Tear Jerker / F is for Family

• Bill getting utterly humiliated by Jimmy on Halloween. When Jimmy catches Bill trying to go trick-or-treating, he beats the crap out of him while other kids egg him on, forcing Bill to strip out of his costume to escape and run back home crying. It doesn't get better at the end of the episode.
  • Really, all the shit Bill puts up with in general, constant bullying from Jimmy, his own father thinking he's a wimp, his sister tormenting him (though this is thankfully dropped eventually), his big brother beating him up and taking his problems out on him, and dealing with constantly being exposed to adult situations he's way too young to handle. He keeps trying to stand up for himself, but it almost never works, because he simply does not have the physical strength to back it up.
• Greg being forced to spend the entirety of Season 2 repressing his homosexuality, and the emotional turmoil it clearly puts him through, is mostly played for Black Comedy. Him finally gaining the courage to come out to his oblivious wife Ginny, only for her to tearfully tell him to "stop being silly," is not. At all.
• Although some may have seen it coming with the "downtrodden family" nature of the show, Sue getting her Salad Tosser idea stolen by the CEO of her company still hurts to see after all the work we see her put into it.
• Some of Frank and Sue's arguments can be this, especially the really ugly one they had in "Fight Night".
• When Frank once again explodes at Kevin after opening up about his own abusive father. Normally you'd just roll your eyes at typical Frank rage or laugh at it, but here he GENUINELY tries to be more open with Kevin and pour out his soul, only for it to fall apart because Kevin falls asleep with no real ill intention. It's one of the most heartbreaking instances of Frank losing his temper, since there was hope for a real connection for a moment there.
  • What happened to Frank? In the fifth grade, he was in a play and his father decided to take a break from work to go watch him. But the real reason he wanted to go was to laugh at him. Which he did, loudly and repetitively. This caused Frank to stumble his lines and cause more people to laugh at him. After the play was done, he refused to give Frank a ride home because there was, in his words, "No room in a DeSoto for sissies who act in plays." Frank had to ride with his mother, all the while his father rode behind them, shouting at passing strangers, "Who wants a daughter? A daughter and a son?" and he started calling Frank "Francine" for the rest of the year.
  • Really, the horrible shit Frank had to deal with from his own father as a kid, of which we only hear one story but which would be enough on it's own to fill a lifetime. Frank, for all his yelling and anger problems, is an absolute pussycat compared to what his own father put him through.
• Poor Otto Holtenwasser, an elderly Holocaust survivor who married an American nurse and moved to the U.S after barely surviving the death camps, only to lose his wife as well sometime before the series began. He's a nice man, but the kids of the neighborhood are terrified of him, because of his German accent and believe he's a Nazi war criminal (except Bill and Kevin who think he's a Satanist, having mistaken his Star of David as a Pentagram). He's moved on as best he could, and is an accepted member of the community but often slips into melancholy reminiscing, much to the discomfort of his neighbors.
  • For the first two seasons, Vic doesn't get what Otto really is, and keeps mistaking his sad references for a party animal past (at one point he thinks Otto's camp tattoo is a sex tally). When he's finally told outright, Vic is sympathetic... then immediately tells him that he needs to stop being a downer and move on with his life. Otto reluctantly agrees.
  Otto: [to a photo of his wife] Nobody likes a gloomy Gustav...
• While watching a home movie filmed during the early '60s, Frank and Sue reminisce about the early days of their family and the good times they had with their neighbors when they first moved in. Younger versions of their current neighbors appear in the film, with one exception, a man who's never been seen by the audience before, but is shown as the life of the party.
  Sue: Oh yeah, I remember him! He was fun, he always made those great burgers! Whatever happened to him?
  Frank: He blew his brains out in '64...
  • Poignantly, when Sue asks what the guy's name was, Frank realizes he has no idea.
• Frank's father, Big Bill, having a massive Jerkass Realization in the Season 4 finale. It causes him to cry after realizing that it's his fault for Frank being so messed up.
• Sue's father, Stan, in Season 4 telling the tale of his first love, Sophie:
  Stan: Sue's mother is a wonderful woman, but she wasn't the love of my life. That was a girl named Sophie. I was head over heels about her. But my father didn't approve. She wasn't the right kind of girl for me, you see? My father had a friend on the police force, and he got this cop to plant some stolen property in Sophie's handbag. Y'know, so i'd see she wasn't a good girl? When her father found out about it, he hit her. And she fell down a flight of stairs and died. I was 17 years old.
  • And then, possibly to avoid looking vulnerable in front of his hated son-in-law, Stan says that despite all of that, he is still grateful to his father for looking out him, and that he wished he had done the same for Sue. Any possible bond between them ruined, Frank tells him (in an exceedingly rare moment of Tranquil Fury) to get the fuck out.
  • There's also how Stan basically admits that while he does love Marilyn, he's not truly in love with her. Heck, given how he words it, Marilyn might not even be his Second Love. Given the dialogue, it's hinted that one of the reasons (or even the main reason) he married her was because she was the "right" type of girl his father would approve of.
• Maureen's utter humiliation when the school play is ruined due to her father and grandfather's fighting just as the second half of the play has begun. Prior to that, Frank and Bill seemed to have mended fences with each other after Big Bill gives Frank a hug that he never received as a child. Obviously, Sue (and the audience) worry that it will not last as, in her words, "one hug doesn't make everything better." And just as expected, Frank's resentment at his father for being unable to own up to his mistakes comes up at the worst time possible during the school play's intermission, culminating in Frank punching his elderly father in front of his family and the audience, shocking everyone in the room (including a disgusted Reaction Shot from Bridget, of all people). Maureen is so mortified by it, she runs off the stage in tears. Heartbroken, she refuses to let her father talk to her when he tries to comfort her later that night.
  • As horrible as Big Bill was, seeing him struggle to get up after Frank punches him square in the face is still rather pitiful, prompting at least one person to call out Frank for knocking down an old man (which, to be fair, he wouldn't have known the exact situation) and Sue coming to his aid. You can even see his right arm unable to carry him, also serving as a bit of foreshadowing to his eventual fate by the end of the season.
• The way Season 4 ends full stop. Frank's new daughter is born and is introduced to the rest of the family. He wants to introduce her to his father whom he finally wants to properly reconcile and just when Frank is introducing her, his father has a heart attack then and there. Frank calls out to him and the episode, and the season, just end...
• After seeing Bill and Maureen fight at Big Bill's funeral, Goomer jokingly asks his wife if she still wishes that they had kids.
  Evelyn: Every moment of every day. [cries]
• After Big Bill's funeral, Maureen celebrates her birthday at the bowling alley. However, Frank learns that his father ordered two fancy bowling balls for the two to use in a father son bowling league from the cashier, causing Frank to start mourning his father all over again.
• A brief, subtle moment during the Thanksgiving montage shows Ed having his Thanksgiving dinner, which is a packaged in-flight airline turkey dinner. He's eating it in the airport employee break room, alone. Though he seems to be eating it with his usual smiling alacrity, a close-up shows a single tear escaping from his eye, indicating that he is feeling lonely.
• Ginny abandons her family to go to California with Frank's sister.
  "I left a note for the boys under the Christmas tree. They're Greg's problem now."
• The last few minutes of the Grand Finale in Season 5; Frank finally discovers that his fathers last words to him, "Box 16", wasn't some revelation that would have fixed all the pain and misery between them. Frank had simply misheard Big Bill's final, and most likely delirious, final words - it was actually "Bach 16", aka Prelude In Fugue And G Minor Nr.16 by Johann Sebastian Bach, which had been Big Bill's favorite piece of music because part of it had been used as a jingle for White House Beer in the 1930s. Frank finally accepts that he's never going to find the meaning and closure he'd been hoping for, and does one last favor for his father before leaving his memory behind forever: playing the tune on a tape in front of Big Bill's grave.
  Frank: Merry Christmas, Dad. [tosses the tape on the grave] We're done.

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