8 TV Shows That Went Too Far In Completely Unexpected Ways
Even the likes of South Park, Game of Thrones, and Family Matters can take it too far...
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00:00 Look, it happens to the best of us. No matter how great a show is, if it's one known for pushing the envelope,
00:05 prodding the boundaries of good taste, and needling at the censors' nerves,
00:09 there will always be some moment which goes too far.
00:13 Maybe this will be enough to turn audiences off wholesale,
00:16 or maybe viewers will simply write it off as a bad week for the writers' room.
00:20 But whatever the outcome, I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com,
00:23 and these are 8 TV shows that went too far in completely unexpected ways.
00:28 8. That Inexplicable Incest Subplot - Dexter
00:33 Dexter was never a show worried by the boundaries of good taste.
00:37 Being based on the admittedly clever and original premise of
00:40 "a serial killer who targets other worse serial killers"
00:44 means that the idea of staying sanitized is thrown out the window fairly early on in development, after all.
00:50 But after years of the show developing the tender, tragic connection between Dexter and his adopted sister,
00:55 the no-nonsense cop Deb, who is none the wiser to his murderous pastimes, at least for a while,
01:01 the series picked the weirdest way to throw away seasons of character development,
01:06 and screw up the dramatic tension of Dexter attempting to hide his secret
01:10 from the only person whose judgement truly mattered to him.
01:13 And that's because, yep, you guessed it, like Game of Thrones before it,
01:17 Dexter had Deb reveal that she harboured secret sexual feelings for her brother.
01:22 And thus, an uncomfortable and wholly unexpected incest subplot reared its head,
01:27 and made a mess of the potentially promising season wherein Deb discovered Dexter's secret double life.
01:33 Their dynamic never really recovered in the eyes of fans and critics alike,
01:37 and the show's decline continued until its roundly reviled series finale two seasons after Deb's dramatic revelation.
01:44 7. The Zombie-Masked Sex Scenes - The Walking Dead
01:48 Like Dexter, The Walking Dead was never, from its violent pilot episode onwards,
01:52 a show which shied away from the grittier and bleaker side of things.
01:56 The post-apocalyptic drama saw its heroes face down not only hordes of the undead,
02:01 but also the worst of humanity as well,
02:03 offering a vision of the world's end which was about as optimistic as Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
02:08 However, whilst the arrival of long-lasting villain and eventual deeply, deeply flawed anti-hero Negan
02:13 did herald some serious ultra-violence that would leave Alex DeLarge himself chugging his Beethoven records out the window,
02:20 his gruesome antics were at least initially well-grounded in the show's plot,
02:24 and provided drama, tension, and character development, along with smashed skulls.
02:30 What was not so well-grounded was the same character's grotesque hook-up
02:34 with season 10's primary antagonist, the zombie-faced Alpha,
02:38 which took place while the pair were still wearing the skinned faces of the undead as masks.
02:44 And yeah, yeah, we are all the way that this one did serve as foreshadowing for later events,
02:49 but you try sitting through that uncomfortable scene again and tell us that it was necessary.
02:54 More than any other show on this list, sorry Negan and Lucille,
03:02 Game of Thrones pushed the envelope so far and so often
03:05 that the show could have been called "1001 Ways to Guarantee the Complaints Department Will Be Busy Until Christmas".
03:11 There was the boundary-pushing violence with heads being crushed and throats being slit in unsparing detail,
03:18 and there was the relentlessly downbeat grim plot,
03:21 where no character was safe and evil almost always won the day.
03:25 So, what could a show like this do that would be seen as an unexpected step too far?
03:31 Well, it would have to be huge. Huge! Like, say, maybe making its penultimate episode a claustrophobic nightmare,
03:38 depicting one of its only even vaguely heroic characters losing their mind,
03:43 and slaughtering a city's worth of innocent civilians in brutal detail.
03:48 Yes, the foreshadowing was there all along for Daenerys' downfall,
03:52 but when most audiences expected the last episodes of the show would follow the defeat of the Night King,
03:57 it came as a crushing blow for many more optimistic viewers to see one of the only beloved forces of nominal good on the show
04:03 be corrupted by power and reducing scores of powerless people to ash over a torturous hour of television.
04:11 Number 5 - Tyler's Assault - 13 Reasons Why
04:15 Netflix's mega-controversial mega-hit, 13 Reasons Why, was never shy about pushing viewers' buttons
04:21 with the show's premise alone addressing sensitive issues like suicide, sexual assault, self-harm, bullying,
04:27 and teenage drug use. However, whilst the show's debut season was criticized for its handling of a suicide scene
04:33 which some felt was explicit to the point of being instructive, much of the first season's content was lauded
04:39 for handling these intensely difficult issues with relative grace and subtlety.
04:44 Once the show was renewed though, the creators surprised everyone by opting to focus less on the casual misogyny
04:50 of contemporary American adolescent culture, and more on the intense physical bullying which is commonplace in high schools.
04:56 Replacing the smug villain Bryce with his more mindlessly aggressive teammate Monty.
05:01 However, viewers who presumed that this thoughtless jock would be any less threatening were left shook
05:06 by the explicit depiction of his sexual assault on the unsuspecting Tyler, whose subsequent trauma
05:11 leaves him traumatized and arming himself up to open fire on the school dance.
05:16 The grueling assault sequence itself spared no detail and left viewers in a state of shock.
05:22 The scene was far more intense than anything the show had attempted before, and understandably proved too much for many viewers.
05:29 4. That inexplicable dramatic domestic violence episode, "Family Guy"
05:34 Seth MacFarlane's most famous animated offering isn't known for pulling its punches.
05:38 Particularly since its renewal, "Family Guy" has been infamous for combining the family sitcom structure of The Simpsons
05:45 with South Park's more risque and irreverent elements.
05:48 The show doesn't shy away from controversial topics both in its jokes and plots.
05:52 However, it's not actually a tasteless joke that earned "Family Guy" a place on this list.
05:57 But rather, the odd misjudged episode "Screams of Silence" the Brenda Q story.
06:03 Ostensibly parodying the format of melodramatic lifetime movies of the week, at least judging by that title,
06:09 the episode proper is a nearly humorless depiction of a battered wife struggling with her abusive partner
06:15 until, spoilers I guess, the show's heroes kill him.
06:19 To say it's a divergence from "Family Guy's" typical fare is putting it lightly.
06:24 But unfortunately, the writers room didn't have the requisite dramatic chops to make the premise work,
06:29 meaning that viewers tuning in expecting animated antics instead got a cut rate needlessly explicit made for TV melodrama.
06:36 3. The terrifying Chucky/Urkel hybrid, "Family Matters"
06:41 Okay, so this one has to be the most famous entry on this list, or at least the most infamously dark.
06:46 The beloved ABC sitcom "Family Matters" was originally envisioned as a spin-off from parent program "Perfect Strangers",
06:53 but the show soon became a vehicle for the character of Steve Urkel.
06:56 Played in a career best turned by Jaleel White, Urkel was the perfect intersection between hilarious and insufferable,
07:03 and carried many later installments of the long-running series on his back.
07:07 And yeah, shoutout to Jim Parsons who must have had a hernia after all those years on the Big Bang Theory.
07:12 However, sometimes the show's Urkel-centred approach backfired,
07:16 as seen in the Halloween special where his ventriloquist's doll counterpart, uh, kills the entire family.
07:22 That's it. That's the bit.
07:24 The arrival of Stevel, a scheming puppet who conspires to, successfully by the way,
07:29 off the entire Winslow clan to gales of laughter from the studio audience,
07:34 is one of the most deservedly infamous moments of an expectedly dark TV.
07:39 And before you ask, no, the impact isn't undone by the reveal that the episode is a dream.
07:44 I mean, after all, 90s sitcoms did the "it's all a dream" gimmick all the time,
07:48 without using it as an excuse to off the entire cast.
07:52 Number 2, Homer loses his dignity for "Simpsons".
07:56 There's no denying that "The Simpsons" is, unlike some of the shows included on this list,
08:00 a genuine masterpiece and one of the defining cultural documents of an era.
08:04 So, how does a show this great, at least early on, manage to go too far?
08:10 Well, the fifth episode of the show's 12th season didn't have much of the magic
08:14 which used to make America's first family so beloved.
08:17 And the installment contributed to its gradual decline,
08:19 as it saw the writers plumb darker depths than usual for laughs,
08:23 and come up with size in the process.
08:25 In this episode, as Homer becomes Burns' prank monkey and partakes in an escalating series
08:30 of public practical jokes which put his dignity on the line,
08:33 the episode eventually culminates in an implied assault,
08:36 which didn't earn much mirth from the audience at home.
08:40 The shocking scene feels out of place at best and horribly misjudged at worst,
08:44 while the rest of the episode does little to alleviate this sour taste,
08:48 making a point of, ironically, recycling old jokes and bits from other, better episodes.
08:54 Number 1 - The Murder of Drew Sharp - Breaking Bad
08:58 By the time Vince Gilligan's masterpiece reached its fifth season,
09:01 few viewers could argue that the propulsive, intensely dramatic thriller was a light-hearted show.
09:07 By now, the series had already explored overdoses, multiple murders, suicide, corpse disposal,
09:12 and just about every conceivable human sin in its gradually escalating, blackly comic portrait
09:18 of a man driven to desperation by an uncaring world.
09:21 That said though, as seen when the tortured protagonist genuinely regrets endangering
09:26 the life of a child during his usual meth-making shenanigans,
09:29 the story of formerly mild-mannered high school teacher Walter White did have a few lines
09:35 that it wouldn't cross, at least until the closing moments of season 5's fifth installment, Dead Freight.
09:41 As relative newcomer Todd "Drew" a pistol and murdered an innocent child in cold blood,
09:46 the audience was left as shell-shocked as our pair of outlaw protagonists.
09:50 Until this point, Jesse and Walt had at least only encountered criminals with some semblance of a conscience,
09:56 and Todd represented a darker turn for the series as a whole.
10:00 However, unlike many entries on this list, the turn was seen by many viewers as a positive development,
10:06 with viewers approving of the amoral new villains.
10:09 You see, by leaping over the threshold of "too fast, so early on",
10:13 Todd and co. gave us an excuse to revel in Walt's violent revenge later. It was clever, that.
10:18 So that's our list. I want to hear what you guys think down in the comments below.
10:20 What do you think about these TV moments, and are there any too far ones that I missed off here?
10:25 While you're down there as well, could you please give us a like, share, subscribe,
10:27 and head over to wotculture.com for more lists and news like this every single day.
10:32 Even if you don't though, I've been Josh, thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you soon.
10:36 [BLANK_AUDIO]