10 TV Shows That Went Too Far (In Completely Unexpected Ways)

More than any other show on this list (sorry, Negan and Lucille), Game of Thrones pushed the envelope so far and so often that the show could have been called “1001 Ways to Guarantee the Complaints Department Will Be Busy Until Christmas”.

There was the boundary-pushing violence, with heads being crushed and throats being slit in unsparing detail. There was the relentlessly downbeat and grim plot, where no character was safe and evil almost always won the day. There were the frequent middle fingers thrown to good taste via rape scenes, torture depictions, and more dead bodies than TV has ever seen.

So what could the show do that would be seen as unexpected step too far?

Well, it would have to be huge. Huge like say, making its penultimate episode a claustrophobic nightmare depicting one of its only even vaguely heroic characters losing their mind and slaughtering a city worth of innocent civilians in brutal detail?

Yes, the foreshadowing was there all along for Dany’s downfall, but when most audiences expected the last episodes of the show would follow the defeat of the Night King, it came as a crushing blow for many more optimistic viewers to see one of the only beloved forces of nominal “good” on the show corrupted by power and reducing scores of powerless men, women, and small children to ash over a torturous hour of television.