Television is known for its brutal deaths. Every genre has had its share, and TV deaths have occurred since the medium’s beginnings in the late 1940s. Keeping track of plotlines in classic TV can be difficult, given that not everything is streaming, and a lot of shows were anthologies, like The Twilight Zone, so we didn’t get to know characters from week to week. Moving into the 1960s, when shows with consistent casts occurred with more regularity, if an actor left a show or died, their characters were usually written off, or simply recast with a new actor. Death was not the usual exit route.
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However, as television began to push boundaries, death became a way of life on TV, and an easy way to surge ratings and let actors leave a show, with the understanding that they wouldn’t have to come back. TV deaths have been brutal from the start, although they were more emotionally difficult than actually gruesome. As content standards shifted, and premium cable and eventually streaming debuted, deaths became both emotionally and physically brutal. These are the 10 most brutal deaths in TV history, in chronological order.
Spoiler warning: Because this list deals with character deaths, spoilers will be mentioned throughout.
10) M*A*S*H – Lt. Colonel Henry Blake

M*A*S*H shocked its viewers when, in the Season 3 finale, Lt. Colonel Henry Blake, the field hospital’s commanding officer, was finally able to be discharged. He left for America, but audience members were devastated when Radar, the nervous company clerk, received the report that Lt. Colonel Blake’s plane had been shot down over the Sea of Japan. The field hospital, is, of course, heartbroken by this news. The idea that they ever get to go home after what feels like a forever war, quickly becomes a futile hope. While it was a brutal way for a lead to leave the show, it did set M*A*S*H on its ‘war, what is it good for?’ path for the rest of its long run.
9) Good Times – James Evans, Sr.

Perhaps taking inspiration from Blake’s death due to his lead deciding to leave M*A*S*H, the patriarch of the family in the Norman Lear sitcom Good Times also got killed off via a report of his death mid-transit. Series star John Amos was getting frustrated with what he felt was becoming stereotypical writing for one of TV’s first black families, so Norman Lear decided to fire him from the show and write his character’s death into the Season 4 premiere. His character’s wife, Florida (Esther Rolle), breaks down as she reads the telegram telling her James was killed in a car accident on his way to Mississippi. It’s a brutal death, mainly because it might be the first example of a retaliatory killing of a character in response to a showrunner disagreeing with their lead actor; unfortunately, it would become a Hollywood trend.
8) Little House on the Prairie – Alice Garvey & Adam Kendall Jr.

Little House on the Prairie is mostly known today as a cheesy family soap opera, appropriate for the whole family. This wasn’t really the case โ the show often tackled tough topics, and it didn’t shy away from some of the realities of life in pioneer times. It often went in a different direction than the books it was meant to be adapting, too. By the sixth season, the original material supplied by the real Laura Ingalls Wilder was mostly ignored. Mary, Laura’s blind sister, had married, founded a blind school, and had a baby. The real Mary was blind, but she never got married, and she never had a baby (and no blind school, either). In a midseason two-parter, the blind school burns down, with the baby inside. The idea of a baby burning to death (or just suffocating before burning) is bad enough โ series creator and star Michael Landon, who wrote and directed the episode, made it more brutal by giving Walnut Grove resident Alice Garvey a rescue attempt. She gets trapped on the second floor, with the baby in her arms, and it looks like she beats the baby against a window in an attempt to break it. It’s awkwardly shot, to be sure. The opening shot of the second part is of two shrunken bodies, wrapped in white cloth.
7) Blackadder – The Main Cast

British TV deaths actually predate most American deaths; the iconic sitcom Coronation Street killed off some lead characters when their actors died, but the deaths weren’t particularly brutal, all things considered. Blackadder, a historical comedy show starring the likes of Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry, and Hugh Laurie, usually ended every series with the titular Blackadder dying. The show was supposed to follow the Blackadder line through the generations. The deaths were usually absurd and funny. The final series of the show deviated from the norm, as the main cast prepares to go over the trenches in one of the endless battles of World War I. The Blackadder who serves in World War I spends the finale trying to avoid the order, knowing it means certain death for him and his men, but in the end, they have to go. It’s a somber ending for a historical comedy that was often very silly.
6) Twin Peaks – Laura Palmer

Laura Palmer’s death kicks things off on Twin Peaks. She’s dead before the show starts, of course, murdered, but her death disturbs everyone in her former orbit. The show’s engine is driven by figuring out who killed her, but Twin Peaks works so well because her murder feels so brutal from the get-go. This is a quirky place, but it holds such darkness, and potential for future cruelty.
5) NewsRadio – Bill McNeal

Maybe comedies have always had their serious moments. To be fair to NewsRadio, this character death wasn’t planned. When Phil Hartman (who played fan-favorite Bill McNeal) was brutally murdered between the fourth and fifth seasons of the snappy workplace comedy, the writers, cast, and crew tried to give the best tribute to their co-worker that they could in the Season 5 premiere, “Bill Moves On”. This is a case of real life affecting fiction; Bill’s death is brutal because Hartman’s was. The cast could barely get through filming the episode in front of a live studio audience.
4) ER – Lucy Knight

A lot of people died on ER over its 15-season run; the show quickly learned it had no need to discriminate between patients or doctors in a show that was all about the delicate balance between life and death. ER viewers were shocked, though, when Dr. John Carter (Noah Wyle) was stabbed by a patient upon entering an examination room; they were horrified when he fell to the floor, and saw young Lucy Knight (Kellie Martin), medical student, also stabbed and lying on the floor. The other doctors manage to save Carter, but Lucy dies. Lucy wasn’t the first brutal death on ER, and she wouldn’t be the last, but she’s probably the most brutal on the show, given her youth and her earnest desire to help.
3) Mad Men – Lane Pryce

Lane Pryce does, in fact, spend most of his final episode trying to kill himself. It’s a long, protracted, and ultimately successful suicide. His death is both physically and emotionally brutal; the stuffy Brit introduced in Season 2 had come a long way as a person by the end of season five, and that he was ultimately just a casualty of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s ruthless attempts to rise to the top, as well as his own hubris, broke a lot of hearts at the time. The cast’s reaction to seeing him hanging in his office just emphasizes how sad it all is. Lane’s death was also the first one of a character considered a regular at that point; Mad Men wasn’t usually interested in shock deaths, and Lane’s wasn’t, but in an era full of them, his death meant fans were looking for death everywhere in the remainder of the show. Many people believed Don Draper himself would die by the end, but it was never that kind of show.
2) Orange is the New Black – Poussey Washington

Poussey Washington’s death came at a time when the unjust deaths of Black Americans by police officers and other law enforcement officers were consistently making headlines. Her death is brutal without that context โ the lovable inmate suffocated by one of the COs during a peaceful protest in the prison โ but it hurts more with that context. While some viewers found the way her character died offensive and pointless, Orange in the New Black often mixed gritty realism with an often absurdist sense of humor. That gritty realism had to include unjust violence against an inmate eventually. But it is a brutal death to watch; in fact, it’s probably the most brutal death on this list visually.
1) Better Call Saul – Howard Hamlin

Yes, there are no Breaking Bad deaths on this list; in a way, it was a show that trafficked in death from the start, so the deaths, while brutal, don’t really shock or stun. Its prequel, however, has a death that is brutal both physically and psychologically. Better Call Saul sought to show how the showboat lawyer Saul Goodman became Saul Goodman. Bob Odenkirk plays Goodman, originally Jimmy McGill, who starts this show actually trying to be a decent lawyer. Jimmy and his girlfriend, Kim, spend most of the first part of the final season plotting against Howard Hamlin. By the end of the mid-season finale, they’ve managed to wreck Howard’s life, but neither of them is prepared for him to be killed by Lalo Salamanca, who is one of Hector’s nephews (the Salamanca family appears in Breaking Bad). The slaying happens directly in front of the two and sets them both on different paths; it’s a killing the show has been building to, as it unravels the mystery of who Saul Goodman is.
What do you think was the most brutal death in TV history? Let us know in the comments below!