There was another British comedy called One Foot in the Grave. In the last episode, the main character, Victor, has been killed by a hit-and-run driver. The episode focuses on his widow, Margaret, trying to cope with his death. At one point she confesses to her minister that the one thought that keeps her going is the chance to get revenge on the killer, although she does seem to find some solace with a friend she met in a support group, and who is also recently widowed.
At the end, Margaret discovers that her new friend is the killer. She was rushing to the hospital to see her husband one last time before he died, and she hit Victor by accident. The episode ends with Margaret driving away and we don’t know whether she has gotten her revenge or not.
I’ll go with All In The Family too. But the one where Gloria got assaulted.
The chilling part for me was, by the end of the episode, everyone had moved on as if the problem had been resolved. But the very last scene was a close up of Gloria who was still obviously shaken.
the episode of barney miller where barn’s wife tells him she’s getting a divorce
And the episode where fish (abe Vigoda)who retired comes back to the precinct for a visit and finds out life there went on without him especially at the end when they all go out for a homicide call and hes just left standing there …
Not a sitcom specifically, but a meta movie inside a sitcom.
“Helene: It was sad for a Three Stooges picture, what with the dead baby and the Stooges being executed and all.
Kramer: Yeah, well that was an unusual choice for the Stooges.”
Great performance by Ben Vereen. Fresh-Prince also had an episode where Will gets some uppers from a friend, tells Carlton they are vitamins. So Carlton pops a few before the prom, does a wild and crazy dance, and ends up in the hospital. Will tells Uncle Phil they were his pills, and Phil makes him apologize to the whole family. First scene where Smith really showed his acting ability, but too damn depressing.
In retrospect, nothing can match the Mork & Mindy episode where Mork is mistaken for Robin Williams and discovers the price of fame and how it killed certain people, including John Belushi & (dramatic pause) John Lennon.
While not an overall depressing and sad episode, the end of S02E03 of Rick and Morty: Auto Erotic Assimilation, with Rick and Unity’s breakup. The end never fails to make me sad, especially Rick being too drunk to competently kill himself.
Scrubs was well known for blurring the line between comedy and drama, but for the most part it was a quirky sitcom. But this scene from “My Lunch” has got to be one of the saddest sitcom moments in recent memory.
If you watch semi-carefully, there’s a countdown to the big news during the whole episode. Numbers are subtly (or not-so) worked into the show until Marshal gets the news.
There’s a two-part episode of Barney Miller (called, obviously enough, “Homicide”), in which the squad becomes strictly homicide investigations. At the end of the second episode, they get a call about that a local liquor store owner has been murdered. This was a character who had appeared several times, one of the neighborhood regulars, so the audience knew and liked him too.
The gut punch was that he had come to them earlier in the episode, reporting that he was being shaken down by gangsters wanting protection money. Because of the homicide-only policy, they couldn’t help him then. Wojo has a devastatingly bitter line when they get the call about his murder: “I guess we can handle it now.”
And there’s a red herring of potentially bad news throughout the episode - Marshall and Lily wondering if they are capable of having children - so the shock of the actual bad news comes as a bigger surprise than it might otherwise (also Alyson Hannigan’s sad face is very effective).
For me, it’s the episode where they try to keep a soldier from dying on Christmas, only to have him snuff it about 5 minutes before mid-night. Hawkeye moves the clock forward.
IIRC, that episode is called ‘the countdown’. I saw the numbers, many of them really aren’t hidden at all and I remember being curious as to what they were counting down to. I guess I’ve just ignored that episode for so long I didn’t remember.
And for some extra trivia, all the scripts they rehearsed with had a different ending (Lily being pregnant maybe?). Right before shot it, they gave Lily the new script and told Marshall they changed it and he just needed to react to what she said.
Ugh, that episode gets to me every time, it’s even hard to type it out.
What’s odd is that for someone that was only on the show a handful of times (12 times in 200+ episodes), how hard it hits the viewers. I suppose it’s how likeable he was and how well him and Marshall got along. We certainly wouldn’t have felt the same way if it had been Robin’s dad or Ted’s dad or [del]Barney’s[/del] Bob Barker.
It’s been ages since I’ve seen it, but an episode of, “The Wonder Years,” had Kevin getting close to a teacher that was helping him with math, then the teacher dies, unexpectedly. More of a gut-punch than depressing, but Fred Savage really sold it.