Comedy can hit a little harder and be funnier overall if there’s something it can be contrasted with. Enter the dramatic sitcom episode, which is more common than one might expect in shows that are otherwise very funny and easy to watch. Certain sitcoms benefit from taking things more seriously every now and then, with such episodes often making characters more compelling and sympathetic, as well as being emotional counters to the usual levity-filled episodes.

The following episodes all get pretty heavy, or at least more dramatic than the average episode of the show each one belongs to. Some of the following shows might be more “dramedies” than sitcoms in the traditional sense, but even then, the dramatic episodes considered below are more emotionally intense or heavy than usual, with such episodes all being ranked below based on how memorably moving they are.

The following article contains spoilers for the TV shows discussed

10 'Community' - "Geothermal Escapism" (2014)

Season 5, Episode 5

Community is absolutely one of the best sitcoms to air in recent memory; perhaps even up there as one of the best comedy TV shows of all time. It was a show that always had a heart and made many of its characters feel like real people, even though they could sometimes behave quite outlandishly while also finding themselves in exceedingly wild situations at an unusual community college.

The season 5 episode “Geothermal Escapism” is worth highlighting as a result, both because it is one of the most high-concept of Community’s high-concept episodes, and because it represents the show at its most moving. The episode revolves around a college-wide game of “the floor is lava,” all done at a time when Troy is preparing to leave Greendale, causing great emotional distress for his closest friend, Abed. It’s fun until it’s sad/bittersweet, and it’s likely that viewers will be similarly sad to see Troy’s actor, Donald Glover, depart the show.

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9 'Young Sheldon' - "Funeral" (2024)

Season 7, Episode 13

The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper was someone who, at the start of said long-running series, had lost his father many years earlier. He was a popular character from an exceedingly popular show, and so in 2017, a spin-off of The Big Bang Theory began airing: Young Sheldon. Ultimately, it’s a series that shows numerous years in the life of Sheldon Cooper as a child, and it all eventually built up to his father’s death.

As such, the usually funny show got particularly heavy at the end of its seventh and final season, with Young Sheldon concluding with a two-part episode, the first half of which was rather bluntly called “Funeral.” It’s heavier going than one would expect an otherwise light-hearted sitcom about a character from The Big Bang Theory to get, and it helped ensure the well-liked sitcom spin-off ended on a high.

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8 'Rick and Morty' - "Auto Erotic Assimilation" (2015)

Season 2, Episode 3

Things started pretty zany and chaotic when it came to Rick and Morty, and, admittedly, the show’s never lost its sense of humor, nor its willingness to fling itself over the rails while depicting strange and out-there sci-fi concepts. But Rick and Morty did always have a darker and prominently existentialist edge to it, with a few heavy moments sprinkled through season 1, and some more being featured in season 2, particularly in the episode "Auto Erotic Assimilation."

The ending is likely to take anyone watching the series for the first time off guard, as the usually lackadaisical Rick seems to take a rejection particularly hard, with viewers seeing first-hand where his mind goes when he’s feeling his worst. The ending sees Rick coming close to taking his own life in a crushingly downbeat and wordless sequence, and the fact it comes after a relatively silly and drama-free episode arguably makes it all the more effective. It’s some brutal emotional whiplash, that’s for sure.

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7 'Fleabag' - "Episode #2.1" (2019)

Season 2, Episode 1

Across 12 episodes, Fleabag confidently established itself as one of the best shows of the 2010s, and, when looked at a certain way (some squinting of the eyes may be necessary), it’s possible to call it a sitcom. It’s not as consistently laugh-out-loud funny as some more traditional sitcoms, and it was also unafraid to get heavy at times, but it did have a unique sense of humor while mining jokes from strange and uncomfortable situations.

And it was the first episode of Fleabag’s second season that displayed its capacity to get both hectic and heavy more than any other, revolving around an awkward family dinner that starts rough and just gets worse and worse. It’s a dynamite half-hour of television, proving more intense than most thrillers and establishing right from the start that the show’s second (and unfortunately final) season wasn’t going to mess around or take any prisoners.

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6 'The Good Place' - "Whenever You're Ready" (2020)

Season 4, Episode 13

It’s possible to view The Good Place similarly to Rick and Morty, mostly in the sense that both started out very silly and took a little time to work in some more dramatic elements. With The Good Place, things didn’t really pick up until a season 1 finale plot twist where it was revealed the afterlife the main characters were in wasn’t heaven at all, and was instead a sort of hell.

So began a journey through the afterlife and beyond, characters both dead and demonic finding themselves and finding a place within the strange areas they found themselves in. Things stayed funny, but the fantastical elements intensified, the romance side of things was more pronounced, and various episodes proved willing to get a little more dramatic, all culminating with a series finale, "Whenever You're Ready,” that was genuinely powerful and perhaps even emotionally devastating.

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5 'BoJack Horseman' - "That's Too Much, Man!" (2016)

Season 3, Episode 11

Expertly balancing silly and pun-filled comedy with crushingly realistic drama, BoJack Horseman was a unique animated sitcom that, during its finest moments, proved capable of being incredible. It’s hard to single out a single episode of the show as being its heaviest, but the season 3 episode "That's Too Much, Man!" might be its most soul-crushing, with the title not only being fitting, but also serving as a potential warning about how intense things will get.

The episode sees the title character going on a dramatic bender with a former child actress he worked with back during the height of his popularity, being a terrible role model by also having her break her period of sobriety during said bender. It all builds slowly but inevitably to a tragic ending where she passes away after an extended period of time, which is an event that casts a shadow over the remaining (and also sometimes very heavy) three seasons of the show.

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4 'M*A*S*H' - "Abyssinia, Henry" (1975)

Season 3, Episode 24

M*A*S*H showed signs of willingness to get heavy as early as its first season, with the Korean War dramedy series emphasizing drama over comedy more and more as it went along. Things eventually concluded in a tremendously bittersweet fashion during season 11’s feature-length series finale, "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” but the most dramatic episode of the show came as early as season 3, with "Abyssinia, Henry.”

This season finale revolved around the staff of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital bidding farewell to Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake, who was honorably discharged and, near the episode’s end, boards a helicopter, never to be seen again. His fate is revealed in a gut-wrenching final scene, with Radar telling the other characters that a plane Blake was on was “shot down over the Sea of Japan” and that “there were no survivors.” From that point onwards, the war being fought in M*A*S*H feels genuinely dangerous and brutal; not just to background characters, but to the main ones, too.

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3 'Scrubs' - "My Screwup" (2004)

Season 3, Episode 14

M*A*S*H is far from the only dramedy series to find humor and tragedy in the lives of doctors, with Scrubs being the closest thing the 21st century has had to equaling that iconic 1970s/1980s series. Scrubs doesn’t take place in an active warzone, instead being set in the fictional Sacred Heart Hospital, following an intern named J.D. and some of his friends as they grow more experienced and deal with times both good and bad, working as doctors/nurses.

It's a show with plenty of tearjerking episodes, one of the most noteworthy coming as early as season 3, with the episode “My Screwup.” It guest-stars Brendan Fraser and puts the focus on Dr. Cox, with an inventive and shocking plot twist that ends up flipping much of the episode on its head while also being devastating and infamously sad.

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2 'Scrubs' - "My Lunch" (2006)

Season 5, Episode 20

What’s this, another episode of Scrubs? Yes, because the medical-themed show is that sad and moving, and it would feel strange to include “My Screwup” without also including season 5’s “My Lunch.” This episode once again centers on Dr. Cox having a very bad time, perhaps establishing that if an episode revolves around him, viewers should brace themselves for the possibility that things might get heavy.

“My Lunch” features Dr. Cox reacting to death, similarly to “My Screwup,” but here, it’s about three of his patients dying after receiving organ transplants from a recently deceased woman, all of whom were Cox’s patients, which causes him to have an emotional breakdown. It’s heart-wrenching stuff that’s willing to show the emotional/psychological toll of being a doctor, proving all the more effective because it happens in a sitcom that’s oftentimes quirky, light-hearted, and rather silly.

1 'Blackadder' - "Goodbyeee" (1989)

Season 4, Episode 6

Running for four seasons during the 1980s, the somewhat under-appreciated Blackadder got off to a slightly rocky start, but settled into a groove during its second season and continued to get better and better as the years went along. Each season of the show retained similar cast members but had them playing different characters at different points in history, each season jumping forward a century or two until season 4 reached the early 20th century.

Season 4 of Blackadder saw the main characters serving during World War I, and for five episodes of said season, it was typically witty and clever stuff sitcom-wise. But then the final episode, “Goodbyeee,” comes around and decides to drive home the senselessness of war in the most brutal way possible: by having all the main characters go over the top of a trench into gunfire, charging toward inevitable death. It’s brutally realistic, even for a show that sometimes had some fairly dark humor, and is one of the most impressive pieces of anti-war filmmaking/TV ever made. That it’s a part of Blackadder, a show that’s ostensibly a historical-themed comedy, makes it perhaps the most emotionally devastating sitcom episode of all time.

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