Fans discuss the funniest times tv shows admitted they messed up in later episodes: 'Simpsons seems to frequently rip on itself'

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Isabella Penn
Sep 26, 2025 1:00 PM EDT

Most shows pretend their worst episodes never happened. Every now and then, though, a series takes the opposite route and openly admits its mistakes, or better yet, mocks them outright. That was the focus of a recent internet thread, where fans listed the best examples of TV turning the punchline on itself.

South Park is maybe the most famous example. Years after clowning on Al Gore with its "Manbearpig" episode, the show circled back and basically admitted they were wrong, turning the fake monster into canon and apologizing through the characters themselves. It's rare for a long-running show to eat that much crow, but when it happens, it sticks. 

Plenty of other series have done the same thing in smaller ways — a character breaking the fourth wall to poke fun at an early plot hole, or an episode that mocks outdated animation styles and cringey writing. It's TV's way of saying, "Yeah, we know that was rough, but we're in on the joke now."

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  • Personally, I love when a show is self-aware enough to admit it isn’t perfect. It’s like seeing your favorite band laugh at an old album — embarrassing for them, but oddly comforting for the rest of us.

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  • "TV shows acknowledging the mistakes of or otherwise mocking previous episodes"

    Time to Get Cereal - South Park: In the episode Manbearpig, South Park establishes a fake beast meant to be an allegory for global warming,
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  • which was widely believed to be a liberal hoax at the time. In recent canon, Manbearpig was made real and South Park essentially apologizes for the past episode
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  • through the main characters apologizing to Al Gore.
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  • Back to the Pilot - Family Guy: Brian and Stewie go back in time to the pilot episode, mocking things such as the art style,
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  • an animation error, characters early personalities, and so on.
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  • ex
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  • The Simpsons (numerous): Image included is a scene in which Lisa references the scorned episode Principal and the Pauper, but Simpsons seems to frequently rip on itself like this.
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  • (Sorry these examples are exclusively adult animation but those are the ones at the top of my head lol).
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  • Look! It's the Great Divide, the biggest canyon in the Earth Kingdom. Eh, let's keep flying.
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  • From Avatar: The Last Airbender, the episode the Ember Island Players has the cast attending a play based on their adventures, serving as a recap episode of the series up to that point When the play reaches the events of The Great Divide, pretty much unanimously agreed to be the worst episode in the series, the characters choose to skip over the events of the episode entirely.
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  • 42SillyPeanuts The Amazing World of Gumball does this a lot. For example, "The Finale" mocks end-of-episode resets by having every unresolved plot turn out to be the Wattersons purposefully ignoring the consequences of their actions.
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  • During the iconic Breaking Bad scene in which Walt throws a pizza onto the roof, the pizza doesn't come apart leaving viewers wondering why the pizza wasn't sliced.
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  • In an episode in a later season, this mistake was referenced when Jesse orders a pizza from the same place and it shows up not sliced. He asks why it isn't sliced and it is said that the store place doesn't slice the pizza to save time and charges less because of it. Jesse says that its stupid because slicing a pizza takes only a couple seconds and they move on.
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  • SimonDNTZ Hey, remember when 1had a monkey? GIF
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  • In Friends season one, there was a goofy subplot where Ross got a pet monkey, only for him to randomly disappear after the Super Bowl episode in season two. Later on, Ross out of the blue asks why he even owned one.
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  • SimonDNTZ Octopeddicus The Great Big Begry Bear The By Tipps the ball
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  • I went back and forth on this because it's kind of a half example, but f in a season six Gumball episode about recycling, there's a scene where Gumball asks Mr. Small why he would want to use something that's already used. He responds "With today's
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  • sophisticated recycling techniques, you can reuse old stuff and most people can never tell the difference." The joke is that it suddenly switches to reused animation from season one, which is noticeably crappier compared to season six.
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  • Coherently-Rambling Saturday Night Live really struggled in the early 80's due to the original cast and Lorne Michaels leaving. 1984 was their worst year due to Eddie Murphy leaving, as he had been carrying the show and keeping it afloat during this rough patch.
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  • In 1985, Lorne Michaels comes back and builds the show back up from scratch. Madonna was the first person to host once Lorne came backs. She starts the episode by reading a message from Lorne to the audience saying "Last year was a dream. A horrible, horrible dream."
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  • Not TV but when drawling Spawn, Todd McFarlane made mistakes like putting the pouch on the wrong spot and after so many people pointed it out, he retconned that the suit is actually alive itself therefore explaining any changes.
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  • If you ever feel useless,just think about the camera on Candace's phone:
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episode hilarious animation tv shows movies fandom TV comedy script fans mistake
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