16 TV Shows With Too Many Deaths To Keep Up With
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The Boys takes an acidic look at a world besieged by superheroes based on the work of comic book madman Garth Ennis. In this world, most superheroes work for the Vought Conglomerate, and the titular Boys are working to take them down by whatever means necessary. It's not just members of the Boys killing superheroes or superheroes killing the Boys, it's everyone killing everyone - including civilians.
Some of the most exciting and out-of-the-box deaths are exactly what audiences want out of their superhero shows. Who doesn't want to see an airplane cut in half with heat vision? Or how about an invisible superhero exploding after a bomb is shoved up his rectum? If those are too high-concept for you, there are plenty of unnamed terrorists who get punched to death, sucked out of planes, and impaled with motorboats. Even when you expect this show to be violent, you never really know what's going to happen.
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When it comes to body counts, Ash vs Evil Dead has everything a gorehound could want out of a bloody good time. This series picks up a couple of decades after Army of Darkness and plunges Ash and a couple of new sidekicks into a world of demonic ultra-violence. In just three seasons, Ash and his cohorts lay waste to Deadites, weird little goopy demon baby monsters, and a whole lot of freaky creatures, but it's not just the undead who get got in this series.
Audiences can set their watch by the amount of time it takes for a human who's not in the main cast to be impaled, decapitated, ripped in half, or dragged to hell. Even the more prominently featured guest stars on this series end up eviscerated by some kind of creepy-crawly - it's brutal. One scene in Season 2 is especially hard to watch (spoilers to follow), and it involves a cast member who seems to be in this for the long run. Detective Amanda Fisher goes from unbelieving, cold police officer to Ash's love interest and someone who's all in on taking out the Deadites over the course of two seasons.
Just as it looks like she's about to make the jump from supporting cast member to main character, a doppelganger of Ash attacks her with a meat cleaver and impales her on a wall before turning her into a Deadite. It's not just shocking to see a beloved character taken out like this, but the sheer brutality of her final moments is hard to watch - and that's just in one episode.
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Putting the undead aside, The Walking Dead has to have one of the highest body counts on television. Even if this was just a show about a group of people trying to live off the grid with no zombie outbreak, the amount of brutal moments is absolutely staggering.
Even the most beloved characters on this long-running AMC series are destined to be turned into grease stains on the highway of life - that's just the way things are in the zombie apocalypse. Each season doubles down on the violence and gore of the previous seasons, but there are some standout moments of brutality in whichever season you settle into. Season 3 ends with a brutal attack on the prison where Rick Grimes and his surrogate family have made a life for themselves, not from walkers, but from their fellow man. This episode is the culmination of a season's worth of back and forth between Rick and the brutal Governor, but on its own, it feels like watching well-edited footage of guerilla warfare.
That episode has nothing on one of the most upsetting scenes of fictional human-on-human violence committed to film. The horrific moment in question occurs in the first episode of Season 7, where new villain Negan asserts his dominance over Rick and his crew by bashing in the head of fan-favorite Glenn with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. Rather than cut away with the first hit, the camera lingers on Glenn's horrific fate as his head is turned to mush.
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Squid Game takes place in a bleak world where impoverished people are tasked with playing a series of deadly children's games in hopes of being the last person standing and walking away with billions in South Korean Won. It's kind of like real life but with more fantastical deaths. Speaking of which, audiences who are fans of over-the-top death scenes must queue this up on Netflix.
There are a ton of characters who just get straight-up popped out of the blue by soldiers dressed in pink jumpsuits, but the most striking montage of deaths occurs in episode 7 when the players are tasked with making their way across a glass bridge.
In this game, the players have to make their way across a bridge fixed with pieces of tempered glass that they can land on, or regular glass that will break if they land on them. Choosing incorrectly is a fatal mistake. In this brutal sequence, seven different players are sliced up with broken glass as they crash through the bridge. Not only is this sequence incredibly stressful, but it also never gets easier to watch players fall to such a painful demise.
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If you want blood, The Punisher is going to give it to you. This series about the grimier side of being a vigilante opens with the Punisher running over two gang members before Frank Castle (Mr. Punisher himself) snipes a cartel member and beats a couple of guys to death with a sledgehammer. Once again, this is just episode 1.
As one might expect from a series about a vigilante going sicko mode on the mafia, The Punisher isn't a show for the week at heart. No episode passes without some kind of body count, which is why it deserves a place in the violent TV show hall of fame. When comparing The Punisher to the rest of the MCU shows that began their lives on Netflix, it's absolutely ludicrous that it exists. If you're the kind of audience member who finds the MCU to be a little too shiny and nice, then this uber-violent series is worth a watch.
For anyone who wants to jump in and see what this show is all about without having to worry about the narrative, Season 2's "The Dark Hearts of Men" features Frank Castle bringing the hammer down on about 25 gang members while using everything from knives to his teeth in this bloody good episode.
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Spartacus
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Not only is "blood" in the title of the first season of this series, but also anything that takes place in ancient Rome is going to be violent. The series follows Spartacus, a Thracian enslaved person who leads an uprising after he's forced into a life of being a gladiator - obviously there's going to be some pretty rad deaths on this show.
Aside from main characters losing their lives through a few classic palace intrigue stories, a ton of red shirts are offed throughout each episode. Guards, folks taking in a good day of gladiating, and various unnamed fighters are sliced up, chopped down, and run through over and over again. Spartacus focuses on the titular character's rise from a gladiator to a leader of men, and characters never stop dropping. Even in the final season, as Spartacus leads an army of former slaves against the Roman general Marcus Crassus, people are dropping like flies from hunger. This series doesn't shy away from the fact that death was an ever-present part of life in the era of the Roman Empire.
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Invincible is one of the few TV shows that show just how bloody it is to be a superhero. Born to Omni-Man, the most powerful being on the planet, Mark learns he has superpowers just like the old man after turning 17, and he decides to get into the superhero game. He quickly learns that violence and bloodshed go hand-in-hand with being a hero.
Things really get out of hand in episode 5, "That Actually Hurt," when Mark and his crew of superteens are whomped by a giant alien who goes by the charming name Battle Beast. Mark barely survives the ordeal, but some of his friends aren't so lucky. Black Samson and Monster Girl both have their heads smashed in, while multiple copies of Dupli-Kate (a teen with the power to make copies of herself) are ripped in half. Aside from the supporting characters, there are about 20 nameless baddies who have their necks snapped by Mark and his crew before things go south. Don't turn the deaths on this show into a drinking game, or your liver will actually file for emancipation.
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Vikings focuses on a group of the most bloodthirsty killers in history, so if you're the kind of viewer who wishes Game of Thrones was a more historically accurate look at ancient cultures while maintaining its death-a-minute pace, then this is the show for you. This is a series where every episode features a ton of brutality, and much like life/a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get.
In the first season of this show, characters are axed, strangled, stabbed, burned alive, impaled, and beheaded. The wildest thing about all of these on-screen deaths is that they never get boring. There's always something fresh and new happening in these bloody moments to keep things from getting stale. For instance, in episode 6 of Season 1, a character is thrown into a pit of venomous snakes. That's not the kind of thing audiences expect to happen, which is why this series rules.
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Sure, Season 8 of American Horror Story features a world-ending calamity that has a body count in the millions, but that's not what we're interested in. This series has always been focused on what happens to people after they draw their last breath, specifically when they meet a violent end. The body counts were definitely high for normal TV in the early seasons, but it's around Season 5 where the body count just goes off the rails.
In Hotel, a season dedicated to a haunted hotel, multiple people are slain by ghosts looking for friends in the afterlife, and a young vampire turns an entire classroom of children into creatures of the night so he won't have to be alone anymore. Things get even more bloody in Roanoke with a legit torture scene that's just hard to watch even though it's produced for prime-time cable TV. The anthology series topped itself in Season 9, 1984, which takes place at a summer camp where a serial killer is on the loose. That's all well and good, but the body count jumps as soon as Richard Ramierez shows up and starts wasting camp counselors until everyone is a ghost.
One fascinating minor plotline involves keeping the ghost of the Night Stalker at bay by doing away with him every time he wakes up. The ghosts of the counselors take turns watching over him so they can bash his brains out again and again in order to keep some kind of post-life peace.
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Based on the Preacher comic by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, this AMC series does everything it can to keep up with the extreme violence laid out for it in the original 65 issues. With Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg at the helm, the series is able to maintain its bloody premise while somehow being fit to air on AMC.
Following a Texas preacher who gains the power to make others do what he says, each episode introduces audiences to weird characters and intense pseudo-magical violence that claims the lives of a wide variety of victims, including Hitler, archangels, vampires, and even God. These aren't off-screen kills, either - these are bloody, insane battles full of over-the-top magical abilities and fight scenes that will make your head spin.
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The CW's iZombie may seem like it's horror-lite, but Rob Thomas's follow-up to Veronica Mars has no trouble piling on the gore in this fun and engrossing take on the zombie mythos. As Seattle becomes ground zero for a zombie outbreak, it's up to coroner's assistant Liv Moore and her Scooby gang to get to the bottom of what's turning everyone into brain eaters, and she has to help solve a mystery of the week. It's a rough life.
If this series plays it safe for the first few episodes (and by "safe" we mean that it opens with a zombie outbreak on a boat where revelers who mix a party drug and an energy drink turn into blood-thirsty ghouls), Season 1 dives headfirst into some of the most unexpected violence of the 2010s. A butcher shop gets blown up. Brains are harvested from healthy people by an undead mafia, and one villain throws his dad into a well and just barely keeps him alive because of, well, reasons?
Even without the cartoonish (and totally awesome) bloodshed in iZombie, there are still gory horror tropes splashed all over this series. Every episode features at least one brain being cooked up and served as a fresh new meal. Sometimes the brain is tossed in a blender to make a smoothie, and sometimes it's turned into brain sushi. It's honestly bold to feature someone eating human organs in every episode of a prime-time TV show.
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Picking up after a global apocalypse, the only people left alive are a few thousand people who are on the international space station, but we're not concerning ourselves with the billions of lost lives - it's the way the thousands go out that are interesting. A lot of characters get murked by bombs and pieces of shrapnel, which is all well and good, but there's something in this series that audiences won't see anywhere else on the CW - acid fog.
You read that correctly - a fog that's made of acid. Known as "The Veil," this fog is a toxic chemical utilized by a group of mountain people to wipe out their enemies in groups both large and small. Catching a whiff of this fatal fog blisters the skins and burns up the lungs. It's brutal to watch this fog wipe people out, but it's also pretty dang cool.
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Even though The Venture Bros. is an Adult Swim-produced animated series with 55 episodes that have run intermittently for over a decade, it's still in the running for the largest body count on television. Just about every episode of this riff on super-spies, supervillains, and super-science is caked in blood.
Every season finale goes big, leaving hundreds of henchman bodies broken and scattered across battlefields, each body maimed and destroyed in a variety of ways. For a series that finds sweetness in its group of lovable losers, it has no problem dishing out pain like an appetizer. Season 1 ends with the titular Venture brothers getting blown off their hoverbikes with a shotgun blast only to be resurrected as clones in the Season 2 opener. By the end of the second season, all of the clones kept on reserve are shot down in a blaze of something like glory. It would be an astonishing amount of on-screen death if the scene weren't taking place in the middle of a battle with an already high body count.
The team behind The Venture Bros. uses the medium of animation to give audiences on-screen violence that would never happen on TV. People are sliced in half, they're eaten by sharks, and they're blasted into the big empty of space in the middle of a movie screening aboard a space station.
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So huge spoiler alert for Midnight Mass, but pretty much everyone dies multiple times in this tricky little horror series from Mike Flanagan. This story about second chances and faith morphs into a new take on the vampire mythos, complete with blood drinking and people who turn to ash with the rising sun.
Audiences should watch the entire season to get the full effect of these deaths, but the finale features the entire vampirized community of Crockett Island succumbing to the sunrise in a variety of nasty ways. As members of the community decide to spend their final moments with their loved ones or trying to set things right, overbearing Bible thumper Bev Keane panics and tries to dig a hole in the sand around the island to shield herself from the sun. It's a sad attempt at survival that shows just how little faith she actually has - and how pathetic she really is.
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After the singular success of The Sopranos, HBO pivoted to the sex-filled and blood-soaked world of vampires in the Deep South. True Blood provides viewers with a pulpy good time. There are a ton of important character deaths in this series, and while they're exciting and heartbreaking, there are a ton of glorious deaths that occur in episode after episode. It rules.
Every single death on True Blood features a geyser of blood and enough viscera to fill a Halloween store. Let's see, there's the episode where a vampire pukes up all over a bar and disintegrates, oh and then there's the one where Sam Trammell turns into a bull and rips out a maenad's heart. Both of those very exciting and gross events pale in comparison to watching Alexander Skarsgard rip off a guy's jaw in one fell swoop. As silly as this show is, it still manages to slap. If you're into a show where people are constantly being taken out, then it's time to stop sleeping on True Blood.
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People are dying in Westworld over and over again. Given that most of the characters are robots, it shouldn't come as a surprise that someone can just peace out and then come back, only to once again be wiped out by various means of ultra-violence.
Initially separated into "hosts" and "humans," many of the characters in this series are either robots acting like people from the Wild West, feudal Japan, or some sort of faraway fantasy destination, or humans who are playing dress-up so they can kill a bunch of cybernetic entities without facing recrimination. It's a little more complicated than that, but we don't have the time to get into it.
It's telling that the most gruesome deaths are saved for the hosts, with the humans dishing out truly inspired moments of brutality simply because they know they're able to get away with whatever they want. Especially in the first season of this series, each episode goes through countless murders until they begin to feel like wallpaper. Bandits, deputies, and regular cowfolk are shot down in the name of entertainment.
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