Here Are the Most Emotionally Devastating Episodes in Sitcom History
Every now and then, a TV show that we watch to laugh makes us mourn a thousand-year-old dog fossil more than we ever thought possible.
In American television, it’s traditional for a series that’s reached syndication to suddenly make a drastic tonal shift for a single episode and stun its audience enough that they spend the rest of their lives talking about the time that The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air got real. Though the show wasn’t strictly a sitcom, the classic war series M*A*S*H arguably pioneered the “unexpected tear-jerking moment in a comedy show” with its Season Three finale, “Abyssinia, Henry,” which closed with the characters and audience learning that Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake died following his honorable discharge when the enemy shot down his transport plane.
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Since the premiere of “Abyssinia, Henry” in 1975, several more ostensibly comedy shows have successfully turned their unwitting viewers into weeping messes, and in a recent Twitter thread started by the TV comedy superfan “no context sitcoms,” those viewers joined together to remember that time when Scrubs made us ugly cry:
This thread had many of the hits that you see whenever sitcom fans talk about that episode — the death of Brendan Fraser’s character Ben Sullivan and Dr. Cox’s inability to face his grief and his failure as a doctor in the Scrubs episode “My Screw Up” is an all-time tear-jerker, as is the aforementioned Futurama episode “Jurassic Bark” featuring the most loyal thousand-year-old dead dog in adult animation history. Marshall’s dad dying on How I Met Your Mother is another one for the Millennial sitcom fans, and, of course, there is the tragic loss of Tobias’ hard-boiled eggs on Arrested Development.
Surprisingly few sitcom fans brought up the serious moments from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which were once even more famous than the show’s funny episodes — the return of Will's dad and his re-abandonment in the 1994 episode “Papa’s Got a Brand New Excuse” is an iconic tear-jerker. Additionally, the facetiously titled episode “Bullets Over Bel-Air” featured a mugger shooting Will when Carlton panicked during the stickup, leading to a powerful moment in the hospital when Will demands that Carlton hand over the gun that Carlton bought for protection following the shooting.
Curiously, not a single response to no context sitcom’s question brought up The Bear, the comedy show that’s so weepy and serious that it has fans of every other Emmy-nominated comedy challenging its genre categorization. Perhaps The Bear is too recent a show to make it on these typically nostalgic rankings, or maybe dead dogs, dead friends, dead dads and deadbeat dads are simply sadder than restaurant workers gloomily staring at a bowl of soup.
