15 Best Regular Show Episodes, Ranked

Debuting on Cartoon Network in 2010, "Regular Show" was created by J.G. Quintel, who also voiced Mordecai, the series' anthropomorphic 20-something blue jay who makes up half of the main duo. The other half is Rigby (William Salyers), Mordecai's raccoon pal and roommate — but "Regular Show" was very much an ensemble. The show's roster of characters also included lovable oddballs like a gumball machine named Benson (Sam Marin), a lollipop named Pops (Marin), and a yeti named Skips (Mark Hamill).

One of the best Cartoon Network shows of all time, "Regular Show" was a ratings success and a hit with critics during its eight-season run, winning one Emmy off of five nominations. Fans agree that the show never declined in quality throughout its run, and even consider some of the show's best episodes to be within its final stretch. This ranking of the best "Regular Show" episodes of all time is culled from audience reviews on IMDb, best-of lists from both fans and other websites, and a little bit of editorial preference from Looper's writing staff.

While "Regular Show" is absolutely not an example of a TV show that's better if you skip the first season, it's easy to make the case that it didn't fully come into its own until Season 2, a season that will have ample representation on this list, starting with "This is My Jam." Mordecai and Rigby often bond over music — both their love of it and their attempts to create it — but "This is My Jam" sees the duo butt heads over Mordecai's hatred of Rigby's favorite song from his youth.

"This is My Jam" is not only a highly relatable story of two friends getting a little too passionate during a pop culture debate, but it's also a hilarious look at earworms and how completely they seem to take over our lives until we're finally able to shake them loose from our heads — even when it's a song that we were initially all too happy to have stuck on mental repeat.

As Gen Xers and Millennials began to create more art, video games started to have a bigger presence in film and on television. This is certainly true of "Regular Show," where Mordecai, Rigby, and the gang are often seen playing video games both passively and in service of some greater purpose. For Season 3's "Video Game Wizards," the gaming at the center of the episode definitely falls into that latter camp.

Mordecai and Skips enter a video game tournament in order to win a gaming accessory called the Maximum Glove — clearly a shout-out to the infamous Nintendo Entertainment System controller, the Power Glove — which upsets Rigby, who thinks Mordecai should've chosen him as a partner instead. But the three of them still travel to the tournament together, and, like many "Regular Show" plotlines, things soon escalate to ridiculously hilarious proportions and stop being a realistically grounded story of a normal video game tournament. The episode ends with the discovery that the Maximum Glove is actually a piece of junk, echoing the same disappointing reality of the Power Glove.

Although a lot of "Regular Show" episodes are fairly self-contained and can be watched in any order, the show was never afraid to play the long game and would often reward steady viewers. One of the best examples of that is "The Real Thomas," a Season 6 episode that focuses on the titular character who had been a recurring regular since his Season 4 debut. 

Played by famed voice actor Roger Craig Smith, Thomas had just been another fun member of the show's ensemble. But in "The Real Thomas," it is revealed that Thomas has actually been a secret KGB agent all along, sent to infiltrate the park. It's the kind of big twist — and subsequent total change of a character's direction — that is generally reserved for more heady, lore-focused shows like "Adventure Time," but "Regular Show" also dabbled in that type of thing from time to time, and it was always a treat when it did. 

In addition to being a giant lollipop, Pops is also one of the show's wackier characters (and that's saying something) thanks to his penchant for dressing, talking, and acting like a turn-of-the-20th-century English gentleman. Whenever he was the center of a storyline, you knew you were in for a treat, and "Cheer Up Pops" is his best episode. It's also one of the best episodes of "Regular Show," period, coming just before the three-part series finale.

Pops spends the majority of the series being almost unflinchingly optimistic, which makes it all the more impactful that this Season 8 episode sees him finally begin to lose hope. His brother, Anti-Pops (Robert Englund), was introduced earlier in the season as, essentially, the evil version of Pops and had become the series' main antagonist. Everything is on the line for the impending showdown between Pops and Anti-Pops, and in hyping Pops up for battle, the gang reminds him of all the good times they had together. The result is an episode that isn't afraid to go light on the laughs as well as heavy on heart, and it pulls it off beautifully.

"Regular Show" sometimes presented an episode that took the full half-hour rather than being divided into two shorter episodes, and it always felt necessary and never bloated whenever that happened. That was certainly the case with "Rigby's Graduation Day Special," which was the double-sized finale of Season 7. The primary plot line is that Rigby had finally returned to, and finished, high school after having previously dropped out. But when he's asked to give a speech on graduation day — one that's going to be broadcast on TV, no less — his excitement for the big day turns to fear.

That part of the story goes through fairly predictable beats, with Mordecai ultimately helping his pal through a tough situation and the gang all rallying around him as well. But this being a season finale, one that predated the final season to boot, "Rigby's Graduation Day" ended with a twist that saw the gang getting blasted into space — thus setting up what would end up being the main conflict of Season 8.

Like many shows whose creative team is of the nostalgia generation, "Regular Show" frequently featured references and throwbacks to 1980s pop culture. In the case of the Season 2 episode "Karaoke Video," that came by way of Mordecai and Rigby choosing the classic '80s rock anthem "We're Not Gonna Take It" by Twisted Sister as the song they sing at karaoke. But when someone in the crowd playfully asks the duo what, exactly, it is that they're not going to take, they end up launching into a rant against several of their pals.

When watching their taped performance at home the next morning, Mordecai and Rigby realize they must destroy the tape so that their friends don't find it and get their feelings hurt. This being "Regular Show," that seemingly simple mission gets ridiculously complicated and results in one hilarious mishap after another. Most other shows would've had Mordecai and Rigby learn a lesson about appreciating their friends or whatever, but while "Regular Show" isn't afraid to get sappy from time to time, "Karaoke Video" was not one of them — this was just 11 minutes of over-the-top comedy.

While scheduling shenanigans meant that it was actually the 98th episode of "Regular Show" to air, Season 4's "A Bunch of Full Grown Geese" was the 100th episode to be produced and was heavily marketed as the show's 100th episode in the lead-up to its debut. Many shows use the 100th episode as an event, full of callbacks to the previous 99 episodes and just an overall celebration of the series up to that point. And to that end, "A Bunch of Full Grown Geese" fits that bill quite nicely.

With Season 4's premiere, "Exit 9B," already presenting a parade of cameos from the previous three seasons, "A Bunch of Full Grown Geese" was freed up to not have to do that. Instead, it takes the route of bringing the show back to basics, as it were. More directly, it's a follow up to the Season 2 episode "A Bunch of Baby Ducks," a definite fan favorite, even though it didn't make our list. On top of all that, the episode is a charming love letter to the anime series "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and mecha anime in general.

As we previously mentioned, "Regular Show" wasn't afraid to veer away from the silly from time to time and tug pretty hard on the heartstrings. "Skips' Story," from Season 5, is one of the show's best examples of that very thing. Most of the side characters eventually get at least one big episode devoted entirely to expanding their backstory and/or just deepening what we know about them; "Skips' Story" does both of those things for its titular character.

Fans of the show know that Skip is immortal, and, like most things on "Regular Show," you just kind of accept it and don't think much about it. But "Skips' Story" digs into that a bit, not only flashing back to a specific — and heartbreaking — story from his teenage years, but also examining what it would be like to have so many more memories than people with regular lifespans have. The episode takes a surprisingly complex look at the toll it would take if you lived multiple lifetimes and how many more people you would lose during them. 

A common setup for a "Regular Show" episode is to have a seemingly simple task escalate to the point of high stakes and utter ridiculousness. For Season 2's "Rage Against the TV," that task is Mordecai and Rigby's attempt to get a new TV. One lead after another turns into a dead end, and the climax of the episode sees the gang having to fight a TV monster.

What also makes "Rage Against the TV" so great is the way it once again deals in delicious nostalgia. Mordecai and Rigby have reached a hard-fought video game level, and rather than lose their progress, they keep the game paused as they search for a new TV. This is something that only '80s and '90s kids will understand, as the younger set were likely left wondering why they didn't just save the game. There's also the matter of progress in a video game being taken so seriously in the first place, something that a non-gamer would find utterly baffling — further proving that "Regular Show" is definitely made by gamers, for gamers.

As "Regular Show" was building towards its epic finale, much of Season 8 was dedicated to not only the whole gang, but Pops in particular as he prepared for battle. "No Train No Gain" begins by utilizing the time-honored method of training by way of montage — only for that method to be completely turned upside down in a very "Regular Show" way.

Things get meta when Mordecai and Rigby begin to get annoyed at having to hear the same montage song over and over again, so they decide to change the song. Unfortunately, they sub in a speed metal song, which causes Pops' training to become way too intense and nearly destroys the park in the process. In addition to hilariously using the word "montage" as a verb — as in, Pops montages too hard — "No Train No Gain" is another stellar example of the show shifting from episodic to serial in the final season, and doing so without losing any of what made the series so great up to that point. If anything, it made it even better.

It would seem as though the only thing the creative team behind "Regular Show" likes as much as video games and Gen X nostalgia is anime, and that shines through wonderfully in "Brilliant Century Duck Crisis Special" from Season 6. From the perfect word salad of a title to the episode's one-off anime intro to the Voltron-esque merging of smaller entities into a huge animal mecha, the episode both lampoons and celebrates the excesses of the best anime of the '80s in equally brilliant measure.

But "Brilliant Duck Crisis Special" isn't just a random celebration of Japanese cartoons. It's also about the struggles of wanting to stay true to oneself in the face of selling out for big bucks, manifested when Mordecai and Rigby are offered the chance to have action figures made in their likenesses. They initially do the noble thing, but when the company that wants to make the action figures instead pitches a video game, the game-loving duo immediately abandons their principles — because, of course they would. 

We mentioned in the introduction to this feature that "Regular Show" won an Emmy, and this episode — Season 3's "Eggscellent" — is the one that earned the show that award. It took home the statue for outstanding short-form animated program, beating out tough competition in the category that year from "Phineas and Ferb" as well as fellow Cartoon Network critical darling "Adventure Time."

It's fitting that "Eggscellent" made "Regular Show" an Emmy award-winning series. While it's not quite the best episode, it's easily the one that most effectively boils down everything that makes "Regular Show" great into a single 11-minute story. It is full of story beats that seem cliche and overdone, but they all have that signature "Regular Show" twist of ridiculousness that justifies their inclusion, like Rigby entering an omelet-eating competition despite being allergic to eggs. Underpinning the whole thing is a great lesson about the power of friendship, which is appropriate since Mordecai and Rigby have one of the best TV friendships in history.

In what is arguably the most meta that "Regular Show" ever got for an entire episode, "Meet the Seer" is a thinly veiled reference to the battle between streaming platforms and traditional cable. Five years before "South Park" would make waves for treading similar ground with the 2022 special "South Park: The Streaming Wars," "Regular Show" was already making its own statements on the shift away from the way we used to watch television before Netflix and the way we typically watch it now — and whether the change is for the better or the worse.

Much of the episode takes place on Planet Nielsen, a callout to the Nielsen ratings that were once the sole arbiters of whether or not a show was successful (they can still help you determine the most popular TV show the year you were born) but are now fading into irrelevancy. It's one of several references the episode makes to terms and concepts of television in the pre-streaming world, all of which are either already obsolete or are destined to soon be so. But even with all of that, "Meet the Seer" still manages to keep the overarching story of Season 8 on track and brings things one step closer to the epic finale that was just two episodes away.

While 100th-with-an-asterisk episode "A Bunch of Full Grown Geese" celebrated that milestone by going back to the beginning, as it were, the Season 4 premiere, "Exit 9B," kicked off what was roughly the show's midpoint with a bonanza of cameos from the various non-main characters that had been on the series in the previous three seasons.

As we've seen from the orgy of nostalgic fan service that film and television have turned into these days — especially movies and shows related to comic books — these types of cameo parades run the risk of feeling gimmicky rather than creatively substantial. But "Regular Show" avoided that issue, balancing the "Hey, remember this character?" winking moments with a surprisingly heavy story where all of the main gang except for Mordecai and Rigby perish in a stun gun mass shooting, forcing the duo to travel back in time to set things right. Time travel is also tricky territory to navigate, but this episode makes it look easy by playing fast and loose with the "rules" in a way that only "Regular Show" can.

A lot of beloved TV shows never got the ending they deserved, and that's especially true for cartoons. Given their long production schedules, animated series often find out they've been cancelled long after they're in any position to write a true finale. Fortunately, "Regular Show" had already planned to go out with Season 8, and as a result, the creators were able to craft both a stellar final season as well as a pitch-perfect series finale.

While the show had released double episodes before, "A Regular Epic Final Battle" lived up to the "epic" in its title by being stretched across the equivalent of three episodes. And every minute was necessary in order to deliver both an appropriately gripping final battle and an extremely satisfying — if devastatingly bittersweet — ending. Time travel, flashbacks, flash-forwards, noble sacrifices, and many more TV tropes are thrown at this last episode — and not a single one is mishandled. 

Like "Skips' Story," "A Regular Epic Final Battle" includes long stretches that aren't funny at all. But it's to the show's credit that it can not only present some of the silliest moments in television history but also seamlessly transition to dramatic and heartbreaking without any of the scenes feeling out of place.