10 TV Episodes That Wanted To Piss You Off
6. Scott's Tots - The Office
"Scott's Tots" is a legendary episode of the U.S. version of The Office, at once held up as one of the show's best episodes and also its most painful to watch.
Here's the rub: it's revealed that Michael Scott (Steve Carell) made a promise to a class of underprivileged kids 10 years earlier that he'd pay for all of their college tuition, believing that he'd be in a financial position to do so a decade later.
However, in the present day Michael of course hasn't become an ultra-successful entrepreneur, and so he's forced to visit the kids and explain that he won't be funding their tuition.
What follows is an excruciating masterpiece of cringe "comedy" as Michael procrastinates breaking the news, sitting through a presentation from the grateful students who believe their future is paid for.
They show Michael the reading room named after him, tell him about their dreams for the future, and even perform a song to commemorate him ("Hey, Mr. Scott, watcha gonna do? Watcha gonna do? Make our dreams come true!").
Michael, and we the audience, are desperate to disappear into a hole and never emerge, but it somehow gets worse when Michael finally comes clean.
After telling the students the truth, he tries to assuage his guilt by offering each of them laptop batteries, as unsurprisingly goes down like a lead balloon.
Scott's Tots is such a viscerally uncomfortable episode of TV that there's even a subreddit devoted to it, and fans often report skipping it on repeat viewings because the psychic pain from watching is just too damn much.
That is, of course, entirely the point: you're supposed to feel like absolute trash while lamenting both the kids' lost tuition and Michael's short-sighted stupidity all those years ago.