10 TV Episodes That Wanted To Piss You Off
3. That's My Dog - Six Feet Under
Six Feet Under is one of the most acclaimed TV dramas in history, and a rare one that well and truly stuck the landing. By far its most divisive episode, however, is season four's "That's My Dog."
The episode largely revolves around David (Michael C. Hall) picking up a handsome hitchhiker, Jake (Michael Weston), who turns out to be a drug-addled maniac.
Throughout the ordeal, David is beaten, tied up, and forced to smoke crack, and then in the episode's final moments has a gun put to his head, before Jake escapes into the night.
Given the show's focal theme of death, there's a very real tension cutting through this episode that David might not survive the night, as is exemplified by superb performances from Hall and a terrifying Weston.
It is nevertheless a massively polarising hour of television, many feeling that it veered into trauma porn territory or deviated too far from the series' dramatic formula.
If it made you angry, as it did many, that's clearly exactly what director Alan Poul and writer Scott Buck intended. This was a violent break from the norm, completely exploding the series' template of interconnected dramatic stories for an episode almost entirely focused on David being taken hostage.
But rather than being a mere disposable one-off, David's PTSD following the incident became his defining character arc for the show's remainder, until he finally came to peaceful terms with it in one of Six Feet Under's final episodes.