12 Great Feel-Bad TV Shows for Bleak Times

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LA is burning. David Lynch is gone. ***** is officially back in office. You don’t need me to point out that things are as bad as they’ve ever been. Normally, in times like these, our instinct is to turn toward art that’s comforting, art that either promotes good vibes or at least reminds you of a time when the vibes were better. Normally. Personally, I don’t always find that constructive. I was feeling depressed recently, and I didn’t feel like watching, say, New Girl—I felt like leaning into it. I felt like watching Mad Men season 6, a collection of episodes that repeatedly posit, through imagery and allegory, that Don Draper is a devil in hell, a season so intrinsically dour that at the time it aired, [some] critics and fans alike accused the show of regressing and wondered if Matthew Weiner had lost his fastball.

Music has a reputation for facilitating bad moods—we all have that playlist or two for when we want to indulge in sad or angry feelings. So why not do the same for what we watch as well? It got me thinking about some of my other favorite infamously great but hardly comforting series across the years. I wound up making this Feel-Bad TV Watchlist for other sickos like me who, in some moments, would rather just see the world’s ugliness reflected back than find fake and fleeting escapism in a sunny sitcom. Let’s call it the Seek Help Series. (There’s nothing too obscure on here, but I’ll try to talk around spoilers still—the world's a mean enough place already.)

Mad Men season 6

To recap: This season begins with Don pitching a Sheraton ad that evokes suicide, and ends with the infamous Hershey pitch scene. While the Coca-Cola account remained elusive, these episodes instead find Big Dick in full Dirty Sprite 2 mode, on his worst behavior after several seasons of trying to be a better person, against the backdrop of the tumultuous year that was 1968. This is the year of the Don-Peggy schism, Sylvia, Pete’s receding hairline, that weird episode where Jim Cutler’s Dr. Feelgood shoots the whole Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce gang up with speed, way too much Teddy Chaough, and maybe the most crushing Don-Sally moment across the series. It’s hardly the show’s finest moment or its brightest, but underneath the ugliness it’s still a damn good dialogue about our capacity—or lack thereof—for change and growth.

Battlestar Galactica (whole series)

I’ve been watching this lately with my girlfriend (me spinning the block, her first time—rewatching alongside a first-timer is the most optimum way to do it, I’d say), and it’s not as if I’d forgotten how dark it was. But on revisit, years later: Man, is this show hilariously bleak. It starts with, like, 90% of human civilization dying in a nuclear holocaust, and shit just goes downhill for humankind from there, as a ragtag group of 40,000-odd survivors embark on a long, possibly futile search for a mythical planet called “Earth.” That may sound hokey to the sci-fi agnostic, but outside of killer robots, this show is as gritty as it gets—by the time you get to season 3, where we are now, the fleet facing total starvation is just fodder for a standalone episode.

One of my favorite bits of BSG production lore is the story about showrunners Ronald D. Moore and David Eick getting a network note early in season 1 to insert even the tiniest bit of levity—like, say, some survivors celebrating a small birthday party. They responded by writing a scene where officers celebrating on a hangar deck get taken out en masse by a malfunctioning missile, including half of the fleet’s trained fighter pilots. In seasons 1 and 2 especially, this may be the most underrated series from TV’s early-aughts golden age.

The Wire season 4

“You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way” pretty much sums up the vibes across what is, gut-wrenching Greek tragedies notwithstanding, arguably the best season of the best show.

Lost season 5

This is the weakest season of Lost (which, as a top 10 series of all time, is still pretty solid). I know some people say it’s season 3—when it became glaringly evident that the show was just biding time with pointless standalone episodes and adding new mysteries without resolving old ones—but, no: Five is the true nadir. Part of that is because by this juncture, all the Oceanic 815 survivors—top to bottom, even comic-relief pillar Hurley—are deeply depressed, to the point of feeling like maybe being stranded on a deserted island isn’t so bad, actually. There are some grim meditations on the unchangeable, unfixable nature of fate peppered throughout here, but most notably, by the time you’ve reached the final twist in the season’s final episode, you’ll realize tragic hero John Locke might actually be one of the saddest characters the medium has ever seen.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 6

One of the most notoriously feel-bad vibe shifts in contemporary television history. Buffy, the plucky, blonde heroine best known for vanquishing evil with a well-timed Peter Parker quip, is suddenly a vacant shell of herself. She dies at the end of season 5, but the sick twist following her resurrection in six is that being alive is hell. No more quirky high school idealism or college freshman exuberance, just a bunch of dead-eyed twentysomethings grinding that theme out through arcs that explored addiction, insecurity, arrested development, and abuse. The fandom is split between those who would rank this toward the bottom of the seven-season pack, and others who view it as a swing for maturity that should be respected. But we can all agree that it’s rarely “fun.”

The Sopranos season 4

It might seem off to include a season with a sequence as side-splittingly hilarious as Christopher’s intervention—but you know things have gotten dark if a moment like that is a comedic high point. This was the first set of Sopranos episodes conceived post-9/11, and while it isn’t expressly acknowledged, there’s a nihilistic, “playtime is over” vibe to S4 that runs right from the season premiere through Tony and Ralph’s confrontation over Pie-O-My and all the way up to the feel-bad landmark that is “Whitecaps.”

This Is Us (whole series)

Even though this show was technically a “hit,” I still feel like it came at a point when we as a culture had fully become too cool for network TV, so even though it got the numbers it never always got the acclaim. Which is a shame because it’s genuinely good, albeit ultra-emotionally manipulative drama porn. This show about three adults still grappling with the ripple effects of their beloved father’s death spent close to two seasons turning the circumstances around said patriarch’s passing into a kind of macabre mystery. It’s sick; at certain points it feels like you’re watching Milo Ventimiglia in a one-man Final Destination spinoff. Ultimately, it’s all heartfelt and sentimental—but more often than not, this show is just ruthlessly engineered to have you in knots.

Breaking Bad season 5

Walt spends the first half of this season so high on his own supply that he drives his wife to pantomime suicide just to get his kids away from him; the back half knocks down every domino that the series meticulously set up to inevitably fall. Cue the train heist, the Nazi punks, and Jesse Plemons’s Todd. Even Jesse Pinkman is too strung out to provide much in the way of levity by this point.

The Shield (whole series)/Sons of Anarchy season 3

The underrated OG; the blueprint for many of the small screen’s most beloved antiheroes. There would be no Breaking Bad season 5 without The Shield first setting the play for how to bring every dramatic ball in the air crashing down. It’s also pitch-black grim from start to bottom, with some of the most heinous and disturbing arcs, subplots and twists I’ve ever seen, executed so artfully you can’t look away.

Shield writer and executive producer Kurt Sutter’s motorcycle-club drama ultimately went off the rails and imploded, but for one year—season 2—it was arguably the best thing on television. Those episodes are pretty fucked up—as showrunner, Sutter puts his leading lady and real-life wife, Katey Sagal, through the wringer, and she returns the favor with what should have been an Emmy-winning performance—but they’re still driven by our [anti]hero Jax Teller’s idealism about what his beloved motorcycle club could be. By the slightly less good third season, that light has been extinguished, and an arc that takes the gang on a rescue mission to Ireland ratchets up the nihilism. The show would go on to get even darker, sure, but it never married those impulses with actual good storytelling better than its first four years.

The Leftovers season 2

Take all the existential dread, pain, and anguish of Lost, but strip out the smoke monsters, ghosts, and polar bears, and the result is one of the most underrated, best seasons of television, maybe ever? For the uninitiated, imagine a whole series based around the sentiment of that blip-survivor group therapy scene in Avengers: Endgame—it feels sinful to even compare this great series to a Marvel movie, but I’ll do whatever’s needed to spread the gospel. Season 2 is better by a hair, but if you’re looking to maximize on feel-bad vibes, season 3 has an all-time great series finale and a scene with Amy Brenneman on a boat that gets me choked up just thinking about it.

Bojack Horseman season 6

If it wasn’t a cartoon, this would be so bleak as to be borderline unwatchable, right?