Every Season From Worst To Best

9. Season 8 (2004)

By this time, the show was well into the process of establishing its "second era," where the boys' innocence and amateurish aesthetic were replaced by a focus on storytelling, more cynicism, and escalation of dramatic stakes. In some cases, the new look failed; Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes tries too hard to create a crisis out of the retail giant.

But for the most part, the show was getting the feel right on a consistent basis. We see Cartman leading a jovial army of "neo-Nazis" through the town streets in The Passion of the Jew, Diddy leading a massacre of PETA in Douche and Turd after singing his "Vote or Die" song, and a gigantic pile of naked men trying to prevent the Goobacks from taking their jobs. The best episodes, though, come from the boys being boys, and none better demonstrates this than the masterful Good Times With Weapons, which uses the frame of the boys playing ninja to make a statement on Americans' opinions on violence in the media while giving us a reprise of Butters as Professor Chaos (in anime, no less). Another exemplar of this type of episode is AWESOM-O, an absolute gem of the Cartman-Butters relationship.

Parker and Stone have said that this season was absolute hell for them, given the work they were putting into Team America: World Police and the creative juices they felt the film sapped from them. But if this was a "down season" for South Park, then it's an indicator of the show's incredible baseline quality, because many of Season 8's episodes are stellar.

Best Episode: Good Times With Weapons

Worst Episode: Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes