10 Most Disturbing TV Episodes Ever Made, Ranked

This article contains discussions of sexual assault and suicide.

Have you ever watched an episode of television that shook you to your very core? An episode that, perhaps, left lasting images in your brain that you feel like you'll never be able to shake? If this doesn't apply to you, perhaps you might want to check out any one of the episodes on this handy list.

Traumatizing the audience has been a big part of television basically ever since the medium was invented; early horror shows like "The Twilight Zone" helped establish short-form scares and spooks, as perhaps the most famous example. Some of the episodes found here are, yes, scary in some way, shape, or form. As television continued evolving and we hit what's called the "Golden Age" of TV around the turn of the 21st century, shows stayed scary, but they also became psychologically intense and categorically dark.

There's a lot of dark, scary, unsettling, and disturbing installments of television on this list, so buckle up. From an acclaimed Apple TV show about a sinister workplace to one of the best HBO shows of all time, here are the 10 most disturbing television episodes of all time, ranked. This should be fairly obvious, but: major spoilers follow for pretty much all of these shows, largely because the context in which these episodes happen is what makes them so upsetting.

Apple TV's series "Severance" is, without question, the most unsettling "workplace comedy" in recent memory. Set primarily within the mysterious Lumon Industries, the concept of "Severance" is that Lumon employees can choose to undergo a procedure that shares its name with the show's title, allowing you to effectively become two people; your "innie," who doesn't leave Lumon's severed floor, goes to work for you, and your "outie" exists in the real world with no knowledge of their other half. When we meet the show's protagonist, outie Mark Scout (Adam Scott), he's part of the "severance" program — specifically because he's deep in mourning over the apparent death of his wife Gemma Scout (Dichen Lachman).

What Mark and his innie Mark S. don't know — and what the audience doesn't learn until Season 2 of "Severance" — is that Gemma's outie is very much alive, but her existence is unbelievably miserable. Before the standout episode "Chikhai Bardo," we did know that Ms. Casey, a severed employee at Lumon, looked exactly like Mark's "dead" wife ... and in this installment, we see that Gemma's outie is a test rat at Lumon, undergoing horrifying, traumatic, and irritating scenarios to try and delineate the line between innies and outies. Learning the truth about Gemma is gut-wrenching ... but seeing her live through simulated plane crashes, dentist appointments, and other torturous experiences makes it all feel even worse.

Donald Glover's comedy "Atlanta" definitely isn't a disturbing show overall ... but its Season 2 episode "Teddy Perkins" is one of the most unsettling half-hours of television we've ever seen. "Atlanta" is a show that tends to focus on Glover's lead character and music manager Earnest "Earn" Marks — and his main client Alfred "Paper Boi" Miles, played by Brian Tyree Henry — but in "Teddy Perkins," we only spend time with their friend Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) as he heads to a recluse's home to pick up a piano. Glover is in the episode, though ... he plays said recluse, the titular Teddy Perkins, in bizarre white makeup.

Everything about Teddy, from his mannerisms to his high-pitched voice to his house to his face, is really upsetting ... and the fact that this episode builds to the reveal that he has a "brother" named Benny (Derrick Haywood) and that there's a gun in the house just makes everything weirder and worse. Plus, according to Vulture, Glover stayed in character for the entire filming process. In an interview with the outlet, Haywood said all of his interactions with Glover were while Glover was "living" as Teddy. "So he's sitting on the couch and I'm like, 'Uh, Teddy, how you doing?' That conversation was quite weird," Haywood said. "Again, I didn't know the guy. I was introduced to him the night before at the fitting, but I didn't know it was Donald." (Stanfield reportedly didn't learn this until later either.) Not only that, but he kept using the Teddy voice. Yikes.

"Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," one of the most established and famous procedurals in modern television history, has plenty of disturbing episodes. Still, we went with the Season 15 premiere "Surrender Benson" because, in this one, the victim of the horrifying violence is Olivia Benson — the character who serves as the anchor for the entire show who's been played by Mariska Hargitay from the very beginning. In the previous episode, the Season 14 finale "Her Negotiation," the squad at the titular Special Victims Unit catches a man named William Lewis (unforgettable guest star Pablo Schreiber) exposing himself in Central Park, but as it turns out, the guy is committing way worse crimes than that. After crossing paths with her during his arrest, Lewis decides that Olivia will be his next target and breaks into her house, holding her hostage; with her present, he sexually assaults and murders a number of people before bringing her to a remote cabin and torturing her.

Olivia, as a character, is a beacon of hope who helps survivors of sexual assault and other horrific crimes get justice and move on from their traumas. Watching her be brutalized at the hands of an unrepentant sociopath is stomach-churning, as is the conclusion of "Surrender Benson," where we watch as Olivia gets the upper hand and (righteously) beats Lewis to a pulp, an act that ultimately creates a crisis when Lewis accuses her of violence in court. William Lewis is one of the scariest figures to ever appear on "SVU," and his obsession with Olivia is horrible to witness.

One of the most famously gruesome scenes ever shown on television is, without question, the infamous "Red Wedding" on "Game of Thrones" — so that had to be part of the list. After the tyrannical boy king Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) impulsively decides to behead Eddard "Ned" Stark (Sean Bean), the War of the Five Kings breaks out, pitting Ned's eldest son and heir Robb (Richard Madden) against Joffrey and his maternal family, House Lannister. Though Robb fights bravely against their forces with the aid and advice of his mother, Ned's grieving widow Catelyn (Michelle Fairley), he makes a tactical error off the battlefield. Even though Robb is promised to one of Walder Frey's (John Bradley) many daughters to continue the alliance between the Freys and the Starks, he falls in love with a woman named Talisa (Oona Chaplin) and marries her instead; before long, she's pregnant with his child.

Walder isn't happy about this, and he secretly allies himself with Lannister-friendly forces and invites Robb, Catelyn, Talisa, and a host of Stark forces to another wedding — the wedding of Catelyn's brother Edmure Tully (Tobias Menzies), meant as a hasty replacement for Robb, to one of Walder's daughters. After the newlyweds vacate the hall, though, the doors are swiftly locked ... and Talisa is murdered when a henchman stabs her repeatedly in her pregnant stomach. Robb dies after taking several arrows to the chest, and Catelyn's throat is slit after she kills one of Walder's daughters on her way out. The Red Wedding is infamously horrifying, and it certainly belongs on this list.

"Criminal Minds" is so famously messed up that star Mandy Patinkin left the series after Season 2 to preserve his own sanity, and when it comes to episode for a list of "most disturbing TV episodes of all time," this CBS procedural has a ton of worthy options. Ultimately, we went with "The Lesson," because who even thinks this stuff up?! In this Season 8 episode, the central Behavioral Analysis Unit investigates a particularly strange killer whose name turns out to be Adam Rain (Brad Dourif) who, after waking from a coma, has mentally regressed to his traumatic childhood. After growing up with a puppeteer father who's murdered in front of him during a robbery, Adam clings to his father's memory ... and he starts turning humans into marionettes and staging plays starring these victims before letting them succumb to their injuries and disposing of them. (Also, in the process of making them into marionettes, he would ... dislocate their joints and put nails through their hands.)

You read that right. We're talking human marionettes. "Criminal Minds" a routinely wild and dark show, but "The Lesson" really takes the top prize here. Again, we understand why Patinkin chose to exit stage left early during the run of "Criminal Minds."

Charlie Brooker's tech-based anthology series "Black Mirror" has a ton of upsetting and disturbing episodes, but its least tech-heavy episode — which also happens to be its series premiere — is actually its most unsettling installment. In the show's very first episode, "The National Anthem" (which aired on England's Channel 4 before the series got picked up by Netflix ahead of its third season), the British Prime Minister, Michael Callow (Rory Kinnear), is woken up in the middle of the night and rushed to his office upon learning that a member of the royal family, Princess Susannah (Lydia Wilson), has been kidnapped and is being held for ransom. What is the ransom? Well, the kidnappers want Michael to fornicate with a pig on live television — and then they'll return Susannah safely.

The reason that we picked this, out of all the "Black Mirror" episodes, is because — again — there's not any "scary" technology involved in this story. It's just about human fallibility and a horrifying, disgusting choice that one man ends up making so that he can "save" this princess. When the princess is released onto London's Millennium Bridge partway through the broadcast of Michael getting down and dirty with the pig, you really feel your gut twist in real time.

Vince Gilligan's universally acclaimed series "Breaking Bad" is, by and large, pretty dark — considering that it's about a science teacher named Walter White (a brilliant Bryan Cranston) who turns to a life of crime and starts making crystal meth after receiving a heartbreaking and financially ruinous cancer diagnosis. The darkest episode in the bunch, though, is undoubtedly "Ozymandias" — the penultimate episode of the entire series and one of the finest hours of television ever crafted. (The pedigree here is, to that point, astonishing; TV veteran Moira Walley-Beckett wrote the script, and future "Knives Out" visionary Rian Johnson served as the director.)

We start "Ozymandias" in peril. Walter's brother-in-law Hank Schrader (Dean Norris) has been shot by sinister drug kingpins, and even though Walt begs for him to be spared, Hank is killed in the middle of the desert while Walt watches helplessly. Driven mad by his grief and his fear of getting caught — by this point in the show, Walt is quietly a kingpin who goes by the name "Heisenberg," which Hank figured out before his death — Hank kidnaps his own daughter Holly, taking her away from his terrified and desperate wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) and fleeing. "Ozymandias" brings basically every major storyline throughout "Breaking Bad" to a gripping and fascinating crescendo, but it will also leave you shocked and shaken.

"The Sopranos" is an absolutely gruesome show, even as you start to feel a strange kinship to mob boss Tony Soprano (the late, great James Gandolfini) throughout the series; again, there were a lot of possibilities to choose from here, but "Long Term Parking" took the "most disturbing" title in the end. Why? This is the episode where we watch as a character who's been on the series since its very inception meets a gruesome, devastating end after Tony's associates learn that she's actually an FBI informant and has worn a wire into their inner sanctum, so to speak.

Director Terrence Winter really tries to convince the audience that Adriana might survive the revelation that she's betrayed Tony and his family, including her boyfriend and Tony's "nephew" Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli). Though Chris seems like he might be willing to run away with Adriana and hide from his powerful family, he ends up betraying her, and Adriana gets a call from Tony himself claiming that Chris attempted to die by suicide and that one of his associates, Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt), will drive her to the hospital.

Silvio is not driving Adriana to the hospital, though. He's driving her to his death. The choice Winter makes — to let the camera linger on Adriana's terrified face as she struggles to hold back tears, realizing that her life is about to come to an abrupt and horrifying end and ultimately begging Silvio to spare her only to die from a gunshot — makes "Long Term Parking" unbelievably disturbing. It also, in the context of the show, reminds you just how heartless Tony Soprano can be.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that audiences really, really, really hate watching dogs die on screen. That's what makes the penultimate episode of the HBO miniseries "Chernobyl" — created by Craig Mazin and based on the very real nuclear explosion in Chernobyl that happened near Pripyat, Ukraine in 1986 — so horrifying. In this searing miniseries (all of which is horrifying and disturbing) about the events that led to the nuclear disaster and the ensuing fallout, "The Happiness of All Mankind," the fourth episode of the five-episode miniseries, introduces a truly stomach-churning development. All household pets and wild animals that were within range of the nuclear fallout need to be "liquidated" in case they're contaminating the environment, and a squad of "liquidators" sets out to do just that.

Any animal lover will, in all likelihood, have to pause or even turn off "The Happiness of All Mankind" several times throughout its run time, because the images and even off-screen noises found within this episode are so unbelievably traumatizing. We see most of this through a trainee named Pavel (future Oscar nominee Barry Keoghan), who's instructed by Georgian soldier Bachos (Fares Fares) on the best ways to efficiently take out all of these unsuspecting animals. Again, "Chernobyl" is really hard to watch anyway; the "animal-killing" episode takes things to a new and devastating level, somehow.

Anyone who's ever watched "The X-Files" all the way through probably expected the Season 4 episode "Home" to show up on this list — and it's number one with a bullet. In case you need a refresher on this unbelievably screwed-up episode, here's the gist: Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) are asked to investigate the buried corpse of a baby in a town called Home, Pennsylvania. There, they meet the Peacock family, an inbred clan led by Mrs. Peacock, a quadriplegic amputee whom everyone assumed died after a car accident that left her injured. Instead, she kept having babies with her blood relatives, a proud (?!) Peacock family tradition, and all of her sons are now murderous and bloodthirsty.

In an interview with co-writers Glen Morgan and James Wong in The New York Times in 2015, the duo revealed that even though they knew this episode was upsetting, they underestimated the reaction to it. "We were trying to make a terrifying show," Wong said. "We didn't think we were pushing the envelope of taste in the way people seem to ascribe to us — 'Oh, there's incest, there's killing a baby.'" Unfortunately, producers called with concerns — and called the pair "sick" — and the episode was left out of "X-Files" reruns.

"The next thing you know, they weren't going to rerun it," Morgan said. "They didn't want the grief." While both Morgan and Wong feel like "Home" is only infamous amongst fans of "The X-Files" because it got temporarily banned from the airwaves, we beg to difer. "Home" is infamous amongst fans of "The X-Files" because it's genuinely one of the scariest and most upsetting hours of television ever made, if not the scariest and most upsetting hour of television ever made.

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