11 Most Painful TV Deaths of 2025, Ranked
Only five months into 2025, and there’s already a winner for the most shocking TV character death of the year. The No. 1 spot is revealed in the gallery below, and we can’t imagine that many could disagree with our selection. All in all, it’s been a television season full of deaths we didn’t see coming, plus one we did, but that doesn’t make the impact less powerful. What sets this year’s TV deaths apart is the sheer needlessness of some of them.
Entire seasons — and in one case, an entire series and its grand finale — have left sour tastes in viewers mouths because of the decisions to kill off certain characters with storylines that arguably don’t make sense as results of the buildup predating them. But for better or for worse, these characters are gone. Some of the shows in the gallery below will have some serious explaining to do in upcoming episodes/seasons to make these deaths make sense in hindsight.
The 2025 TV deaths aren’t all bad. Some make perfect sense and in fact were always expected if you knew the source material on which a certain hit series is based. One of the character losses is made all the more sad by the real-life passing of the actor who played them.
Here, we break down the 11 saddest TV deaths of 2025 so far (across broadcast, cable, and streaming), ranked by the shock they delivered for viewers. All of the episodes depicting these deaths came out between January 2025 to the time of publication, so don’t expect to see any TV deaths that came out in 2024, even if that show’s corresponding season started in 2024 and continued into the new year. Clearly, copious spoilers ahead.
11. Cap, Ransom Canyon
James Brolin played Cap in Netflix’s response to Yellowstone alongside costars Josh Duhamel, Minka Kelly, and more. Cap was an ex-Army captain and stubborn leader/owner of the Fuller Ranch.
Cap died on his ranch before he could make amends with his long-lost grandson, Yancy (Jack Schumacher), and it was Yancy who found him dead to begin with. Despite the sad circumstances of how his death was discovered, Cap died peacefully of natural causes at the age of 80 in the penultimate episode of Season 1. He died leaning against a tree on his land.
10. Ms. Pearl, Will Trent
“Grandma” was a woman who took Will (Ramón Rodriguez) in when he was down on his luck, having just been kicked out of foster care without a penny to his name. Though her grandson, Rafael (Antwayn Hopper), was skeptical at first, Grandma didn’t hesitate at all to welcome Will into her home, even sharing the couch for her afternoon General Hospital viewing sessions. She was there for him when no one else was, so it was fitting that Will helped plan her funeral, even though he and Rafael were at odds, professionally speaking, at the time.
9. Chelsea, The White Lotus
It’s heartbreaking that Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) and Rick (Walton Goggins) died together, but Chelsea’s death was all the more tragic because it was caused by Rick. When she was accidentally killed in the shoot-out at the White Lotus Thailand resort, a shooting between hotel security Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) and Rick caused by the latter, Rick resigned himself to dying with her.
If only Rick had listened to Chelsea and stopped seeking vengeance for his presumed-dead father while on this trip, they might have made it out alive instead of in body bags. These were tragic deaths, to be sure, but the least surprising deaths of The White Lotus so far. Chelsea had repeated several times that bad things come in threes, and she had already survived an armed robbery and a snake bite on this trip. We could see the death coming from a mile away, but it didn’t make it less painful to watch.
8. Nikki, Alert: Missing Persons Unit
When Nikki (Dania Ramirez) was kidnapped and killed by mob boss Charlie McGannon (Ian Tracey), viewers were left stunned. McGannon took Nikki out because she was going to turn damning information about him over to the FBI.
There was no sign or warning that Alert: MPU was killing off its leading lady. Ramirez’s final full episode was the Season 3 premiere, which aired the week prior to her death episode.
7. Will, Criminal Minds: Evolution
The long-running series with several iterations killed off one half of one of its couples that met all the way back in Season 2. For Will (Josh Stewart) to die on what was seemingly a normal morning at home in Season 18 Episode 2 was a huge shock to longtime fans.
Will and wife JJ (A.J. Cook) had been together for 18 years and had kids together. Outside of the death happening at all, what made this twist so shocking was that it came so sudden in the final moments of the episode.
JJ had just seen her son off to school, was coming in on a high of her son’s friend thinking she was a badass thanks to a news article about BAU catching a serial killer. In the kitchen, Will had a migraine, then just suddenly collapsed. He was rushed to a hospital, with the BAU team waiting in waiting room. JJ came out at the episode’s end to announce his death. It was a seismic change for the long-running show, one that prompted the return of Matthew Gray Gubler’s Spencer in the subsequent episode that showed Will’s funeral.
Linda Lavin also appeared in the episode as Connie, Will’s mother. It was one of her final acting performances before her own death in December, which leads us to the next TV death on our list…
6. Sybil Schneiderman, Mid-Century Modern
Lavin died on December 29, 2024, of complications from lung cancer. The new Hulu multi-cam sitcom had not yet finished filming at the time of her death, forcing the comedy to write her character, Sybil Schneiderman, out of the series in which she was a meant to be a series regular.
Lavin gave Mid-Century Modern‘s creators instructions on how to handle her character’s death prior to her own. The funeral episode for Sybil was the series honoring Lavin’s wishes. This character’s death ranks higher on the list because of the tragic real-life circumstances surrounding it, but Lavin certainly lived a fabulous life.
5. Seven Characters in One Episode, 1923
1923 shocked viewers with the brutal killing of seven characters (and a horse) in the penultimate episode of the series. And all but two of them died in tragic, violent circumstances.
Runs His Horse (Michael Spears) and Pete Plenty Clouds (Jeremy Gauna, who took over the role after the death of his friend, Cole Brings Plenty) were both killed in Season 2 Episode 6 of the Yellowstone prequel for trying to save Teonna (Aminah Nieves) from the vengeful and evil Father Renaud (Sebastian Roché) and Marshal Kent (Jamie McShane), two men who also met their ends in this installment (good riddance).
Runs His Horse and Pete’s deaths were quick and needless, just like the death of Jack Dutton (Darren Mann) later in the episode. Jack was a soon-to-be father shot and killed simply for running into enemies of his family on a road to a train station.
At the end of the episode, Alex (Julia Schlaepfer) awoke to her car being stranded in the middle of a mountain pass and buried in snow, her travel companions Hillary (Janet Montgomery) and husband Paul (Augustus Prew) had frozen to death overnight.
The only thing more shocking than the deaths in this episode was the sheer volume of them.
4. Coach Ben, Lottie, Van, & Mari, Yellowjackets
Yellowjackets fans could long tell that Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) was not long for this world. His death while stranded in the Canadian wilderness with the Yellowjackets high school soccer team has felt inevitable, but the nature of his demise was painful to watch. An imprisonment, the forced disabling injury to his one remaining foot, and a weeks-long hunger strike on Ben’s part culminated in Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) performing a mercy killing for him. But his death did lead to them being discovered by the outside world.
Mari (Alexa Barajas) was revealed to be the infamous Pit Girl from the series premiere in the Season 3 finale. We knew how Pit Girl died, but finding out that she was Mari was a blow for fans. And the violence involved in preparing her body for their cannibalistic feast — spearheaded by Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) who hated Mari and was keeping everyone in the wilderness against their will despite having the means for rescue — made Mari’s death all the more disturbing.
The most gut-wrenching deaths of Yellowjackets‘ third season, however, belong to adult Lottie (Simone Kessell) and Van (Lauren Ambrose). We still don’t understand why these murders at the hands of Shauna’s daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins) and adult survivor Melissa (Hilary Swank) needed to happen. Thankfully, Yellowjackets has been renewed for Season 4, so more answers are on the horizon. But with adult Natalie’s (Juliette Lewis) murder at the end of Season 2, we can’t help but fear that the wilderness survivors are going to continue to be killed off, which isn’t the ending fans are hoping for. All of that trauma and fight for survival just to still die relatively young? At least we still have the young versions of Lottie, Van, and Natalie. But we’ll still miss their adult counterparts something fierce.
3. Joel, The Last of Us
This is the TV death many knew was coming. Anyone who knows the plot of The Last of Us video game on which this HBO drama is based knows that Joel (Pedro Pascal) would die in Season 2. It came surprisingly early in just the second episode of the season, and it came with some surprises that were not so welcome by fans of the source material. Joel was brutally killed by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) in front of surrogate daughter Ellie (Bella Ramsey) in revenge for killing her own dad in the Firefly hospital at the end of Season 1. Some viewers felt Abby revealed too much about her motivations in this season, leaving less space for meaningful, suspenseful character development that’s featured in the video game.
Still, it marked another major character death in an HBO series for Pascal, and the scene was violent and intense to behold for anyone who loves Joel and Ellie’s bond. We rank this so high because of the fact that viewers who don’t know the game were delivered an entirely unexpected death of the show’s main character. For those fans, Joel’s death is akin to the rug-pulling kinds of deaths seen in Game of Thrones, which makes this Game of Thrones alum’s casting all the more fitting.
2. Alexandra, 1923
Spencer (Brandon Sklenar) and Alex (Julia Schlaepfer), lovers torn apart by circumstances out of their control, had a miraculous reunion in the 1923 series finale. Spencer’s train passed by the place where Alex was left stranded and nearly freezing to death, and she was rushed to a hospital to treat her frostbitten limbs. She went into early labor in the hospital from the stress.
Amputating her legs from the knees and one of her hands would’ve saved her life. And with baby John Dutton II surviving the early birth (Alex’s pregnancy was only 6 months along), she had extra incentive to fight to stay alive. She chose to succumb to her fatally necrotic limbs. In the end, she and Spencer were reunited for less than 24 hours before she died.
Fans (and we) were shocked by Alex’s tragic end. This was a woman who fought to stay alive and succeeded despite all odds. For her to then choose death instead of bravely face adversity like she always had before felt uncharacteristic. While you can’t downplay the difficulty that would come with losing both feet and a hand, especially in this time period, 1923 spent all of Season 2 showing Alex’s grit and determination to stay alive for herself and for her family. And then she did the exact opposite in the series finale.
The fact that Alex died of complications from frostbite just like Spencer’s mother, Margaret Dutton (Faith Hill from 1883), only twists the knife further. His older sister, Elsa Dutton (Isabel May) died on her own perilous journey west before Spencer was even born. Can women catch a break in the Taylor Sheridan TV universe?
1. Bobby Nash, 9-1-1
This is, hands down, the most shocking death of the 2024-2025 season and one of the most unexpected TV deaths of recent memory — one that fans are understandably struggling to wrap their heads around and has left everyone with a slew of burning questions heading into Season 9.
9-1-1 is all about first responders. Death surrounds these characters, but the main ensemble characters have never perished. The series decided to kill off its first major character eight seasons into its run, and it couldn’t have started with a more major character.
The leader of the 118 died a hero by giving his teammate the sole antidote to a deadly virus with which they were both infected. Bobby (Peter Krause) didn’t reveal he had contracted the virus until after the antidote was administered to Chimney (Kenneth Choi), just as he and his wife were expecting their second baby. Bobby’s final moments with wife Athena (Angela Bassett) and surrogate son Buck (Oliver Stark) were sudden but impactful.
When Bobby cried, “I don’t want to go” to his wife through the protective glass that kept them apart, you could tell that that was Krause speaking for himself. He’ll be deeply missed in the series, but hopefully he’ll continue to return in flashbacks.
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