Cursed With Awesome / Live-Action TV

• Angel:
  • The Groosalugg was cursed with unmatched combat skill. As he recounts his life's story to Cordelia, he talks about how his human heritage in the demon world of Pylea got him banished to the Scum Pits of Ur, meaning for him to die. Unfortunately, his awesome combat skills prevent him from dying honorably, as he destroys every one of his opponents, making him The Groosalugg, or undefeated champion.
  • Angel is cursed with a soul (see below).
  • Doyle (and later Cordelia) gets visions from the Powers That Be about people who need Angel's help. And when we say "visions" we mean "great splitting migraines with pictures."
• Babylon 5 psychics, particularly in Season 5, when they start whining about how they are all "weapons" created by the Vorlons.
  • Their main issue is with the Mundanes hating them. According to the canon Psi Corps novel trilogy, when the knowledge of telepaths first became public on Earth, it was followed by mass Witch Hunts for anyone who even seemed like they may be a telepath. This is despite the Pope (you know, the head of the largest religion on the planet) telling people that he approves of telepaths. The only time shown in the book where he is heeded is when an Italian mob boss lets a telepath go after cheating in his casino, provided he uses his gift to help him.
  • To be fair, there is a lot about being a telepath in Babylon 5 that sucks. In order to keep from hearing the stray thoughts that everyone around them is constantly "shouting", one has to keep one's mind occupied with nursery rhymes, multiplication tables, anything and everything to generate "white noise" inside your own head. Because anything else is an invasion of privacy. Strong emotions are more difficult to block, so if someone's passionately intent on murder, you're going to hear it. And if you're hired to monitor a deal between two people, and one of them is preoccupied with "rather erotic" thoughts, well...
• Openly addressed in the first episode of Being Human (UK). "How noble of you to take on the curse of immortality so that your friends could wither and decay in hospitals and old people's homes..."
  • Similarly, McNair sees lycanthropy as a blessing rather than curse: "When bones break, they repair stronger, when skin tears, it heals tougher."
  • Although in both cases, vampirism and lycanthropy do seriously suck, especially if you aren't prepared for it.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Buffy, who is cursed to be a "hot chick with superpowers", as Faith once put it. The curse part is she has to use said superpowers to fight for her life every night, and the world's very existence every late spring. All evil is waiting for is for its "one good day" to fall on one where they can end the world. And statistically, she's ancient — most Slayers die the same year they're chosen. At fifteen.
  • In the episode "Nightmares", Buffy is temporarily turned into a vampire... which gives her the strength she needs to defeat the Monster of the Week.
  • Angel is a formerly very famously evil vampire cursed with a soul. Good in that he's immortal with superpowers, irresistible to young girls, a shoe-in to be a Hunter of His Own Kind and the titular star of his own Vampire Detective Series. Bad in that he has a century of memories in his head that make Charles Manson look like a kid playing dressup and said soul never lets him forget it.
  • Dawn. While being a giant and centaurette were annoying to her, she at least acknowledged they had some good points. Being turned into a doll though... not so much.
• The Charmed Ones from Charmed seem to fit this. For the first three series they don't half go on about being spectacularly powerful witches (especially Piper) and are all somewhat inclined towards giving up their powers if given the chance (especially Piper...) in fact, they only stop complaining about their abilities (to freeze time or move things with their mind/astrally project or see into the future/levitate) in order to use them to save the day from the demon of the week. This may have more to do with the fact the writers set up the entire universe to ensure the sisters would never get to use their powers for anything besides demon-killing. Several episodes are centered around them trying to do something for themselves and getting punished for it.
• Doctor Who: In "The End of Time", the Master Comes Back Wrong with superpowers including lighting-throwing and super-jumping after a sabotaged resurrection. It is Cast from Lifespan, but his Horror Hunger can take care of that. Knowing the Master, he sees having a reason to kill more people as a bonus.
• Dollhouse has Echo, slave to the titular organization and all too aware that she and her fellow Actives are being exploited. This curse, however, comes with the ability to call on skills from any imprint she's ever received.
• Farscape: Normally, Jool's metal-melting scream falls into the inversion, as others routinely scare her or injure her specifically for that. But when someone hits on the bright idea of handcuffing her, she makes with the scream, and the cuffs are no more.
• Guardian: The Lonely and Great God: For his sins, Kim Shin is doomed to walk the Earth as a handsome rich guy with godlike powers. It has some bummer Who Wants to Live Forever? aspects, but still.
• Heroes touches on this a lot.
  • Chronologically, the first offender was Brian Davis, who wished he didn't have his powers. He gets his wish when Sylar kills him. Most other characters are somewhat angsty about the consequences of their powers, but quickly learn to make use of them.
  • But some cry about it throughout the entire series. Such as Claire Bennet: her ability is regeneration, and she cries about it nearly all throughout Season 1, mourning how she's the freakshow of the cheerleaders, despite the fact that nobody except for a very select few friends and family knows about her ability, nor is her ability all that apparent unless she severely wounds herself in plain sight. Then in Season 2, it gets even worse, because she cries that she can't go around showing her ability and how restrained she feels. Never mind the fact that the only way to show her ability to others is by injuring herself. Never mind the fact that all she has to do in order to avoid suspicion is lay off her masochistic tendencies. Then she realizes the possibility of the company finding her, because they'll run tests on her and stuff, poking and prodding her. She cries about this too, even though it seems that's all she wants to do to herself; if you find an episode with Claire in it in the first two seasons that doesn't involve a suicide attempt or self mutilation, you get a cookie. And then in Season 3, she loses the ability to feel pain, and cries about that because it apparently takes all the fun out of self-mutilation. At one point she mentions this to Elle, who is suffering horrific agony due to her Power Incontinence, and is, needless to say, not pleased to hear it.
  • Emma Coolidge in Volume Five, a deaf woman who develops the power to see sounds as multicolored lights. This not only looks pretty cool, but also makes her an Instant Expert at playing musical instruments. Her first reaction (after receiving independent verification that she's not hallucinating) is to demand that it be taken away and spend several episodes Wangsting about it for no readily apparent reason.
• One episode of House implies that the title character may be autistic, which allows him to focus intensely on his cases, at the expense of being a complete social incompetent and highly self-destructive (on the basis of an autistic boy he was treating deliberately meeting his gaze at the end of the episode, which he is stated to have never done before). Wilson outright states at the end of the episode House isn't — he's just an ass.
• To some extent, David Banner of The Incredible Hulk (1977). Turning into a green raging behemoth whenever you get angry is pretty lousy, yes, but as played on the show it nearly always kicked in to save him or someone else from life-threatening danger. Justified in that David has no memory of what he does as the Hulk, and no conscious control over when he'll change or what he'll do when he does, and the Hulk's insane Super-Strength means it could very easily kill people. If David could see the Hulk as the audience sees him, he'd be much more relaxed about the whole thing. As it is, put yourself in David's shoes, and you have every reason to be terrified of the uncontrollable giant green rage monster lurking inside you. (Yes, young Clark Kent, that means you.)
• Becoming a zombie is usually treated as a Fate Worse than Death, but in iZombie, zombies like the heroine Olivia "Liv" Moore get a lot of benefits. Liv retains her personality and intelligence as long as she routinely gets to eat human brain matter,^note failing to do this results in the zombie in question permanently degrading into a feral "Romero" and also gain the ability to absorb the memories, skills and knowledge from the brains they eat. Liv is exceptionally resilient to injury; she can be shot and stabbed multiple times, she doesn't feel pain, she loses very little blood and the wounds eventually heal like they would for a normal person. On top of that, Liv has a "full-on zombie mode" where she gains Super-Strength, able to chase down cars and overpower men much larger than her. She also doesn't need to sleep, and her alcohol tolerance is greatly increased. Against all that, the downsides of being a zombie are your taste gets dulled so you can't enjoy normal food again, you look like someone who hasn't seen in the sun and got a tan in years, and it can potentially alienate you from your friends and your career.
• Acknowledged in the promotional ads for The Listener, about a guy who can hear people's thoughts: he used to think his power was a curse, but he's figured out a way to save people with it.
• Lizzie McGuire: Lizzie, after trying to find something she is good at, is not very happy to find out she is a rhythmic gymnastics prodigy, calling it a "stupid talent" to have and does not enjoy taking part in a competition which she easily wins.
• Lost: The Man in Black was thrown into the Island's source by Jacob, which stripped him from his body and turned him into the monster, which was said to be a fate worse than death, and he's trapped on the Island. However, he can shape-shift and impersonate dead people to manipulate others to do his bidding, is immortal and can't be killed by bullets or knives, and in his smoke monster form he can kill an entire group of people with ease.
• The Middleman has a character who was cursed with immortality as a punishment for kicking someone else out of a lifeboat on the Titanic. This rather backfired, because he thinks Living Forever Is Awesome.
• In Once Upon a Time, Rumpelstiltskin is cursed to be the most powerful sorcerer in the land and to have sparkly grey skin — which he may or may not be able to conceal with magic. This also comes with a bent toward dark, murderous urges. That this is a curse is established in the Season 1 episode "Skin Deep", wherein Belle almost ends it with True Love's Kiss. In a slight departure, while the show clearly wants us to see him as cursed, Rumpelstiltskin himself never complains about his powers, and is quite sensibly freaked out at the prospect of losing them and being at the mercy of the Evil Queen, not to mention losing any chance of finding his son. The detrimental aspects are not emphasised as much, but the power of the Dark One is much like that of a djinn in that he has incredible power, but there is a magical item which grants the holder complete control over him (as well as the ability to take on the curse via You Kill It, You Bought It). As long as he has the dagger, he can't be killed or controlled, but the curse also makes you prone to evil and the magic always comes with some kind of cost. What the cost will actually be doesn't seem to be predictable.
• Subverted in Reaper. At first it seems like the devil owning Sam's soul looks like the best thing that's ever happened to him: he gets a cool job as a hunter of escaped souls, powers specially designed for each soul so he shouldn't have too much trouble with them, and the big guy's inside advice on how to get laid. However, the devil also occasionally screws with Sam's life just for the hell of it, and he can't say anything about it to the girl he really loves since it would jeopardize her ownership of her own soul.
• Saturday Night Live: in one skit, a man is cursed to summon a sexy sax player named Sergio who immediately invokes everyone around him to dance.
• The Sentinel's Jim Ellison sometimes feels his super-senses are a curse; his first request of Blair is how to make them go away.
  • There are a number of episodes when they are a detriment to him rather than a gift. There's the "zoning-out" problem, which nearly gets him run over by a truck in the pilot, when he focuses his vision too much on a flying frisbee. Also, after his ears get flushed out from all the wax build-up, his hearing is greatly enhanced, meaning he can't even focus at work thanks to all the tiny noises hitting him with the volume of a heavy metal concert. He's also extremely sensitive to pain, although Blair teaches him how to "dial it down" (specifically, using the "dial" imagery).
    • Funny thing is, it's never mentioned that the same super-sensitivity would also mean he would enjoy sex a lot more. Now imagine if two sentinels get it on...
    • Didn't that actually happen once? And with Jeri Ryan of all people...
• Clark Kent on Smallville, constantly whines and angsts about how terrible it is to be an alien "outsider" with such an awful secret. Yep, an outsider with: two unbelievably loving parents, some awesome best friends who are totally supportive when they eventually learn his secret (and one's a hottie that's totally in love with him to boot), an acceptable level of baseline popularity in school, gets to looks like Tom goddamn Welling so most chicks think he's hot-as... oh and the small matter of developing a wide array of earth-shattering superpowers that make him a virtually unkillable demigod. He's not even superficially distinguishable from a human. Yeah, boo-frikkety-hoo, Clark; cry me a river... If it weren't for kryptonite it would be win-win-win.
  • Admittedly, his whining becomes slightly more justified in later seasons as some people he loves die or move away, his would-be OTP starts getting really screwy, and increasingly more dangerous and determined adversaries are pitted against him. Still, you wish you could just tell him that a few years down the track he'll get the hot chick, be the universally beloved protector of the planet, hang out with a bunch of super buddies etc... SO JUST PUT A SOCK IN IT!
  • He does have the problem of potentially losing control of his strength at a bad time, like during sex, but he later gets a handle on this, making the lesson here "Stop whining and practice controlling your strength so it won't be an issue."
• In Stargate SG-1, the Jaffa have been genetically engineered so that they must receive a larval Goa'uld symbiote once they reach puberty as part of a rite of passage. The symbiote gives each Jaffa a Healing Factor and immunity to disease, but the symbiote essentially replaces their immune system, so any Jaffa subsequently deprived of a symbiote will die in a matter of hours after enduring great pain. SG-1's Jaffa member, Teal'c, hates how he is reliant on the symbiote even when fighting against the Goa'uld as the ones who have enslaved his people for so long, until the SGC are able to find an alternative in the form of tretonin, a drug that was briefly used by a human world as a health boost but can be adapted to replace the Jaffa's need for a symbiote.
• In Stargate Atlantis, Teyla is understandably freaked out at first when she learns her telepathic abilities stem from the fact she's part Wraith. However, being a no-nonsense Action Girl, she quickly comes to terms with her background and quickly sets out trying to figure how she can use it against the Wraith.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation The android Data is stronger than a Klingon, smarter than a Vulcan, doesn't need sleep or food or drink, can survive in open space or on any planet, can interface with anything that moves and doesn't have to worry about fear, sadness, hatred, or any other negative emotions, even if he's constantly the victim of racism. But, poor guy, all he wants is to be more human. And even in Star Trek: Generations, when he finally retrieves his emotion chip from his Ax-Crazy brother, Lore, and it interferes with half of his regular operations, and makes him, frankly, a tool, he is still happy to hear LaForge say he's acting more human — in response to Data's chickening out and leaving LaForge in the hands of Dr. Soran and the Klingons. Averted in the next film, Data gets enough control over his emotion function to turn it off when it gets in the way. Lampshaded by Q in one episode, where he points out a great many species spend millennia trying to be as close as they possibly can get to what Data is by default, as a way of pointing out how absurd his desire to be human is.
  • The half-Betazoid counsellor Troi is something of a meta-example. She personally loves her empathic powers that allow her to sense the emotions of most other living beings, but this is precisely why she has a reputation among the fandom for being utterly useless as the writers struggled to incorporate her into stories where her powers would make a difference, such as being able to sense when another character is lying, as this would wrap up the plot in five minutes. The result was that her good advice was frequently ignored by other crew members, or her statements were incredibly obvious and didn't require supernatural empathy, or she was just kept out of the main plot or even the whole episode entirely so it could happen.
  • Tam Elburn from the episode Tin Man is a full blooded Betazoid and thus has full blown telepathic powers, but he can't tune out the thoughts of other people and is easily overwhelmed when he is not alone or at least with only one or two people, though he gets on well with Data as he can't read the android's mind. He's been in therapy with Troi and others to help him deal with the stress of his powers, which make him a highly effective diplomat but also make him feel isolated and miserable.
  • Star Trek tends to go in for this trope a lot. Odo in Deep Space 9 and Seven of Nine in Voyager are other examples of characters with cool abilities and immunities who go through lots of angst over the fact that they aren't the same as everyone else.
  • Seven of Nine is perhaps an interesting subversion. Initially, she just wants to be a Borg again, since it's almost all she's ever known (she was assimilated as a young child). As the series progresses, she learns she can't go back, but doesn't entirely want to give up the positive things she's learned from the Borg (strive for efficiency and perfection). While she does set out to learn about and understand the positive aspects of humanity, she uses her differences in the best ways she can.
• In the Stick Stickly TV special Stuck, Stick discovers several advantages to having an ice skate stuck to his foot, such as being able to cut out coupons, slice giant marshmallows, and slice potatoes.
• Scott McCall from Teen Wolf. He doesn't see the awesomeness of lycanthropy when Derek Hale says the bite is a gift, arguing that being turned into a werewolf has made his life much more difficult and now he has to hide it from everyone around him. Justified at first by a Superpowered Evil Side, but now he has full control and seems to have grown out of the angst. His best friend, Stiles Stilinski, rejects the bite later as well because of a similar reasoning and states that he's perfectly happy being a normal human.
• Although Captain Jack Harkness from Torchwood doesn't spend a lot of time bemoaning the fact that he can't die, he has clearly found the drawbacks to it, and there is a fair amount of subtext. He also has to watch almost all his friends, his lover, and at least one member of his family die, then step up and fix everything anyway. He's sort of expected to be emotionless — not cold, just unable to be emotionally hurt or depressed. This, ironically, has got to be depressing.
• The Russian mini-series Wolf Messing: Seeing through time, based on the (possibly fictionalized) memoirs of a Real Life psychic of that name, portray Messing's abilities alternatively as a gift and as a curse. It's all fun when he uses them on stage to read people's thoughts or make them do something. The pilot starts with Messing being asked a trivial question during a performance (which hockey team will win the championship), and he ends up getting a vision so disturbing (one of the hockey teams will die in a plane crash) that he cuts the performance short and immediately calls the Kremlin. He also gets horrible visions about the two World Wars before they happen. When a character later remarks about how great it would be to see bad things coming and change them, Messing points out that the bad things he sees are too grand to change by him alone. Even the plane crash still happens, despite him warning Stalin about it. Strangely, he is unable to foresee his own people being exterminated by the Nazis. He is also once asked to find a dead girl's body based on a photograph, and he visibly breaks down after touching the picture and revealing the location. When the cops ask if he'd like to help them full-time, he opts to be in the circus instead.