Broken Pedestal / Live-Action TV

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• On 9-1-1, a bodybuilder is competing in a contest with his father, a legendary bodybuilder, attending and showing off his still impressive physique. After the bodybuilder wins, his dad joins him on stage only to tear his bicep on the trophy. When the paramedics get there, they find the crowd nearly rioting as they've seen that rather than just blood, the guy is leaking synthetic oil to build up muscle mass. His son is dismayed that "I was so afraid of not living up to you and you were cheating the whole time." He even turns down the trophy as he was only doing this for the dad he now knows is a fraud.
• 24:
  • Jack Bauer has seen this happen with two of his mentors; Christopher Henderson, who brought him into CTU, first turns out to be embezzling assets seized by the government and later becomes the point-man for a conspiracy that kills an ex-president and several of his best friends.
  • James Heller, the Secretary of Defence, is probably the show's first Benevolent Boss and someone that Jack admits he "looked up to like a father". The pedestal gets broken over the course of three seasons as Heller fails to live up to Jack's high standards: he obtains evidence against the President Evil but tries to use it for political leverage, he leaves Jack to rot in a Chinese prison for two years and generally treats him like a mindless disposable resource. His remarks on Jack being "a curse" to everyone around him are particularly harsh if more than a little true. There's the minor complication of Jack being in a relationship with Heller's daughter...
  • No one on 24 can ever manage to retain their original loyalties throughout a season. Including Bauer himself.
• In a 30 Rock episode, Liz met her idol, a 1970s-era comedy writer, discovering that they're now a lonely failure and that there's a reason they can only find work in the '70s.
• On Alert: Missing Persons Unit, Mike has lived under the shadow of his father, a cop fired for corruption. The man has long claimed his innocence but Mike turned his back on him and hasn't spoken to him in twenty years. His dad's partner, George, helped raise Mike, got him into the police and been a second father to him. In "Craig," George asks Mike for help finding a man accused of murder, with Mike aiding, even letting George know where the man is being kept in safety by the FBI. When that man is abducted, Mike doesn't want to believe it but eventually realizes George was involved and using Mike to get at that witness. Even worse is Mike discovering this wasn't a new development, George had been on the take for years and framed Mike's dad for his own crimes. Mike is obviously rocked he's been blaming his father for two decades while looking up to the man responsible for his fall.
• Alien Nation:
  • The cop who taught Matt in the force frames George for stealing drugs. And of course, Redemption Equals Death.
  • In Body and Soul, George is a huge admirer of a Newcomer physician who created a cure for diabetes and gushes on meeting with her. Then it turns she's a notorious Overseer who performed all kinds of experiments on the slaves as assistant to an even worse Mad Doctor. Her daughter says that she became remorseful and this is why she created the cure, but George says he would have strangled her if he'd known.
• Angel: In "Supersymmetry", Fred looked up to and idolized her former physics professor, Oliver Seidel, until the events of "Supersymmetry," when she discovers that he was the one responsible for banishing her to the demon dimension Pylea as a means of Crippling the Competition. As soon as she finds out, Fred is outraged, disgusted, and out for blood.
  Fred: I idolized him, and he sent me to hell. Me and God knows how many others who didn't make it back. So-so sure! I'll calm down when he's dead!
• Arli$$ used this several times, most notably when Arliss helps a retired ballplayer accused of beating his second wife. His first wife says that the two were together but then confesses to Arliss that she's covering for her husband. When Arliss asks why, she responds "why do you think we got divorced in the first place?" and she'd rather the world think her husband is a cheater than a wife-beater. Arliss is rocked to discover his idol is this way and, while not calling him out on it, does drop him as a client.
• Several examples in Arrow:
  • Oliver Queen always believed that his father and mother had worked to better Starling City. After his father's yacht went down, he admitted to Oliver that he was responsible for much of the corruption, greed, and crime plaguing their city.
    Robert Queen: I'm so sorry, I thought I had more time. I'm not the man you think I am. I didn't build our city, I failed it! And I wasn't the only one!
  • Later revelations show that Robert outsourced the Queen factory's business to China while cheating his employees out of their severance pay, had accidentally caused and covered up a colleague's death, and had several affairs which seriously affect his children, when a former mistress, and later a lovechild whom he refused to acknowledge, decide to seek revenge.
  • Then for Oliver and Thea, there's their mother being revealed to have been in bed both figuratively and literally with Malcolm Merlyn (who turns out to be Thea's biological father), helping the man plot and succeed in the destruction of part of the city.
  • Despite their differences, Oliver had nothing but respect for Quentin Lance, until he discovered he was (though under threats) helping the villain Damien Darhk take over the city. Ironically this forced Quentin to finally put aside his own issues with Oliver, and they eventually reconcile.
  • John Diggle lost enough respect for Oliver after the way he hid information from his allies in Season 3 to leave the team. And then for his own brother Andy after he found out he faked his death and turned to villainy. His friendship with Oliver got better. With his brother, not so much.
  • Similarly to the example above, several allies of Oliver who admired him from afar ended up being severely disappointed with his attitude after working with him. This includes, between others, Barry Allen (before and after becoming The Flash), Wild Dog, Mr. Terrific, Black Canary, and Artemis. Most of them ended up forgiving him one way or another, but Artemis considered his previous killing ways such a betrayal that she became a full-blown villain.
  • Thea Queen loses her Big Brother Worship after discovering her brother Oliver concealed the truth about her being the illegitimate daughter of Malcolm Merlyn. Fortunately they reconcile the following season when Oliver reveals that he is the Arrow—rather than castigate her brother for keeping this secret as well, she embraces him for saving lives, including her own.
• Subverted in the Babylon 5 episode "Atonement". Delenn is afraid that her pedestal will be broken when Lennier finds out her darkest secret (having been the one to cast the deciding vote in favor of war with humanity many years ago in a moment of rage after Dukhat's death). However, Lennier accepts her Warts and All.
• In the Netflix Canadian crime series, Bad Blood, this becomes a major plot point during Season 1. Declan, the Villain Protagonist, was a loyal member of Vito's crime family. The main reason was that Vito's father treated him like a grandson, and Vito acted as an adopted father. Vito constantly reminded him how important family was and how he was a special part of it. That is until Vito tasks him with watching over his unruly, grown biological son while he did a prison bid. Declan has trouble taming him and when he goes to Vito for help during a prison visit, Vito reminds him that the family talk was bullshit, that Declan was just another hired goon and if he doesn't get control of his true son, then he would get eliminated like any other Mook. Declan decides to ruin the crime family from within by helping Vito's enemies until Vito's son is dead, Vito loses his power, and Declan kills Vito by poison.
• Banshee:
  • Gordon is one at the start of Season 3. He is in the process of divorcing Carrie, living in a messy apartment away from the family home, descended into alcoholism, regularly using prostitutes, and even starts flirting with his assistant DA. However, he manages to bounce back halfway through the season.
  • The chief of the Kinaho Reservation Police has long since given up on trying to stop the illicit activities on the reservation and claims he is "too old" to begin caring about bringing Chayton in.
• This is how Wil Wheaton got on Sheldon's list of enemies in the backstory of The Big Bang Theory. Sheldon idolized Wheaton thanks to relating to his Star Trek: The Next Generation character Wesley and was eager to meet his hero at a fan convention. Only Wheaton didn't show up, which crushed Sheldon. When Wheaton learns this, he apologizes and explains that his grandmother had just died before that convention, leading Sheldon to forgive him... until he admits that he was lying, and simply prioritized another event because he didn't care about his fans.
  • When Wheaton does finally decide to bury the hatchet, giving Sheldon the autograph he missed out on all those years ago along with a genuine apology, his place on the enemy list is quickly taken by his former co-star Brent Spiner (whose character, Data, Sheldon likewise related to) who, not realizing the significance of the still-in-box action figure, quickly snatches and opens it.
• Big Time Rush: In "Big Time Break," Logan is infatuated with a prominent mathematics professor named Phoebe Nachee, both for her brilliance and her beauty. However, Logan's appreciation of her diminishes when she disparagingly asserts that boys can't be as smart as girls.
• In the Black Mirror episode "USS Callister", programmer Nanette Cole starts a new job at Callister Inc., where she meets one of her idols in the field, programmer and CTO of the company Robert Daly. When she wakes up aboard a simulated starship, however (the titular USS Callister), she discovers that Daly has built a sadistic, narcissistic fantasy world for himself, using the consciousnesses of his colleagues as playthings. Pedestal smashed.
• On The Blacklist, Liz is helping Floriana Campos, the head of an international anti-slavery organization whose work she's long admired and even wrote a paper on her in college. Realizing an assassin out after Campos was hired by Reddington, Liz bursts into a meeting the two are having. Red reveals that Campos is actually the leader of the biggest slavery ring on the planet who is using this act to take out the competition and even had her own husband killed when he was about to find out the truth. Naturally, Liz doesn't believe it...until Campos calls Reddington "Raymond" and Liz realizes only a true criminal would be on a first-name basis with Red (Red: "Oooh, that was a mistake.") After Campos dies from poison, Liz lampshades how Red knew she would never believe her idol could be like this if he'd just told her so had Liz find out the hard way.
• Bones:
  • Brennan's old professor, whom she had and currently was dating, was an expert witness for the opposing side of the case she was working on. To specify, he's not doing it in service of the truth, which Brennan would respect him for, but because he's being paid to do it. Then he implies, on the stand, that she's not an objective researcher even though he and the scientific community recognize Brennan as the best and most objective in her field. He is also outright lying, since he had previously called Brennan's case irrefutable, meaning everything he said about other possibilities was wrong and he knew it. In the end, she dumps him via a What the Hell, Hero? moment.
    Brennan: This one isn't about winning a pasta dinner or showing up your former student. It's about putting two people away who murdered a 19-year-old girl.
    Michael [the professor]: Tempe, you can't personalize the work.
    Brennan: Do you remember in Central America standing in a mass grave being guarded by soldiers? We knew that they were probably the same soldiers who had killed the people we were digging up. I was just a student. I was scared. I turned to you and I asked, "What do we do?"
    Michael: That was a different place and a radically different context.
    Brennan: You said, "We tell the truth. We do not flinch." You flinched, Michael.
  • Also Brennan's brother, who left her shortly after their parents were forced to flee their past. They reconcile later.
  • Booth had one with Jacob Broadsky, who was his mentor but became a Cold Sniper intent on killing people he felt escaped justice. Between Booth’s belief in letting the justice system dispense justice and the fact that Broadsky killed innocent people in the process, Booth wasn’t happy with him.
• One episode of Boomtown (2002) has the officers trying to defuse a hostage situation at a sporting goods store. Ray gets excited when he finds out the manager was the star of a television series he used to enjoy and volunteers to go in undercover. The pedestal starts to crumble when he sees how washed up the former star is and completely breaks when he fails to recognize his own Catchphrase. The broken pedestal is further pulverized when Ray discovers the former star was collaborating with the criminals.
• The Boys (2019):
  • Hughie was a big fan of A-Train, a member of the Villain with Good Publicity Super Team The Seven, having posters of him and action figures, including rare limited edition ones. However, this isn't revealed until after A-Train smashes into Robin, Hughie's girlfriend, at Super-Speed during the beginning of the first episode and turns her into a bloody pulp. After Robin's death, Hughie comes to hate A-Train with a passion, smashing all of his A-Train memorabilia in a fit of rage, and joins Billy Butcher on his crusade to take down The Seven, specially after Butcher shows him footage from a secret superhero bar where A-Train jokes about accidentally killing Robin.
  • After Starlight becomes the newest member of The Seven, she's thrilled to be shown around the meeting room by The Deep, since she admits to him that she's had a crush on him for several years. The Deep takes this as a cue to use Sexual Extortion to threaten her place in the team. She comes to hate him for what he did to her, and after calling him a loser who's nothing but a joke to the rest of the team, she also ousts him as a sexual predator and he's reassigned to Sandusky, Ohio until the whole thing blows over, and where he's raped by a crazed groupie. In Season 2, he tries apologizing for his actions, saying he's learned a lot in his exile, but she angrily refuses to hear him out.
  • Homelander himself gets one in Season 3 when he finally comes face-to-face with his predecessor Soldier Boy. Homelander says that he idolized him growing up and watched all his movies, saying that he's the only one who knew what it was like to be burdened with overwhelming strength. Soldier Boy just mocks his cape in response and calls him an Inadequate Inheritor. Neither of them take it well after learning that Soldier Boy was Homelander's father all along.
• Walter White from Breaking Bad has progressively become this more and more for his protege and partner-in-crime, Jesse, over the course of his slide into evil, as Jesse becomes increasingly troubled and guilt-ridden over his actions and what Walter orders him to do. It seems to reach a head after Walt's rationalization over a child's murder and seeing through his manipulations. But it has finally culminated in him figuring out that Walter had Brock poisoned.
  • Also, Walt gets it from everyone who learns his true nature. Skyler goes from loving him to fighting him and trying to get his cancer back, Marie goes from supporting him to wanting him dead, Hank takes it so hard he compromises his integrity and turns catching Heisenberg as personal, and Junior, the boy who idolized his father, hating him due to him supposedly murdering Hank, wanting to do nothing with him anymore (to the point where he legally changes his first name to “Flynn” because he’s ashamed to share his original name with his criminal father) and screaming at him to die already.
  • Mike from both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul was this to his son, Matt. Matt was a cop, just like his father, and saw him as a hero and inspiration. When he found himself faced with the opportunity to take a cut from some drug bust money, he called up his father, looking for advice. However, Matt found out that his father was not the beacon of goodness he thought he was, but, in Mike's own words, "down in the gutter with the rest of them." Although Mike had a very good reason. He knew that in a precinct full of Dirty Cops, not being down in the gutter with the rest of them meant you were almost certainly going to be killed, just in case you were thinking of ratting on everyone. Hearing this from his father broke Matt, but ultimately convinced him to take the money. Unfortunately his hesitation was reason enough for two of his fellow cops to kill him anyway.
• Chuck McGill from Better Call Saul becomes this to a lot of people over the course of the series.
  • His brother Jimmy McGill, later known as Saul Goodman, initially looks up to his brother and becomes a lawyer partially out of admiration for his legal skill. However, due to his conman past, Chuck is adamant he will only cause trouble as a lawyer and works tirelessly to sabotage his career - at first behind his back, but then openly once Jimmy puts the pieces together. The betrayal shakes Jimmy deeply, and it looms large over the rest of the series.
  • His law partner, Howard Hamlin, also looks up to Chuck. He at first goes along willingly with his efforts to sabotage Jimmy's career, although he shows obvious discomfort with the fact that Chuck is making him the scapegoat for Jimmy's career setbacks. Over the course of his series, his discomfort grows greater, finally disobeying Chuck and recommending Jimmy for a position at another law firm. The pedestal takes a serious blow from the twin revelations that his "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" is in fact a mental illness that Chuck refuses to acknowledge, and that his animosity towards Jimmy is much more personal than Chuck likes to represent. Their relationship continues to deteriorate until Howard personally buys Chuck's partnership out and forces him into retirement.
    • The pedestal later gets rebuilt to some degree. Chuck commits suicide soon after being fired, destroying Howard emotionally, and Jimmy's increasingly aggressive behavior and campaign to sabotage Howard's career convinces him that Chuck was right about him all along.
• This happens a lot on Brooklyn Nine-Nine:
  • Peralta is initially thrilled to meet his idol, reporter Jimmy Brogan, who wrote a true crime novel about 1970s New York cops that inspired Peralta to become a cop. Jake gradually becomes disenchanted with Brogan's hard-edged, hard-drinking, "old school" ways, but for a while, it looks like things will end better than usual for this trope; Jake asks Brogan not to write about some things Jake said while drunk that would be embarrassing to Jake and the 99th Precinct, and Brogan agrees as a favor to the kid. But just when it looks like the two will part ways on decent terms, Brogan uses a homophobic slur about Captain Holt and Jake responds by punching Brogan out.
  • Holt is thrilled to have a case involving a classical musician he admires. Naturally, it turns out the musician staged the whole thing as an attempt at insurance fraud.
    Holt: I finally understand the old adage that you should never meet your heroes. This is like when I found out that Robert Frost was from... California.
  • Terry goes through something similar while working with an author he loves. He's innocent, but the experience is still disappointing.
    Scully: Never meet your heroes. Marie Callender was a real bitch.
  • Jake and Rosa are excited about working with legendary tough cop Melanie Hawkins...then they find out she's corrupt and running a gang of bank robbers. And that's before she has them framed for her crimes.
  • Amy loves filling out forms and sees it as a "perfect system." Then, when having to get a permit, she discovers how bloated and ridiculous the entire thing is. She meets a woman who she gushes about being a "legend" in the filing world with a great system. Not only is she now a Crazy Cat Lady but it turns out her "system" was a combination of sloth, incompetence, and dyslexia.
  • Played for laughs when Rosa meets Marshawn Lynch, who she's long admired for his famously tight-lipped media appearances which inspired Rosa's own "never say more than you need to" attitude. She's naturally thrown when Lynch spends the entire interview talking non-stop about his lunch habits and refusing to shut up.
  • Holt and Amy are excited to get help on a case from Dr. Yee, hailed for using flies to determine the right type of blood on a crime scene. Rosa and Terry are suspicious and accuse Yee of faking the results. Holt is so outraged that he's about to fire them on the spot...at which point, Yee confesses they're right. He wasted millions of dollars on his "system" which doesn't work at all and was faking the results, leaving Holt and Amy stunned. Downplayed as, when Rosa bluffs a confession out of the killer, Holt and Amy say Yee "solved" the case after all and "we should tell him, it'll make him feel better" as Rosa and Terry gawk.
  • When a glitter bomb ruins evidence, Holt calls in his old friend, master detective Dillman. The man appears to prove" Jake did it only for Jake to do some investigating of his own and reveal the truth: Dillman was fired from the SFPD years ago because his abrasive attitude rubbed his superiors the wrong way (plus, how scores of his "deductions" were based on flimsy evidence and thus laughed out of court). He's working a menial job at a Home Depot-like store (with his 20-something female supervisor yelling about how he acts like he's better than everyone there) and is desperate to land a job on a task force. Also, his entire "brilliant case" against Jake falls apart when Charles reveals the true culprit. Holt admits he's lost a lot of his respect for Dillman.
• An episode of The Brothers García has Lorena winning a trip to L.A. to visit the set of her favorite telenovela and meet the star. Turns out the star is a hammy and callous diva.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Buffy has moments like this with Giles, although she usually eventually gets over them. Until "Lies My Parents Told Me", when Giles conspires with Robin Wood to kill Spike behind her back; Buffy tells Giles point-blank that he's taught her everything she needs to know and shuts the door in his face.
    Buffy: Yep. I thought you were a grownup. Now, it turns out that you're a person.
    Giles: Most grownups are.
  • Wishverse Buffy from "The Wish" was built up to be the one to save the world. Not only is she personally not nice, she fails.
  • Dawn hero-worships Spike throughout Seasons 5 and 6 and looks up to him as a surrogate big brother, but finding out from Xander in "Grave" that Spike tried to rape Buffy completely shatters that. When they next interact in "Beneath You", Dawn outright threatens to set him on fire if he hurts Buffy without batting an eye. Nonetheless, upon the reveal that Spike regained his soul, they eventually begin to rebuild their friendship, with Dawn readily defending Spike when Andrew asked by Buffy was so desperate to save him from the First.
• Through three seasons of Bunk'd, Lou gushes on Jebediah Swearingen, the founder of Camp Kikiwaka and the model of the camp director she wants to be. Lou is thus stunned when she finds his diary in season 4 which relates Jebediah was a terrible director the campers hated for putting their lives at risk with his stupid stunts (from polluting the lake to unleashing a ghost). Worse, the man faked his death and went on to found the rival Camp Champion. Downplayed as, after seeing her campers get into hijinks, Lou admits she can almost understand Jebediah's actions.
• Burden of Truth: Joanna looked up to her father and followed him into law, with him as her role model. She's devastated to learn he cheated on her mother, fathering another daughter with a woman who's Joanna's age (a minor at the time) who he abandoned. It all distresses her so much she breaks down in tears and adopts her mother's last name later on.
• Le Bureau des Légendes: The exposure of Malotru, an agent respected and admired by all, as a double agent, sends shock waves through the DGSE.
• The Bureau of Magical Things: Imogen looks up to Orla as an example of who she wants to be like when she joins the Department of Magical Intervention. She overlooks a lot of Orla's shadier moments, until Orla impersonates her and steals a powerful magical artifact, sending the entire DMI after Imogen's head. The New Era Speech after Orla becomes the strongest magical being in the world only cements it, revealing that Orla was nothing more than a Super Supremacist who cared for nothing but her own power. The experience also shakes Imogen's faith in her own father, who joins Orla because she's an elf deposing the current head of the DMI, who is a fairy. Imogen spends the second season half-heartedly trying to enforce the DMI's rules that she used to follow unquestioningly, until she abandons it altogether and finds a new goal to pursue.
• Burn Notice has Tom Card to Michael, who turns out to have been responsible for the whole of Michael's woes.
• Various NBC Saturday morning sitcoms like California Dreams would have the plot of a character meeting their singing idol and showing off songs only to have the idol steal them as his own and put down the character for how the music business really is.
• Castle has quite a few of these:
  • The training officer who taught Beckett everything she knew betrayed her for a chance to find a treasure, though she did chase his killer to Los Angeles. Just two episodes after this, Captain Montgomery, who was her mentor as a detective turns out to be involved in her mother's death.
  • Castle's old school friend who inspired him to be a writer.
  • While having a brief relationship, Castle also looked up a lot to Sophia Turner, a CIA agent who inspired one of his characters. You can thus imagine his reaction when it's revealed that not only is Sophia working with a terrorist group trying to start World War III, but she's actually a KGB mole who infiltrated the CIA only to be left on her own when the USSR collapsed and has never been loyal to America.
  • "The Final Frontier": The cast of Nebula 9 (a Star Trek clone), specifically Captain Max Rennard and Lieutenant Chloe, for Beckett. She used to love the show (which only lasted 12 episodes) despite the cheesy premise, over-the-top acting, and awful-looking aliens and cosplayed as Lieutenant Chloe. Then, while investigating a murder at a 'con, Beckett meets the actors playing them. Rennard's actor is a pompous Jerkass and a washed-out actor who can't get a decent role and seems to think he really is Captain Rennard. Besides acting the "Nebula 9 Experience" to ridiculous extent, he tries to pick up any woman in the vicinity. Chloe's actress is a bitch who hates being type-casted because of the show and turns out to be the killer, trying to prevent the revival. Despite this, Beckett resolves not to let her affect her memories of the show. After all, her idols were the characters, not the actors playing them.
• In Charite, Robert Koch's pedestal is broken before the entire world when his Tuberculin turns out to be not the tuberculosis miracle remedy it was made out to be; within a short time, he goes from being the most popular celebrity to being the most despised and hated.
• On Charmed (1998), Prue is assigned to take pictures of her photography idol for her magazine. She's thrilled until she realizes he's a crude egotist who criticizes everything she does. He lampshades the parallel as a picture of him she's developing starts to burn (because she left it under the light too long).
• Chuck:
  • Casey's mentor comes back and is a Fulcrum agent.
  • Also, Chuck's old college girlfriend turned out to not only be a spy, but also a Fulcrum agent. In all honesty, it seems like everyone in any way connected to Chuck is involved with Fulcrum in some way...
  • Not exactly. Nowhere in the episode is it stated that Ty Bennett was working for Fulcrum, and he is instead set up as having instead been working independently and forming his own mercenary/terrorist organization. It's revealed in a later episode in which Casey is reunited with his former commanding officer—another Broken Pedestal who is now working for the Ring—that Bennett was actually working directly with or for him.
  • Daniel Shaw makes for one huge Broken Pedestal. Set up as Chuck's mentor in using the Intersect, and a great spy and everything Chuck was aspiring to become once accepting his destiny as a hero (YMMV how well this was played). Then he gets manipulated, broken, and turned by the Ring to become one of the most dangerous villains in the entire series. Only Quinn in the fifth season came close to hurting the team as deeply and personally as Shaw did.
• In the Korean Series The City Hunter, Kim Jong Shik, Young Joo's father, turns out to have been part of a group that engineered the deaths of 20 special forces soldiers in order to further his political career, as well as hid a drunk driving vehicular homicide. Young Joo, an idealistic detective, doesn't take it well.
• Clarice: Clarice, who adored her father, is devastated to learn he was a criminal and coward later.
• One episode of The Commish features Scali's friend who is working in Drugs' Department - an upright man who also spends his free time training children to refuse drugs. When he is murdered, Scali swears to bring whoever did it to justice. Turns out the murderers were the friend's kids, whom he had beaten regularly for the slightest mishap. He beat his wife too. Ouch.
• In The Continental, Lou has always looked up to her father, a shopkeeper who always set a good example such as Doesn't Like Guns and an honorable man who let go of his one-time gang life. When her shop comes under attack, she stands up to the crooks, saying she won't let them ruin the store her father built up from nothing. Laughing, Don Li tells Lou her father killed the family that actually owned the store, moved in without a second thought, and was a gun for hire who happily did whatever the High Table wanted him to do. He even shows her a pistol engraved with her father's name that he loved to use. Oh, and Lou's brother had known this all along and kept it secret from her. Lou is so rocked by the realization of what a monster her father was that she doesn't even stop the mobsters from wrecking the shop.
• Cold Case: In "The Hen House," David Pool is heartbroken to find out his cousin and Parental Substitute is an imposter and a former Nazi
• Community:
  • In the episode "Mixology Certification", Troy experiences one towards Jeff and Britta. About to turn 21, Troy has spent all night listening to their advice on choosing the right bar and ordering the perfect "first drink". At the end of the night he learns that they have been bickering over the same bar, each referring to it by a nickname and not realizing that they have been insulting/praising the exact same property:
    Troy: I just spent the last two years thinking you guys knew more than me about life, and I just found out that you guys are just as dumb as me.
    Britta: ...Duh-doy.
    Jeff: Yeah, duh-doy.
  • Inverted, again with Troy, in "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking". Troy asks Pierce for a picture of Levar Burton. Burton shows up in person, much to Troy's shock... because he was worried about disappointing Burton.
• CSI has one of these for almost every member of the team:
  • Sara's best friend, a prosecuting attorney, is confined to a wheelchair — ostensibly shot by an unknown man who killed her husband. When Sara reopens the investigation, she learns that there was no intruder — her friend was the one who shot her husband. (Sara doesn't quite use the stock dialogue, but does point out the hypocrisy the attorney has been demonstrating in her demands for justice.)
  • Catherine discovered that the cop who inspired her to become a CSI rather than a stripper had planted evidence in a homicide investigation. (Pithy statement: "Good evidence doesn't need help.") She points out that he threw away his integrity, which is the thing that he himself taught her that you can never give up.
  • Warrick's mentor lost it after the murder of his daughter and assaulted the suspect, who turned out to be innocent. (Pithy statement: "An eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind.")
  • Oddly enough, the trope was subverted in this show as well. The episode revolved around the murder of a psychic; one of Brass's buddies, on the verge of retirement, showed up saying that he had been consulting the psychic regarding a cold case he has been pursuing, and that his suspect murdered the psychic to stop her from providing the location of the body. The suspicion is raised that the old cop is trying to frame his suspect, but he turns out to be completely legit.
• CSI: NY gets in on the action as well, although they play around with it a little.
  • Flack's mentor and friend is found to have tampered with a crime scene in order to protect his son, who was present when the murder took place. The mentor is arrested, but Mac is the one driving the investigation; Flack is pissed to have to go after a friend and remains bitter about the incident for some time.
  • A former partner of Danny's turns out to be one of these. He was working as a bodyguard for a sleazy lawyer and helped set up a robbery of the man's in-home safe.
  • Stella discovers that the Greek professor she looked up to since she was a little girl was part of an antique smuggling ring.
  • In Season 5, the former medical examiner and friend to current examiner Sid Hammerback, Marty Pino, is revealed to have killed numerous drug addicts and extracted the substance from their organs to sell.
  • Mac discovers late in Season 7 that his first partner stole a couple hundred thousand dollars (before passing the stash off to Mac to log into evidence), and that he'd killed the perp's girlfriend when she caught him retrieving it.
• In The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Brea is shocked to learn that her mother -and queen of the Gelfling Clans- Mayrin is bribed with trinkets from the Skeksis' tithes.
• Dear White People:
  • Lionel is devastated when he learns Silvio is @AltIvyW and even tells him, “You were my mentor.”
  • Sam is deeply disappointed when she meets with Cynthia Fray, her idol, who is rude and dismissive.
  • Reggie is devastated when Moses admits he did have sex with Muffy (though claiming it was consensual).
• Dexter:
  • Dexter has gone through a lot of these. He idolizes his foster father Harry, adhering rigidly to the "Code of Harry" when he kills, only targeting criminals who've escaped justice, and never taking risks of being caught. Then, in Season 1, he finds out Harry knew Dexter's biological father was alive and kept the info from him, and destroyed the file on Dexter's Harmful to Minors moment. If that's not enough, in Season 2, Dexter decides to abandon the Code — or at least shift it to suit his means — when he finds out that Harry likely killed himself because he couldn't stand what he'd made Dexter into. He also had an intimate relationship with Dexter's birth mother, which was directly responsible for her murder.
  • In Season 6, Dexter meets the man who inspired him to be a serial killer — the Tooth Fairy, a man who ripped the teeth out of his victims, and once dumped a fresh body on a District Attorney's lawn and still managed to elude capture. He's become an abusive, drunk old pervert waiting to die in a retirement home. Granted, it's not like we'd expect much more from a serial killer, but the impact it has on Dexter certainly shows elements of Broken Pedestal. Also, he apparently only dumped the body cause he was drunk and lazy — he got away by pure stupid luck.
• Dickinson:
  • Emily with Thoreau. He starts out as one of her heroes, but upon meeting him, Emily finds that he's really a lazy, entitled man who grossly exaggerated his whole "living in the woods" claims and is contemptuous of her over being an unpublished poet. Thoreau lampshades it by saying "never meet your heroes" to Emily.
  • Although they clash at times, Emily is closest with her father. When he won't even consider leaving Emily the house in his will and justifies this with the standard sexism of their time, she's appalled, tells him off about it then storms out crying.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Three Doctors": The Doctor goes through this when he meets Omega, one of the first Time Lords who apparently died giving the Time Lords the power source of time travel. Omega survived and is trying to drain away the Time Lord's power, driven mad by millennia of isolation.
  • The Doctor suffers it again in "The Five Doctors", in which Borusa, his old Academy tutor, who he never exactly liked but deeply respected and who was a major influence on his life, turns out to have gone mad with power and become the story's Big Bad.
  • "Father's Day": Played with in terms of Rose's affection for her dad, Pete. Since he died when she was a baby, he was built up by Jackie as being the perfect father — so when she travels back in time to his death, only to find that her parents were having marital problems, Pete was failing as a businessman and liked flirting with other women, she was upset. However, in the end, he proved to still be a good man; incredibly devoted to his wife and daughter, and willing to sacrifice his life to save others.
  • The Doctor to Jack, and in turn Jack to Torchwood, both when the admirer finds out that the Doctor/Jack isn't the omniscient hero they thought he was.
  • "The God Complex": The Doctor breaks his own pedestal in regards to Amy Pond, by telling her how he truly views himself; not as a hero, but a vain mad man who's willing to put the people he loves in danger (although considering the situation, part of this may have been him exaggerating).
  • In "Kill the Moon", the Twelfth Doctor inadvertently breaks the pedestal Clara has put him on by abandoning her on the Moon and forcing her to make a world-changing decision, after which she gives the Doctor a The Reason You Suck speech and terminates her relationship with him. In the following episode, "Mummy on the Orient Express", Clara agrees to go on one last trip with the Doctor as a last hurrah, during which the pedestal is rebuilt.
  • Matthew Waterhouse makes no big secret about the fact that his first day working with his hero Tom Baker was quite unpleasant.
  • At the end of audio drama "Zagreus" the Doctor says this has happened with all his Time Lord heroes, Omega, Borusa, Morbius, and Rassilon.
  • An Eighth Doctor comic strip sees the Doctor 'betray' the human-factor Daleks he created in his second incarnation to save a group of humans the Daleks were keeping prisoner to ensure word of their existence didn't get out, although the Doctor mused that it would have been impossible for him to live up to the human-Daleks' expectations of him anyway.
• ER did an arc about Drs. Benton and Carter being taken under the wing of the illustrious Dr. Vucelich, the only doctor at County General to have never lost a patient. This is because he's a slimy cheat who drops every patient he knows is going to die from his care ahead of time.
• Everything Now: Mia had always been closer with her dad, so the fact he's the one who initiated divorcing her mom is a shock to her. She's very against it and believed her mom at first to be the instigator.
• In The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, America has idolized John Walker, who was turned into the new Captain America after Sam surrendered the shield to the Smithsonian and the US Government decided to make a new Captain America. All of this goes down the toilet when he's videotaped murdering a Flag-Smasher in cold blood with the shield and he's given an Other Than Honorable Discharge (meaning they're not tossing his ass in jail, but he's still losing all of his titles and his pension).
• Alex goes through this on Family Ties when he discovers that his Uncle Ned, who he idolized, is an alcoholic. And then he hit Alex.
• A strange inversion occurs in Farscape. Scorpius, the Big Bad who puts a lot of value on patience and planning, makes a big deal about the intelligence and cunning of John Crichton, his archnemesis, and sees him as a Worthy Opponent. Imagine the sheer disappointment when circumstances force Scorpius to become part of Crichton's crew, and he realises that all of Crichton's victories come from Indy Ploys so insane that he makes Indiana Jones look like The Chessmaster.
  • Played a bit straighter in other situations, usually involving the Peacekeepers:
    • Captain Durka was a legendary figure among the Peacekeepers, and his ship, Zelbenion, was rightly feared throughout the Uncharted Territories. Then it's eventually learned that Durka was actually a coward and probably psychotic as well, faking his own death and surrendering to the Nebari when they attacked his ship.
    • A later episode has Sub-Officer Dacon, a legendary Peacekeeper officer who sacrificed his life to safely end an assault on a monastery filled with nothing but women and children. When the crew gets accidentally sent back in time to this event, turns out Dacon is just a cook. He is a decent person though, and it turns out his commanding officer was the real hero of legend, so there's that.
• Fellow Travelers: In the early 1950s, millions of American Catholics regard Senator Joseph McCarthy as a saint, including Timothy Laughlin, who is initially very enthusiastic about working for his hero. However, over time, Tim notices the underhanded strategies that his employer and his team use to combat communism, which violate Tim's principles. He quits the job a couple of years later after he becomes disillusioned with the dark side of McCarthyism. Despite recognizing McCarthy's faults, Tim still feels some sadness after his former boss passes away.
  Hawkins Fuller: So, tell me what's bothering you. You can't be grieving for Tail Gunner Joe.
  Tim: At the end, I saw McCarthy for what he was. A rabble rouser, demagogue. (sighs) So why do I feel like I've lost someone?
  Hawk: Because you knew him. And you're a decent person.
  Tim: He believed in something. He had ideals. And even if they were misguided, he held them with passion. I used to have passion like that.
• The Flash (2014):
  • "Harrison Wells" becomes a pariah to most of the city after the particle accelerator explosion, but is venerated by every promising mind in the Arrowverse. Caitlin, Cisco, and Barry still look up to him as a hero and a mentor and Felicity and Ray admire him, but cracks start to appear in his pedestal when Hartley Rathaway returns seeking revenge on "Wells" for ruining his career after he discovered the particle accelerator was intended to fail. "Dr Wells" manages to retain their faith in him by finally owning up to his mistakes, but then the plot happens, and Barry starts to suspect that he is actually the Reverse Flash. Cisco and Caitlin are reluctant to believe him, but then it is revealed he is a villain and not Wells at all.
  • Eobard Thawne turned on The Flash when he discovered the two were "destined" to become enemies, and then he swore to be the Reverse-Flash.
  • "Jay Garrick", the Flash of Earth-2, became good friends with Team Flash, even starting a romance with Caitlin, while they try to defeat Zoom. When it appears he is killed by Zoom, Barry constructs a small monument to Jay, with his helmet in a glass case, vowing to honor him. Unfortunately, when they start noticing certain clues about Zoom, they have Cisco use his powers to confirm what they're figuring out... "Jay" is Zoom. It would later be revealed his real name is Hunter Zolomon, a serial killer who kidnapped the real Jay Garrick from another Earth and stole his identity, and has been making Barry get faster to steal his speed. In a literal sense of this trope, when Barry gets suspicious, he shatters the glass container on the pedestal Jay's helmet was resting on.
  • Barry Allen was seen by his fellow Arrowverse heroes as the paragon. However, after Zoom murders Henry Allen Barry creates a time aberration called "Flashpoint" to recover his parents, then he has to undo it all. Although Thawne agrees to undo Flashpoint, a few things were not quite the same. In the Invasion! event, Cisco forces Barry to confess his time aberration and almost everyone gets disappointed in him, excluding Supergirl, Felicity, Oliver, Martin, and Jax.
  • An intriguing turn in Season 5 where the breaking is intentional. When his grown daughter Nora arrives from the future, Barry helps her in his own time. Barry realizes that because he vanished when she was a child, Nora has grown up on stories of the Flash and seen him as nearly perfect. When she fails in a mission, Nora is beating herself up for how she has totally failed her father's legacy. Barry shows her video of his first few years to illustrate he made tons of mistakes with his speed and misjudgements. Nora thus realizes the Flash isn't so perfect but it actually lets her appreciate her father more.
• For All Mankind: Margo is very close with Werhner von Braun, who serves as her mentor, and it's heavily implied that she sees him as a surrogate father. When the full extent of von Braun's Nazi affiliations are exposed, Margo is extremely shocked and hurt by the revelation and refuses to talk to him until she's forced to years later.
• Played with on Frasier; after discovering that his mentor and Roz are having a relationship, Frasier believes he's experiencing this (and it's not helped by the fact that he saw his mentor wearing nothing but Roz's robe) but he comes to realize that it's actually jealousy that Roz has become attracted to someone very similar to him whilst having never demonstrated any kind of attraction towards him.
  Roz: Frasier, did you ever stop to think there may be something special about not being picked?
  Frasier: Roz, that didn't work when I was cut from pee-wee football, it's not gonna work now.
  • While struggling with this issue, Frasier confides in his father who reveals he went through something similar. One day he saw his commanding officer from the army working at a fast food place as a burger-flipper. After going through his own turmoil over seeing someone he respected in a menial job, Martin realised the man was still the same hard-as-nails guy he'd always been...so Martin never ate at that fast food place again.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Jon's discovery that the Night's Watch is an Army of Thieves and Whores rather than the ancient and noble order he believed them to be. He is even more disappointed to learn the Lord Commander turns a blind eye to Craster's depravity because he's too valuable an asset.
  • Sansa idolizes Cersei ("I'll be a queen just like you!") until the events of "Baelor" and "Fire and Blood".
  • Daenerys always assumed (as her brother believed) that the rumours about her father's madness were just Malicious Slander until Barristan explains they are true. Later, she tells Tyrion that if she ever returns to Westeros, she will not return to the old form of feudalism that created something like her father and that she will break from her family traditions as well. That doesn't happen.
  • Olly clearly idolizes Jon but is definitely not pleased to learn Jon really means to ally with the wildlings since his entire village was slaughtered by them.
  • Bran is disappointed when his visions of the past reveal that his father Ned stood no chance against Arthur Dayne in their duel and Ned only won because Howland Reed stabbed Dayne in the back. Ned had earlier told him that he had defeated Dayne in single combat. He is even more stunned to learn that his father lied to everyone about Jon Snow's parentage in order to protect Jon — who is actually Ned's nephew and the son of Ned's sister Lyanna.
  • Robb breaking his marriage vows ended up causing him to become this to his men in the third season.
  • Stannis is this to Davos, especially after he learnt that he agreed with Melisandre to sacrifice Shireen.
  • After training under the Maesters of Oldtown for a while, Sam Tarly gets fed up and leaves when they don't take his warnings about the White Walkers and the Army of the Dead seriously and reveal they have no interest in using their knowledge to improve society, only in maintaining the status quo.
  • Downplayed with Rhaegar Targaryen. Oberyn had made fun of all of Elia's suitors but even he was taken by Rhaegar's charisma and good looks. He became rightfully angry when Rhaegar spurned Elia and absconded with Lyanna Stark. In the "Conquest and Rebellion" series, Jaime, as well, thought that Rhaegar could have been a better ruler than Aerys II until his affair with Lyanna which made him conclude that Rhaegar is not so different than his father.
    Oberyn: My sister loved him. She bore his children. Swaddled them, rocked them, fed them at her own breast. Elia wouldn't let the wet nurse touch them. And beautiful, noble Rhaegar Targaryen... left her for another woman.
• Gilmore Girls: Rory Gilmore's worst nightmare is meeting CNN's Christiana Amanpour and finding out she's stupid.
• On The Good Fight Maia Rindell is rocked when her father is arrested for running a massive Ponzi scheme. At first thinking he might be innocent, Maia realizes he is guilty and stole the life savings of thousands of people (including Maia's godmother, Diane) which leads to Maia's own life ruined. Worse, Maia discovers that not only did her mother know about what her father was doing but has been sleeping with Maia's uncle.
  • Even bigger is in Season 3 when Adrian and Liz Reddick discover Liz's father, Carl Reddick, Adrian's mentor and a beloved icon of social justice for decades sexually harassing and exploiting multiple subordinates. They simply can't believe a man who fought so hard for equality of others could treat women in his employ as sexual toys.
• Gossip Girl (2021): Julien feels betrayed and horrified to find out her dad, who she loves dearly, is a serial date rapist after she had initially believed his claims of innocence.
• In Growing Pains, Ben is devastated to find out that his favorite rock singer (Brad Pitt in an early role), who he believed to be a nice guy devoted to his wife, is actually an ill-tempered serial cheater.
• On Hawaii Five-0, medical examiner Noelani is kidnapped by gangsters who also hold her long-time mentor, Dr. Chu. The two are being forced to work on a surgery for one gangster's father. When Noelani tries to escape, Chu pulls a gun on her. It turns out that after being forced to take the fall for a malpractice suit at her hospital, Chu has become an underground surgeon for crooks. Noelani lays into her how "I looked up to you more than my own mother" and heartbroken her mentor turned out this way. Even after Chu sacrifices herself to save Noelani's life, Noelani can only cry over her body on "you think you know someone..."
• On Heroes, Hiro grew up being told of the legendary samurai warrior Takezo Kensei and his incredible battles against evil. When he actually travels back to the past and meets him, however, he discovers that the great Takezo Kensei is actually a Dirty Coward Con Man (who's not even Japanese). And then he gets back to the present day and it gets worse: Kensei, who is still alive in the 21st century, is the season's Big Bad. However, the trope is ultimately subverted when it's revealed that the legend of Takezo Kensei was actually based on Hiro all along.
• Hightown:
  • Jackie is very close with her dad. So when he urges her to flirt with a dealer for drugs after using all his money, she looks quite betrayed and distraught before refusing.
  • Later, she's also shaken to learn that Ray, who'd inspired her becoming a cop, is pretty corrupt himself.
• Himitsu no Hanazono (2007): Yoh Kataoka idolized his father, Ryo and was inspired by him to be a mangaka under the pen name Yuriko Hanazono because he was a successful painter. Yoh then finds out that Ryo isn't his actual father, and even worse, he didn't actually make those paintings - they were made by Minoru Noguchi, Ryo's deceased friend who also happens to be Yoh's true father. Angered, Yoh set fire to the works of both of his fathers.
• Homicide: Life on the Street:
  • In "Partners", Russert is overjoyed when her old partner and best friend Douglas Jones joins the Homicide Unit, and the two partners up again. She's horrified when she discovers he's been physically abusing his wife and won't take responsibility for it, even telling him he's no different than the numerous domestic abusers they arrested together.
  • In "I've Got A Secret", Bayliss comes to admire a doctor for doing everything in her power to save her patients, and admits to Pembleton that she saves lives where he and his partner can't change the tragic murders they investigate. He eventually discovers she murdered the Victim of the Week by deliberately sabotaging his surgery, as her husband had recently been injured during a mugging and the victim had been a burglar, much to Bayliss's horror.
• House of the Dragon: Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower become estranged after she learns of Alicent's betrothal to King Viserys. After three years of being queen, she is still distant with Rhaenyra despite her attempts to rebuild their old relationship. However, their relationship becomes a Rebuilt Pedestal as Rhaenyra realizes Alicent had no choice in the matter and admits she misses their old friendship. Alicent even furiously defends Rhaenyra at every turn, slowly earning Rhaenyra's trust back. However, the pedestal begins to chip once she's told that the Maester brought Rhaenyra Fantasy Contraception tea at the request of the King, and it breaks permanently when Alicent discovers that, while Daemon didn't take her virginity, Ser Criston Cole did, and Rhaenyra had lied to her. This all takes place against the backdrop of her father's warnings that unless she 100% unquestionably trusts Rhaenyra, she better start fending for herself.
• Horatio Hornblower:
  • In "The Examination For Lieutenant / The Fire Ships", Horatio is a wide-eyed admirer of Living Legend Captain "Dreadnought" Foster, whose nickname says it all, and thinks that the Indefatigable could stand to follow his fighting example. Then, after he ends up commanding a supply ship that is also under quarantine, Foster insists on taking provisions from it before the period is up. Hornblower realizes that Foster is just a Fearless Fool who disregards the lives of everyone around him as well as his own.
  • Captain Sawyer in the second series. Horatio notes bitterly that he and Archie got totally drunk in celebration when they learned they would be serving under him and have learned painfully that despite his past heroism, Sawyer is now The Paranoiac verging on insanity. Lieutenant Bush similarly arrives full of admiration for Sawyer, but over the course of the episode sees the destructive effect his behavior has on the ship.
• In Hyperdrive, Henderson idolises the Show Within a Show Captain Helix, and finally gets to meet the actor only to find out that he's an alien spy who's hypnotised Henderson into stealing Britain's new superweapon.
• The opening episode of Imposters has Ezra discovering his new bride, Ava, is a con artist who just took him for everything. His father wants to go after her but Ezra says if they do, Ava will reveal the contents of a folder. He slaps it down before his father, who he's worked for and admired for years and the man blanches saying "no one has to know."
  Ezra: Know what? That you've been cheating on Mom for 20 years? With a woman named... what is it? Chanterelle? ...Or that you stole the patent for the Bloom heel from Uncle Joe?
  • Maddie works with Max and Sally, a pair of older grifters who took her under their wing, working cons and teaching her the ropes. Maddie especially sees Max as an almost father figure. She's thus devastated when she learns Max sold Sally out to the ruthless Lenny, knowing she'd be killed and did it without hesitation to save his own skin and just shrugging it off as "rules of the game."
• Innocent: Yusuf's opinion of his mentor and former police chief Cevdet deteriorates over the course of the series. He even discusses this trope as he tries to persuade him to do the right thing, warning he will fall in the eyes of others if he doesn't.
  Yusuf: You're a hero in that station. Don't walk in there in handcuffs.
• Intergalactic: Ash has to suffer a lot of this, realizing that the Commonworld that she serves is a brutal, vicious regime that's oppressing outworld settlers, along with her parents both being quite ruthless (plus her mother lying to her that her father is still alive).
• In Jupiter's Legacy, Sheldon's father kills himself right in front of Sheldon. Sheldon later finds out his father had been doing some dirty dealings to keep the company running and has used the employee pension plan to fund company expansion. When the stock market crashes, all of it is wiped out and hundreds of their workers are left with no jobs and no savings. He then kills himself leaving his sons to deal with the mess and bear the brunt of the hatred their family receives. Sheldon is shattered by this and it is the basis of the Utopian's uncompromising Black-and-White Morality.
• Kamen Rider Gaim has a self-inflicted version of this: Micchy starts off the series viewing Kouta as the big brother he never had. Unfortunately, then they get caught in a Love Triangle: both Kouta and Micchy like their teammate Mai, but she obviously likes Kouta. As a result, Micchy starts gradually changing his view of Kouta, viewing him as a naive idiot whose idealism only causes trouble. This leads to Micchy pulling a full Face–Heel Turn, to the point where it looks like he's going to become the show's Big Bad. However, Kouta never stops viewing Micchy as his friend even after he finds out, and his Heroic Sacrifice to save Micchy from a life-draining Lockseed is what starts Micchy's path to redemption. It's ultimately subverted, as at the end of the series they're even stronger friends than they were at the start, and Micchy follows the example Kouta set with his determination to protect all his friends, even supposed "lost causes" like himself.
  • In Kamen Rider Zero-One, Gai Amatsu/Kamen Rider Thouser had Korenosuke Hiden as his idol in the A.I. industry. However due to their conflicting views on how A.I. technology should be used, with Korenosuke refusing to collaborate with ZAIA as a result, as well as having his grandson Aruto Hiden/Kamen Rider Zero-One named as his Unexpected Successor, Gai makes it part of his vendetta to take over and surpass everything Korenosuke left behind, which includes turning his beloved HumaGears into Magia while framing Hiden Intelligence up for a takeover bid, as well as creating his own Kamen Rider to outperform Zero-One in all aspects.
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent:
  • Goren doesn't find it especially hard to believe that his FBI profiler mentor might also be the Serial Killer who kidnapped his partner. The twist reveals the killer is actually the profiler's daughter, who washed out of the FBI and wants to disprove her father's theory that women can't be Serial Killers (let's just say he couldn't leave the shop talk at work and she liked to use his recordings of people being tortured as a test for prospective high school boyfriends before getting intimate with them) in a desperate bid to get his attention. Needless to say, it worked.
  • Then, in a later episode, said mentor helps Goren's archnemesis kill his younger brother, and then kills her himself, in order to do Goren a favor. Goren doesn't understand it either.
• Law & Order: Organized Crime: Stabler looks up to his late father, who'd been in the NYPD too, although they didn't see entirely eye to eye on how police should operate. He speaks proudly of the fact that his father had once been awarded for Taking the Bullet to save his partner. Donnelly, a dirty cop who runs a gang of other corrupt cops like him, later tells him that his father had in fact covered up his partner's mistaken killing of an unarmed suspect, shooting himself to make it look like self-defense. Stabler is visibly shaken and disturbed by this revelation. It gets worse when he learns his father was corrupt in general, and abused his mother too.
• In an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Stabler enlists the help of his mentor, a retired astronaut and his oldest son's namesake, to help investigate the murder of another astronaut. The investigation stalls until an offhand statement by his son triggers a Eureka moment for Stabler, who realizes it was his mentor himself who killed her.
• Legends of Tomorrow:
  • Professor Martin Stein meets his idol Albert Einstein via time travel... and is dismayed to find he is an obnoxious Dirty Old Man, plus he stole many of his ideas from his ex-wife. Stein ends up punching him out (to save his life).
  • Lifelong crook Mick Rory is jarred when he realizes legendary pirate Blackbeard is a coward who doesn't hesitate to give up secrets or sell out his own crew to save his own skin.
• In a sketch on Little Britain, Sebastian (in love with his boss, the Prime Minister) is asked to destroy some secret papers which reveal that the Prime Minister reneged on a disarmament pact. Sebastian obeys, but sadly whispers "I thought you were perfect ..."
• Logan's Run: In "The Judas Goat", Logan, Jessica, and Rem meet the first successful Runner Matthew 12, who escaped from the City of Domes six years earlier. Jessica, who knew him very vaguely before his escape, tells him that he is an inspiration to the resistance because his example proved to them that the Sandmen's power was not absolute. However, Matthew has set himself up as the leader of a primitive group of people, treating them as if they were his personal slaves. They refer to him as "the Provider" since he was able to reactivate some of the disused computer technology in their settlement. Matthew forces them to patrol the area on a daily basis to ensure that Sandmen will not be able to find him. He later refuses to allow the Runners to leave as he is concerned that they will reveal his location to the Sandmen if they are captured.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: King Durin III becomes very disappointed to hear his son declaring that Elrond, and Elf, is like a brother to him, so disappointed that he disinherits his own heir.
• Lost Love in Times: Yuan Che admires and looks up to his father. This changes when Yuan An turns against Yuan Ling, falsely accuses him of rebelling, and imprisons Yuan Che to lure Yuan Ling back to the palace.
• Sally Draper in Mad Men idealizes her father Don over her mother Betty. This changes catastrophically when she breaks into the apartment of a young man she has a crush on and finds Don having sex with the boy's mother.
• Making History (2017): History teacher Chris is heartbroken to actually meet some of his idols and heroes and find out that they're kind of jackasses and not the larger-than-life figures he expected. Reaches its breaking point when his hero John Hancock tricks him into urine.
• The episode "Fallen Idol" of M*A*S*H. Hawkeye has to leave the O.R., due to a hangover. This breaks the pedestal Radar (and, according to Radar, many others as well) has put Hawkeye on. Hawkeye, on the other hand, does not want to have the stress of being someone's idol. (Just in this episode; normally, Hawkeye would not mind).
• From Merlin, Arthur is a huge "Well Done, Son" Guy who's basically spent his entire life having it hammered into him that whatever he does, his father Uther does it better. After about three years of ruling as king, he gets a chance to contact Uther from the otheworld, who immediately reams him out on all the "stupid" decisions he's made to bring equality to the land. Arthur's heartbroken, and accidentally lets Uther's spirit free, who proceeds to wreck the Round Table, attack Percival with an ax, and tries to set Guinevere on fire. Arthur's in denial for a lot of this, but he finally breaks and realizes just how terrible a man his father was.
  • Mordred also experiences this in early series 5, when he is reunited with Morgana, only to discover that the kind woman who saved him when he was a young child is now practically mad with hatred. He ends up stabbing her in the back (literally) to prevent her from killing Arthur.
• Midsomer Murders: Barnaby is extremely fond of Plummer's relish at the start of "Sauce for the Goose", having had it since he was a boy. By the end, however, he's gone quite off it.
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers had this happen in the episode "Rita's Pita." One of Tommy's karate students, Danny, looks up to Tommy. That is until Rita plants a monster inside Tommy's stomach that makes him crave nothing but junk food. Danny is pretty upset about this, especially since Tommy just gave him a big speech about the importance of healthy eating. When Tommy gets the monster out of him, he apologizes to Danny for the way he acted, and Danny's respect for his teacher returns.
• Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries: Georges Sanderson to Jack, in the second-to-last episode of the second season when he discovers the revered police inspector was turning a blind eye to a human trafficking ring who committed murder to keep his position. Likewise, the man's own daughter is disgusted with what he was doing.
  Jack: I looked up to you George. I respected you...
• In an episode of the 80s Mission: Impossible revival, Russell Acker — one of the founders of the Impossible Missions Force and creator of the latex mixture used for the IMF trademark masks — has started killing women and built a frame by getting caught on tape while wearing a Jim Phelps mask.
• Monk: Though not quite a mentor, a child actress from Monk's childhood favorite TV show the only TV show he ever watched and the only thing that made him happy as a child ("'The Cooper Clan' was my other family. Heck, the Coopers were my family, my family was my other family") wrote a tell-all memoir about her very sordid life and the lives of her costars. There wasn't enough Brain Bleach to help Monk after reading it. Not only that, the child star herself is later revealed to be a murderer.
• Murder in the First: Police captain Ernie Knubbins, whom Terry had respected and looked up to, is revealed to be the "head man" of the corrupt police group called the Union.
• The Murders: Kate was always closest to her father, and followed him into the police force. She's devastated to learn he went along with his partner planting evidence, crying as her mother confesses what he'd done.
• On Murphy Brown, Murphy is happy to interview Nick Brody (Martin Sheen), a counter-culture icon of the 1960s whose book taking on "the establishment" inspired numerous people like Murphy to fight back. The interview starts with Brody snapping on how terrible Ronald Reagan was as a President and Murphy smiles... only to hear Brody's complaint that Reagan was too liberal. He then slams "the liberal wimp in Republican clothing" George Bush. Murphy is utterly stunned to hear this ultra-liberal icon spouting the most right-wing rhetoric imaginable ("fairies in the military, you know what that's done to my defense industry stocks?"). He also slams his book as nothing but "the rantings of a snot-nose kid who had no idea what the real world is like" and is only happy it made him a ton of money. Murphy can just sit horrified to realize one of her most loved heroes of the 1960s has become the most right-wing guy imaginable (even calling Pat Buchanan "the most enlightened figure since Moses."). To top it all off, she had once slept with Brody back in the '60s and it turns out he always thought "that hot blonde was Diane Sawyer."
  • It does lead to a discussion where Frank admits that he does think "some folks on welfare could work harder to get more jobs." Murphy is then pushed to admit that she's worried about hits to her income due to taxes, wanting more police presence for her kid, and "at 7-11, trying to buy pampers and wishing everyone could just speak English." Thus, Murphy basically realizes she'd be a Broken Pedestal to her own past self.
• A Cool Teacher arrives in My So-Called Life who challenges and inspires the students, but after a few days, he's carted off by the cops for some skeletons in his closet.
• Subversion: Former Special agent Mike Franks, NCIS, mentor of Agent Gibbs. Something of a jackass, but a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, though a very small heart of gold and a HUGE jerk. Some of Gibbs's more notable mannerisms came from him, but the main difference is he retired, Gibbs didn't (not permanently, anyway).
  • This trope is the basis for Gibbs' Rule #73: "Never meet your heroes."
• Never Have I Ever: Eleanor thinks her mother's absence is justified by her living her dreams on glamorous cruises. She's actually waiting tables in town and never bothered to check in on her daughter all the while.
• The Night Agent: Peter is very unhappy to learn his father really was guilty, since he's always believed in his innocence.
• In Nip/Tuck, Sean's old teacher, Dr. Grayson, shows up as a pathetic alcoholic performing underground surgery on transsexuals in a filthy apartment.
• Odd Squad:
  • In the Season 2 finale, it's revealed that Otis is a former villain who was Happily Adopted by a group of ducks. As a young child, he admired his family and went along with what they were doing, but as he got older he realized that the ducks were villainous and frequently harassed people for the fun of it. It came to a head when Brother Quack, the leader of the ducks, shared plans with Otis to build a machine that would move the Earth closer to the sun in order to prevent winter from coming permanently, and Otis realized that his sibling and father figure was going to inadvertently kill all life on Earth. He betrayed his family, got the help of Odd Squad, and stopped the machine from being activated, but it came at the heavy cost of Otis being emotionally broken for years to come, developing an Absurd Phobia of ducks out of fear that his family would come back to hurt him despite being hundreds of miles apart. By "Odds and Ends", however, he ends up reconciling with Brother Quack and the rest of his duck family, who realizes that he was just trying to protect them all, and the familial bonds are restored.
  • Deconstructed in "Jeremy". The episode revolves around the eponymous fan, who is revealed to idolize Odd Squad, and by extension the Mobile Unit — moreso after they help him and his family destroy some vegetables that had turned evil. When the group gets back to their van, they end up inadvertently putting it in lockdown mode after forgetting the code needed to unlock it, and the situation is made worse when Jeremy suddenly appears next to them, wanting to take a picture of them flying away and inquiring about their van's strange appearance. Oswald begins to tell him the reason why their vehicle is covered in armor but is cut off by Opal, who begins giving Blatant Lies to Jeremy to distract him before discussing a course of action with her teammates. Orla outright tells Opal that she doesn't want to admit even the Mobile Unit makes mistakes and it would break her heart to do so, contrary to Opal's reasoning that she doesn't want to tell Jeremy about the van because it would break his heart. As Orla and Oswald attempt to unlock the van, Opal and Omar take the helm in preventing Jeremy from finding out the truth and distracting him. Opal is eventually forced to admit the truth when a villain known as Monsieur Papier-Mache attacks the Mobile Unit, getting Orla and Oswald captured. However, Jeremy isn't upset in the slightest and says that regardless of if they make mistakes or not, he will always look up to them. He ends up helping to defeat Monsieur Papier-Mache and gets a recommendation to the Odd Squad Academy courtesy of Opal herself.
  • In "It's Not Easy Being Chill", Omar attempts to defy the trope as he gains a fan by the name of Orpita, a young agent-in-training from the Odd Squad Academy who is onboard the Mobile Unit van as part of an assignment to write her Agent Report on an agent she admires. While both of them are very laid-back and don't care for rules, Omar is hesitant about letting Orpita do what she wants, which includes feeding a creature that the group is transporting, but as soon as she makes a note of him being more of a "rules guy" (which could be interpreted as her viewing him as a broken pedestal), he gives in and allows her to feed it. Eventually, he begins to develop stress and anxiety over Orpita consistently screwing her one job up, and it bites him when the creature gets loose from its cage. By the end of the episode, Orpita becomes enamored with Opal and Orla instead after seeing them take off to feed the right amount of food to the creature and shifts the focus of her Agent Report to them instead of Omar.
• Once Upon a Time:
  • This happens after Henry realizes that his mother Emma lied to him about the identity and the fate of his father Baelfire.
  • Snow White's mother becomes this to her when she discovers that she wasn't always the kind person she was, being a spoiled brat in her teenage years and her callous treatment of her servants led to one of them, Regina's mother Cora, eventually becoming enemies against her and her family and unwittingly resulting in much of the trouble that's occurred in the series.
  • This happens with Emma in Season 4 after she learns that her parents, Snow White and Prince Charming, often idolized as paragons of perfection attempted to ensure their daughter's goodness by expelling her potential for darkness into an innocent child conceived about the same time.
  • Hook three times in Season 5. First with Emma, who turns him into a Dark One against his will and tries enslaving him with Excalibur, pushing his Berserk Button. Then in the mid-season finale. Young Killian Jones is rocked to find out his father had abandoned his sons and sold them into servitude. Especially when earlier on in the episode, he told his father "I want to be just like you".Then later with Liam, who as it turns out was more flawed and less noble than Killian had thought he was.
• Paper Girls: Erin is jarred to see the older version of her sister Missy, who she always thought of as a cool and amazing girl, now turned into a colder woman who was barely there for her or their mother.
• Part of Me: Camila had issues with her mother, who tended to prioritize her career over her family, but still loved and admired her. But after her death, when she learns that her mother's will (which Elena faked) assigned most of her fortune to Gerardo and left her and Emiliana almost penniless, she starts wondering if her mother ever loved her at all. But by the end of the story, she learns that it was Elena's villainy all along and gets a Rebuilt Pedestal of her mother.
• The Partridge Family plays this for laughs in "Me And My Shadow." When the money-grubbing Danny finds out a wealthy author deliberately lost a contest so he would have to donate $25,000 to the Children's Home, he says, "Another idol bites the dust."
• The Power (2023): Roxy is horrified to learn that her dad arranged her mom's murder. She'd looked up to and loved him, while even wanting to join his crime family.
• A villainous example from Prison Break. Kellerman sees Caroline Reynolds as a cool and effective boss, a brilliant mastermind, and follows her believing she can change the country for the better (the fact he has a huge crush on her helps). In Season 2, being cut out of her main circle soon leads Kellerman to realize that rather than being the boss, Reynolds is nothing but a pawn for the Company and has little real power of her own.
• Shawn and Gus from Psych see a bounty hunter (played by Hercules) bringing in a thug in the prologue of "Bounty Hunters" (Season 2 Episode 9), and immediately decide he's the coolest thing on the planet. Then he turns his head and winks at them, taking a level in awesome, and the Hero Worship begins in earnest. Years later (i.e. later that same episode) they meet him again and it turns out he's a complete douche, the "wink" was just a tic, and he even tries to kill Shawn and Gus near the end of the episode.
• Queen Sugar:
  • Charley and Micah both feel way this toward Davis after his sexual assault of an escort is uncovered.
  • Micah toward Nova after learning that she is dating a white cop, even though she wrote an article exposing the racism and corruption in the same police force her boyfriend worked for.
  • Romero toward Charley after he learns that she forced migrant workers to work through a hurricane, ultimately leading to two deaths.
• The Rising: Alex is devastated while thinking her dad murdered Neve, since she'd always sought his approval.
• Riverdale:
  • Cheryl Blossom loved her twin brother Jason and clearly thought the best of him. When Veronica is "slut-shamed" by a football player, she discovers other girls at the school also were and they share how the players kept a book "keeping score" of their conquests. Cheryl rejects the idea as Jason would have told her given how they shared everything. She joins Betty and Veronica to discover that not only does the book exist but Jason's name is all over it with several conquests, including Betty's sister Polly, who suffered a breakdown after their encounter. Cheryl (who had long thought Polly a crazy ex-girlfriend) is rocked to realize her brother wasn't this saintly man and apologizes to Betty for what he did and what she thought of Polly.
  • Veronica Lodge believed her father was being set up on charges of corruption and imprisoned falsely. She also accepted her mother as a moral compass helping her get through it. Veronica soon discovers that her father is not only guilty but, from his prison cell, is still running his plan to devalue the real estate of Riverdale so he can "tear it down and start over." Worse, her mother not only knew of her father's corruption but is helping him in his scheme.
  • Jughead discovers his grandfather Forsythe was the creator of a mega-hit best-selling mystery series and believes the "original" author stole it from him. Jughead is determined to right this wrong and honor his grandfather's legacy. Jughead eventually finds Forsythe living in a trailer. His grandfather explains his work was never stolen; rather, he couldn't figure out what to do with the first book so sold it for a mere $5000 dollars. It's clear that his anger at himself for giving up millions drove him to drink and abusing his son with Jughead realizing his grandfather was no wronged artist but a troubled and selfish man.
  • As revealed in the Villain Episode "Citizen Lodge", Hiram in his youth used to work for an Italian gangster whom he clearly idolized. But when the gangster killed his father and left town, Hiram lost all respect for his boss and was bent on revenge, eventually becoming the Corrupt Corporate Executive he is today.
• In Season 3, Episode 8 of BBC's Robin Hood series, Robin's mentor appears, having agreed to help Prince John fake out the people of Nottingham with a lifelike wax dummy of King Richard, pretending that he's died. His reason for treason falls to Never Remove a Blood Knight From The Battlefield. He is taken off active duty because Richard believes he's gotten too old but is given the prestigious position of guarding the crown jewels. Despite his age, he nearly bests Robin when they fight, but is unprepared for the guerrilla tactics Robin has developed in his absence.
• Room 104: "The Murderer"; A small group of friends gather to hear a mini concert from a legendary musician who dropped off the radar decades earlier. When the guy shows up he's a drunken, disheveled mess, and his songs strongly imply that he's guilty of murdering his mother. The friends proceed to beat the shit out of him and leave.
• Saved by the Bell has this a few times:
  • The gang is happy to have movie star Johnny Dakota come to the school to shoot an anti-drug ad. Lisa is tongue-tied, Zack finds Johnny cool and Kelly goes with him to a party. But there, she finds Johnny smoking pot and the gang realize the guy is a huge hypocrite and refuse to do the shoot.
  • Mr. Belding's brother Rod comes to teach the class and shows himself as a really cool guy. Zack especially loves his attitude and how he doesn't put too much strict stuff in teaching and leading the kids on a camping trip. Before that happens, Zack overhears a fight between Belding and Rod where Rod is blowing off the trip for a hot date. It comes out that Rod has a long history of slacking off responsibility and doesn't care how the kids will be hurt by him not coming along. Belding covers by claiming Rod is sick and he'll lead the trip but Zack knows the truth.
    Belding: I guess Rod always was the cooler Belding.
    Zack: Maybe. But we got the better Belding.
  • In the College Years spin-off, Zack and the gang are happily hanging out with a legendary player from the college. Until he turns out to be a total jerk who kicks Kelly out of a limo when she refuses his advances.
• Scrubs does this a lot, usually JD reversing one of Dr Cox's pieces of wisdom back on him. Though Cox was a dick from day one.
  • Subverted, however, in the episode My Fallen Idol, where JD convinces himself that he's furious and disgusted with Cox for being a hypocrite about the advice he gave JD in the previous episode "My Lunch" after accidentally killing three patients, and then coming in to work stinking drunk the next day. However, JD gradually realizes that he actually doesn't care about what Cox did at all, and in fact admires the fact that even after years as a doctor, a patient's death could still affect Cox that deeply — he was just terrified over the idea of his tough, unshakable mentor being so badly shaken, and was using the things he did as an excuse to avoid him.
• For most of Season 1 of Sense8, the protagonists deeply respect the last surviving members of the cluster that created them: Angelica, who birthed their sensate abilities and then killed herself to prevent BPO from getting to them through her, and Jonas, Angelica's former lover who helps them understand and refine their new powers. Season 2 reveals that Angelica was a high-ranking official at BPO who developed the technology that allows them to turn sensates into zombie drones and, using said technology, indirectly killed all of the first cluster she birthed, and has Jonas sell the protagonists out to BPO in order to save his own ass. Though Jonas later redeems himself when he blows up BPO headquarters from the inside to protect the main cluster.
• Slow Horses':
  • In a way, every agent of the Slough House went into MI-5 thinking the best of the agency and those running it. They soon discovered how bloated it was in bureaucracy as well as supposedly respected leaders willing to break every law and even sacrifice agents for their own game.
  • In the Season 3 finale, River is jarred that his grandfather, David Cartwright, who inspired him to join the Service, burns a file proving corruption in the high places, telling River it's better the public not know. As it turns out, River already made a copy, seemingly expecting his grandfather to act this way but still disappointed he did it.
  • Catherine snaps at Lamb on his terrible attitude toward her, saying Lamb is horrible compared to her former boss, Charles Partner, always cared for her, even choosing not to report Catherine's alcoholism and a friend. Fed up, Lamb informs Catherine that Partner was a traitor selling secrets to the Russians, not for ideology but just money. The only reason he kept Catherine around was because he knew her drinking would prevent her from seeing the proof of his treason. Oh, yes, and before his untimely demise, Partner was prepared to frame Catherine for his own crimes. While she claims not to believe him, Catherine is jarred as she knows Lamb wouldn't lie about this.
• The Spencer Sisters: Darby is very unhappy to learn her deceased dad, whom she adored, was actually abusive toward her mom. She's also mad at her mom for keeping it a secret. Her mom initially hadn't told Darby precisely because she wanted to spare Darby learning this.
• The Ancients, big time, in Stargate SG-1 and its related spinoffs. At first, everyone practically hero-worships them and desperately wants to learn more about them, even meet them, if at all possible. However, after a number of demonstrations of just how badly they ended up screwing up (e.g. the creation of the Wraith... and the Pegasus Replicators... and the way that the Ascended Ancients let Anubis do more or less as he wished so long as he didn't use his ascended powers), plus their general apparent apathy as Ascended beings, most of the cast end up rather soured on them. And that's before a surviving ship full of Ancients turns up and unceremoniously boots the Expedition out of Atlantis. As Teyla observes, her people, the Athosians, found 'the Ancestors' to be a grave disappointment.
• In the Starsky & Hutch episode "Birds of a Feather," Hutch finds out that his old mentor Luke Huntley, who was the reason Hutch became a cop in the first place, has been trading information to criminals in order to pay off his wife's gambling debts.
• In Star Trek: The Original Series, just about anybody Captain Kirk admired, especially in his Academy days:
  • In "Patterns of Force" John Gill interfered in a society and patterned it after Nazi Germany, hoping to organize them. (He had planned to leave out some negative aspects, but things did not go that way.)
  • In "Whom Gods Destroy", Kirk encounters the famous Captain Garth, who has taken over an asylum and plots to steal the Enterprise. He gets better, but things are dicey for a time.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • Occurs retroactively in the episode "The Pegasus". The eponymous starship was Riker's first post-Academy assignment. The ship's former captain (now an admiral) was conducting illegal cloaking-device experiments until the crew mutinied. Riker defended his captain and helped cover up the truth later. When said admiral comes back to retrieve said device, Riker admits that, given a second chance, he would have joined the mutineers instead (a claim he gets to fulfill in spirit later on).
    Riker: I wasn't a hero, and neither were you! What you did was wrong, and I was wrong to support you, but I was too young and too stupid to realize it! You were the captain; I was the ensign. I was just following orders.
  • Happens also in "The Drumhead" — Picard is initially thrilled to have the revered Admiral Satie on board to assist their investigation into a possible saboteur on the Enterprise, but his pedestal is quickly broken when Satie starts ruthlessly persecuting his crew, including the captain himself.
  • "The Wounded" reveals that during the Cardassian War, O'Brien served on the Rutledge under Captain Maxwell, whom he greatly admired. After the war's end, however, Maxwell launches a series of rogue attacks that threaten to reignite the war. O'Brien refuses to believe that his former captain has gone bad, however, figuring that the Cardassians must be up to something that would justify Maxwell's actions. It's not until near the end of the episode that O'Brien admits that what Maxwell did was wrong.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
  • We get Admiral Leyton, whom Sisko served under and admired... until he tries to usurp power and declare martial law.
  • Then we learn that Odo had not always placed justice first and three innocent Bajorans were executed as a result.
  • And Admiral Ross works with Section 31!
  • Played straight and subverted in "Valiant": Nog meets Red Squad, the elite Cadet group from Starfleet (whom he adored) and they are stubborn, hubris-filled, and intolerant, and get themselves killed, with Nog, Jake, and one female cadet barely escaping. However, the young woman still maintains her blind admiration of the group's leader, Tim Watters, refusing to accept that he was responsible for the whole disaster.
  • Sisko gets to play the role himself once, to the audience. The entire episode uses a Framing Device of a log over the past week or so. During this week, he lied, broke laws, and was an accessory to murder in his quest to bring the Romulans into the Dominion War on the side of the Federation.
  • An in-universe example, Kor (one of the Original Klingons) joins Worf and General Martok on a raid in Dominion space. He is able to captivate the crew with tales of fighting the Federation. However, during the battle with the Dominion, when command falls to Kor, he believes he is fighting the Federation with his long-deceased friend Kang. This nearly destroys the ship.
  • Kai Opaka, a wise spiritual leader of Bajor until her death, once provided the Cardassians with the location of a Bajoran resistance cell so they could destroy it. She did this because she believed it was the best option — had she not given up the rebels, the Cardassians would have obliterated the entire area, killing thousands of others — but Kira is still shocked and disgusted to learn that such a beloved figure had aided the regime that enslaved their people. When details of this secret threatened to become public knowledge, Vedek Bareil decided to take the blame rather than allow Opaka's reputation and legacy to be tarnished, even though doing so utterly destroyed his own chances of becoming Kai and meant Vedek Winn was free to take the position for herself.
  • In a Peter David-written novel, Kira and Ro work together to stop a plague hitting Bajor and Kira seeks an old trusted member of the resistance. She's stunned when the man first demands payment in gold for his help and then when Ro reveals the guy is into smuggling and even child slavery. At first, Kira thinks the guy had to be broken somehow by the war. However, meeting other former fighters into criminal behavior, Kira is forced to acknowledge that these people were never as high moral as she thought, they were always corrupt, and fighting the Cardassians was all they had in common.
• Star Trek: Voyager:
  • Janeway talks of how she was inspired to join Starfleet by the stories she'd been told of her ancestor, Shannon O'Donnell. Janeway speaks with pride on how Shannon single-handedly created a special Millennium Gate Tower against massive opposition and became a star at NASA. But going over some old Earth records, Janeway discovers the truth: Shannon was never an astronaut, she was only a consultant on the project and there was no organized opposition, just one very stubborn man by the name of Janeway. Chakotay points out that Janeway shouldn't be upset with Shannon as the woman had no idea she would have to live up to Janeway's expectations. Janeway tries to brush it off by saying her big concern is how to break it to her aunt that the great family legend is false.
  • Janeway also admired famed exobiologist Rudolph Ransom and got the chance to rescue his ship, the Equinox, which had also been stranded in the Delta Quadrant. It then turned out that Ransom and his crew were murdering sentient aliens and using them as fuel for their ship, prompting Janeway to go Captain Ahab on him.
  • Harry Kim is dismayed in one episode to learn from Tuvok that Capt. Sulu falsified reports and made false log entries during the events of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Janeway, more pragmatic, notes that Sulu, Kirk, and McCoy operated on an untamed frontier and were regarded as heroes, but in their current age of Starfleet would likely have been drummed out of the service.
• Star Trek: Enterprise:
  • T'Pol meets her hero, Ambassador V'Lar, who has just been accused of criminal misconduct. The pedestal collapses as V'Lar admits that "there is no defense" against the charges. Then it turns out that the charges were fabricated to draw attention from her mission to bring down a criminal syndicate, and she's a hero again.
  • One episode later, Archer finds himself on the pedestal when an alien named Zobral asks for his help in fighting a war, having heard how Archer defeated an entire army to save thousands of oppressed Suliban. He's disappointed to learn how exaggerated the stories are (Archer and his crew defeated a small Tandarin Redshirt Army to free 89 Suliban), and Archer tells him that even if the stories were accurate, that's not why he's out in space.
• Star Trek: Picard: The opening flashback of "Absolute Candor" shows that Picard used to be revered by the Romulan refugees on Vashti. After ignoring them for fourteen years, that reverence has faded to resentment, and a few of them are willing to kill him when he returns.
• In the Supergirl episode "Medusa", Kara discovers her father Zor-El is responsible for creating a bioweapon capable of killing any non-Kryptonians.
  • Kara is thrilled when William Dey is hired on to CatCo due to his long career as a journalist. It doesn't take long for Kara to realize Dey has basically thrown away his old standards in order to keep being employed. Not only is he a total Yes-Man for boss Andrea but is too willing to let his work be transformed from hard-hitting journalism to fluff pieces with little evidence because "they sell better with readers."
    • Subverted later when Kara finds William was just getting close to Andrea in order to break a major story on a conspiracy.
  • James returns to his hometown and has a reunion with Nelson Sturat, the man who taught him journalistic integrity. It's bad enough for James to hear Nelson say he doesn't want to investigate a corrupt prison as it's the only thing "keeping the town alive." It gets worse when he finds Nelson is involved with the whole thing to boot.
  • Winn idolized business mogul Maxwell Lord until Lord started speaking publicly against Supergirl.
• On Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye, Jack and Bobby are happy when their mentor Wes, who taught them everything about being great FBI agents, joins them on a case involving stolen uranium. When Wes appears to have been killed, the duo are naturally out to avenge him. When evidence comes up Wes faked his death, they assume he did it as part of the sting. Arriving at the big deal, Jack and Bobby are stunned when Wes confesses he's planning to take the money from the deal and vanish, unable to live with a lousy desk job under an arrogant boss who expects them to look the other way. Wes ends up taking a bullet for Bobby and Bobby and Jack put out the story Wes was working on his own investigation so he's remembered as a hero. While clearly suspecting the truth, the rest of the team doesn't press it, knowing it's hard for Jack and Bobby to handle that a man who loved the FBI was willing to turn his back on everything he taught them.
• Supernatural — God himself. Castiel, a steadily descending angel spends most of Season 5 looking for his father for guidance on how to prevent the apocalypse, only to discover that God just doesn't give a damn about any of them anymore, has effectively left them alone to get on with it, and doesn't care whether the apocalypse happens or not. This does not have a good effect on Castiel.
  • Castiel later becomes this to the Winchesters and the angels who follow him in the Angelic Civil War after it becomes clear that he has become an ends-justify-the-means Well-Intentioned Extremist and is making deals with demons.
  • Metatron invokes this when he positions Castiel to become a leader again during the Second Angelic Civil War, only to then frame Castiel as the mastermind behind a series of suicide bombings. The undecided angels respected Castiel for stopping the Apocalypse and thus flocked to him until Metatron's scheme showed them Castiel's flaws. Disillusioned, Castiel's followers switch their allegiance to Metatron. Castiel then turns it right back on Metatron by showing Metatron's most loyal followers what a Manipulative Bastard Metatron really is.
  • It comes up majorly in Season 11 when God who's been living as writer Chuck is shown to have been in hiding for so long. Metatron lets him have it over how he's been praying to him all this time and God just dismisses it as nothing really changing. A big bit is Metatron talking of how happy he was when God chose him to be his Scribe only to learn that he was chosen simply because he was the closest angel.
• Time After Time: Wells feels this for the future rather than a person. He had expected a utopia where war, hunger, and other ills had been overcome, but instead discovers those things are still very much around in 2017, to the point of him almost crying while he watches the news. Ironically as this series is related to The Time Machine, which was one of his novels where the future isn't depicted as a utopia.
• The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien:
  Conan: Tell us about this scene. This is a fight scene?
  Dean the Foley artist: Yes. This is between two principal characters, Chris Meloni and James Brolin. Chris Meloni just found out that James Brolin, who is his mentor, actually killed someone.
  Conan: They always do. Mentors always disappoint, just as you've disappointed me today.
• Top Gear:
  • Variant: when James May and Richard Hammond get to drive their childhood dream vehicles (a Lamborghini Countach and a Vincent Black Shadow motorbike, respectively), they find that the real things are harder to drive and less comfortable than they had imagined.
    May: And [the Countach] looked so good on the poster. In fact, I wish it had stayed there. I'm absolutely gutted. But you know it's not the car's fault; it's mine. I've broken the Golden Rule: You never, ever meet your childhood heroes. ...Stick with the memories. They're just better.
  • Mentioned again — but blatantly averted — by Hammond in another episode in which he gets the chance to drive two more of his dream cars.^note a Porsche 959 and a Ferrari F40 He giddily enjoys every moment behind the wheel of both.
    Hammond: So often it is, "Don't drive your heroes." Not this time!
• Trinkets: Tabitha laments that she's idolized her dad all her life when she learns he cheated on her mom, tarnishing his image in her eyes.
• In Ugly Betty, Betty is happy to work for Sofia, a magazine writer/editor she admires who recognizes Betty's potential. She's impressed by Sofia allowing women at her magazine who'd never be hired for Mode (from unattractive to one in a wheelchair) and romancing Daniel to the point he asks her to marry him after just a couple of months of dating. Then, in a TV interview, Sofia reveals she never loved Daniel, and their entire relationship was all to promote her book on how any woman can get a guy to fall for her fast. It also hits Betty that Sofia hired those specific women because they make her the most attractive woman in the office and she's nothing but a massive hypocrite. She's outright astounded Sofia expects Betty to keep working for her as "I see much of myself in you."
  Betty: Well, I don't see any of myself in you. Here's my article on working at Mode. Funny thing I found out researching it. Those people might be superficial but they know it. And they don't pretend to be anything more than they are. I actually think I fit in better there than I will here. I quit.
• In The Umbrella Academy, Luther looks up to, admires, and trusts Reginald, the main characters' adoptive father, believing that everything Reginald did, even the things that hurt them, were for the good of them and the good of the world. It takes learning that he was sent to the moon for no reason at all and that his father never even looked at the things Luther sent back for Luther to finally lose trust in him. Unfortunately, Luther loses trust in himself as well, and spirals pretty badly. The other siblings lost trust in Reginald earlier, as children.
• On Veep Selina Meyer talks warmly of her father, a great businessman who built the family fortune, bought her a horse as a kid, and always brought her snowglobes for family vacations. To her, he was a much better parent than her cold mother who sold the horse off. But during a visit home, Selina finds out the truth: her father had been cheating with his secretary for years and in fact, died during sex with her. He was the one who sold the horse to pay off debts as he was a horrible businessman and her mother had converted the barn into his private place to be with his mistress so as not to be caught in a hotel. Every "business trip" was just him off with the secretary and she was the one who bought Selina the snowglobes. Selina is so upset that she ends up destroying the office her dad had and realizing how she ended up marrying a guy just as slimy as her father.
• Victorious has Ryder Daniels, who has a reputation of taking girls under his wing... only to use them for class projects to help him get a good grade and then ditch them without any prior notice.
• Voyagers!: "Bully and Billy" has Jeff encountering Billy the Kid, who he thinks is not honestly such a bad person. He changes his mind after seeing how mean and dishonorable he could be.
• White Collar: Neal when he realizes that nothing matters to his dad more than himself. He makes it clear he's not above hurting his son to avoid even the chance of getting caught and Neal looks absolutely shattered.
• The White Queen: In Episode 7, the pedestal that Richard of Gloucester had placed his eldest brother on now shows cracks as large as Edward IV's girth. The former has dedicated most of his life to serving his king, but his veneration transforms into disgust when Edward participates in an orgy while the Queen is in labour on the floor above. ("I don't believe that [whoring] is the best way to celebrate the birth of your child.") Richard's outrage solidifies during their war against France.
  Richard: Dear Anne, our campaign is a farce. King Louis has offered Edward terms of peace and he has taken them. His son is to marry Edward's daughter, so she will be the next Queen of France, and lots of gold. I cannot forgive him for this betrayal. I have always been heart and soul for my brother Edward, but now I cannot meet his eye. We have become like merchants, haggling a price.
• The Wilds: Fatin was very disappointed when her dad, whom she'd been close with, cheated on her mom by sending women dick pics. After this, she sent them out to everybody in his contacts list for revenge.
• In Wire in the Blood, an old colleague of Tony Hill's returns and proceeds to attempt, apparently out of pure bitterness over his failures in life, to turn Tony and DI Fielding against each other.
• In the final season of The Wonder Years, Winnie becomes passionate on helping George McGovern be elected President in 1972. Kevin realizes Winnie is really smitten with the local campaign office manager, Mike, who talks of how much electing McGovern means to get Winnie to fire up the local youth. When McGovern suffers his epic landslide loss to Nixon, Winnie is near tears asking Mike how this could happen...and Mike's reaction is to just brush it off with "hey, it's politics" and Winnie should have known "our guy never had a chance." He then walks off with an assistant, already talking about supporting Ted Kennedy in a couple of years. Winnie's heartbreak Mike didn't care about her is overshadowed by the realization he never believed in this campaign and just using her to try and fire up the youth vote for future elections.
• You Me Her: Jack has to learn his deceased dad, whom he'd idolized, cheated on his mom over many years, starting when he'd just been a baby.
• Zero (2021): Anna had looked to her dad as a source of inspiration, the person who taught her values, so she's heartbroken on discovering that he's corrupt to the point of being in bed with a gang.

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