24 years ago South Park crossed a line and was never the same again
The Trey Parker and Matt Stone series, which started in August 1997 and is still running to this day, has always been known for pushing buttons and causing a stir.
Its very first episode featured lead character Eric Cartman having to deny that he was abducted by aliens and probed in a very personal place on his body – and it only got more risqué from there.
But despite all the hilarious and x-rated antics in South Park over the years, arguably no episode of the show has ever topped Scott Tenorman Must Die for combining side-splitting laughter and 'unfathomable sadness'.
Scott Tenorman Must Die was originally broadcast on July 11, 2001, arriving as the fourth episode of South Park's fifth season – at a point when the show was already notorious.
In the episode, Eric falsely believes he's the first among his friends to reach puberty after purchasing pubic hair from local high schooler Scott Tenorman – all for the price of $10 (£7.50).
When Eric finds out about the practical joke, he vows revenge on Scott but has his initial schemes outsmarted by the older boy on several occasions.
Things come to a head when Eric discovers that Scott's favourite band is Radiohead and invites them to South Park to visit, falsely claiming that Scott has cancer.
Radiohead's arrival coincides with a chilli cook-off that Eric and Scott both enter – Scott, in a bid to humiliate Eric again, secretly fills his chilli recipe with pubic hair.
But in one of the darkest twists in TV history, unbeknownst to Scott, Eric has secretly had both of Scott's parents killed, dismembered, and ground up into Scott's chilli.
Eric informs Scott of this after a few mouthfuls and then literally licks the tears off his cheeks as he cries over his dead parents, with Radiohead witnessing the entire horrific ordeal.
The episode has been cited as being among the best in South Park history by several TV critics over the years, with some heralding it as one of the greatest and darkest comedy storylines of all time.
In a 2000s interview, Trey Parker said of the episode: 'It was a big milestone in South Park, only because it was the first time we realized, maybe we're trying to do too much in episodes.
'It turned out so good that from then on we started saying, 'Let's forget B stories, let's forget C stories, let's just do a really well told A story'.'
Speaking about the episode to Pitchfork in 2010, Matt Stone called it 'one of the most notorious episodes' of the series and admitted that he still couldn't believe he managed to get Radiohead to guest star.
'I don't think [we told them about the chilli storyline]. I don't think we'd come up with that yet. We didn't tell them, we told them everything. We just weren't done with the episode.
Many South Park fans also see the episode as a turning point for Eric's character, with the evil 10-year-old only adding to his list of despicable crimes down the years. More Trending
In later episodes, Eric knowingly infects Kyle with HIV, kidnaps his friend Butters and leaves him in an underground bunker, fakes his way into the Special Olympics, and pretends to have Tourette's syndrome.
On IMDb, Scott Tenorman Must Die is the best-rated episode of South Park across 27 seasons, with an average user score of 9.6 out of 10, based on more than 11,500 ratings.
When the episode went out, Matt called up the members of Radiohead to see what they thought: 'I talked to them afterwards. They liked it.'
Watch South Park on Apple TV and Paramount Plus.
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