Ryohei Arisu in Alice in Borderland was The Smart Guy of the group but lived as a NEET prior to entering the Deadly Game. It's implied he developed emotional issues as a result of his mother's death before dropping out of college to play video games all day, making him Black Sheep of the family with his father considering him a disappointment and his younger brother calling him a leech. Despite his extreme slacker tendencies, he's intelligent enough to casually solve 5x5 Rubik's cubes on his phone and has the deductive reasoning ability to always be the first to figure out the trick to surviving each game.
On The Big Bang Theory, Leonard gets accused of this by his mother and Sheldon, both of whom think his work in validating theories and other's experiments is a waste of time and of his potential. It's left ambiguous whether this is them criticizing Leonard's work ethic or just showing disdain for his field of study, but it's left equally ambiguous whether Leonard went into Experimental Physics out of genuine interest or to avoid having to do theoretical work. That said, he's been published multiple times and he points out that science isn't just going to take Sheldon's "word for it" when he comes up with a theory, he's going to need someone like Leonard to test it. It doesn't help that both Mrs. Hofstader and Sheldon are insufferable geniuses.
Black Books: Bernard is perfectly capable of writing a complex 1000-page novel draft in a single night, and is clearly not unintelligent, but he seems to prefer being drunk, bitter and miserable.
Kimoto Mami in Boss (2009). She prefers to take a taxi rather than walk for a few seconds. Also constantly armed with a pillow.
Eric is said to be this several times by Mr. Feeny. It's true that as time goes on he becomes a Cloudcuckoolander with shades of Fun Personified but he also maintains (mostly) good marks in college despite a late start, has Rain Man level counting skills, is amazingly adept at reading people and is an excellent judge of character. Most of this characterization is gone by Season 7, however, where he's just a plain dumbass with few moments of brilliance, though it appears he still gets good enough grades to graduate from college.
Shawn becomes this in later seasons. Intellectually he's on par with Topanga, enjoys poetry, and knows about the placebo effect. He also rarely does his assignments on time, unless it's something he really cares about. It's also heavily implied that much of Shawn's "laziness" stems from him believing that he will never get anywhere in life due to his background, which he explicitly confirms later in the series:
Shawn: Cory, people like me, we don't go anywhere because we don't believe that we can get there! I'm my own worst eskimo!
Jesse from Breaking Bad for much of the series, due to his drug habits and later depression. When he does cook meth, he is as almost as good at it as Walt due to picking up his technique without fully understanding the science behind it, but does not have the business sense to run a business by himself.
Jimmy McGill in Better Call Saul. He is every bit as bright and capable as his much more successful brother, but is initially content to use his wits and charm to run small-time scams and keep himself in beer and beer money. While he eventually starts to apply himself and pursues a career as lawyer, he is still prone to taking shortcuts, always choosing the easy Get Rich Quick scheme over doing what is right.
Homelander in The Boys is shown to be a cunning strategist and manipulator, far more so than his comic book counterpart. He's also the most powerful Supe on the planet, but he is shown to be quite lazy and callous with how he stops criminals when there aren't cameras rolling, almost exclusively using his Eye Beams to deal with his enemies. His laziness with his eye beam usage is what would end up causing the Flight 37 disaster to play out like it does, carelessly destroying the plane's control panel while killing the terrorists, when he could have easily gotten up close and killed them with his Super-Strength. Similarly, a later attempt to give himself a cheap and easy boost in approval ratings by eliminating a Supe terrorist backfires when his usual resort to Eye Beams accidentally kills a bystander — which ends up being recorded and uploaded to the web.
Oz, the highest-scoring person on the SATs ever to fail to graduate, because he had a bunch of incompletes and didn't go to summer school to make up for them. He'd much rather work on perfecting playing the E-flat, diminished ninth chord on his guitar. That's a man's chord. You could lose a finger.
Buffy herself. She often skipped training or trained on her own time. It wasn't until Season 5 that she took training seriously.
Jeff on Community. It's gradually played with over the course of the series, in that while Jeff's quite smart and definitely very lazy, whenever he tries to coast on his wits something inevitably goes wrong and causes him more trouble than if he'd just put an honest effort in.
Jeff: Well, the funny thing about being smart is that you can get through most of life without ever having to do any work.
In Conviction (2016), Hayes Morrison is an excellent defense attorney but spent years as a disreputable law professor because, as the daughter of a former President of the United States, she was burned out from all the public attention she got growing up and wanted to keep a low profile.
The Doctor exhibits this in most of their plans, with the end result being quite simple and easy. At least mentally. Physically they run everywhere. And in "The Waters Of Mars", the Tenth Doctor wasn't even particularly keen on having to do that, asking why they couldn't have had bikes. Heck, pretty much every adventure the Doctor gets involved in results largely because they're happy enough to just bumble aimlessly through the universe and see where they end up; the Doctor just happens to keep ending up right in the middle of trouble.
Likewise a good number of companions, e.g. Rose and Donna from the new series, have menial jobs and normal lives and never seem anything out of the ordinary. However, when they travel with the Doctor, they're forced to become braver, bold, quick thinking and rely on their atrophied but innate intelligence.
Ditto for Amy, whose kissogram background hardly prepared her for, well, anything. Her boyfriend/husband Rory, though, is a nurse, who does occasionally have to make use of his medical knowledge.
The past of the Doctor in the Academy, revealed during the Fourth Doctor's tenure, is a perfect example of this. While the Doctor is clearly a genius even by Time Lord standards, they were also Book Dumb, mostly due to their hatred of structured learning and how extremely lazy they were in school. (The novelization of "Shada" contains a scene where the villain tries to read a secret Time Lord lecture from the Doctor's memory, only to find that the young Doctor spent the whole lesson staring out of the window daydreaming about how much he'd like to have a picnic.) Romana, who got much, much better grades at the Academy than them, is unconvinced by the Fourth Doctor's intellect at first, but goes to accept that he is legitimately brilliant but at different things to her.
Drake & Josh: Drake Bell, resident Book DumbBrainless Beauty, sometimes. He usually gets terrible grades and rarely puts any effort into his studies, preferring to coast by on his charm, good looks, and musical chops. However, he has occasionally been shown to be quite intelligent when he feels the situation warrants it. In one episode, Drake, Josh, and Meagen snuck out of the house while their parents were away in order to ride a roller-coaster. After being sent to the back of the line, Josh wonders if they even have enough time to ride the coaster and make it back home before their parents get back. Drake does some rapid calculations in his head and arrives at a very precise answer in a matter of seconds.
Josh: You really think we can ride the Demonator and be back before Mom and Dad get home? Drake: Okay, let's think this through, alright? It's been 17 minutes since we were at the sign that said "Two Hours From This Point." You'd figure 1 hour and 43 minutes for the line, six minutes to ride the Demonator, 13 minutes to find the car, and 20 minutes to drive home. That puts us at the front door at exactly 10:58, so that's two minutes before Mom and Dad said they'd be home. [Beat] Josh: Okay, like if you could figure all that out, why're you failing math? Drake: Because this is important.
On The Drew Carey Show, Lewis has a genius-level intellect but works as a janitor because he'd rather not apply himself to anything more challenging than cleaning toilets.
Louis from Even Stevens is seen as the dimwitted Black Sheep of his high-achieving family, but he's shown to actually be very intelligent, capable of putting together intricate plans and have a real knack for engineering. He just has no ambition and doesn't want to try hard, and prefers to use his talents to come up with get rich quick schemes or pull pranks.
This is how Francisco d'Anconialikes to come across. Various characters ask him why with his brilliant mind he just wastes his time crashing parties and seducing women but it's all actually a facade.
Game of Thrones: Despite his prodigious skill with a sword and a certain cunning when he bothers to use it, Jaime has few tangible accomplishments beyond his infamous kingslaying and shows no greater ambition than to be a member of the Kingsguard. By contrast, his father remade the Lannisters as the strongest house (and seems to consider Jaime a Jaded Washout) and aspired to become Hand, his sister tries to make herself the power behind the throne and aspires to become Regent, and his brother who ruled King's Landing (and wants to be Lord Paramount at Casterly Rock).
Lord Tywin: You're blessed with abilities few men possess, you're blessed to belong to the most powerful family in the Kingdoms, and you're still blessed with youth. And what have you done with these blessings? You've served as a glorified bodyguard for two kings: one a madman, the other a drunk [...] I need you to become the man you were always meant to be. Not next year, not tomorrow... now.
It's also a deconstruction in that Jaime's laziness leads to him having few real accomplishments. Moreover, in the book describing the achievements of each member of the Kingsguard, his page is ridiculously small and the only notability compared to other members is his killing of Aerys... so as a swordsman he's practically a Living Legend, but as a member of the Kingsguard he is a Butt-Monkey. However, come Season 6 and he is growing out of it. Jaime confronts the High Sparrow, immediately tries to approach the small council to do something about the situation in Dorne and then when it's clear that unity is needed to take on the Faith Militant he not only convinces Kevan and Olenna to work with Cersei again, but it's clear from Olenna's face that she's thinking "This boy knows his shit".
Jess on Gilmore Girls. He's actually quite intelligent with a passion for literature and very handy, having practically raised himself due to his mother being delinquent in the parenting department. He acts like a jerk while he's in Stars Hollow as no one aside from Rory had realistic expectations for him, so he skips school to work instead before failing due to low attendance and leaving town to sort his issues out. He eventually resurfaces in Rory's life as a Self-Made Man who operates an independent publishing house/art gallery and is heavily involved in the Philadelphia arts scene.
Good Omens (2019): Crowley is a classic example of someone who is brilliant because he's lazy. Instead of going through all the time and effort of doing things the traditional way, he invents new ways that are more efficient and require less effort on his part. In one of his first scenes, the demons Hastur and Ligur report how they corrupted a priest and a politician. Crowley reports that he downed all the mobile networks in London, which will piss off millions of people, who will spread that low-grade evil around and increase the overall evil in the world significantly more than corrupting one or two souls, no matter how important. A Running Gag is that he doesn't think these plans through; for instance, right after that conversation he needs to make a call but can't because London has no mobile service.
Eleanor Shellstrop of The Good Place. She concluded fairly early on that being a good person who cared about others was hard work, and as a result, abdicated most moral decisions in favor of going along with whatever was most convenient or what someone else proposed. At the same time, she's generally shown to be a lot smarter than she's given credit for; at one point, an essay she writes for Chidi did only marginally worse than that handed in by the highly educated Tahani, and the biggest Reveal for Season 1 came about because she figured out the underlying truth that eluded even Chidi and Tahani.
Chuck Bass on Gossip Girl, generally a sleazy, pot-smoking slacker getting by on raw charisma and money. However, his quick wit, skill as The Social Expert, and eloquence demonstrate him to be one of the most highly intelligent characters in the roster. It's shown that part of his persona is the result of being crushed by his father's enormous expectations and the elite snobbery of the world he grew up in, though it's also partly due to being a hedonist with little concern for himself or others.
Rob of Series 2, an attractive, charming, clearly talented young baker with a distinctly offhand attitude to time management, resulting in a series of great-tasting but visually disastrous bakes. This drove Paul insane.
Selasi of Series 7 gained a reputation for always being chilled even if his time management was all over the place. How much time he spent lying on the floor became something of a running gag.
Sergeant Schultz (the rank given is Oberfeldwebel, the equivalent of NATO E-6, or U.S. Army Staff Sergeant, though he later gets promoted to Hauptfeldwebel, E-7 or Sergeant First Class) from Hogan's Heroes pretends to be a bumbling idiot because he likes smooth, friction-free shifts. However, when he takes over command of the camp (and thusly will have to take the blame if someone finds out about any of the many irregularities in the camp) he becomes such an unholy terror Hogan and his team spend the rest of the episode getting Colonel Klink reinstated. Also, in later episodes it's stated that he is not only a decorated veteran of World War I, he also built up a very large and successful toy business in the interbellum years, and only re-enlisted because his factory was appropriated for the war effort and he was conscripted.
Himitsu no Hanazono (2007): Osamu is the most irresponsible of the 4 Kataoka siblings, but when he's left to his devices, he reveals that he's a skilled writer and can pump out ideas at a fast pace. However, he's also a perfectionist, so he's often critical of his work.
House, House, House. He is entirely unmatched when it comes to medical diagnostics and his reputation is legendary. However, he also has an equally legendary aversion to routine clinical work, making him a massive liability in spite of his skills. The only hospital that would hire him got around this by earmarking a "Department of Diagnostic Medicine," wherein House is pretty much allowed to screw around until a case that interests him and is beyond the ability of other doctors shows up. It's equalized by paying House far below what a doctor of his talents should earn. In most cases, it's a given that he will become involved eventually, but the other characters often have to talk him into it while he's busy playing video games or watching his soap operas (or downloading Internetporn). He also actively avoids his clinic duty since that doesn't usually have the promise of intellectual stimulation. Since he is a Sherlock HolmesExpy, this isn't entirely surprising.
Sam on iCarly. Extremely lazy. But she shows occasional signs of brilliance, like innate ability to discern the amount of a certain food product in a giant jar, and her ability to Houdini an A when she didn't bother doing a science report using just an orange from her bag.
Luke from Jessie. There's a whole episode about the fact he's this and not just Book Dumb.
Jonathan Creek can appear this way initially; with his keen intelligence and lateral thinking skills, he could easily have been a great magician or a great detective if he so desired, but prefers the more anonymous life of a director and set designer for a stage illusionist, while rather reluctantly dabbling in detective work. As the series explores his character, it turns out to be not so much that Jonathan is lazy — being the Only Sane Employee of the Adam Klaus magic show is extremely hard work — as that he's uncomfortable with the limelight and easily bored.
Daisy: You could have gone far if it wasn't for your handicap. Onslow: What handicap? Daisy: Bone-idleness
Kitchen Nightmares shows two examples from both the American and the British version:
In the British version we have Mamma Cherri. When Ramsay tried her food, he actually cleaned his plate — which is something that he has never done. (Unless it was a particularly good dessert.) The focus of the episode wasn't fixing the food, but improving the restaurant's structure and Cherri's marketing ability. Again, her main fault was that she would try to take the quickest possible option, which led to her having a bit of a fall in quality, but now she actually does quite well. Allegedly she said that she just should never be put in a managerial position.
Lisa from Lido di Manhattan. She just graduated from business school — so she was clearly booksmart. However, at the time she was one of Ramsay's most helpless cases, even going to cry in the bathroom. When Ramsay returned, he was genuinely impressed at how much Lisa had turned it around, one of the few who had updated his menu and on top of that has launched her own wine brand.
LazyTown's Robbie Rotten is the epitome of this trope. He prides himself in being lazy, and even schemes to make the rest of the town's citizens as lazy as he is, yet he is easily the most brilliant person in the entire town and is able to create anything out of anything. He even has a microwave which makes inventions for him.
Hardison on Leverage seems to be this in parts of Season 1note The reason that it seems so during parts of the season is because it was aired out of order. When watched in the intended chronological order, it makes more sense. and it is a major plot point in the Mile High Job.
Nate: You can't skate by on talent and luck forever.
It took until the sixth grade for anyone to even notice that Malcolm was a genius, which came as a huge shock to everyone. In the first season, he hated being in an advanced class because he had to do twice as much homework as the regular kids when he'd rather be scheming with his brothers, playing games, or watching TV, as his portrayal was very much not a TV Genius. In later seasons, he gradually became more serious about his studies because he became afraid of ending up a failure like his parents, but he remained lazy in other respects and a good chunk of his intelligence was still spent on stuff like teaching himself advanced child psychology so that he could fake mental disorders convincingly enough to be sent to therapy, and therefore get out of class periodically.
Reese also has shades of this. In the episode where Hal gets into a dispute with their garbage man, and said garbage man dump his truck's full load onto their lawn, Reese, with Hal in tow, steals a fully loaded garbage truck with the intent of dumping it on the garbage man's lawn. Hal tells Reese that he could achieve so much if he applied his energy towards his education the way he does with any Zany Scheme, but realizes "that ship sailed long ago."
Axel from The Middle is thought to be that in one episode; it turns out his test results were just switched with a classmate who is actually brilliant.
Adrian Monk's brother Ambrose isn't so much this as Brilliant but Hopelessly Socially Crippled.
Ned from Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide is labeled as a "smart but lazy student" by some of the school staff. He's clever enough to come up with Zany Schemes and write a School Survival Guide with very useful tips, and he could make straight A's if he would only try, but he never cares enough to do so. His science teacher Mr. Sweeny once tricks him into actually studying for a test by framing it as The Caper and Ned actually aces it, leading Sweeny to point this out to him.
Jim Halpert from the US version of The Office is lazy and unmotivated, yet he is still one of the top salesmen in all of Dunder-Mifflin. But when his job is on the line or when he wants to buckle down and work, he's among the most competent workers there.
Pam: The thing about Jim, is when he's excited about something, like the Office Olympics, he gets really into it and he does a really great job. But the problem with Jim is that he works here, so that hardly ever happens.
In The Orville, John LaMarr spends most of the first season acting like a dimwitted fratboy and playing bad pranks. Then it's revealed that he's actually the second smartest person on the whole crew in terms of raw knowledge and intelligence, and the first is a robot with a computerized brain. As it turns out, he's been deliberately choosing easy jobs with the intent of coasting on his natural gifts.
In Power Rangers Mystic Force, Xander is shown to be this. He's a natural leader and quite logical but his lazy attitude and dislike of being told what to do, often hold him back. But when the situation requires it and he tries his hardest, his plans often work very well in his favor.
In Power Rangers Jungle Fury, Dominic is a martial arts prodigy at least as skilled as RJ but avoids all responsibility and dropped out of the Pai Shwa academy and went Walking the Earth rather than actually train or become a master. When entrusted with a powerful magical artifact, he just hides it down the side of a cushion in a fast food restaurant.
In Power Rangers Samurai, Mike the Green Ranger is possibly the smartest out of the original five before Antonio came along. He is a master tactician who can make strategic battle plans effortlessly. However, he is incredibly lazy and would rather be playing video games and loves to rebel against authority.
In Power Rangers Ninja Steel, Calvin is great at building or repairing anything mechanical and especially loves working on vehicles, but is also a bit too lackadaisical for his own good.
Shawn from Psych is a gifted observer, and he earned a perfect score on the detective's exam at age 15 for fun. He beat his dad at chess when he was eight, solved Sudoku upside down, and possesses an eidetic memory. Also shown to be a crack shot, as he hit all of detective Barry's bullet holes in the shooting range with zero training. He can't join the police force due to a past car theft as a teen (though that is a more complicated issue, read below) Instead, he took up a random string of jobs purely for their entertainment value. He opened his own "psychic" detective agency and is on contract with the Santa Barbara police department after solving a series of crimes from television reports. He's a Phony Psychic because after solving all those crimes with his own criminal background he needed an explanation to avoid being convicted as an accomplice. Phony Psychic also happens to pay well and allow him to be a lazy detective (psychic detectives are not required to take examinations or get licensed.) He is still something of a slacker, but when motivated, will work hard. However, in Season 6, he did make more mistakes, which his dad pointed out to due to becoming sloppy and not being challenged.
At least some of Shawn's laziness is explained as being a reaction against his father's absurdly overbearing attempts to groom him to Follow in My Footsteps and become a police officer upon recognising his abilities. It's often implied that had his father just backed off a bit and let Shawn develop at his own pace more, Shawn would have likely been more willing to do so, or at least make more of his abilities than he did before the series. Though Henry Spencer is a Control Freak and perfectionist in every aspect of his life (he once spent a few hours fishing with Lassiter... criticizing his technique the whole time). Lassiter was annoyed by it all that when he talked to Shawn about it, he admitted he began to understand a bit on why Shawn acts out.
In his youth, Shawn was still planning on becoming a cop despite his dad's pushiness because he genuinely saw it as a good thing. But complications led to Henry and Madeline Spencer splitting (namely an educational opportunity for Maddie) and Henry took the fall so Shawn would not resent his mother. This led to quite the Broken Pedestal for Shawn regarding his dad and he committed the felony to spite his dad and not be able to become a cop as a result. The Season 3 premiere has Shawn be told the truth about what happened by his mom and Shawn rebuilds his relationship more with his dad.
Dave Lister from Red Dwarf certainly qualifies. Despite being the biggest slob in the galaxy, he is able to rebuild Kryten (twice), form a cunning scheme to defeat a time-travelling simulant that is capable of erasing people from history, display a knack for Esperanto (well, better than Rimmer anyway) and form philosophical opinions on a variety of themes. That Lister has brains but has never used them is the primary reason he was sentenced to being erased from existence by The Inquisitor (the above time-travelling simulant). Lister's response to claims he had wasted his talents: "So?"
Surprisingly, Sherlock completely averts it in Mycroft's case, to the point where it's something of a role-reversal: Mycroft is a high-ranking officer in the security services while Sherlock often requires a certain amount of prodding to apply his vast intellect to anything practical. Though a token nod to Mycroft's canonical dislike for actual physical labour is made in The Great Game, where he explains that his reason for not investigating a case himself — instead delegating it to a reluctant Sherlock — is its requiring "legwork."
Season 8 of Scrubs has the intern Ed, who acts as a deconstruction of this trope by pointing out that if you try to start out being like this, you're setting yourself up for failure. Eventually, you're going to get to the point where your smarts aren't a substitute for real effort, and if you don't put in the work, you'll fall flat. When Ed becomes lazy to the point of not even trying to better himself, he gets fired and replaced.
George Costanza from Seinfeld. He comes up with surprisingly brilliant schemes, but for the purposes of completely pointless things. One can only wonder how successful he'd be if he put the effort into work that he puts into avoiding work.
Detective Steve Billings from The Shield; brilliant police officer who at some point in his career, stopped giving a damn and went on auto-pilot while counting down to retirement. Loathed because of his laziness, his brilliance has saved him from being fired.
Lois shows elements of this on Smallville — she skipped out on classes in High School and then dropped out of college but is shown to be extremely capable when motivated as a political campaign manager, a Senator's chief of staff and a journalist.
Eli Wallace from Stargate Universe qualifies as this according to both his backstory and flashbacks we've seen of him at home. It's probably the main reason he dropped out of MIT. Although it's also implied part of his reason was to spend more time with his mom, who was HIV-positive from getting stuck with an addict's needle, and in bad straits at the time for heath coverage to keep her alive.
Colonel Sheppard, when he isn't being a Colonel Badass, is this. When Ronon accuses him of being a coward during a fight, Sheppard retorts that no, he's just lazy. Sheppard is also a genius, having aced the Mensa test but not feeling like actually joining the organization. In an Alternate Universe, he is shown to be just as smart as McKay. He just prefers to seem like a simpleton (a bit like Jack O'Neill, actually).
This applies even more so in the Alternate Universe episode "Vegas", where Sheppard doesn't join the Stargate program and ends up as a police detective in Las Vegas with drinking and gambling problems. And yet he is the only one who figures out where the Wraith is.
On Star Trek: Voyager, Mortimer Harren is a brilliant cosmologist who has five university degrees on the subject and who only joined Starfleet because a school he wanted to attend required a year of practical experience. Torres tried to give him jobs that would utilize his vast intellect, but he refused to do the work because he thought anything other than cosmology was beneath him. She eventually gave up on him and gave him the easiest job in the department. In the episode he appeared in this was made somewhat ridiculous because it also established that the crewwoman who they actually had doing cosmology was completely unqualified and hated her job.
Zack Martin from The Suite Life series is shown to get terrible grades often shows poor general knowledge. His mother seems amazed he somehow passed history after he thought President Lincoln lived in Gettysburg and died at the movies (he refers to him as that Abe guy with the beard and the hat.). However, he's probably as smart as his overachieving twin brother Cody, but often lacks proper motivation and would rather coast through life than put in the work. He has been shown when putting in the effort to be an excellent student; he is extremely proficient in English in summer school, despite failing during the year, only to slack off when he doesn't want to be seen as a nerd. One episode demonstrates that when given extra accommodations when faking dyslexia, he excels, further cementing that his problem is a lack of focus and motivation rather than intelligence. He's also difficult to motivate because he feels Always Second Best to his twin, who is a genius.
Alex Russo from Wizards of Waverly Place is probably just as smart her brother Justin but chooses not to use her intellect except for elaborate pranks. Several times she has been referred to as an evil genius (though evil is used 'very' loosely). It's implied in several episode that she's likely Justin's superior in wizarding skill — even if he's superior in book smarts — and that she could beat him in the family wizarding competition if it came down to it. That ends up being the case, with Alex becoming the family wizard, but Justin's book smarts get him the position of professor of the wizarding school.
