What differentiates Madoka from other magical girl shows isn't its content, but its tone and pacing
I had originally posted this essay to r/CharacterRant , but it got instadeleted for "insufficient karma" or something. As such, I decided to post it here instead.
Spoiler Warning: heavy spoilers for Sailor Moon, Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica and Heartcatch Precure! and light spoilers for other magical girl shows
Let me tell you the story of a magical girl who has it rough. First, all her best friends and loved ones are dead. Second, she's now fully aware that, despite all her powers and best efforts, the universe is vast and cruel, full of threats ready to kill her. Most of those threats are other magical girls, in fact, and she will have to kill more than a few if she wants to make it out alive. To top it all, she soon learns, thanks to a time traveller, that this massive catastrophe that she's living through will only get worse, so much worse: it's practically eternal, and she will be locked in an endless cycle of renewal and destruction, where the future of all things hinges on her being able to never, ever give up. The prospect puts an immense toll on her, so much that she considers destroying the universe herself just so it can all stop. That's the story of the final arc of the Sailor Moon manga, titled "Stars".
Hey wait a minute, doesn't that sound a lot like Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica? Wasn't Sailor Moon a silly franchise where nothing too serious ever happened?
Well (see page 36 as numbered in the viewer), no (see page 10 as numbered in the viewer). The manga at large is preoccupied with cycles, and specifically with the way periods of hope follow periods of destruction and viceversa, featuring plenty of deaths and even two instances of suicide (both from the protagonist, no less!). The 90s anime doesn't reach that same mythological scope and direness, but it's still very much a show about a young girl's often painful growth from a selfish crybaby to someone willing to sacrifice herself to save everyone and everything, and the first and last seasons famously featured a very distressed Tsukino Usagi amidst plenty of important character deaths. The live-action adaptation I'm not very familiar with, but my understanding is that it's primarily focused on breaking away from the past and becoming someone who can be a genuine friend to other people instead of succumbing to one's most (very literally) destructive impulses.
Sailor Moon is by far the most well-known magical girl work in terms of global outrreach, so popular and important that it set a new standard for magical girl works by heavily infusing them with tokusatsu elements and creating the "magical warrior" subgenre (essentially a new flavour of superheroine), which surpassed the original "cute witch" (majokko) style shows in terms of influence. Every magical warrior work that came afterwards owes something to it, especially those like Wedding Peach or Pretty Cure. It had tension and drama to spare, but if you heard the average English-speaking otaku on this side of the world, you'd think it was K-On with extra steps.
Is the English-speaking Western public at large wrong about the most famous magical girl there is? I'd say it is. Can it be argued that it's just as misinformed about other magical girls? Very, I'd say, either out of prejudice or just ignorance, and this includes the pre-Sailor Moon shows. The truth is dark topics and arcs have been present in magical girl works pretty much since the genre's start in the 60s. Death? Magical girls have been there many times. Trauma? Also done. Coming-of-age? That's the magical girl bread-and-butter. Deceitful mascots? Magical girls already did that, too. Other magical girls as rivals or even deadly enemies? Also done! Existential dread? Yeah, been there, done that. Some of the most prominent examples before Madoka's creation, aside from Sailor Moon, include works like Toei's 1973 adaptation of Cutie Honey, Marvelous Melmo, Little Witch Megu-chan, Magical Princess Minky Momo, Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, Phantom Thief Jeanne, Princess Tutu, and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. Even shows aimed at pre-schoolers, like Ojamajo Doremi or Pretty Cure, have touched all these topics in some way. The year before Madoka, that latter franchise saw the release of Heartcatch Precure, an installment that contained a whole arc about an older ex-magical girl trying to move past the murder of her mascot, and the very first Pretty Cure starred Misumi Nagisa, who legitimately hated being forced into the magical girl life and was very vocal about the fact she did it out of obligation.
Anyone who knows magical warrior shows knows that danger and difficult times eventually rear their ugly heads, and that it's not a matter of whether the stories and episodes that shock or provoke tears will come, but of when they will (midseason, usually). Insofar as it threads on dark topics, Madoka is no different from most magical girl shows that came before. It opens on a post-apocalyptic dream sequence, but know what else does? The third arc of Sailor Moon, both the manga (see page 10 as numbered in the page viewer) and anime. Heartcatch Precure, meanwhile, opens with its own downer in the defeat of Cure Moonlight. The first episode of Little Witch Megu-chan doesn't open on anything so serious, but it still has the protagonist getting nearly killed by her arch-rival; as in, she gets zapped with magic over and over, lies in bed all discolored and her foster family is genuinely worried she might die levels of "nearly killed". Magical girls have been to all the usual dark places already. A magical girl show having dark elements isn't new at all, and Urobuchi Gen himself said in the 19th 2010 issue of the Otona Anime magazine that he checked other warrior-style works before writing for Madoka and concluded "those girls had it rough".
Madoka's darkness was, indeed, not new, and by author admission... not new per se, anyway, because there is one thing that actually differentiates Madoka from most other magical girl shows: it's incredibly serious and somber all the way through. Come now, say, what's your favourite funny moment, or the biggest laugh you had. And I mean something meant to cause laughs.
See?
It's not like Madoka is completely bereft of levity. There's things like the perpetually single and bitter homeroom teacher or the Holy Quintet scene at the start of Rebellion, but these moments are few and far inbetween. The stereotype of the fluffy magical girl show does have a kernel of truth to it: most of the time, they are very silly by design. They're aimed at younger audiences and therefore indulge in laughs a lot of the time. Whenever they turn grave and serious, the tone changes completely, and they will fittingly go whole stretches without so much as a pun. Essentially, Madoka takes the heightened tension and distress that's normally left for important episodes and applies it over a whole extremely compact cour. To a veteran of the genre, the surprise wasn't that Mami died, but that she died so early and with almost no light-hearted moments or comedy in the preceding episodes. That is what's unique about it compared to most magical girl works before, not that it dared to be dark, but that it had an ominous tone from the start and stayed that way, and if you were caught off-guard simply because of the peppy and bittersweet opening song... well, that dream sequence had already warned you.