A lot of movies and TV shows have been made based on real life events, probably more than you imagine. Some of them were dedicated to the lives of famous people, others showed big historic events. Filmmakers have also created some great (and some not so great) movies based on tragic events. Exploring real life tragic stories, they give their audience a new perspective on things and food for some thought.
Unfortunately, not every tragedy is left in the past. Events that affect our lives in a grave manner still occur, leaving many people at a loss as to how to process them. And though most of the time we don’t see television as anything more than entertainment, some of the best TV shows went above and beyond to help the viewers cope with trauma when encountering a tragedy in life, or dealing with a loss of a beloved cast member.
For this article, we have collected examples of how shows dealt with public and personal tragic events. Do you think they did the correct thing? If you were the network executive or series creator, how would you have dealt with any of these situations? Share with us in the comments. If you know any similar cases, recommend some shows to watch that dealt with real life tragedies.
#21 "Castle" Delayed An Episode Involving Dismantling A Bomb. The Timing Would Have Been Too Close To The Real-Life Tragedy, 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings
Castle, named after its main character best-selling novelist Richard Castle, managed to combine crime mystery and comedy. It ran successfully for 8 seasons over 7 years. However, when the Boston Marathon bombing occurred in 2013, the creators of the show thought it would be appropriate to postpone by a week one of the episodes of season five that was on air at the time. The Tsarnaev brothers planted two pressure cooker bombs at the finish line of the annual marathon race held in the greater Boston area. Three people died and hundreds were injured, out of which 17 lost limbs.
Titled Still, the main plotline of episode 21 that was supposed to go on air on April 22 is focused on detective Beckett, the female lead of the series, accidentally stepping on a pressure bomb. While the team managed to disarm it and save Beckett, the creators thought it was too soon to show the episode that might have brought back the trauma of the Boston Marathon.
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36points
#22 AHS: Cult Episode Titled “Mid-Western Assassin” Aired Only Nine Days After The Las Vegas Shooting, Producer Ryan Murphy Removed Scenes In The Episode That Included Gun Violence
If there is one thing anyone knows about American Horror Story, it is that the series never held back from being graphic. Gory violence and rather explicit sexual situations were frequently featured in the episodes. But even with that being the case, the creators made a decision to heavily edit the opening scene of the episode “Mid-Western Assassin” that depicted a mass shooting at a political rally after the 2017 Las Vegas shooting took place.
A 64-year-old Nevada resident opened fire into the crowd attending the Route 91 Harvest music festival. Standing above the crowd on the 32nd floor, he killed 60 people and injured over 400. The subsequent panic increased this number to almost 900. When the police reached his room, he was found dead.
Even though the scene in the AHS: Cult episode was very different from the Las Vegas event, the creators reasoned that it might traumatize those directly related to the tragedy, removed a lot of graphic details, and reduced the scene in length to the bare minimum necessary to keep the plot together.
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31points
#23 The Sitcom Heathers Delayed The Launch Of The Show "Out Of Respect" For The Victims Of The Deadly Mass Shooting At A High School In Parkland, Florida
The Parkland shooting has gained a lot of media attention since the surviving students of the Stoneman Douglas high school were very vocal about it, demanding a viable solution for the gun control problem in the United States. The shooting, which occurred on February 14, 2018, took the lives of 17 students and left 17 others injured. In the following period, some of the surviving students committed suicide, unable to cope with the PTSD and survivor’s guilt.
In the light of these events, the Paramount Network announced its decision to postpone the premier of their second scripted series Heathers. Based on the 1988 dark comedy starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, it is built around a high school student and her feud with a clique of popular mean girls called The Heathers.
Prior to the premier, the network sent out several episodes to journalists for review. Many agreed that while episode five was probably the reason the network decided to delay the release, the entire show treated violence and other social issues inappropriately.
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30points
#24 Premiere Of TV Show "Shooter" Was Put Off Due To The 2016 Dallas, Texas Police Shootings. Given The Similar Content, USA Network Decided To Postpone
It is overwhelmingly sad how many shows had to postpone going on air because of a mass shooting. Shooter was one of them, as it was set to premier in July 2016 but had to delay its first episode by a week due to a sniper’s assault on police officers in Dallas, Texas.
With the entire story of the show set around a master sniper, it was only natural for the channel to make this decision. Though Bob Lee Swagger, played by Ryan Phillippe, is shown to use his impressive skills only to uncover a conspiracy formed to eliminate him, his excessive arsenal and the amount of violence in the story would have a way too strong of an association with the recent Dallas event.
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26points
#25 "Alternatino With Arturo Castro's" 7th Episode Featured A Sketch About Mass Shootings, Episode Was Pulled After A Shooting At A Garlic Festival In Northern California
Arturo Castro has performed in film and television for over 10 years and created numerous comic characters. For his sketch show Alternatino with Arturo Castro on Comedy Central, he played not one, not two, but multiple characters. The show that depicted “Arturo's experiences as a Latino millennial in the United States” premiered on June 18, 2019 and ran successfully for six episodes until the mass shooting at the Garlic Festival happened.
On July 28, 2019, a 19-year-old male broke into the site of the Garlic Festival, a famous food festival in Northern California, and opened gunfire. He took the lives of three people, two of them underage, and injured many more. After a shootout with the police on site, he shot himself.
Following this event, Castro decided to postpone the seventh episode of his show that accidentally was built on the topic of mass shooting. A week later, before airing the sketch, Castro took to Twitter to leave a heartfelt message about the tragedy and how mass shootings need to end.
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22points