Quest for Ratings
| "Quest for Ratings" |
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"Quest for Ratings" is the eleventh episode in the Comedy Central series South Park's eighth season. Its original air date was November 17, 2004.
Plot synopsis
Eric Cartman, Jimmy, Butters, Kyle, Token and Stan are taping "Super School News", a newscast airing on South Park Elementary's closed-circuit television system. Cartman and Jimmy play the leading roles as head anchors, Butters is the entertainment/celebrity reporter, Stan is a field reporter, Token is the meteorologist, and Kyle does sports. However after their news program premieres, their teacher (Mr. Meryl) tells them that they did horribly in the ratings, trailing far behind Craig's home video show, "Animals Close-Up With a Wide-Angle Lens" (which uses the Benny Hill theme song, "Yakety Sax"), which they consider aimless and banal. (Kenny apparently also helped Craig, since Cartman hadn't allowed him to participate in their news show since, according to Cartman, “[he is] too poor, and poor people don't watch the news.”
The news team then pledges to make a program that will be a ratings booster and gain the attention of all students. They rename the show "Sexy Action School News" and add flashy elements (in a parody of various infotainment shows), including random "Panda Madness Minutes" in which the newscasters spontaneously dance with pandas. However, nothing seems to work; although they beat Craig's original series, they fall behind his follow up "Animals Close-Up With a Wide-Angle Lens Wearing Hats". To get ideas, the boys decide to get high on cough medicine. They hallucinate and wake up the next day with hangovers (and ironically enough, watching "Animals Close-Up With a Wide-Angle Lens Wearing Hats"), but their notepads contain nothing useful (specifically, Cartman drew a circle and a squiggly line, and Kyle wrote down the lyrics to the Happy Days theme). Remembering that they had seen Craig's program while high and thought it to be brilliant, they conclude that a majority of the school must be perpetually high on cough medicine, accounting for his ratings. They then decide to produce a special report that gets cough medicine banned from school.
Soon after, the ratings drop and Craig's show is cancelled, as the children are no longer high, and they start to cough endlessly. To emphasize the importance of good ratings, the AV teacher then suspends Craig from school and requests the removal of his testicles. Satisfied with their results, the "Sexy Action School News" team discovers the curse of a successful show: each subsequent episode has to be just as good. Back in the writer's room, they come up with nothing and eventually decide to just bail.
Production
With the recent release of season 8 on DVD, many of the mini commentaries revealed that much of the lack of ideas was due to the fact that Team America: World Police, Trey Parker and Matt Stone's concurrent film, had just been through a long, grueling post-production and left the staff low on energy:
So, this episode marks a very special time in South Park history, because, this was the first time that we were officially... out of ideas.
— Trey Parker on the DVD commentary for this episode