Adolescence to The Virtues: the most heartbreaking TV of all time

The Guardian

20-03-2025

Adolescence, as the world seems to agree, is a perfect piece of television. However, even perfection has its problems. Adolescence is the sort of show that needs some breathing space afterwards; it's so comprehensively shattering, and will leave you in such a state of emotional despondency, that you can't simply hop straight into the next show. I tried – after episode four, I had to watch a reality show for work – and it was horrible. It was like stumbling from a funeral straight into a circus.
Perhaps what we need here is an off-ramp. A bunch of shows that, while they might leave you in pieces, may not pack quite such a devastating punch as Adolescence. Here's a selection of the most heartbreaking television.
If Adolescence wanted to make me do anything – aside from lock my sons in a sensory deprivation chamber until they reach adulthood – it was to watch 2019's The Virtues. Like Adolescence, it stars Stephen Graham and was co-written by Jack Thorne, and like Adolescence it's so raw that it sometimes feels impolite to even watch it. Directed by Shane Meadows, it's the story of a father who suffers a comprehensive alcoholic breakdown when his wife and son move to Australia without him. There's repression. There's childhood trauma. There is an ending that will leave you numb for weeks. If you're chasing the hit of Adolescence, this is the place to start.
Another collaboration between Graham, Thorne and Meadows, these are a clutch of miniseries, made between 2010 and 2015, that develop the story from Meadows's 2006 film This Is England. All three shows deploy a gut-wrenching intensity that can be hard to bear. There's rape and violence, murder, death and poverty – and some of the narrative is set at Christmas, just to compound the misery. Graham's arc, as a character who struggles to atone for his part in a violent racist attack years earlier, is particularly harrowing. However, there's also a sense of hope in the show, however dim it might be at times, that just about manages to lift you out of the dirt.
Written during a depression after the death of his father, Damon Lindelof's The Leftovers has the potential to be one of the bleakest programmes ever. An unexplained event makes 2% of the world's population vanish, leaving the remaining 98% to battle through their grief while a nihilistic religious cult forces everyone to confront their loss. This might be a good next step from Adolescence, because although it starts dark – the pilot episode contains scenes of dog murder – it soon finds absurdity and hope in its miserable premise.
The fear of Adolescence is that what happens to its family could happen to anybody. Meanwhile, the Chornobyl explosion was a thing that did happen to many people, and the truth of the disaster was far worse than was reported for decades. There's an innate sadness to the show, of course – how could there not be? – but in its depiction of radiation poisoning and death, it also makes a fitting lurch into horror. Historically accurate bleakness.
This show deserves to go down as Russell T Davies's masterpiece. Both the BBC and ITV passed on It's a Sin before Channel 4 picked it up, perhaps fearing that a show about the Aids epidemic of the 1980s would be too harrowing for mainstream audiences. This isn't quite the case – there are moments of real joy here – but it's a hard thing to watch as characters die off, knowing that this all really happened. Like Chernobyl, the show burns with an anger that this was ever allowed to happen. But there's also a deep sense of humanity in every frame. Davies has never written more from the heart, and it shows.
This Is Us is compelling: it feels as if it was precision-designed by a team of expert crafters to make as many people cry as possible. It's about a family who experience the familiar peaks and troughs of love, birth, death and heartache, but with everything ramped up to an absurd degree. You find yourself sobbing even though you're being manipulated. It is also aggressively sentimental in a way that Adolescence isn't, which might be a comfort.