History MissingEpisode / LiveActionTV

** In 2011, an apparently genuine copy of the CBS broadcast of Super Bowl I was found. While it was missing the halftime show and most of the third quarter, and was fast-forwarded and pixelated in spots, it's still about 90 minutes longer than anything previously seen.
*** In 2016, the NFL released a compiled version that contains 100% of the gameplay.

* ''Series/CoppersEnd'' survives in full, but not in its original condition; the series was filmed in colour, but many episodes only exist in the archives as black and white telerecordings.

* Hardly anyone has seen the earliest episodes of the wildly popular Mexican sitcom ''Series/ElChavoDelOcho'' because it originated as a sketch on an hour-long variety show "Chespirito", named for Chavo's creator. The better sketches were edited together into half-hour episodes (resulting in a short season zero), but they're an OldShame; the earliest Chavo sketches haven't been seen in decades. There are some actual missing episodes of the series - at best, only their Brazilian dub versions remain. It's not been revealed why they were lost, but it's rumored the 1985 Mexico City earthquake could be related, as it damaged some studios of the Televisa network, which broadcasted the series.
** The same happened with the Brazilian dub, there were many episodes that were removed from broadcasting, they might have been lost by the network SBT, and some were never dubbed in portuguese at all, but after the 2000s, there was an effort to bring back the missing episodes and dub the ones that were never dubbed, although there was a problem since many of the original voice actors were already dead and [[TheOtherDarrin had to be replaced]], and even some living ones didn't come back.

*** ''Series/DoNotAdjustYourSet'', the other "parent series" to ''Flying Circus'', was the first series to star Eric Idle as well as Creator/DavidJason (later of ''Series/OnlyFoolsAndHorses'' and ''WesternAnimation/DangerMouse''), and the second to star Terry Jones and Michael Palin (after ''Twice a Fortnight''). The series ran on ITV for 27 episodes across two series in 1967-69; eleven are known to survive, including nine from Series 1, the Christmas 1968 special "Do Not Adjust Your Stocking", and one from Series 2. [[note]]The latter two are the only surviving episodes to feature animated segments by Terry Gilliam; the DVD release of the surviving Series 1 episodes nevertheless claims to feature Gilliam's animation.[[/note]] As with ''At Last the 1948 Show'', audio recordings do exist for some, but not all, of the missing episodes.

* BBC Television's commercial rival, Creator/{{ITV}}, did its own (less well-known) archives purge at roughly the same time as the BBC.[[note]] But at that time, ITV was a loose collection of regional broadcasters rather than a single organisation, and individual stations had widely varying attitudes toward programme preservation. It's quite possible that a few shows which might otherwise have been wiped have survived by being re-recorded down the line by regional stations for timeshifting purposes.[[/note]] The most notable victim of that purge was ''Series/TheAvengers1960s'', which is missing virtually all of Series 1 (to date, only two complete episodes and the first 15 minutes or so of the first episode have been recovered).

* Three episodes of ''Series/{{Firefly}}'' were never broadcast ([[TheFireflyEffect seemingly just because it was on FOX]]). They would only see the light of day on the series' DVD release and re-airing on the [[Creator/{{Syfy}} Sci Fi Channel]].

** The ''Series/ShakeItUp'' episode "Party It Up" was banned a year after its premiere when Music/DemiLovato [[http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/demi-lovato-slams-disney-on-twitter-for-eating-disorder-joke-20112412 objected on jer Twitter page]] to scenes and dialogue that encouraged or made light of eating disorders (anorexia, specifically). The ''Series/SoRandom'' episode featuring Music/ColbieCaillat was also banned for its tasteless jokes about eating disorders. "Party It Up" returned to rotation with all scenes and references removed. However, there's still no word on whether or not Colbie Caillat's ''So Random!'' episode will be rebroadcast, especially since the series got cancelled after a season (and the show never aired on the Disney Replay block). Both banned episodes are available online uncut and uncensored.

* ''Series/TheArmyGame'' was Creator/{{ITV}}'s first sitcom, launching or boosting the careers of such actors as Creator/WilliamHartnell, Geoffrey Sumner, Creator/AlfieBass, Creator/CharlesHawtrey, Creator/BernardBresslaw, Norman Rossington, and Bill Fraser, while writers included Creator/MartyFeldman, Barry Took, John Junkin, and future ''Film/CarryOn'' scriptwriter Talbot Rothwell. It ran for 154 episodes across four series from 1957-61; just 52 are known to survive.

* Tony Hancock's series for Creator/{{ITV}} have fared even less well than his BBC series, and only the efforts of the Tony Hancock Appreciation Society to KeepCirculatingTheTapes have allowed what has survived to be viewed by contemporary audiences.

*** ''Series/DoNotAdjustYourSet'', the other "parent series" to ''Flying Circus'', was the first series to star Eric Idle as well as David Jason (later of ''Series/OnlyFoolsAndHorses'' and ''WesternAnimation/DangerMouse''), and the second to star Terry Jones and Michael Palin (after ''Twice a Fortnight''). The series ran on ITV for 27 episodes across two series in 1967-69; eleven are known to survive, including nine from Series 1, the Christmas 1968 special "Do Not Adjust Your Stocking", and one from Series 2. [[note]]The latter two are the only surviving episodes to feature animated segments by Terry Gilliam; the DVD release of the surviving Series 1 episodes nevertheless claims to feature Gilliam's animation.[[/note]] As with ''At Last the 1948 Show'', audio recordings do exist for some, but not all, of the missing episodes.

** Among the missing episodes of ''Ronnie Barker's Playhouse'' is "Ah, There You Are", the only one to get a spinoff series in the form of ''Hark at Barker'', in which Barker played bumbling aristocrat Lord Rustless, presenting a sitcom/sketch show from his ancestral home of Chrome Hall. The series ran for 15 episodes across two series in 1969-70 and featured writing from Eric Idle, Graeme Garden, and Bill Oddie as well as Alan Ayckbourn and Barker himself writing under assumed names. Though the entire run survives, the Series 2 episode "Rustless at Law" only exists as a low-quality, off-air black and white recording (ITV had made the transition to colour in late 1969).[[note]]The recording is a 16mm video-to-film transfer, and exhibits noticeable moiré patterns on brightly-coloured objects. This suggests that, if funds were available, the recording might be suitable for the "chroma-dot colour recovery" process, developed for ''Series/DoctorWho'' and also used on an episode of ''Series/DadsArmy''.[[/note]]
* ''Theatre/BeyondTheFringe'' stars Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's 1968 ITV series ''Goodbye Again'' didn't fare well - although all episodes have survived, some of the interior footage only survives as black and white copies.

* Puppeteer Creator/ShariLewis said Creator/{{NBC}} taped over almost all of the episodes of her early '60s program ''The Shari Lewis Show'' to record the 1964 Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Decades later, Lewis expressed her disappointment at the loss of the shows, because she believed them to be well done and early examples of color television. A handful of episodes were saved and restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and were released on DVD. Lewis' BBC show that aired from 1968 to 1976 was also wiped with only a few episodes remaining

* The 1987 Creator/{{ITV}} sitcom ''Hardwicke House'', which starred Roy Kinnear as the headmaster of a comprehensive school where the students and teachers are equally criminally depraved, took BritishBrevity to its logical extreme when, after just two episodes (of seven), it was pulled from the airwaves after press and public outcry over its perceived tasteless humour. The other five episodes have never aired, the first two episodes have never re-aired, and a DVD release is unlikely at best (one was planned at one point, and got far enough into production that a booklet providing historical context on the series' lack of broadcast was written, but rights issues scuppered it). However, contrary to rumour, the tapes were not wiped and are still in the ITV archives; a select few have managed to access them and view all seven episodes.

** Creator/ShoutFactory has acknowledged that eleven episodes (including ''The Amazing Colossal Man'', ''I Was a Teenage Werewolf'', and ''Godzilla vs The Sea Monster'') will never get a DVD release due to rights issues. So, in Volume 39, they released a bonus disc comprising the host segments from those "lost" episodes as it was "the next best option."
* ''Series/MaxHeadroom'' was cancelled with three completed episodes left unaired. Two were shown six months later when a writers' strike left a shortage of new programming, while the last episode had to wait until the Sci-Fi Channel showed the series 8 years later. As with many short-lived US series, however, all 14 episodes aired first-run in overseas markets (such as Creator/Channel4 in the UK).

* The 1983 "Conflict" episodes of ''Series/MisterRogersNeighborhood'' were originally created to help children cope with the war-related themes of ''Film/TheDayAfter'' miniseries, but were deemed inappropriate to air after 1996 due to real-life wars happening. This set of episodes has not been released on Amazon.com, unlike most of the 1979-2001 episodes. Also, the Plan and Play book (which, interestingly, did include Conflict week) did omit four weeks of episodes that, for unknown reasons, stopped rerunning earlier than the rest of their seasons: episodes 1036-1040, 1051-1055, and 1056-1060 from the 1969 season, and 1071-1075 from the 1970 season.
* TBS stopped airing the ''Series/MamasFamily'' episode "Gert Rides Again" sometime in the early 2000s, apparently because their master tape of it was somehow destroyed. Fans were able to see the episode again when ION began airing the show in 2006.
* While you can find all of the animated portions of ''WesternAnimation/TheSuperMarioBrosSuperShow'' and its fellow series ''WesternAnimation/TheLegendOfZelda1989'' everywhere (albeit with [[ClumsyCopyrightCensorship music that doesn't require royalties from celebrities]]), the live-action tie-in segments of the series haven't seen much luck in the years after their broadcasts:

** When the show entered its second run in 1990, the live-action segments were cut and replaced by a more modernized, less sitcom-ish series with a group of teenagers titled "Club Mario". It was very poorly received, and after the series was canceled DIC ordered all of the masters destroyed out of OldShame[[note]]However, only one episode, "The Unzappables" (which was released online through [=iTunes=] and Hulu), did not have its "Club Mario" master tape erased; Brian Ward of Shout! Factory confirmed that [=DiC=] sent said master of that episode to Shout!, instead of the original master tape, by mistake when the [=DVDs=] were being prepared[[/note]]. Only a small number of these segments survive through [[KeepCirculatingTheTapes home recordings]], most them recorded when the series was about to disappear from local stations.

** The first season had several scenes that were removed after its broadcast run, either due to music clearance issues or concerns over excessively-violent content for the show at the time it aired. This includes a deleted sequence from "The Home Invaders" where Zito and Switek argue about parachute pants while conducting surveillance on a couple, a character singing "There's No Business Like Show Business" during the episode "Heart of Darkness", and an extended love[=/=]torture scene from the fourth-season episode "By Hooker, By Crook" that only aired overseas due to concerns over the excessive death of a supporting character (intercut with a love scene between Crockett and the GirlOfTheWeek). Short of fan circulation, none of these clips have ever been released officially.

** When Disney Channel aired ''{{Series/Dinosaurs}}'', the episodes "Baby Talk" (where Earl and Fran start a campaign against indecency on television after Baby begins repeating the word "smoo", which in the dinosaur world is an InformedObscenity for gunk that collects under a dinosaur's feet) and "Dirty Dancing" (where Fran teaches sex ed at Robbie's high school after Robbie begins spontaneously doing the mating dance[[note]]which, in the dinosaur world, means he's getting erections[[/note]]) were not shown. The latter episode to be banned is odd, as Disney aired the episode where Charlene's tail grows in and [[MyGirlIsNotASlut Earl worries that Charlene will become a "tomato"]]. Meanwhile, the trope is inverted with the leftover episodes that ABC didn't air, but did air in syndication and on Disney Channel.

* ''Series/TheGeorgeLopezShow'' episode "George Goes to Disneyland" is the only episode left out of most syndication packages due it being part of a "Win a Trip to Disneyland" contest that was around at the time of the show's premiere. The few local stations (including Chicago's WCIU) that did air the episode removed the opening scene and explained the contest.

** The first season had several scenes that were removed after its broadcast run, either due to music clearance issues or concerns over excessively-violent content for the show at the time it aired. This includes a deleted sequence from "The Home Invaders" where Zito and Switek argue about parachute pants while conducting surveillance on a couple, a character singing "There's No Business Like Show Business" during the episode "Heart of Darkness", and an extended love[=/=]torture scene from the episode "By Hooker, By Crook" that only aired overseas due to concerns over the excessive death of a supporting character (intercut with a love scene between Crockett and the GirlOfTheWeek). Short of fan circulation, none of these clips have ever been released officially.

* The ''Series/MiamiVice'' episode "Too Much Too Late" didn't air in its first run on NBC due to a subplot involving child molestation. It would be included later on USA.

* The UK version of ''Series/FraggleRock'' featured wraparound segments set in a lighthouse and featuring Fulton Mackay as the Captain, a retired sailor (replaced, after Mackay's death in 1987, by John Gordon Sinclair as his nephew P.K. and then Simon O'Brien as his son B.J.), instead of the workshop segments with Gerry Parkes as Doc seen in North America. Many of the tapes of the UK wraparound segments were wiped; an effort led by ''Fraggle Rock'' fan Alex Taylor over the course of several years [[http://www.nightshade.org.uk/fraggleuk.html confirmed]] that of the 96 episodes, 29 still have surviving official copies held by the British Film Institute, while 58 only exist as off-air recordings (of variable quality) by home viewers, and another eight were recovered from the personal archive of producer Victor Pemberton after his death in August 2017, so that the only episode not known to exist complete is "Gobo's School for Exploring". Because the production company (TVS produced the UK elements) has changed hands several times and production rights can't be sorted out, they cannot be broadcast or released again anyway. That's why when ''Fraggle Rock'' was rerun in the UK, the episodes were the North American segments that featured Doc rather than the Captain.