The 10 Most Disturbing TV Episodes of All Time, Ranked
Jeremy has more than 2800 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas.
Sign in to your Collider account
While there might've been a time when TV was relatively safe, at least if you were watching fictional shows, that time’s well and truly over. Shows from decades past could explore dark and disturbing things on occasion, but never really to the extent that those episodes remain devastating to watch by today’s standards. Things shifted a bit in the 1990s, and then well and truly by the turn of the 21st century.
Honestly, some TV shows get more graphic and intense than what you might see in an R-rated movie. The following episodes either exemplify that, or they find other ways to be tremendously distressing. These are the most disturbing episodes in TV history, with a limit placed on one episode per show, just to keep things a little more interesting and varied.
10 "A Hole in the World"
'Angel' (1999–2004), Season 5, Episode 15
Angel could be fun sometimes, as a show, but not as often as Buffy the Vampire Slayer was. It was a spin-off of that show, and that one also had its distressing episodes, including one worth mentioning below. On average, though, Angel was darker, and so it shouldn’t really be surprising that something like “A Hole in the World” hits in season 5 and feels all about fighting an unwinnable battle.
There’s something particularly impactful about the slowness and cruelty with which the inevitably tragic happens here.
The whole series is about life being a constant battle, at the risk of simplifying things a bit. It’s just that “A Hole in the World” has the most distressing casualty in all the battles fought throughout Angel’s run, and there’s something particularly impactful about the slowness and cruelty with which the inevitably tragic happens here. It’s a kind of sadness that also ends up being disturbing.
9 "Holiday"
'Peep Show' (2003–2015), Season 4, Episode 5
Of all the shows here, Peep Show is the most comedy-focused, to the extent that it probably wouldn’t be accurate to even call it a dramedy. It’s pretty much all comedy, but very dark comedy, and so it naturally gets fairly upsetting at times, dealing with bleaker things than most comedies or sitcoms. And then of all its episodes, “Holiday” might well be the most uniquely upsetting.
The whole show has things seen from various people’s points of view, but mostly Mark and Jez’s, because they're the main characters. The show’s about them making messes of their lives, essentially, and the way the show’s presented makes all the already uncomfortable things feel more squirm-inducing. The places “Holiday” goes to are mortifying. It can’t really be done justice with a summary, but the punchline the episode ends on (if it can be called a punchline) is undoubtedly disturbing.
8 "Seeing Red"
'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' (1997–2003), Season 6, Episode 19
As alluded to when talking about Angel, here’s a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode. It’s “Seeing Red.” It’s confronting on two main fronts: with where the destructive relationship between Buffy and Spike ends up, and then what happens at the very end of the episode as well. There is an intense loss that sends someone else on a further downward path for the remainder of the show’s penultimate season.
That penultimate season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a pretty feel-bad time all around, with the characters at their lowest throughout, even during the technically bright (and often funny) musical episode earlier in the season. The sixth season is about life beating all the characters down, and the drama is of a more mundane variety, compared to earlier seasons. Much of the horror in this episode, in particular, feels very real, contributing to this sense of the supernatural and fantastical really being de-emphasized in this especially downbeat season of the show.
7 "A Mother's Work"
'Sons of Anarchy' (2008–2014), Season 6, Episode 13
Sons of Anarchy went downhill quality-wise toward the end of its run. That might not sound super relevant, but part of its downhill spiral had to do with the show desperately trying to be more tragic and intense with every passing season, and so it got to be a bit of a parody of itself. So, it can be observed that some of the most violent and alarming moments of the show were found in its last two seasons, but also, whatever. Those seasons weren’t good.
“A Mother’s Work” is just here because it has the grisliest murder scene in a show filled with grisly murder scenes, and it happens to someone who, by Sons of Anarchy character standards, isn't awful. It’s shock for shock’s sake, but hey, it’s still shocking. Don’t watch this show, though. The concept of Biker Hamlet is more engaging to think about than actually watch, in practice.
6 "That's My Dog"
'Six Feet Under' (2001–2005), Season 4, Episode 5
Though not to the same extent as Peep Show, Six Feet Under is partly a dark comedy. It leans heavier on the drama side of “dramedy,” though, and then it ventures into full-on horror/thriller territory in its fourth season, evidenced by “That’s My Dog.” Basically, one of the main characters picks up a hitchhiker, and then that hitchhiker makes his life a living nightmare for a short while.
There are other things that happen in the episode, because it’s an ensemble-type show, but the stuff with David and the hitchhiker is the most memorable part of “That’s My Dog,” for better or worse. It coming out of nowhere and clashing with the general tone of the show (which is still dark, just dark in a different sort of way) adds to how intense and distressing this single episode ends up being.
5 "Escape from Oz"
'Oz' (1997–2003), Season 2, Episode 8
There is a sense of shock value being pursued over anything else at times, on Oz, so that maybe puts it in the same ballpark as Sons of Anarchy, but it was more consistent and… okay, not classier, but of a higher quality. It’s a show about prisoners inside a maximum-security prison, with some time spent on the staff as well, and characters were generally cycled through quite fast because they were all killed off so fast.
“Escape from Oz” concludes the show’s second season, and while it’s hard to single out just one episode when all of Oz is so graphic and confronting, there are some especially violent and sadistic moments in this particular episode. It stands in for the whole show here, because you could argue just about any episode of Oz is worth considering among the most disturbing television ever produced.
4 "Lonely Souls"
'Twin Peaks' (1990–1991, 2017), Season 2, Episode 7
Some historical context has to be taken into account, with the Twin Peaks episode “Lonely Souls,” which is also known as the more boring-sounding “Episode 14.” It’s episode 14 overall, and the 14th episode was much too early to answer the main question of Twin Peaks (“Who killed Laura Palmer?”), but at least that reveal was done in a monumentally impactful way.
Even if you know it’s coming, it’s still devastating, and then there is more beyond the reveal itself (“It is happening again” and all that) which adds to how disturbing the whole episode is. It’s the Twin Peaks episode that did have to happen, at a point, and it is a high point of the overall series, even if it does play a big role in the second half of the show’s second season getting kind of directionless. At least the season finale’s good, and Twin Peaks: The Return, in 2017, might not have delivered complete closure, but it was nice to have more Twin Peaks after all that time, not to mention serving as a fitting swansong for David Lynch.
3 "The National Anthem"
'Black Mirror' (2011–Present), Season 1, Episode 1
It’s the Black Mirror episode with the pig. If you know, then you know. If you don’t know, maybe you'll want to keep on not knowing. If you start watching Black Mirror, you'll know. It is the first episode of the whole series, and sure, it’s an anthology, so you don’t have to start with this episode, but there was a bold choice to have this stand as technically the first episode of Black Mirror.
The science fiction elements found throughout much of the series are downplayed here, and it doesn’t feel especially futuristic or anything. It’s just a bleak story about a Prime Minister who is forced to do something unspeakable to save the life of a member of the British royal family. “The National Anthem” is truly nasty and cynical, even by the show’s standards, and so it arguably represents Black Mirror at its best, even if arguments that it’s the show at its worst might be understandable. It’s that bold an episode, really.
2 "Employee of the Month"
'The Sopranos' (1999–2007), Season 3, Episode 4
Like Oz, most episodes of The Sopranos have something dark or confronting in them, and then it’s also comparable to Oz and Twin Peaks in the sense that it went to some disturbing places before most other shows did, feeling groundbreaking for its time and all that. Season 3 of the show isn't the most devastating in terms of death, because the other seasons tend to be deadlier for prominent characters, but it is perhaps the darkest season of the show for other reasons.
A large part of that comes down to “Employee of the Month” and “University,” with violence against women explored thoroughly and distressingly in both. One or the other could go here, but it’s going to be “Employee of the Month,” which might well be ever so slightly harder to revisit (that’s saying quite a lot, considering what happens in “University”).
1 "The Rains of Castamere"
'Game of Thrones' (2011–2019), Season 3, Episode 9
Would it make sense to put anything else in the #1 spot? Here’s “The Rains of Castamere,” which is the penultimate episode of the third season of Game of Thrones. The third season, overall, might well be the grimmest the show ever had. You get death, misery, and devastation in every season, but “The Rains of Castamere” is on a whole other level, while the rest of the season has most of the good characters licking their wounds, so to speak, and then all the stuff going on with Theon (or “Reek,” as he’s renamed).
The vibes are bad all season long. And then the infamous Game of Thrones penultimate episode phenomenon strikes even harder here than “Baelor” from season 1, which is saying a lot. “The Rains of Castamere” is the episode with the Red Wedding. That’s all you need to know; all that’s necessary, by way of commentary. That’s enough (also, it’s not particularly nice to think or talk about for any longer than necessary).
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.