Badass Bystanders in Live-Action TV.
- In Season 4 of 24, Jack and Paul Raines take refuge in a gun store while being hunted by mercenaries. The two Arabic brothers who owned the store say they have lived here all their lives and refuse to abandon it, and help them repel the attackers.
- Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024): When Zuko attacks Aang in the middle of Omashu in broad daylight, one lady suddenly lays into him for it.
- Banshee: When two armed criminals hold kids hostage at the school, Deva's friend is able to temporarily incapacitate one of them.
- In Chuck, Big Mike ends up, on two separate occasions, completely owning enemy special agents that had been giving Team Chuck major problems earlier in the episode.
- In Desperate Housewives, a nameless extra is the one who ends up taking down and killing the insane gun wielding murderer holding a grocery store full of innocents hostage, after all evidence seemed to be implying that one of the main characters was going to.
- One episode of Dragnet features a bank robber whose MO was to force his way into a car with a woman and force her at gunpoint to serve as his accomplice for the robberies. At the end of the episode, he inadvertently picks a karate teacher, who is in the process of kicking the crap out of him when Friday and Gannon show up. Played with in that she's shown to be badly shaken afterwards.
- The F.B.I.: In "Special Delivery", the manager of a car rental yard shoots and critically wounds a bank robber who has just shot his mechanic and stolen one of the cars.
- Simon does a medical version of this in Firefly. Disguised as a bystander in a hospital, he saves a random patient's life when the patient's normal doctor didn't do it right, and just keeps on walking.
- Deconstructed in Flashpoint when every time an untrained bystander tries to intervene, it made things worse such as in "Grounded" where Parker would have been able to talk down the hostage takers if a passenger didn't try to be a hero.
- In one episode, Jules' new boyfriend, a paramedic, enters a hostage situation to help an injured man. This results in him and Jules being taken hostage, and he ends up with a (fortunately non-lethal) gunshot wound for his trouble.
- Occasionally, the SRU will coach someone through a situation if there's a reason they can't handle it directly or if they suspect the subject will react better to a third party, but it's always under their guidance, and the most they'll ever have the bystander do is talk the subject down.
- The one time it's played straight, the bystander in question is an SRU officer himself. Even then, he uses a hidden radio to get help from his team.
- Deconstructed in one episode with an ex-cop who deliberately engineered a hostage situation in order for him to appear as a Badass Bystander to defuse a situation as a way to regain his career, join the SRU after failing to be accepted and prove specifically to Parker that he was SRU material. Unfortunately for him, things spiraled out of his control and he ended up accidentally shooting the hostage.
- Hobb from Game of Thrones, who is mentioned in passing a few times as the Castle Black cook but is basically just a background extra, gets a whole sequence dedicated to him fighting off several Wildling raiders with kitchen utensils during the siege of Castle Black.
- Hikonin Sentai Akibaranger has a scene possibly inspired by the Bike Thrower example under Real Life below, with some differences — the bike belonged to Akagi Nobuo, who tried to help but couldn't, and the bike was hurled at the robber by the victim herself.
- In Jonathan Creek, a little old lady witnesses a group of men nailing another man into a coffin and attacks them with a tree branch and pepper spray. She takes down four men, and knocks at least two of them into an open grave before using her security whistle to call for the police. It's just a shame that she was actually interrupting a perfectly innocent magic trick...
- Kingdom (2019): In the fifth episode of Season 2, an unnamed servant armed with only a club and what appears to be the lid to a large pot manages to briefly hold off the undead horde while protecting a group of other servants. He is ultimately overwhelmed, but it was still impressive.
- In Merlin an undead wraith crashes into Camelot and throws a gauntlet down before King Uther and Prince Arthur's feet. Though it is clearly intended for a member of the royal family, on two separate occasions a knight of Camelot grabs it before Arthur can in order to protect him.
- Midsomer Murders: Downplayed in "The Night of the Stag" with Jonathan Oak who knocks Smudgepot on his ass and then speaks up in defiance of Quested's plan to kill Barnaby and Jones.
- No Ordinary Family: In "No Ordinary Visitors", a victim of the home invasion throws a pot of hot water in one man's face and then tries to whack a second intruder with the empty pot. He gets hospitalized for his troubles.
- In the first season finale of The OA, the school shooter is taken out by a random cafeteria worker.
- The citizens of Angel Grove become this in the finale of Power Rangers in Space. Firstly, when Astronema holds the Earth hostage, she demands that the Rangers step forth or she will start killing people. The citizens then proceed to re-enact the I Am Spartacus scene. Then when the Rangers appear and morph in plain view of the citizens, Bulk and Skull of all people, lead them in a charge against the Quantrons. After six years of monster attacks, it was clear the people of Angel Grove decided enough was enough.
- Psych: The trope is referenced in the episode "Cog Blocked" when Lassitter mentions Posthumous Character Pony Wayne White was shot to death when he tried to hold up a shooting range, a location that is always full of armed and well-trained marksman. Lassiter views White's death as a perfect example of being Too Dumb to Live.
- The Punisher (2017): When Frank Castle is attacked by several armed mercenaries at Beth's roadhouse in the episode "Roadhouse Blues", the bar's bouncer, Ringo, immediately comes to his aid. Despite there being no indication that Ringo has any military training or combat experience comparable to Frank's, he puts up a surprisingly vicious fight, taking a lot of damage and even killing one of the mercenaries by snapping his neck with his bare hands before he's finally brought down by multiple gunshots.
- In the Stargate SG-1 pilot episode "Children of the Gods", when the team breaks out of Apophis' prison along with a bunch of slaves, one of the random unnamed slaves kills a Jaffa with his bare hands and stands alongside the military personnel covering everybody else's escape through the Stargate to Earth.
- One episode of Taggart features a deconstruction; a suspect in the murders of some members of a criminal gang is the daughter of a man who tried to be one of these and got beaten to death with a baseball bat for his trouble.
- Twin Peaks: When two Professional Killers are staking out the house of their target Dougie Jones (a.k.a. Agent Cooper), a pugnacious neighbor arrives and accuses them of blocking his driveway with their van. The killers try to scare him off by firing a round into his windshield, but he simply retrieves a Glock-17 from his trunk and sprays the assassins' van with bullets, killing both of them and inadvertently saving Jones/Cooper. Bonus points for doing all of this right in front of the FBI.
- Vikings: In the episode "Kill the Queen", a random Mercian Mook is ordered to kill queen Kwenthrith. He makes a mad dash to the tower, ignoring an arrow shot to the leg in the process. At the tower he takes on Prince Aethelwulf, and damn near defeats him in a knockdown-dragout brawl which has to be seen to be believed, only to felled by a dropped rock from his own side.
- The Wheel of Time (2021): After the initial panicked flight, the Emond's Fielders under attack from the trollocs begin to gang up against them, wielding farming implements, and manage to kill a few this way. They still need help from Lan and Moiraine to turn the tide of the battle, but they're not helpless.
- Played with to great effect in the original Whoops Apocalypse. A major sub-plot in the early episodes has the Soviets brutally interrogating a sweet, harmless elderly husband and wife whom they believe to be undercover agents for the West. The audience laughs merrily along at this, until suddenly... they beat the crap out of their interrogators, produce various spy-tech gadgets, and stage a jail break.
