South Park: Ranking Every Season From Worst To Best

14. Season 13 (2009)

After the lack of quality that hampered Season 12, South Park came back with a decent effort. A number of episodes in Season 13 entered the broader pop culture lexicon, most notably Fishsticks. Lost in the splendor of Kanye West dressing up like a gay fish and singing an accompanying autotune-bedazzled parody of "Heartless" is the fact that the episode's main storyline features an awesome, rarely-seen dynamic between Cartman and Jimmy.

Aside from Fishsticks, Season 13 hits some of South Park's highest single moments in recent years. Watching Butters become a pimp induces unstoppable tears of laughter, and Margaritaville may have delivered the most poignant criticism of the Obama administration's handling of the recession. The music was particularly on point, too, with Cartman delivering a few great songs: his sea shanty, his lament over minorities in his water park, and especially his cover of Poker Face.

But laughable moments can't cover up a paucity of plot, and Season 13's episodes, on the whole, fall short in delivering compelling stories. Some efforts are legitimately bad; Pinewood Derby is slow, strange, and not funny enough to compensate, and The F Word can't sustain its single joke. The seeming dichotomy of Season 13 - either hilarious snippets or a quality twenty-two minutes of television, but not both - is a sign that Parker and Stone were starting to struggle pretty hard with South Park in the late '00s.

Best Episode: Fishsticks

Worst Episode: Pinewood Derby