History CruelAndUnusualDeath / LiveActionTV

* Series/TheWalkingDead has quite a few gruesome deaths:
** The "bicycle walker" had so much of her eaten that there's barely half of her torso left.
** Dale is unable to wrestle a walker off of him, and it rips open his stomach and guts. He's left writhing until someone can bring themselves to put him out of his misery.
** T-Dog is bitten on the neck when the prison is invaded by walkers, and later sacrifices himself to save Carol by allowing himself to be horribly torn apart and eaten by walkers. When Rick finds his corpse, there's so little left of him that the only way he was recognized was by his tattered clothes. In the same episode, Lori orders Maggie to give her a C-section without anesthetic, and once Judith is born, Carl puts her down. Post-mortem, her body is completely eaten by a walker, who Rick finds bloated and dazed.
** Milton gets tortured by the Governor for an unknown amount of time, and when he tries to fight back, he's gutted and left to bleed out and turn.
** Zach saves Bob from being eaten... only to be bitten on the leg and get eaten himself from the leg-up. A fallen helicopter on the roof breaks through and crushes him for good measure.
** Anyone who is captured by Terminus is gassed, bent over a pig trough, has their head beat in with an aluminum bat, and then gets their throats slit so they can bleed out. And ''then'' they're carved up to be eaten.
** The Hunters are bloodily hacked to pieces by Rick's group in retaliation for previously capturing them and eating Bob's leg, but they're definitely AssholeVictim's.
** Averted with Bob. He's bitten on a run, and while he does endure the trauma of watching the Hunters slurp down his leg, he dies one of the most peaceful deaths on the show. After the Hunters are killed, he says goodbye to his surrogate family, and dies smiling since the last thing he sees is Sasha smiling at him. And he gets one hell of a "Fuck You!" at the Hunters by informing them they've eaten "TAINTED MEAT!"
** Aiden is impaled in several chunks of metal after accidentally setting off a grenade. He orders the others to leave him, and he dies a slow, horrible death when the walkers eat him, and he gets to watch them rip out and eat his innards. Later in the same episode, Noah is pinned against the glass of a revolving door, and gets torn apart in front of Glenn from behind. We get to see the walkers ripping his face to shreds and eating through his shoulders.
** Savior Paula is impaled on a metal bar by Carol and gets her parts of her face bitten off by walkers while she's still alive, before she finally succumbs to her wounds.
** Glenn. Negan really draws out his beating with Lucille, giving us a good look at Glenn's bloody face and his eye popping out, mimicking an infamous panel from the comics. Negan then keeps beating his head to a bloody pulp long after he is clearly dead. The same thing happened to Abraham minutes earlier, just without the eye-popping.
** Dr. Emmett Carson is thrown into the Sanctuary furnace face-first by Negan and gets the upper-half of his body incinerated.
** Creepy Savior Gunther gets ''[[HalfTheManHeUsedToBe bisected]]'' by Jerry with his axe.
** In "Honor", an unarmed Morgan is being beaten down by a Savior who had just been shot in the gut. Out of options, Morgan shoves his hand inside the bullet wound and ''rips out the Savior's intestines'', killing him instantly. Everyone else's OhCrap expressions say it all.

* This generally tends not to happen in ''Series/{{Columbo}}'', but in the episode ''Any Old Port in a Storm'', Adrian Carsini leaves his half-brother to slowly suffocate and thirst to death over several days in his [Adrian's] wine cellar. Yet despite the heinousness of his crime, Adrian still manages to be one of the most memorable and sympathetic killers in the show's run.

** The Hands of Blue are ThoseTwoBadGuys who ominously pursue the Tam siblings. What they did to the Feds who only talked to the Tams in "[[Recap/FireflyE09Ariel Ariel]]" definitely fits the trope. They use a weird ultra-sonic weapon that causes bleeding out through every orifice in your body. This is not a pleasant way to die.

* The first episode of ''Series/{{Frasier}}'' has Roz tell the story of Lupe Velez, who wanted a lavish suicide and instead as she was trying to overdose she stumbled into the bathroom and goes head first into the toilet.

* In ''Series/TheBoys'', Madeline Stillwell is executed by an angry Homelander, who hits her with a faceful of his laser-vision from a distance of about a foot and a half. When he's done with her, Stillwell's face looks more like a Halloween decoration than a human head.

** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E3PlanetOfTheOod "Planet of the Ood"]]: ReverseMole Dr. Ryder gets pushed over a railing into the giant Ood brain and sucked inside it.

* ''Series/TheOutpost'': [[spoiler:Garret]] is sentenced to death by drowning. That entailed he get dunker underwater and held there. In reality, drowning like that has been described as agony by survivors. He survives, though a Blackglood later does not.

* ''Series/TheOuterLimits1995'': In "The Light Brigade", Major John Skokes, the cadet and the Chief Weapons Officer are exposed to a lethal dose of gamma radiation while climbing past the engine core of the ''Light Brigade''. They begin to suffer the symptoms of radiation poisoning within minutes.

* In the episode "Where There's Smoke" of ''Series/{{CSINY}}'', the killer trapped his former foster mother in an elevator and started a fire right next to it, essentially cooking her to death.

* ''Series/BlackMirror'': In [[Recap/BlackMirrorPlaytest "Playtest"]], the protagonist dies abruptly [[spoiler:a second into the game test by his phone interfering with the experimental technology and causing a system crash as his consciousness was partially uploaded. He's put through immense (and completely undeserved) psychological torture on par with MindRape and dies alone, literally living out his worst nightmare, [[IWantMyMommy crying out "MOM!"]] as his brain is fried.]]

** Spike once told Buffy that as soon as he was able to get at her, "they're going to be finding your body for ''weeks''." One assumes he didn't intend to rip her apart after ''after'' death.

* ''Series/TheOuterLimits1995'': In "The Light Brigade", Major John Skokes, the cadet and the Chief Weapons Officer are exposed to a lethal dose of gamma radiation while climbing past the engine core of the ''Light Brigade''. They begin to suffer the symptoms of radiation poisoning with minutes.

* ''Series/BlackMirror'': In [[Recap/BlackMirrorPlaytes "Playtest"]], the protagonist dies abruptly [[spoiler:a second into the game test by his phone interfering with the experimental technology and causing a system crash as his consciousness was partially uploaded. He's put through immense (and completely undeserved) psychological torture on par with MindRape and dies alone, literally living out his worst nightmare, [[IWantMyMommy crying out "MOM!"]] as his brain is fried.]]

* ''The Big One: The Great Los Angeles Earthquake'': Like most natural disaster movies, many people die from falling debris, are crushed when tall buildings collapse and so forth, with some dying after several days of being trapped in rubble. Fitting the trope are a couple of examples:
** Office of Emergency Management executive director Chad Spaulding (Joe Spano), who while trying to escape the U.S. Geological Service safety bunker beneath city hall is trapped when the safety doors seal shut, the sprinklers go off and the wiring shorts out; he is electrocuted, after which his body is crushed beneath tons of office furniture, which come crashing down as the ceiling collapses.
** Main protagonist Claire Winslow's mother, Anita Parker (Bonnie Bartlett), who is within the grasp of being rescued from a disabled elevator car when another aftershock snaps the cables. The car goes crashing to the bottom of the shaft presumably far below, and is presumably killed. Trope-making in that Anita was within a few inches of being saved, only to plunge to her death, and likely not suffer her fatal injuries, much less lose consciousness, until crashing at the very bottom of the shaft.
* In ''Series/TeenWolf'', it is a hunter policy to cut defeated werewolves in half so that they can't heal their injuries.
* In the ''Series/TheVampireDiaries'' Anna gets tortured by a sonic ear-bleeder device, injected with poison, and is lying on the floor feebly begging for her life when she is staked and burned.
* In ''Recap/BlackMirrorPlaytest'', the protagonist dies abruptly [[spoiler:a second into the game test by his phone interfering with the experimental technology and causing a system crash as his consciousness was partially uploaded. He's put through immense (and completely undeserved) psychological torture on par with MindRape and dies alone, literally living out his worst nightmare, [[IWantMyMommy crying out "MOM!"]] as his brain is fried.]]

** In "[[{{Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS6E20Villains}} Villains]]", Willow, who has [[BewareTheNiceOnes snapped]] as a result of Tara being killed, deals with Warren Meers, the guy who killed her, by crucifying him, sewing his lips together, using magic to slowly force a bullet (one which Warren had himself used to shoot Buffy) into his chest, and finally ''[[FlayingAlive flaying]] and burning him alive''. The utter cruelty of it all would cement Willow's status as the season's new BigBad.

** In "[[{{Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS1E6ThePack}} The Pack]]" Principal Flutie was ''literally'' eaten alive by some troublemakers.

* Fred in ''Series/{{Angel}}''. Illyria liquefied her organs and turned her into a shell.

** The Hands of Blue are ThoseTwoBadGuys who ominously pursue the Tam siblings. What they did to the Feds who only talked to the Tams in "[[{{Recap/FireflyE09Ariel}} Ariel]]" definitely fits the trope. They use a weird ultra-sonic weapon that causes bleeding out through every orifice in your body. This is not a pleasant way to die.

* ''Series/TheTudors'', the producers seems to take pleasure in showing the all myriad ways that Renaissance England had for torturing and killing people. Needless to say, ''[[{{Squick}} extremely]]'' TruthInTelevision. One example will suffice, from the judge handing down a sentence of death: that the accused be "drawn on a hurdle through the city of London to Tyburn. There to be hanged, till you are half dead. After that cut down yet alive, your bowels out of your body and burned before you, your privy parts cut off, your head cut off, your body to be divided in four parts and your head and your body to be set at such places as the King shall assign."
* Many instances in the ''Franchise/UltraSeries'', however, the most horrific death in the entire franchise probably happens to Barabas from ''Series/UltramanAce''. First, he is [[ImpaledWithExtremePrejudice impaled]], next his [[EyeScream eyes are gouged out]], then he gets his hand severed, and finally, he gets [[OffWithHisHead decapitated]].
* Spike TV's ''Series/OneThousandWaysToDie'' is all about this trope. It doesn't shy away from including graphic images of being wrapped in freshly-killed animal skins and left to be pecked to death by vultures, to being asphyxiated by cocoa powder, to jumping from a cliff into a lake and hitting the water at an angle that causes water to rush into the rectum, rupturing the large intestine.
* ''Series/{{Farscape}}'' occasionally utilized its immense prosthetic budget to come up with graphic depictions of these. The one that comes most readily to mind was the rather horrible fate of a childhood friend of Aeryn's, who was going to shoot her while the ship around them was being destroyed... only for a nearby pipe to burst and ''sear the skin off her face'', after which she shambled around for a few seconds before dying. [[http://www.farscapefantasy.com/3.21.5/images/221_jpg.jpg Not for the squeamish.]]
** Scorpius' ExtremeMeleeRevenge against his Scarran "nanny," by [[EyeScream thrusting both halves of a snapped coolant rod through her eyes]]... and when that [[MadeOfIron fails to kill her]], he resorts to punching her into submission before using [[HoistByHisOwnPetard her own torture-thermostat]] to lower the temperature until she [[RasputinianDeath succumbs to hypothermia and her own injuries.]]
* ''Series/DeadLikeMe'':
** They manage to make this nearly ''OncePerEpisode'', as it's a show about 'Reapers' dealing with ''accidental'' deaths.

** A few other episodes with notably gross and unsettling deaths include "Malleus Maleficarum" (teeth fall out, chokes on blood), "Red Sky At Morning" (brutal bathtub drowning), "Bugs" (beetles burrow into brain), "The Magnificent Seven", and "Crossroad Blues," "Time Is On My Side," and "No Rest For The Wicked," all three for hellhounds ripping people apart, though "Time Is On My Side " also features a gross old man surgically removing the heart from his still-breathing victim. Classy. And then Season 5 happened, with two lovers ''eating each other to death'' in "My Bloody Valentine".

* Argentinian miniseries ''Epitafios'' is filled with these.
* Happens to Captain Jack of ''Series/DoctorWho'' and ''Series/{{Torchwood}}'' a lot since ImmortalLifeIsCheap. A few examples include being buried alive by his brother to suffocate and come back to life repeatedly for 2000 years, being blown up and very painfully regenerating from the few remaining bits, and being encased alive in concrete. GoodThingYouCanHeal, indeed.
** The fourth series has the world governments incinerating people. The problem? Everyone is immortal and, as far as anyone knows, can still feel pain even as a charred corpse.
** Anyone who is shot by a Dalek's DeathRay. They don't just kill you, oh no, that would be far too nice. WordOfGod says that they set it at one notch ''just below'' what's required to kill their targets, so that instead of instantly dying, their victims' nervous systems are burned out... ''which they can feel before they die''. Why? Because as as far as Daleks are concerned, anyone who isn't a Dalek deserves to die in agony for the crime of not being a Dalek.
* Early ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' had phasers that could set people on fire, some indeterminate energy weapons that stripped away the skin and flesh before disintegrating the skeleton while the faces of those who were so killed stood frozen with horrified expressions, and a two-episode character's head ''exploding'' with a good deal of gore and an [[SpecialEffectsFailure alien puppet thing]] where his chest internals ought to have been once his ribcage is opened up.
** In "[[{{Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS3E22TheMostToys}} The Most Toys]]" Data's kidnapper owns a Varon-T disruptor, a weapon banned in Federation space because it tears the body apart from the inside out, resulting in a slow and excruciating death.
* The first episode of ''Series/{{Frasier}}'' has Roz tell the story of Lupe Velez, who wanted a lavish suicide and instead as she was trying to overdose she stumbled into the bathroom and goes head first into the toilet.
* ''Series/{{JAG}}'':
** In "Death Watch" (third season), Commander Holbarth, the murderer of Harm's academy classmate in "Skeleton Crew", fell into the water and was crushed to death between the hull of a destroyer and the dock.
** In "Enemy Below" (seventh season), the [[RenegadeRussian Russian crew]] aboard the diesel submarine Al-Qaeda bought from Iran [[ConvenientTerminalIllness succumbs to radiation poisoning]] because the dirty nuke is unshielded.
* Although it's never shown, the fate of a human who comes into contact with the blood of a Horror in ''Series/{{GARO}}'' is one of these: 100 days after exposure, your muscles break down inside your body, your body emits a foul odor, and you suffer excruciating pain from which there is no respite. Also, anyone who is exposed to the blood of a Horror will be seen as a particularly delicious target by other Horrors, which can be a bit of a problem for anyone who doesn't happen to be associated with any Makai Knights.
* Another ''Franchise/StarTrek'' example, this time ''Series/StarTrekEnterprise'': Although it is never shown onscreen and is simply mentioned, what happened to the crew of a Klingon ship entering the Delphic Expanse could qualify. Although not necessarily involving death at first, it is stated by Ambassador Soval that that particular Klingon crew was "anatomically inverted, their organs splayed open, ''and they were still alive'', but they no doubt died shortly after, and it almost certainly was very unpleasant.
* In ''Series/{{CSI}}'' in Las Vegas, there was a rapist who joined a cooking show with a friend of his (another rapist). The show's producer was the rape victim's vengeful sister, who proceeded to stab the man multiple times with his own knife, before dismembering parts of the man and using those parts as cooking materials for a "mystery meat" challenge. His friend was murdered by the producer as well, albeit in a less violent manner - death by asphyxiation from an allergy to almonds.
* In the episode "Where There's Smoke" of ''Series/{{CSINY}}'', the killer trapped his former foster mother in an elevator and started a fire right next to it, essentially cooking her to death.

* Laura Moser of ''Series/{{Dexter}}'' was killed with an electric chain-saw in front of her two little children. Poor woman.
* ''Series/{{Grimm}}'': How spinnetods kill their victims. See "spiders" in the RealLife folder.
* Many of the victims in ''Series/CriminalMinds'' suffer this:
** Frank Breitkopf would inject his victims with Ketamine, leaving them paralysed but conscious, before he dissected them. His trailer had a mirror on the ceiling, so they could see what was happening.
** In the episode "52 Pickup" the unsub disemboweled young women, then forced them to clean up the mess with their intestines hanging out, before slitting their throats.
* ''Series/{{Community}}'' - in "Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps", Annie ends her Halloween story having her defeating vampire Jeff revealing herself to be a werewolf. Her narrative is only made creepier by her perky, button-down demeanor:
--> And she ripped into his torso, like a gerbil shredding a Quaker Oats box, sending chunks of viscera and an aerosol mist of blood all over the skanky concubine. Then, she flossed her teeth with his tendons. And, because he was a vampire, he lived through all of it. He had to watch her swallow his last eyeball. She kept it attached to the optic nerve, so he could see down her throat, to his own partially digested flesh in her stomach.
* ''Series/AshVsEvilDead'': Most deaths at the hands of the Deadites and other evils are horrifying, but are either over quickly or played for BlackComedy. Not so the death of [[RedShirt Heather]] in the first SeasonFinale, at the metaphorical hands of [[EldritchLocation the cabin]] -- first, an invisible force throws her around the room, and then tosses a couch onto her legs (one of which is already broken from a previous Deadite encounter). Then nails pulls themselves out of the walls and fling themselves into her face, followed by more impaling her feet from the floorboards. And finally, the invisible force drags her into a room lit by an eerie red glow; moments later, the dismembered remains of her body are expelled from the cabin in a gyser of blood.
* The sitcom ''Series/TwoPintsOfLagerAndAPacketOfCrisps'' had a horror episode in which all the characters got killed in variously nasty ways, all of which were played for laughs, but still horrific. One of the most was Kelly the barmaid, who was attacked by a whirlwind of crisp packets that covered her entire body while she staggered blindly around giving muffled screams, before suffocating to death.
* ''{{Series/Victoria}}'': Some Chartists convicted of treason were sentenced to being hanged, drawn and quartered, the particularly gruesome punishment for this crime. Victoria commutes this into [[SentencedToDownUnder transportation to Australia]], viewing it as barbaric.
* ''Series/TheHandmaidsTale'': The "particicution", in which a supposed rapist is beaten to death by the Handmaids (other versions specify that the man is actually a political dissident. The TV series leaves it to your imagination).
* ''Series/AmericanGods2017'': A man at the Vulcan plant dies by falling into a container of molten metal due to a faulty railing, with his corpse being turned into part of the bullets it churns out.
* ''Series/AgathaRaisin'': The second VictimOfTheWeek in "Agatha Raisin and the Curious Curate" is murdered by being drowned in a large pot of boiling jam.
* ''Series/TheOuterLimits1995'': In "The Light Brigade", Major John Skokes, the cadet and the Chief Weapons Officer are exposed to a lethal dose of gamma radiation while climbing past the engine core of the ''Light Brigade''. They begin to suffer the symptoms of radiation poisoning with minutes.
* ''Series/{{Chernobyl}}'' shows in [[NightmareFuel great]] [[{{Squick}} detail]] what happens to the people who get exposed to far more radiation than healthy, including [[HopeSpot Walking Ghost Phase]] and other stages related to the Acute Radiation Syndrome. Made far worse by the fact '''all of this actually happened'''.

* ''Series/TheHandmaidsTale'': The "particicution", in which a supposed rapist is beaten to death by the Handmaids.

** In the episode "Villains", Willow, who has [[BewareTheNiceOnes snapped]] as a result of Tara being killed, deals with Warren Meers, the guy who killed her, by crucifying him, sewing his lips together, using magic to slowly force a bullet (one which Warren had himself used to shoot Buffy) into his chest, and finally ''[[FlayingAlive flaying]] and burning him alive''. The utter cruelty of it all would cement Willow's status as the season's new BigBad.

** Principal Flutie was ''literally'' eaten alive by some troublemakers.

** The Hands of Blue are ThoseTwoBadGuys who ominously pursue the Tam siblings. What they did to the Feds who only talked to the Tams in the episode "Ariel" definitely fits the trope. They use a weird ultra-sonic weapon that causes bleeding out through every orifice in your body. This is not a pleasant way to die.

** In the episode "The Most Toys" Data's kidnapper owns a Varon-T disruptor, a weapon banned in Federation space because it tears the body apart from the inside out, resulting in a slow and excruciating death.

** The main character dies of being hit in the head with the toilet seat from a deorbiting space station... [[FirstEpisodeResurrection in the first episode]].