Live-Action TV/Tear Jerker


Category:Tear Jerker/Live-Action TV‎ will do nicely.

MOD: Please do not add more entries to this page. Instead, cut out the middleman and add them to Tear Jerker subpages for the individual works. If the work doesn't have a Work page, remember: Works Pages Are a Free Launch. Don't forget to add Category:Tear Jerker/Live-Action TV to the new subpage!

Sometimes, television makes us laugh... and sometimes, television makes us cry. A lot.

See the individual works' Tear Jerker subpages for examples. See Category:Tear Jerker/Live-Action TV‎ for the individual works' Tear Jerker subpages.

Works that need to be identified

All of these are documentaries, but are they films or series?

  • The Alzheimer's Project - just reading an article about it was enough to induce tears.
  • 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 documentary Mayday! Bering Sea on the sinking of the Alaska Ranger, during Ed Cook talking about finding that his brother had died.
  • 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...

Works that need pages

All section titles match the English Wikipedia names of the works (except "12 Dias que estremecieron a Chile", which doesn't have an English Wikipedia page, and "Great Teacher Onizuka (live-action series)" and "Hell Girl (live-action series)", which Wikipedia cover on the same page as the respective manga and anime), so please use these redlinks when you create pages for the works.

12 Dias que estremecieron a Chile

  • 90% of times, the Chilean TV series "12 días que estremecieron a Chile" ("12 days that shocked Chile to the core") was a huge, giant tear: not only the terrible things that are told happened in real life, but the mixture of fiction and real life montages was incredibly effective. The crowner was the episode touching the horrifying incident known as "caso degollados" aka "case of the slit throats", specially two scenes: the one one of the victims's day, a famous stage actor, is told that the corpses have been found in the middle of one of his and his troupe's theater sessions; he and his fellow artists (including the original troupe members playing as themselves) decide to not stop the show, specially to say "fuck you" to the dictatorship that robbed them of their friends/relatives and the one where the same dead man's wife suffers an Heroic BSOD and starts claiming for justice and the fall of the dictatorship. The latter is made worse/better due to the mix of the fictional scene with real footage of the moment when it happened.

American Music Awards

  • As if "Isn't She Lovely"--a song where a blind man rhapsodizes about his newborn daughter's beauty--weren't enough of a tearjerker, it went to a whole new level at these awards when they did a tribute to Stevie Wonder. The segment ended with an ensemble singing "Isn't He Lovely" and the camera turned to Stevie in the audience. If you didn't know already, blind people can cry.

Animal Cops (Reality TV series)

  • Animal rescue shows can be heartbreaking when it comes to animals having to be put to sleep or seeing really bad neglect or cruelty.
  • Oh, God. One particular episode of Animal Cops. A breeder of shi tzus had been injured and more or less confined to her bed, and enlisted the help of her daughter and grandsons to care for several of the dogs, who lived outside where she couldn't get to them. They didn't, but told her they did. Watching that poor little old lady cradle the miserably neglected creatures and sob when the SPCA officers brought the dogs inside and she saw their real condition for the first time and realized her family had been lying to her for months... Almost as bad as the old lady's grief was the pitiful little noise of agony the oldest dog (who'd never recovered from a broken back and had gone blind in the kennel) kept making during the examination, and the revelation that she'd have to be put down, because there was nothing else the vets could do to spare her more pain.
  • On the opposite end of the tear spectrum, another episode featured a dog who officers found almost frozen to death in his owner's back yard. They had to pick him up, as he couldn't even move, and take him to an ASPCA vet. Cut to the next day... where he's begun to recover. Cut three months later, where he's running around in his new owner's yard and playing with her and her other dog. * Sniff*

Carrier (TV series) (Documentary series)

  • 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.

Einstein and Eddington

  • Einstein and Eddington, anyone? Eddington's best friend, William, is about to go off to fight in WWI and Eddington almost misses the train. Just when you think he's about to say goodbye to William, he's caught by a colleague seeing his son off and forced to make small talk. He cycles to the next station, but doesn't quite catch the train - he sees William on board, but William doesn't look out of the window. Later, inevitably, William dies at Ypres. Finally, Eddington breaks down and admits to his sister that he loved William, which is what he wanted to tell him at the station...and a few scenes later, to highlight the poignancy, the aforementioned colleague accuses Eddington of knowing nothing about grief.

Fridays

  • Fridays is a Saturday Night Live Expy-cum-Dueling Show from the early 1980s that not that many people remember and hasn't been seen on television in a long time (There was an Urban Legend saying it doesn't even have an official DVD release because Michael Richards signed a deal stating that he didn't want the show to be put out on home video that circulated until Shout Factory released a five disc best-of collection featuring highlights (not complete episodes) of 16 episodes in 2013). Nonetheless, it still had its Tear Jerker moments:
    • Faced with the daunting task of doing a live comedy show the Friday after John Lennon's death and not making light of the tragedy, Fridays did itself proud. The show went on with no mention of Lennon until just after the "Friday Edition" news segment. Then the screen went blank and the words to "Imagine" scrolled across the screen. It said all that needed to be said.
    • Another episode had a dramatic sketch in which a punk rocker (Michael Richards) returns home to his elderly father, who keeps asking who he is and telling the man that he has no son. The son takes this as a sign that his father wants nothing to do with him because of the generation gap and the fact that the son had been away from home for so long. The son then gives an impassioned speech about loving and accepting him, despite the mistakes he made -- until it's revealed that the man is right -- the punk rocker really isn't his son.

Un gars, une fille

  • This otherwise hilarious French-Canadian series got a few brilliant tear-jerker moments, all delivered by Sylvie Leonard. The first of the two most notable happens at the end of the episode in which Sylvie's mother dies. She gives a beautiful speech to her mother's grave, and asks her to give her a sign if she heard her. At this point, a pigeon poops on Guy's, her boyfriend, shoulder, turning it into a Crowning Moment of Funny.
  • The second happens during the final episode. After going all the way to Vietnam to adopt a little girl, Sylvie suddenly collapses in the street and wakes up in hospital. Weak and afraid she might die, she tells Guy how much she wanted to see their new child grow up and how much she loves him. The doctor arrives seconds later to inform them that Sylvie is actually pregnant, turning the scene into a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming.

Great Teacher Onizuka (live-action series)

  • The live action Great Teacher Onizuka episode where Tomoko pours her heart out during the public speaking part of the competition.

Hell Girl (live-action series)

  • In episode 2 of the live-action Hell Girl series, Enma Ai's client is a Hikikomori whose father has been murdered. There's a heartbreaking flashback sequence in which we see all the times his father talked to him through the door of his room, patiently trying again and again to reach his son. They love each other, but whatever sorrow has taken hold of the boy won't let go. And now it's too late -- he'll never see his dad again, never get to make things right. You'll need to hug someone you love after watching this.

History Cold Case (Documentary series)

  • History Cold Case is an eight-episode BBC Two programme which goes back in time and analyses dead bodies, finding out their history. One episode, "Crossbones Girl", 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.

Kasou Taishou

Los Archivos del Cardenal

  • The Chilean TV series "Los Archivos del Cardenal" ("The Files of the Cardinal"), narrating the struggle of the "Vicaria de la Solidaridad" ("Vicary of Solidarity") during the terrible Chilean dictatorship, is the perfect mix of Tear Jerker and Nightmare Fuel. Maybe the names and some circumstances were changed to protect sensibilities of the victims and their families, but the emotional impact is devastating.

Monkey Life

  • Alison Cronin breaking down in tears on camera, discussing the death of her husband Jim and her intent to carry on running his park the way he wanted.

Pirate Master (Reality TV series)

  • Cheryl Kosewicz, the fourth person to leave the show, was found dead during the show's run on TV (after filming). She blamed the show for causing friction between herself and her boyfriend

Romance of the Three Kingdoms (TV series)

Rough Riders (miniseries)

  • The Rough Riders miniseries. When Tiffany, in one of the battles, shouts out as Roosevelt has charged forward with no one else following, "For God's sake, follow the Colonel!" He stands up to follow his own words and that's when the bullet goes straight through his head, making him fall back into the group of other soldiers, dead.

Secrets of the Dead (Documentary series)

  • The documentary series Secrets of the Dead also had one incredibly tear-jerking episode, "Titanic's Ghost". 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.

Wildlife SOS (TV series) (Reality TV series)

  • When CT the Badger was put down. Gracie Lizzie cried, not so much for CT herself but from watching her being cradled in her last moments by a heartbroken Simon Cowell (no not, that, Simon Cowell - this Simon Cowell).

The World at War (Documentary series)

  • The World at War is full of heartbreaking stories from various eyewitness accounts, but the speech in the episode "Genocide (1941-1945)" from a Hungarian who'd survived a concentration camp is made even sadder by the speaker's 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.

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