The series regularly employed Black Comedy to make us laugh at things that might usually be horrifying, but it didn't stop a few tear jerking moments from getting through.
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- The episode "Who Will Buy" has Margaret delivering flowers to an elderly blind man, who asks her to read letters he assumes are from his children for his birthday. In the end they are just junk mail, but Margaret doesn't want to upset him and instead tells some white lies and pretends that the letters are about how much his family misses him. In the end the old man is murdered in his home, and it is mentioned that he was intending to get extra security but cancelled at the last second as he needed the money for something else. The episode ends panning on a box of toy dinosaurs that he had bought for his grandchildren. It gets worse: the toys are overpriced mail-order junk being sold by a pushy door-to-door salesman (he comes to the Meldrews' house earlier in the episode).
- The final episode "Things Aren't Simple Any More" actually begins with Victor Meldrew dead, his wife Margaret trying to cope with it. It is shown in flashback that he was knocked down by a car after attending a works reunion (where no-one else turned up apart from a single single latecomer who Victor missed by seconds) by a widow that Margaret befriends during the episode. In a surprisingly dark move even for One Foot in the Grave, after Margaret finds out that her new friend is the killer, it's left ambiguous whether Margret gave her an overdose of paracetamol as an act of revenge.
- One charity short features a scene with Victor and Margaret. Victor is looking over some films and talking and Margaret seems to be ignoring him. At first the viewer assumes this scene takes place before the final episode and Margaret is just ignoring Victor out of annoyance as she had previously during his rants. But then he happens upon the DVD of The Sixth Sense and says how they "saw the twist coming at the start". It's at that point Margaret leaves Victor alone and confused, and the viewer realizes that (as in the aforementioned film) he was dead all along. Either dark comedy or tear jerker depending on the viewer.
- In one episode, Pippa loses her baby after a car accident caused by a driver being over the legal alcohol limit. Perhaps you shouldn't, but you feel even worse for her when you learn that she was the drunk driver. She has absolutely no way of consoling herself with the thought that the crash wasn't her fault.
- In the Bottle Episode "Timeless Time" Victor and Margaret suffer insomnia, during which point Victor rambles something of a Dead Baby Comedy joke in frustration. Suddenly somber music plays and Margaret's eyes widen sadly. Victor suddenly apologizes for bringing it up, however Margaret mentions she was only thinking of "Stuart" the previous day, remember bringing him up and wondering how he would have turned out, marking the show's one reference to what seems to be a son the two had that tragically died young.
