There’s a lot of bad TV out there, and it can be amazingly hard to find something worth watching. Something that has a point, decent character and plot development, perhaps something of a message. Of course the problem with all that is that we begin to care about the characters… which of course makes it amazingly difficult when something bad happens to them. We get hurt because some bastard writer is attempting to score an emotional response from us.

But what about the TV shows that, overall, become so harrowing by the end of their run that they make you want to curl up into a little ball and weep.

**SPOILER ALERT**

If you don’t know how Alf, Dinosaurs, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Daria, Buffy, M*A*S*H, Now Then Here & There or Saikano / She The Ultimate Weapon end, and would like that to remain a mystery until you’ve seen the shows, don’t read the rest of the article.

Here’s my list of them, and it was originally meant to be 10, but Farscape got removed because too many people told me that anything with puppets and sexy albinos in it can’t be depressing. So, here it is! Just in time for you to pick up the boxed sets during Xmas sales, and watch in the week between then and New Year’s Eve when you have nothing better to do than top up your Prozac prescription!

9) Alf

Overall, Alf is a pretty upbeat show. It’s about an adorable, smart arsed alien made out of a doormat without the cocaine addiction of some other TV aliens I could mention.

However, did you ever manage to catch the ending of it? No? Would you like to know what happens? He gets caught and fucking dissected, that’s what!

He thinks he’s about to get home to Melmac, because a couple of his buddies show up, and then fuck right off again the moment the fuzz shows up. Pissed off about not being to capture an entire ship, Alf is captured and put up on Swedish rape charges, and then they carry out what they promised to do to him in the first episode.

The final moral of Alf: Don’t trust your supposed friends for they will betray you, and your family can do nothing to save you.

Dinosaurs

Another great series with puppets! Thank you 80s, for showing us that you could get things without CGI and that they were kinda cool. The only real issue with Dinosaurs was that the puppets were really there to cram moral lessons down your throat in a very unsubtle way that only the 80s really managed to muster in their TV shows. It also had many genuinely funny moments (well, if you were 7).

And the ending just pisses all of that away:

Thanks to Man ma– I mean Dinosaur induced climate change – everyone dies… an it’s Earl’s fault… and Earl is YOU, you filthy consuming whore!

The final moral of Dinosaurs: It took them hundreds of millions of years to fuck up the planet – we’ve done it in just over a century. Kudos!

7) Neon Genesis Evangelion, EoE Ending

With delightful movie adaptions such as You Are (not) Alone and You Can (not) Advance, how could this not be a cheery fun filled romp for the whole family? It’s about what, you say? A small child’s father cloning god and manipulating his own son into piloting a robot that requires melding with his psyche to function, whilst being manipualted into it over the memories of his own mal-adjusted childhood and mother issues, whilst struggling with sexual development for a lust for one woman that treats him like dirt and another that’s actually a clone of his dead mother? Whilst being made to eat the only friend he ever had, and consistently reminded of how alone he truly is in the world? Or that a loving and forgiving God finally returns, only for him to have to kill it if he wants to retain a sense of individuality, which is apparently based on the abject terror of forming emotional bonds with others?

What could possibly be depressing about that?

Ok, so perhaps this won’t make sense if you haven’t seen the rest of the series. Whilst high. But if you can figure out what’s going on, you’re basically seeing the undoing of the entirety of humanity to fulfill the ego of one kid’s father.

As it turns out, Spike Spencer is the reincarnation of Nitsche.

The final moral of Neon Genesis: There is no God… but if there was, it’d totally be a clone of your dead mother than jerked off over while she was unconscious in a coma.

6) Now, Then, Here & There

In an attempt to get laid, a boy (Shu) finds himself transported to an alternate reality whilst trying to save some chick (Lala-Ru), ruled over by an insane and amazingly stupid dictator (Hamdo), where an even more cowardly and stupid population don’t think anything of rising up until he points out that they should. For his effort, he gets tortured, everyone else gets killed by way of the flooding, and he doesn’t even get laid.

The irony is that in some ways, Hamdo isn’t even the bad – He’s trying to unite the world (albeit, with an iron fist) because it’s a wasted desert, and only through careful oversight, centralised planning, and getting Lala-Ru’s water pendant, can there be any hope of survival for the people.

On the bright side, the nice folk at Manga Entertainment will let you watch the entire Now Then Here & There for free on their YouTube Channel. So, y’know, go and watch it with some popcorn and submit to the Manga Effect. Man, that was a cool advertising campaign. It was all Pantera in the sound track and shit!

The final moral of Now, Then, Here & There: Don’t attempt to save strangers that are perfectly able to stand on industrial smoke stacks without the aid of a helicopter.

5) Daria, Season 5

Daria, in and of itself, was MTV’s realisation that once upon a time they actually made intelligent programming aimed at disaffected Gen-X teens that actually had a brain, and weren’t into the amazingly crude grunge culture that was based on the idea of rejecting the 80′s elitism by rejecting all that the 80s had to offer, like even mildly of an intellectual bent. Daria herself was a character in Beavis & Butthead‘s class who moves to another school to get a fresh start, and instantly becomes the acidic chick who hates everyone else because she’s, frankly, smarter than they are (Hi, Sunny!).

OK, so we know that Daria is a disaffected teenager, and that brings with it a whole heap of issues – the show is not exactly safe viewing if you look in underneath it from the get go. Series 5, and the telemovie to finish it off, though, jesus. Daria fucks up her relationship with her boyfriend over sexual feelings she can’t deal with, which is also the same reason she has unrequited feelings for her best friend’s, Jane’s, brother that has begun to poison the relationship she has had with Jane since she moved to Lawndale High. Jane, fairly enough, can’t deal with a “best friend” that has the hots for her brother and steals her boyfriend, as well as not being sure if she might actually be a lesbian (after all, she wears a lot of flannel). This is on top of her family breaking down because her mother and aunt are massive bitches, her father having a mental breakdown (and an embolism), she sabotages her own chance of getting into a good college because she wants to stick around with Jane who now also thinks she’s an idiot for not taking a golden opportunity like that, her sister’s new boss turns out to be an alcoholic, and finally she finds a time capsule that actually kinda points out that no, she was always unhappy.

The final moral of Daria’s final season: You were always unhappy as a kid, which is why you’re fucking up your life now.

4) Buffy

Life is perfect when you’re a hot blond girl in a Californian highschool… unless you happen to be the person who’s meant to be in charge of saving the human race.

We all know and love Buffy. Sassy, hot teenagers that save the small town (and effectively, The World) time after time, having fun and drinking chocolate malts, because they live on top of a Hell Mouth. Except if you stop and think about it, the life of Buffy Summer’s is amazingly fucked up.

Every relationship she has with a guy, the guy ends up dying. Sometimes he’ll be brought back to life, or cyborg enhanced… and then he goes and dies again. Or starts a detective agency in L.A. Either way, she’s being abandoned by her loves constantly. At least she has her friends, right? Wrong! She consistently gets rejected the moment they have something better to do, or get mildly shirty with her about them not being the super powered ones. Willow takes the cake with this one, deciding to start trying to bring on the apocalypse which she has actually helped avert many times because some nerdy douchebag comes and shoots her girlfriend accidentally (she does flay him pretty good though).

Well, she has her fami- NO! Her father up and left because she was a problem child, as saving the world tends to turn you into when you’re totally under appreciated. Her mother dies in a way so mundane that not only could you not see it coming, but even Magic and soap opera medicinal best practice could save her. And her sister doesn’t even exist really.

Her school friends and general acquaintances in society are consistently trying to kill, kidnap, murder, maim, clone, sacrifice or rape her. Even the Gods are against her, literally, multiple times!

The one reprieve she gets is when she dies. For all her good work, she gets her just reward and goes to Heaven… only to have her douchebag friends assure themselves that she’s somewhere awful (because saviours go to Hell, right?), and summon her back, tearing her soul from the only solace she’s ever known back into not even the world we know, but one crawling with demonic entities, corrupt humans and people that generally try to make sure she’s dead… again…

And then there’s the distinct possibility that none of this was actually real. What a relief, right? It could be that she was just in a mental asylum the whole time.

The final moral of Buffy: The only way to make sure your boyfriend remains stiff is to ensure he’s dead before you even begin.

3) Saikano / She: The Ultimate Weapon

Yes, there is a lot of anime on this list – bite me.

Meet Shuuji. He’s your average perverted Japanese teenager that just wants to get have a teenage romance. Meet Chise, the clutzy girl he’s in love with. As it turns out, their date isn’t going to go so great… Because she also happens to be a secret military experiment that’s the most destructive force on the planet.

There’s a war going on – neither the manga nor the anime ever explain with who. We just kind of assume “everyone” by the end. The war slowly begins to destroy the cities of Japan, and everyone they care about. You never hear about the rest of the world, and you can’t be sure if it’s propaganda for the characters in the world of the show, but you’re told that Japan is winning. You get to see what losing is like in the last episode.

Throughout the war, Shuuji and Chise attempt to have their awkward teenage relationship and attempt to ignore both the war and Chise’s involvement in it. It’s actually adorably cute. However, Chise is forced to live with the things she has done. What’s worse is that it’s never explained, although it is implied, that she was not a willing subject in the experiment. Shuuji has to deal with a girlfriend that is literally a genocidal monster that occasionally drops a grenade when sexually excited, as well as her prolonged absence, and the psychological fact that even though she is a fantastic weapon she is not only not keeping him and his loved ones (and country) safe, but exacerbating the problem due to retaliatory strikes. This leads him to cheat on her with one of his childhood friends (who happens to be expiring in a pool of her own blood at the time, but she didn’t want to die a virgin) – not the wisest move when your girlfriend has the power to turn cities to ash in a few seconds.

As the power within Chise grows, and there is no longer enough medication to contain it, the weapon in her overpowers all emotion (contrary to every other anime previously) and she becomes some large, weaponised entity that ends up protecting what is left of their tiny city in Japan from a few rag tag left overs of whatever global forces still exist that try to take her down in the finale.

Unable to bear the stupidity of the human race in general and its insistence on violent retaliation, Chise uses the last of her will to bring her now massive presence down to claw at the oceans, summoning a tsunami to wipe out the armada… and then reduces the entire world to carbon soot except for Shuuji, who will now get to die of thirst in approximately three days time.

In classic Japanese style, Chise apologies for this before losing the last remaining aspect of her consciousness.

The final moral of Saikano: Love doesn’t conquer all – it just commits terracide.

2) M*A*S*H

Let’s just start with the theme song, shall we?

That’s right, bitches, Marilyn Manson did not write that song. It was written for a witty, anti-war sitcom! War is depressing enough without having smart arsed alcoholics (who later become the president of the USA when the zombies attack) consistently playing jokes on everyone else who is simply wanting to survive or wear dresses. Let’s face it, the Korean war kind of fucked over the lives of everyone on M*A*S*H, and pretty much every US teenager of the time thanks to conscription, and the show consistently drove home how futile the war was, as well as how stupid many of the actual, historical command decisions of the war happened to be. Larry Gelbart is even on record stating how the show was basically his anti-war soapbox, and the only reason there was a laugh track at all was because the show was so incredibly depressing without, particularly the funny parts.

It was a rather bleak, black comedy.

The most depressing part of the show though is that of Major Charles Winchester. People that remember the show remember him as the stuffy, British-ish surgeon that was the replacement for Major Frank Burns, with a characterisation that is more than likely the basis for Frasier. Winchester is possibly the most human of all the characters on the show, caring enough to try to actually fix each patient that comes under his gloves as each load of wounded is brought in, a source of antagonism between him and the other surgeons who make quips and do rushjobs in order to get as many soldiers off the table and technically living, rather than being fully able. Winchester gives to charity to be rebuked for it in possibly the only Christmas episode of any sitcom that’s ever actually had a moving moment. And in the movie finalè, Winchester attempts to give some P.O.Ws a new life by teaching them instruments and gets them to play Mozart to his satisfaction just as it’s announced a cease-fire to negotiate an end to hostilities is about to go in effect… only to have his band get shelled in the few hours of the war that remain.

Everything that Winchester wants to do, is, has done, is turned to shit by the war for the crime of… what? Wishing he had that position a the Boston hospital he was meant to have before the war started? He finally gets that position, only to have everything else he ever cared about reduced to bitter ashes.

1) Bridalplasty

There’s nothing particularly depressing about the show in and of itself. Here’s a clip – it seems kinda inspirational almost…

… almost. And then you remember what reality TV contestants are like.

The depressing part is what it says about humanity in general that such a show not only exists, but rates decently enough for the advertisers to a) cough up enough to pay for the show’s filming, prizes and fat executive salaries with some money for the network to spare and b) no, actually, it’s fucking sad that enough people are watching this shit. That is all.

The final moral of Bridalplasty: You can be a nasty, horrible, skanktacular whore that hates all those around, and still become a minor celebrity.

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