The 20 best TV shows about grief

The hit sitcom The Golden Girls dealt with several weighty political and social issues during its long run. Just as importantly, however, it also dealt with emotional and personal issues, including grief. All four women deal with grief during the series’ run, particularly Sophia, who has to say goodbye to several friends and even her son. The women find strength and solace with one another. The series provides a necessary space for audiences to work through and grapple with their grief. 

This is Us is, in many ways, pure TV melodrama, and that’s its greatest strength and a major part of its appeal. With its various timelines and characters, it makes for a compelling and layered watch, and what makes it even more rewarding is the fact that it deals with the way that grief echoes down through life. It also features some of the best performances on network television, including from Sterling K. Brown, Mandy Moore, and Chrissy Metz. 

Phoebe Waller-Bridge stars in Fleabag, which focuses on the title character and her various struggles as she attempts to make sense of grief and the shortcomings of her life. The series is yet another illustration of how the black comedy genre can often prove to be a useful means of navigating the fraught territory of grief. Fleabag’s struggles to deal with her friend taking her own life are one of the main threads of her journey, and it’s rewarding, if at times frustrating, to watch Fleabag’s journey.

Ricky Gervais gives a surprisingly nuanced and touching performance in After Life. His character, Tony Johnson, is, in Gervais fashion, abrasive and often horrible, but in this case, his behavior is a response to his wife’s death. It’s pitch-perfect black humor, and it uses its unique sensibility to probe the meaning of grief, showing how it can change how a person behaves and how they engage with the world, even as it also pushes them to think differently about themselves.

Jason Segel stars in Shrinking, in which he plays Jimmy Laird, whose grief over his wife’s death leads to him changing his entire approach to how he treats his patients. Needless to say, things go more than a little sideways, particularly given that his new radical honesty doesn’t always sit well with the people that he treats. There’s no denying that this is the kind of show that isn’t afraid to explore some darker territory, even if it also is the kind of show that wears its heart on its sleeve. 

BoJack Horseman isn’t afraid to deal with some bigger issues. After all, its title character is a former sitcom star who repeatedly spirals into mental health crises and addiction. Moreover, BoJack also has to contend with numerous losses, both in terms of those who die during the show’s run as well as his own fading career. The show doesn’t necessarily provide a blueprint to those struggling with similar griefs, but it still deserves a great deal of credit for being willing to showcase mental illness in all of its complications and ugliness. 

The Last of Us is arguably one of the best post-apocalyptic dramas of recent years. Much of this is due to the central performances from Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey as Ellie, two survivors in a world in which most people have been turned into zombies by a deadly fungus. While the show is obviously about their struggles to survive, it’s also about mourning and grief: for those who have been killed by violence or taken over by the fungus and, just as importantly, for a world and a way of life that has vanished beyond reclaiming.

Created by Michael Schur, A Man on the Inside  follows Ted Danson’s Charles Nieuwendyk, who struggles to come to terms with his wife’s death until he takes a job as a private investigator inside a retirement home. The show expertly blends comedy with drama, and there are more than a few heartbreaking moments. Even so, the series does a superb job of showing how one’s life doesn't end just because one gets older, nor does it end just because one loses the people that one loves. 

Few sitcoms have taken as many big philosophical swings as The Good Place. What begins as a story about four people sent to The Bad Place soon becomes a more potent and moving reflection on mortality and one’s place in the universe. Among other things, the series also addresses grief in its many forms, particularly as each of the characters grapples with various kinds of loss, both in terms of their place in the afterlife and in the broader scheme of the cosmos itself.

Horror maestro Mike Flanagan excels at crafting horror shows that aim to do more than terrify and titillate. In Midnight Mass, he takes the well-worn mythology of the vampire and uses it to explore the nature of grief and how one’s search for forgiveness can lead to tragedy and death. Zach Gilford is particularly wrenching as Riley Flynn, who returns to his home — an isolated island — in an attempt to atone for killing a woman while drunk driving. Once there, however, things quickly turn deadly as a sinister creature begins to take over the island. The show is as heartbreaking as it is haunting. 

Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini give powerful performances in Dead to Me. The series focuses on two women who end up meeting a grief support group, with the added twist that one of them was responsible for the death of the other’s husband. Over the course of the series’ three seasons, it managed to strike the perfect balance between humor and sadness, exploring the many complications accompanying grief and loss. It is also, just as importantly, a poignant portrait of the extraordinary friendship between two women.

Though The Bear is about many things — the stresses of running a fine dining establishment, the emotional toll of being in a troubled family — it’s also about grief. After all, the whole reason that the main character Carmy inherits the family restaurant is that his brother took his own life. The next several seasons of the show are, in one way or another, an exploration of Carmy’s attempts to deal with that loss and to rebuild his own life. 

Reservation Dogs earned significant praise for its emphasis on Indigenous stories. When the series begins, a group of Indigenous youths are struggling to deal with their friend taking their own life, as well as the many other things that young people have to deal with on a daily basis. Grief is a throughline running through all three seasons of the show, and it manages to expertly balance both the comic and dramatic elements of its story. It remains one of the most authentic and powerful TV series of the 2020s.

Mike Flanagan’s Netflix horror series are some of the best of the genre, and he uses its conventions to do more than merely scare his audience. In fact, in series such as The Haunting of Hill House, he uses horror to explore issues such as grief, trauma, and mental illness. The series, based on the novel by Shirley Jackson, follows the tortured Crain family as their fate is increasingly intertwined with the titular domicile. In the process, they all have to contend with the grief of their mother’s death and that of several other family members. 

The Leftovers might, at first glance, appear to be yet another post-apocalyptic drama, but it’s much more than that. Taking place in a world in which millions of people disappeared overnight, it focuses on the efforts of those left behind to contend with the ravages wrought by such an event. The series is undeniably grim, but there’s astounding depth to its stories and its characters. It ends up being one of those series that stays with the viewer long past the time that it’s over.

HBO had another hit on its hands with Six Feet Under, which focuses on the various members of the Fisher family and their funeral home. Given its central subject matter, the series unsurprisingly isn’t afraid to address death and grieving, which helps in part to explain why it is often regarded as one of the network’s best series. It’s one of those rare shows that realizes that death isn’t always something to be feared.

No Good Deed focuses on a married couple, Lydia and Paul Morgan (Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano), as they attempt to sell their house, even as they contend with their grief over their son’s death prior to the series’ events. Both actors ably convey the anguish of parental grief, showing the extent to which such a tragedy can damage even the most loving of couples. In the end, fortunately, they are able to cope with it and rebuild their fractured marriage and family, and the series, like any black comedy, manages to find humor and tragedy in death.

When the series Somebody Somewhere begins, main character Sam has moved back to her home town of Manhattan, Kansas, where she has to come to grips with the death of her sister from cancer. Over the course of three seasons she works through her grief and starts to build a new life for herself, largely with the help of her best friend Joel (Jeff Hiller) and her other sister Tricia (Mary Catherine Garrison). Bridget Everett gives a remarkable performance as Sam, and the series perfectly captures the many different forms that grief takes and how people deal with it.

WandaVision remains one of the most extraordinary series to have been produced by Marvel. By putting Wanda and her grief over losing Vision at the center of its story, it managed to explore emotional depths that the franchise could explore, at least in the medium of television. The show came at just the right time when much of the world was reeling with the grief imposed by the pandemic and its death toll. To this day, it remains a powerful piece of TV, thanks to Elizabeth Olsen’s performance and its own skillful engagement with the history of TV.

The heart of the series Grace and Frankie  is the extraordinary friendship between Jane Fonda’s Grace and Lily Tomlin’s Frankie after their husbands leave them for one another. However, the series also grapples with a number of issues related to grief. There’s obviously the issue of the two women grieving their lost marriages, but they also have to mourn the deaths of various loved ones, and even Sol and Robert, their ex-husbands, have their fair share of grieving to do. Equal parts hilarious and poignant, the series shows that life doesn’t end just because one gets older.