10 Most Shocking Plot Twists In TV History, Ranked

This article contains discussions of addiction and mental health.

Long-running TV shows like to throw in twists every now and then; think the multi-episode investigation of Larry Hagman's J.R. Ewing on "Dallas" or even that wild ending of "St. Elsewhere" that created a bizarre kind of cinematic universe structured around the dreamscape of a young boy named Tommy Westphall. Some of the shows that employ big, game-changing twists are structured around this very possibility and keep trying to outdo themselves; "Game of Thrones" does appear somewhere on this list, for example, but it also kept introducing narrative twists and turns that ultimately felt lackluster and underwhelming because they became plotlines that went nowhere.

That digression aside, let's look at some truly shocking plot twists on TV and rank them, although there's an important note here: calling a plot twist "shocking" does not endorse that twist, so to speak. What that means is that at least one of the plot twists we're going to discuss in this article is, honestly, kind of stupid — surprising, but really stupid. Now that that's out of the way, one last bit of housekeeping: this should be obvious, but major spoilers follow for 10 different television shows! If you haven't seen one of these and don't want the twist to be ruined for you, come back later! Now, without further ado, let's rank 10 truly shocking TV plot twists.

Created by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage and very loosely based on a series of books by Cecily von Ziegesar, "Gossip Girl" aired on the CW from 2007 until 2012 and immediately introduced a huge question: who is the titular Gossip Girl? Right away, we learn that Gossip Girl is an anonymous blogger who stalks and reports upon a select group of wealthy, privileged teenagers living on Manhattan's elite Upper East Side — specifically, Gossip Girl focuses on queen bee Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester), golden boy Nate Archibald (Chace Crawford), bad seed Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick), and flighty social butterfly Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively). In the pilot, it also brings Brooklynite Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley), who the blogger dubs "Lonely Boy," and his social-climbing younger sister Jenny (Taylor Momsen) into the fray.

Throughout the entirety of "Gossip Girl," a wonderfully silly show that only gets sillier as it continues, we keep waiting to find out precisely who Gossip Girl is. Well, the reveal is shocking and stupid — because it's Dan. This was, apparently, not the original plan, and the showrunners even admitted that they wanted Nate or Serena's younger brother Eric (Connor Paolo) to be Gossip Girl but fans figured out both of those options, forcing them to change course. Still, this doesn't change the fact that, throughout the show's earlier seasons, Dan keeps reacting to Gossip Girl blasts while he's completely alone in a room, really undercutting this whole reveal. Again, it's surprising, but really dumb ... and made worse by the fact that Dan then marries Serena, the girl he cyberbullied the most out of everyone.

"Scrubs" is, ostensibly, a funny show — but Bill Lawrence's quirky, off-beat, and often heart-warming medical sitcom also gives its rare serious moments plenty of weight, which is what makes the twist in one episode so sad and shocking. In the Season 3 episode "My Screw-Up," we catch up with our protagonist Dr. John "J.D." Dorian (Zach Braff) and his mentor Dr. Perry Cox (John C. McGinley) as Perry and his partner, the imperious Jordan (Christa Miller), prepare to throw a first birthday party for their son. Naturally, Jordan's brother Ben Sullivan (guest star Brendan Fraser) shows up for the festivities with his trademark camera ... and celebrating that he's in remission from leukemia, even though he's been avoiding his necessary screenings.

Ben is, as it turns out, not at a child's birthday party at all. Actually, nobody is attending a child's birthday party. Perry is actually in the midst of a mental health crisis and is imagining that Ben is able to attend his kid's first birthday; everyone is actually at Ben's funeral, because he passed away due to complications from leukemia. The most heartbreaking thing about this reveal is the way it unfolds: while Perry thinks he and Ben are joking around, an unusually somber J.D. walks up to his friend and colleague and simply asks, "Where do you think we are?" before the audience learns the truth. It's a great acting showcase for Braff and McGinley, and one of the most famously emotional moments on "Scrubs."

Adapted from Gillian Flynn's bestselling debut novel "Sharp Objects," this HBO series, helmed by Marti Noxon and the late, great Jean-Marc Vallée, focuses on Camille Preaker, a troubled journalist played by Amy Adams. After one girl is killed and another goes missing in Camille's secluded hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri, she reluctantly returns to investigate it, reuniting with her controlling Southern belle mother Adora Crellin (a magnificent Patricia Clarkson) and her half-sister Amma Crellin (Eliza Scanlon). As Camille tries to protect Amma and her young friends from whatever dangerous force in Wind Gap is targeting girls their age, she routinely clashes with Adora, struggles with her own long-held addiction to alcohol and mental health issues, and strikes up a strange romance with detective Richard Willis (Chris Messina), who's also in town to investigate these occurrences.

There are actually a few twists in "Sharp Objects," and the first big reveal is that, for years, Adora has been poisoning her children because she has Munchausen's by proxy, a mental illness that leads people to injure or incapacitate loved ones to make them fully dependent. That's why Camille's younger sister Marian (played in flashbacks by Lulu Wilson) died as a child — Adora accidentally took things too far that time — and why both Amma and Camille often get sick at Adora's home. Adora is arrested and Camille takes Amma to live with her in St. Louis, only to discover, in the show's final moments, that Amma is hiding missing teeth that belonged to the Wind Gap murder victims in her dollhouse. To make matters even worse, in the mid-credits, we see Amma murder a young girl in St. Louis too ... after Camille lavished attention upon the girl in question.

There's no question that Mike Flanagan's first major series for Netflix, "The Haunting of Hill House" — a relatively loose adaptation of Shirley Jackson's beloved novella of the same name — is one of the best and scariest shows on Netflix. It also, as it happens, features one of the most shocking twists in recent television history. As we follow the troubled, seemingly haunted Crain family through multiple timelines as they deal with hauntings at the titular Hill House, pay special attention to Nell Crain, played as an adult by Victoria Pedretti and as a child by Violet McGraw ... because she's the source of the show's huge reveal.

We learn, throughout the show, that Nell suffered most severely from Hill House's hauntings and is still troubled by them as an adult; we also know this because as an adult and child, she sees a ghost known only as the Bent-Neck Lady. If you've seen "The Haunting of Hill House," you know the truth: Nell is the Bent-Neck Lady after an accident she experienced as a child where she was playing with a noose, only to be shoved off the top of a staircase by her own mother's ghost. Ever since the show aired in 2018, fans have praised both the series and this twist ... and it helped turn Flanagan into one of horror's biggest names.

In the pilot of "WandaVision" — the flagship Disney+ series tied to the Marvel Cinematic Universe that was created by Jac Schaeffer — we immediately realize something isn't right. As Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olson), a superhero known as the "Scarlet Witch," prepares dinner for her robot husband Vision (Paul Bettany), his boss Todd Davis (Fred Melamed), and Todd's wife Sharon (Debra Jo Rupp) —  scene that's depicted in black and white like a classic sitcom of old — the scene freezes strangely when Todd begins to choke, only for things to revert back to "normal" when Vision uses his powers to save Todd. This is just the first bizarre occurrence in "WandaVision," a show that moves through different television genres and eras with each episode (paying homage to everything from "Bewitched" to "Malcolm in the Middle" to "Modern Family").

The big reveal, though, comes at the very end ... and no, we're not talking about the reveal that Wanda's seemingly friendly neighbor Agnes, played by Kathryn Hahn, is actually a super-powerful and ancient witch named Agatha Harkness who's been pulling strings of her own. (Hahn does get a fantastic song to break this news, though.) The big reveal is that Vision is dead, the children Wanda had with him don't exist, and Wanda has been forcing and trapping an entire town of innocent people in New Jersey to do her bidding out of sheer grief. Though the show ends with Wanda perusing a book of ancient magic called the Darkhold to try and find her twin sons elsewhere in the multiverse, it's a staggering, shocking reveal to learn that Wanda has been hexing people while in mourning, making them play-act an entire existence because she can't accept that Vision is gone.

Throughout "Game of Thrones," we're told, over and over again, that Kit Harington's Jon Snow is a bastard; specifically, he's the result of an illicit affair between the honorable Eddard "Ned" Stark, the patriarch of House Stark, and some random tavern wench. In the Season 6 finale of the series — based on "A Song of Ice and Fire" by George R.R. Martin and helmed by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss — we learn that actually, Jon isn't a bastard at all, despite what Ned told him for his entire life. 

In fact, Jon's real parentage ends up presenting a huge issue for his new girlfriend and sworn ruler, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), who seeks to reclaim the Iron Throne that her father once held. Besides Daenerys, her father, the "Mad King" Aerys II Targaryen, had two boys ... and one of them, Rhaegar, secretly married and fathered a child with Lyanna Stark, Ned's sister. After Lyanna gave birth to Jon, whose real name is Aegon, Rhaegar was killed by Ned's ally Robert Baratheon (played by Mark Addy on the series), and Ned protected baby Jon by lying and saying he was nothing more than a bastard. (He did this because Lyanna was promised to Robert, who was in love with her and convinced that Rhaegar "stole" his intended bride ... and Robert would have killed Jon.) Because "Game of Thrones" loved leaving plot threads hanging, Jon's true parentage was never particularly important, but it was still an awesome — and shocking — twist.

Dan Erickson's bizarre "workplace" series "Severance," which counts Ben Stiller as an executive producer and director, is full of crazy twists and turns — which makes sense, since this show can pretty easily be categorized as a "mystery box" series. We know that Lumon Industries employees like Mark S., Helly R., Irving B., and Dylan G. — played by Adam Scott, Britt Lower, John Turturro, and Zach Cherry, respectively — underwent procedures to "sever" their consciousness, with their innies going to work at Lumon and their outies existing in the real world, but what's the purpose of the severance procedure, really? What is Lumon testing in the bowels of its severed floor, especially as far as Mark's missing wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) is concerned? We still don't have all the answers, but as far as the answers we do have, the twin Helly R. reveals are pretty spectacular.

In the Season 1 finale of "Severance," the innies, desperate to see what their outies are up to, stage an event known as the "overtime contingency," which temporarily combines the innie and outie back into their original single person. Through that, we learn that Helly R.'s outie is Helena Eagan, the successor of the family that started Lumon in the first place. Then, in the Season 2 standout "Woe's Hollow," we get another Helly twist: ever since the overtime contingency, Helena has been masquerading as her own innie, tricking everyone ... especially poor Mark S., who thought he was falling in love with Helly R. and not her evil outie.

Throughout Vince Gilligan's universally acclaimed drama series "Breaking Bad," Bryan Cranston's anti-hero Walter White does a lot of horrible things, to put it very lightly. Still, one of the worst things he ever does, which is saying something, is he poisons a kid, Brock Cantillo (Ian Posada), to trick Walter's closest criminal associate Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) into aligning against their common enemy Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito).

Brock, the son of Jesse's on-again, off-again girlfriend (Emily Rios) Andrea, becomes good friends with Jesse ... making this twist even more heartbreaking. When Brock suddenly gets sick and is rushed to the hospital, Jesse assumes he's been poisoned by Gus using ricin, a poison that Gus is known to favor. It was actually Walter, who used the poisonous part of the lily of the valley plant to poison and kill Brock so that Jesse would agree to go up against Gus. Again, Walter does a lot of horrible stuff on "Breaking Bad." This one is really bad. 

When it premiered in 2016, Michael Schur's afterlife comedy "The Good Place" seemed relatively straightforward. After dying, Kristen Bell's Eleanor Shellstrop wakes up in what she's told, by neighborhood architect Michael (Ted Danson), is "the good place," this universe's version of heaven. One problem: everything Michael says to Eleanor about her perfectly-lived life on Earth is wrong, and as she ultimately admits to her assigned soulmate, ethics professor Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), she's pretty sure that she's not even supposed to be in the good place. Chidi agrees to help Eleanor become a better person thanks to his encyclopedic knowledge of ethics, and though she proves to be a tough student, she does her best so that she can at least have a shot of safely remaining in the good place.

The plot only thickens throughout Season 1 as Eleanor finds another good place outcast — the lovable Florida dirtbag Jason Mendoza (Manny Jacinto), who initially pretends to be a silent Buddhist monk named Jianyu — and finds herself irked by the name-dropping socialite Tahani Al-Jamil (Jameela Jamil). That's when, as Season 1 draws to a close, the show yanks the rug out from under us. As Eleanor realizes when she, Jason, Tahani, and Chidi get in an argument over which one of them will be forcibly sent to the "bad place," none of them can go: they're already there. Yes, they were all in the bad place the whole time and torturing each other, as Michael is delighted to announce ... right before he wipes all of their memories so he can simply restart his evil experiment. "The Good Place" has a few more tricks up its sleeve, but it's hard to beat this pitch-perfect Season 1 reveal.

The granddaddy of all modern mystery box shows is, undoubtedly, "Lost" — the deserted-island drama series created by J.J. Abrams and led by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. Throughout the show, which follows the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 after they crash-land on a bizarre tropical island full of polar bears and secret bunkers, we see a ton of flashbacks that explore the lives of main characters like Dr. Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox), Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly), James "Sawyer" Ford (Josh Holloway), and John Locke (Terry O'Quinn), just to name a few. 

That's what makes it so shocking — and a truly great TV twist — when, in the Season 3 finale "Through the Looking-Glass," a perturbed Jack says something strange to Kate in a scene we learn isn't a flashback at all, but a flashforward. As Jack begs Kate to return to the island, convinced they need to keep unlocking its mysteries, the audience was absolutely gobsmacked; clearly, "Lost" wasn't playing by typical TV narrative rules, and it's definitely the show's best-ever wild twist.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

If you or someone you know needs help with mental health, please contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.