There are few shows as controversial as South Park, and there are few episodes of the cartoon satire as controversial as the fan-hated “Pip” (season 4, episode 14). Like any show that has been around for a matter of decades, South Park has produced its fair share of disappointing episodes. As a pointed political satire, some of South Park’s most disliked outings have been criticized for relying on hot takes that aged poorly or were viewed as insensitive.
However, while outings like season 23’s “Board Girls” or the recent special The Streaming Wars featured transphobic gags that earned the ire of reviewers, other South Park episodes have been disliked for less obvious reasons. Sometimes, despite South Park’s scatological humor and no-holds-barred approach to satire, it is the show’s more anodyne outings that annoy fans most. For example, the Great Expectations parody “Pip” is frequently listed as one of South Park’s most hated outings online, despite the episode featuring less potentially offensive jokes than many of the show’s more controversial outings.
“Pip” is hated by many fans online and even cited by South Park’s creators themselves as a failed experiment, but it can be tricky upon a rewatch to work out just what is so bad about the episode in question. While plots like South Park’s pointless Tegridy Farms story can reasonably be accused of taking forever to go nowhere, “Pip” has a self-contained, fast-moving plot based on a deservedly beloved piece of classic literature. While many South Park episodes rely on hot-button topics that cause the show’s outings to age terribly, “Pip” is a parody of a novel that is over 100 years old, making its storyline as timeless as South Park episodes get. Despite this, “Pip” remains one of South Park’s most fan-despised outings online, and there are numerous reasons for this.
South Park Season 4 Episode 14 Explained
"Pip" retells the story of Great Expectations and is surprisingly faithful to the Dickens novel for the first half. The episode focuses on Pip the British kid, a minor cast member who was already infamously unpopular among fans, and follows his life story as it grows increasingly bizarre (and less book-accurate). While The Simpsons' annual Treehouse of Horror Halloween specials prove that animated sitcoms can devote episodes to spoofing popular pieces of media, those specials include one vital ingredient that “Pip” inexplicably lacks. Namely, The Simpsons casts its main characters as the protagonists of whatever movie, show, or novel the episode is parodying. In contrast, none of South Park’s regular cast appears in “Pip,” making it one of only two South Park episodes to feature no Kenny, Kyle, Cartman, or Stan. This didn’t go down well with fans, many of whom didn’t care about Pip and were understandably surprised to see South Park drop its leads to focus on this obscure side character.
Why South Park Fans Hated Pip
The main reason that fans online cite for hating “Pip” is the most obvious issue with the episode, namely that is one of the only South Park episodes that doesn’t feature the show’s main characters. Complaints about South Park’s Randy problem proved that fans like to see the show’s quartet of kids at the center of proceedings, and that while replacing Kenny with Butters was an acceptable move since the shift occurred organically and gradually, simply dropping the main characters to focus on a supporting star for a one-off episode was a step too far. There is also the odd issue of Pip being both an homage to Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and a parody of the classic novel, as South Park seems surprisingly reticent to change too many details of the story it is spoofing. This being South Park, there are plenty of gross-out jokes added into Great Expectations in the show’s retelling, but “Pip” still rarely strays from the novel’s familiar plot, meaning there are few surprises in store for viewers on the level of storytelling.
Why South Park’s Creators Hated Pip
Per South Park co-creator Trey Parker, “Everyone—including us—hates Pip.” While season 3’s “Jakovasaurs” was also hated by fans, “Pip” has the dubious distinction of being a rare outing that even South Park’s creators viewed as a failed experiment. This is an understandable stance, since trying to retell a literary favorite via a ribald cartoon satire was never going to be easy and the episode did make things harder for South Park’s creators by leaving out Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman. The largely negative reaction to “Pip” also appears to have colored the South Park’s co-creator's views of the outing, with Matt Stone calling the episode “really cool and good” during an interview in 2004, but softening this defense to “I don’t hate it. But it was like ‘why did you guys do that?’” in a 2011 retrospective (where it was named as one of South Park's least popular episodes).
However, South Park’s creators did spend months working on the episode, originally planning to make “Pip” a lavish musical like 1999’s feature-length South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut. The creators also made a slew of animated assets from scratch to ensure the outing looked markedly different from a normal South Park episode. They even toyed with the idea of bookending the outing with a framing device wherein Pip was reading his life story to his elementary school class. This abandoned idea was later revived by South Park’s 2004 Christmas episode “Woodland Critter Christmas,” which also borrowed its closing joke from “Pip.”
Was The Pip Hate Fair?
In retrospect, the outsized hate that “Pip” received from South Park fans was not entirely fair. Viewed on its own merits, “Pip” is a funny (if underwritten) episode with an inspired Malcolm McDowell cameo and some fun moments of bizarre, surreal lunacy. It is far from perfect and has the misfortune to arrive in season 4 (otherwise often cited as the show’s strongest, with competition like South Park’s ingenious Children of the Corn spoof “The Wacky Molestation Adventure”). However, in an average South Park season, “Pip” wouldn’t stand out as a weak link and the inventive premise deserves praise as an admirable attempt to try something new by the show’s creators. While the season 4 outing’s fan hate did eventually convince the creators that every episode of the series needed some involvement from the show’s regular cast lest it is rejected by fans, “Pip” also allowed South Park to try something new and take a creative risk, opening the door for more successful experimentation in the show’s future.