Live-Action TV/Tear Jerker/Lists that need to be split by individual works

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


CSI franchise

  • CSI. "Goodbye and Good Luck". 'Nuff said.
    • Also, Warrick's apparent death in "For Gedda".
      • The horrible confirmation of all the rumors in "For Warrick". When he died in Grissom's arms.
      • It wasn't even so much the confirmation that Warrick was dead. It was Grissom completely losing it while holding Warrick in his arms. Grissom spent the entire series beforehand showing two emotions: indifference, and occasional happiness. Watching him fall apart as his friend and colleague dies in his arms as well
        • And when Grissom breaks down reading the eulogy at his funeral.
      • Warrick was a father who was looking to gain custody of his son when he died. There is a video of how he considers Grissom to be a father figure when he didn't have one himself.
    • Just mentioning the episodes "Dead Doll" and "Living Doll".
    • "Grave Danger" when they found Nick. Warrick pleading with him to drop the gun and Grissom using his father's nickname for him to keep him from going hysterical again.
    • "Feeling the Heat". Namely the ending, where Catherine tells the Winstons, who killed their baby because they thought he was going to die of Tay-Sachs anyway, that the tests for the kid came back negative.
    • Miami had "Wannabe", an episode where a CSI wannabe fanboy witnesses a crime. After retrieving evidence the fanboy "borrowed" from his apartment, Speed starts making friends with him. Then he dies horribly. Evidence can't link the suspect to the fanboy's murder, but he does go down for the original. Then Speed finds out the kid was mentally disturbed, and actually killed himself.

Speed: What do I do?
Caine: You go home, get some rest, and you come back tomorrow.

    • The last 5 minutes of "One to Go" reduced her to a blubbering pile of mush.
  • The CSI:NY season 5 finale "Pay Up" when Detective Jessica Angell was shot and killed. First of all, she's on the phone with her boyfriend, Detective Don Flack, when the bad guys drive a truck into the diner she's in. His panic makes you tear up. Then, later on in the episode, we find out that she died through Flack's quiet, stressed, "She's gone..." before he breaks down. The fact that Flack was the last person many fans expected to see cry on the show makes it worse. Flack's expression through the rest of the episode, especially when he gives her police badge to her former-cop father, is heartbreaking.
    • The show hasn't been the same since, and more's the pity for that.
  • The fate of Cassie and Ashley James. Two sisters, both of them beautiful and outgoing, drawn into the modelling world. One of them ends up dead of eating disorders and self-neglect, the other crazy and homeless, wandering the streets of Vegas with her shopping cart...
  • "A Thousand Days on Earth" - a little girl is found in a box, abandoned, only to be recognized by her father, who is in prison. The whole episode is said, but seeing her father (played by the same actor who plays Det. Sanchez on The Closer), a hardened criminal, break down in tears of anguish and impotent rage when he sees her picture on the news is ... wow.

Documentaries

  • One section of the PBS documentary Carrier as the sailors stand on the deck while pulling into Pearl Harbor. The combination of Five For Fighting's "World" in the background and the sheer beauty of the execution of the scene sent her into a blubbering mess.
  • The documentary series "Secrets of the Dead" also had one incredibly tear-jerking episode. The scientists were trying to identify several anonymous corpses recovered in the aftermath of the Titanic disaster, nearly a century after they had been buried. When they exhumed the bodies however, they found to their horror that most of the graves had been filled with water and there was almost no DNA left they could use for identification. Only one grave wasn't flooded - the grave reserved at the top of the hill for the body of an unidentified baby boy. Incredibly, they found a tiny bone fragment that hadn't decomposed yet, and it contained just enough DNA so that they could finally identify the boy. The scientist who performed the identification was so moved that he seemed to be holding back tears, and could only say that "Someone wanted us to know who this child is."
    • There's more. IIRC the reason why the bone fragment had been preserved was because of a copper plaque reading "Our Babe" that had been bought for the no-expense-spared funeral arranged by the men who found the body. These were big, tough men who had done the dangerous work of laying telegraph cables in the Atlantic; and because they were so moved by their discovery of the Unknown Child, and honoured him with that plaque, it was finally possible ninety years later to find out his identity.
    • The episode ends with another incredibly tear-jerking scene. It was found that the boy had surviving relatives in Finland, they flew all the way to Halifax, Canada to visit his grave. They found that there were already flowers on his grave. It was then that they realized that ever since the baby died, the people of Halifax had been taking care of the boy as one of their own. It took nine decades and the love of countless strangers so that a baby boy could finally have a name.
      • Worse still, they spoke to a lady whose mother met the boy's mother, recalling seeing her panicking in the flooding stairwell, lamenting to God, 'Do they all have to die by water?!' Yes, it seems just months before, Our Babe's older sister had drowned in a pond.
  • One episode of Walking with Dinosaurs featured the last flight of a male Ornithocheirus (a massive flying reptile ) on his way to the mating grounds: it ends with the male dying alone on a deserted beach over the course of several agonizing hours. Everything about the scene, from the heartwrenching music to the sight of the creature trying desperately to rise one last time.
    • In the sequel series Walking With Beasts, when the young indricothere (a giant giraffe-like rhino) was violently abandoned by its own mother as she got a new baby. RL is such a Crapsack World...
      • What gets me every time isn't so much the Parental Abandonment itself; that was strongly foreshadowed earlier on in the episode. Instead, it's the scene where the young indricothere is injured while on his own, prompting him to return to his mother -- except, now that she's suckling her new baby, she sees the previous one as nothing but a threat, and drives him away. It's worth noting that this practice occurs among modern-day rhinos as well.
  • The Alzheimer's Project - just reading an article about it was enough to induce tears.
  • China's Unnatural Disaster - The 2008 earthquake in China. All those children, almost all of them only children.... One mom: "I have no tears left" and later you see her neighbors berating her for protesting the Communist Party. They just want some answers, dammit!
  • CBS did a miniseries of the life of George Washington. At the end of the Revolution, just before Washington resigns his command of the Continental Army to go home, he has a meeting with all of his principal commanders and staff. After a short speech Washington asked that each one of them to come up so he can shake their hand before he leaves. These men had fought a war that lasted eight years, fought in tremendous battles and suffered great deprivation and as they passed Washington both he and them (and the viewers) were so overwhelmed with emotion that no one was capable of speech and wept unashamed as Washington embraced each one of them. This was also Truth in Television.
    • In the History Channel's The Revolution series, the show mentions that after the Revolutionary War, many of the American generals and officers were unhappy with Congress refusing to pay them, and began considering a military coup to seize power from Congress. Washington, horrified at the idea, confronts his officers. He gathers them all in the room and prepares to give a speech, but before doing so, puts on a pair of glasses. The officers are shocked, as they had never seen Washington wear glasses, and Washington explains that he had lost his vision over the course of the war. Realizing how much Washington had sacrificed to win the war, every single officer in the room breaks down in tears and the crisis is averted.
  • The World At War is full of heartbreaking stories from various eyewitness accounts, but the speech from a [1]Hungarian who'd survived a concentration camp - made even sadder by the speakers almost completely emotionless narrative.

You could say today I'm 27 years old. I was reborn when I left the camp. The years before didn't matter.

  • The documentary Mayday! Bering Sea on the sinking of the Alaska Ranger, during Ed Cook talking about finding that his brother had died.
  • History Cold Case is a programme which goes back in time and analyses dead bodies, finding out their history. One episode involved a Victorian prostitute, originally thought to be in her late 20s, racked with non-congenital, tertiary syphilis and likely to be utterly destitute, living in one of the most deprived areas of the country. That depressing enough for you? Then its revealed that the girls is in her late teens. This means that she would have had to have got her syphilis as a child, possibly when she was six/seven.
  • One episode of Nova documented a six-year attempt to identify a World War II-era submarine that had been found off the coast of New Jersey. It was finally identified as U-869. The filmmakers found that one of the crewmembers' sisters had emigrated to the United States after the war and had settled in Maryland, a few hours from the New Jersey coast. She had been told that her brother's U-boat was presumed lost off Gibraltar. The filmmakers went to her home and filmed the moment that she was told that her brother was much closer than she had believed...

Kamen Rider franchise

  • Given its Anyone Can Die policy, Kamen Rider Ryuki, unsurprisingly, has a fair number of these moments.
    • Kamen Rider Imperer's final moments are particularly painful. Betrayed and left for dead in the Mirror World without his armor for protection, he spends his last seconds alive in the rain, gazing at the lone figure of a woman who may have represented everything he wanted in a life, as his body slowly dissolves into nothingness.

Mitsuru Sano/Kamen Rider Imperer: Why did something like this happen? All I wanted was to be happy.

    • Shinji's death in the penultimate episode. Lethally wounded by a Raydragoon, he drives off an army of Monsters before succumbing to his wounds. It's only made worse in one of the first scenes of the final episode, as Ren regretfully walks away, leaving Shinji's corpse as one more casaulty in the day's massacre.

Kido Shinji/Kamen Rider Ryuki: I just realized that I do want to close the Mirror World. I'm sure it will cause alot of pain, but I still want it to end. I don't know if it's right or wrong but as a Rider, I have a wish I want fulfilled, and this is it.

    • Asakura Takeshi/Kamen Rider Ouja and Kitaoka Shuichi/Kamen Rider Zolda have had bones to pick with each other since the former's debut. When the time comes to finally settle things between them, Asakura is victorious. However, as Zolda's armor breaks away, Asakura realizes that it is Kitaoka's manservant, Yura Goro, not Kitaoka himself that he had just killed. As for Kitaoka himself, the audience is taken to his mansion, his body resting peacefully on a couch, having finally succumbed to the illness that threatened his life.
    • As the victor of the Rider War, Akiyama Ren finally succeeds in saving Ogawa Eri, but at the price of his life. Crawling all the way to her hospital room, he leaves the memento he'd kept of her, a pair of rings, in her hands before taking his final rest.

Ogawa Eri: Ren, if you sit there, you'll catch a cold.

    • Realizing that his sister, Yui, would always reject his offer to save her, Kanzaki Shiro, in a moment of despair destroys Kamen Rider Odin, and thus forfeits the final prize of the Rider War. However, unwilling to accept his sister's death, Shiro threatens to restart the Rider War in spite of her pleas. Then the camera pulls back, and we see Shiro for what he really is beyond the stoic malevolence; a young man tortured by the fear of a world without his sister. As the younger version of his sister pleads with him one last time, the camera pulls to a sentimental gaze of the older Shiro as he rewinds time, revealing that now, both versions of the Kanzaki siblings live in their own version of the Mirror World, populated not with the Monsters they created but with the drawings of happy times between them. As the ending credits roll, we return to the Atori, and pull in on a picture of the Kanzaki siblings, a younger version of them as opposed to the older versions, implying that the two died in the new timeline Shiro created.
  • Kamen Rider Kiva was always a serious show that could tug at the heartstrings, but when Mio died, my eyes definitely watered for her. The ending of the episode was horribly sad when she shattered in Wataru's arms. Even more heart wrenching is how she died. Originally, it appeared that she had done a Diving Save to save her husband, Taiga. Later on, Bishop revealed he killed her, seeing Mio as a hindrance.
  • Kamen Rider Double isn't as serious as Kiva or Blade. It doesn't matter though, as it can deliver several sad moments. At the end of the A arc, the poor little girl. And Kirihiko's death. As his hankerchief blew away,
    • The Puppeteer Dopant. You have to feel sorry for him, since his daughter died a few months prior to obtaining his Gaia Memory.
    • Phillip's death, with an acoustic version of Cyclone Effect playing in the background. It takes an upbeat song and makes the line "We've got nothing else" tragic in context. Yes, he's brought back to life the next episode but the preview is entirely melancholic for the next episode. Shoutaro himself is in tears cause he is technically the one to kill Phillip by deactivating the transformation.
    • A Bitter Sweet moment: The Sonozaki family reuniting peacefully in death. After having spent the entire series fighting and backstabbing each other, Wakana and Saeko are seen embracing while Ryubee tells Philip they'll be watching over him.

Reality TV

  • Several people have actually committed suicide after being contestants on a reality TV show. Cheryl Kosewicz from the show Pirate Master was found dead during the show's run on TV (after filming) and someone[who?] from Paradise Hotel also did the same.
  • Big Brother: All Stars had a small tear jerker when Dr. Will and Boogie, Chilltown, were put up on the block against each other and they chose to evict Dr. Will. Throughout the game, they played around in the diary room and pretended to call each other on the telephone. After Dr. Will was evicted, Boogie had one of those where he had the phone-hand to his head and asked "Hello? Hello?" and there was no answer.
  • The Israeli version’s third season (not including the celebrity season) has Ram Preiß Siton who came out on television. His parents had been told not that long before he came in, so the only ones who knew were his family, production (he had told them he might come out during the show), presumably some of his friends, and his boyfriend, known only by his nickname ‘Smiley’ (Kiyukhi חִיּוּכִי). The really tear-jerking moment came later on, when one of the two hosts, Asi ‘Azar, who is also gay, came in to talk to Ram about it. Bar Refaeli was sitting at the same table as they were, and was moved to tears by the scene.
  • Michael from Survivor: The Australian Outback being evacuated. He was going to be perhaps one of the best players ever (Tina admitted that he could have beaten her) but then passed out in the fire and ran into the water in pain, fingers burned together. They then showed him being evacuated and saying "Bye!" to everyone.
    • A few other people being evacuated. There were a few people where it wasn't really that big of an impact and was sort of a relief to see that they got treatment. (Like say, Bruce in Panama or Jonathan Penner & James in Micronesia) But some others were odd...Kathleen quit the game in Micronesia and was having a mental breakdown, but the most recent was in Samoa where Mike and Russell S. both had extremely low blood pressure and Russell S. was saying "No no let me get back into the game"

Super Sentai franchise

  • Mikoto's death in Bakuryu Sentai Abaranger, made all the more amazing by the fact that for most of the series he had been the resident Magnificent Bastard.
  • Any episode of any Super Sentai series where the rangers befriend a Monster of the Week that doesn't want to hurt people or cause trouble never ends well for the heroes.
  • Burai's death in Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger.
  • In episode 12 of Gokaiger, we have Joe's desperate attempt to get Barizorg to remember his humanity as Sid Bamick.
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