Deliberate Values Dissonance / Live-Action TV

Deliberate Values Dissonance in live-action TV.

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• La Petite Histoire de France

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• Shows up occasionally on 30 Rock, usually relating to the relics of GE and NBC's past. For instance, a series of flashbacks in one of the live episodes shows a sitcom from The '50s starring a white man in blackface playing a racist black stereotype, or a female news reporter from The '70s being assumed to have forced her way in front of the camera.
  Jack: Look how Greenzo's testing, they love him in every demographic: colored people, broads, fairies, commies. Gosh we've got to update these forms.
  • The autobiography of Jack's mentor and GE CEO Don Geiss contains such phrases as: "because a woman's brain has fewer folds" or "the Negroid musculature".
  • In an episode where TGS has a mother's day special, all of the mothers, who range from late middle age to elderly, tell Liz that she is getting too old to look for an ideal man, and to just settle for somebody before it's too late.
    Colleen Donaghy: You see, that's what "fem-in-ism" does, it makes smart girls with good birthing shapes believe in fairy tales.
• Agent Carter:
  • Shows the struggle that a single woman has to deal with in the post-WWII business world, seen as fit only to take lunch orders and answer the phones.
  • The second season has an African-American scientist and doesn't hide the difficulties that a man like that would have in the 1940s, not to mention the issues an interracial couple would have when Peggy finds herself attracted to him. The primary antagonist for the season is also partially motivated by the fact she's utterly pissed off at being considered only useful as an actress for her pretty face, and as she's getting older she's even losing that, when she's a self-taught scientific genius that no one, even her own family, would take seriously.
• American Dreams being set in the early sixties plays with this trope extensively. While it contains a certain amount of nostalgia, there were pains taken to give characters realistic attitudes in regards to things like race, sexuality and war. There was also a fair amount of care taken to avoid Strawmen (although there were some arguable examples) and people's attitudes and actions were often conflicting. Pete Pryor was shown to be casually racist in his dealings as a cop but also seemed to genuinely respect Henry, his brother's black friend. Jack Pryor might have somewhat archaic views on women but allows his wife to work and offers to help his daughter attend college despite his initial misgivings. Even JJ objects to his sister's budding inter-racial relationship. Some critics (especially since Mad Men has come along) have said it could have hit this trope harder but many others feel that not having a specific political viewpoint gave the show a more expansive perspective on the period.
• The Americans: Oleg visits a Russian market and walks past sullen shoppers picking over half-full shelves under ugly fluorescent lights. He then interrogates the market owner on why her market is stocked with such an unusual abundance of quality goods.
• Andromeda: This gets played with a lot, especially in regards to the Nietzscheans. A stellar examples is when Dylan and his Nietzschean Number One Gaheris play Go. Dylan is surprised and somewhat offended that Gaheris would play in such a cutthroat manner in a friendly casual game. Gaheris is perplexed that anyone can see any test of skill as anything other than a life-or-death matter. And, as Gaheris explains, in his culture, it often is. Nietzscheans constantly jockey for position within their pride, and any loss could be construed as evidence of the loser's genetic inferiority, and disqualify them from anything from parenthood and leadership positions to the right to food and air, should supplies get tight enough.
• The Angel episode "Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been?" shows Angel living in Los Angeles during The '50s. At one point, an African-American family is prevented from staying in the Hyperion Hotel by its manager, who angrily claims that "the sign is wrong" and that he really has no vacancies. Additionally, Angel's neighbor is an Armored Closet Gay man who has to be incredibly careful to hide this fact from the other people of the hotel unless he wants to be thrown out on the street.
• Another Period takes place in 1902 and uses this trope for comedic effect. Casual racism, misogyny, outdated ideas, and overall prejudice are referenced each episode.
• Babylon Berlin:
  • The filmmakers make a point about the open sexism of the time almost Once per Episode.
  • Numerous characters, apart from those who are actual Nazis, express casually antisemitic statements, reflecting the day-to-day discrimination that Jews faced in Germany. In one episode, Councilor Benda (who's Jewish) is told in so many words that he isn't really German. Even our hero Gereon shows casual interest in reading Mein Kampf and thinks the Hitler Youth will be a positive experience for his nephew.
  • It's also made abundantly clear that the democratic system is far from being uncontested, with several prominent characters showing disdain not only for the Weimar government, but for democratic government as a concept.
  • Charlotte's little sister, Toni, sometimes works in a textile factory, which the rest of her family at least tacitly encourages. Charlotte is the only one who vocally objects to this and insists that Toni go to school.
• Babylon 5:
  • The episode "The Corps Is Mother, the Corps Is Father" is made of this, as all three of the episode's main characters are Psi Cops who have grown up in the Corps, and therefore been brainwashed with its skewed values since birth. Also, two of the characters are Naive Newcomers on their first mission, and the third is Bester.
  • Londo provides a number of examples on how their culture is different from humans, such as having no trouble with his lover being a slave (though he does buy her freedom), considering love and marriage completely unrelated (though he's willing to cover for two young Centauri who want to marry for love and buy them time to have a proper arranged marriage), and treating poisoning as a perfectly normal instrument of politics, at least among Centauri. Being an ambassador, he's perfectly aware that other cultures don't share their exact values, and won't get offended when a non-Centauri does something normal to them unless he has to or knows the other guy is doing it on purpose (and even then, he could be tolerant to Troll them).
  • In the backstory it's revealed that the Centauri once used limited piracy as a political tool, the Noble Houses engaging privateers to damage each others' trade when convenient and even attacking non-Centauri shipping if they were trading with a rival House, as nobody was stupid enough to risk a war with the Centauri over admittedly limited damage. This ended when House Jaddo's rivals reacted to them getting the monopoly of trade with Earth Alliance by sending their privateers... And found out the hard way that humans consider piracy of any scope as an act of war and reacted by having EarthForce chase the privateers across the border, firing on anyone who tried to interfere, and only stopping in the face of the overwhelming firepower of a starbase and its fleet and the promise the Centauri would try the pirates themselves, with the last chase ending in the EarthForce squadron nuking a starbase and its fleet because they had realized the Centauri never tried the pirates.
  • Regent Virini claims that his only vice is "strict sobriety". In Centauri society, sobriety really is a vice. The Centauri are culturally big on recreational drugs, and consider self-care to be a duty, just as important as their duties to the Empire or their House. By abstaining from drugs, Virini is neglecting his duty to himself. During the fifth season the fact that Virini was found wandering around the palace shit-faced drunk alerts Londo that something is very wrong in the palace as he had never known the regent to be drunk before.
• The TV shows The Borgias and Borgia are contrasted in an essay "The Borgias" vs. "Borgia: Faith and Fear" by author and historian Ada Palmer. She talks about what she calls "historicity" (what TV Tropes might call Deliberate Values Dissonance) vs "historical accuracy" (what TV Tropes might call Artistic License – History). Historical accuracy pertains to the details, while historicity is about sensibilities. Both are about as historically accuracy as you'd expect, but Borgia has far more historicity.
  Ada Palmer: A bar brawl doesn't go from insult to heated words to slamming chairs to eventually drawing steel, it goes straight from insult to hacking off a body part. Rodrigo and Cesare don't feel guilty about killing people, they feel guilty the first time they kill someone dishonorably. Rodrigo is not being seduced by Julia Farnese and trying to hide his shocking affair; Rodrigo and Julia live in the papal palace like a married couple, and she's the head of his household and the partner of his political labors, and if the audience is squigged out that she's 18 and he's 61 then that's a fact [...] 14-year-old Lucrezia is constantly demanding marriage and convinced she's going to be an old maid if she doesn't marry soon, but is simultaneously obviously totally not ready for adult decisions and utterly ignorant of what marriage will really mean for her. It communicates what was terrible about the Renaissance but doesn't have anyone on-camera objecting to it [...] I praise Borgia: Faith and Fear for what I call its "historicity" rather than its "accuracy". It takes its fair share of liberties, as well it should if it wants a modern person to sit through it. But it also succeeds in making the characters feel un-modern in a way many period pieces don't try to do. It is a bit alienating but much more powerful.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003): invoked Per Word of God, this was deliberately invoked when assigning religious practices to the Twelve Colonies of Kobol and Cylons. The Colonials, who are overall the main protagonists of the series, practice a traditional polytheistic faith heavily reminiscent of Classical Mythology, despite largely seeming to be a United Space of America given the Constructed World treatment and having an officially secular government. Meanwhile, the (primarily) villainous Cylons are monotheistic extremists who follow a thinly veiled version of Christianity, to the point where most of their mentioned Scripture sounds like fire-and-brimstone Evangelical Christianity. According to the show's main creator Ron Moore, this was done so as to play on how Christian-centric most Western media portrays religion.
• Boardwalk Empire is set in the 1920s, and well, here are some of the highlights:
  • Jimmy Darmody has no problem cheating on Angela while he is away and even considers abandoning his family altogether and moving to California before his lover dies, but he reacts violently when he merely suspects that Angela was having a relationship with a photographer while he was in the army. He is, however, surprisingly cool when he learns that she was actually seeing the photographer's wife.
  • Father Ed Brennan compares Teddy Thompson to "the cruel Jews [...] who taunted Jesus when he was on the cross".
  • Among Eddie Cantor's most acclaimed songs is the incredibly misogynistic one called "The Dumber They Come".
  • Chalky White is the most powerful black man in town, yet even he has to be arrested and lie low for shooting a Klansman in self-defense, right after the Klan killed several of his people.
  • In Season 4, after great effort, Chalky manages to have Nucky agree to let him build a club in Atlantic City's Boardwalk. The club is entirely managed and served by African-Americans, but the entry is whites only. And his number includes a white comedian in blackface, building his entire number on calling black people hystrionic and stupid, and there is also a number with scantily clad, light-skinned black dancers in leopard skins. Chalky even complains at one point that not even he can sit in his own nightclub.
• Played for Laughs in the Boy Meets World episode "I Was a Teenage Spy", where Cory dreams he is sent back to the 1950s. When he says "butt" in class, Mr. Turner and all the other students react as if he'd said a horrible curse word.
• In The Boys (2019), Fish out of Temporal Water Soldier Boy has some very dated views considering he was from the 1940s. His interactions with Mallory display a heavily chauvinistic attitude, musing that an attractive woman is wasted as an officer, making numerous unwanted advances, and derogatorily calling her a "lesbo" for shooting him down. While travelling around New York, he's confused by the promotion of Queen Maeve (which was marketing around her bisexuality) and bemused by the sight of an interracial gay couple kissing in public, rolling his eyes in disbelief. He later on questions the idea of men acting in a nurturing way after seeing an ad for baby care aimed at fathers, and speaks fondly of Liberty, better known as Stormfront, an actual Nazi.
  • This isn't just played with him being blindly bigoted, though, as he speaks fondly of Afghanistan and doesn't understand why the US had invaded; in the time he was from, Afghanistan was America's ally against the Soviets, so he lacks the anti-Arab prejudice many conservative American men like himself developed during The War on Terror. He also isn't racist towards black people. In fact, he thinks the icon of the perfect and ideal American dad (and a wonderful drink mixer) is Bill Cosby.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine:
  • Captain Holt, as a black cop, starting in the 1970s, suffered discrimination from his white colleagues. When he came out as gay, it made career advancement almost impossible for a long time, despite him being an excellent police officer. He fondly reminisces about his favorite partner, who was "homophobic, but not racist... that was pretty good back then."
  • When discussing the most popular guy in his high school, Brandon Bliss, Jake mentions that Brandon lost his virginity when he was twelve. Gina immediately interjects, "Which is horrifying!", and Jake agrees, but points out that back in high school, it just made Brandon seem even cooler to the other teens.
• In the 2005 TV film Byron, everyone's acting shocked over Lord Byron's latest scandal, and it looks like the secret is out about Byron's affair with his half-sister. Turns out they're actually upset because he had anal sex with his wife.
• Call the Midwife: The series is set in the East End of London during the 1950's and 60's, and depicts the standards of the era.
  • It is considered merely strange that the family in the first episode has 24 kids (with the 25th on the way), not to mention that the husband apparently married the wife and brought her to England when she was 14. Sister Julienne even says that she might even have been younger than that, and in Real Life Jennifer Worth reckoned that Conchita was eleven or twelve when she left Spain.
  • Everyone, including doctors, nurses, and pregnant women, smokes. It's even a bonding moment for Sister Bernadette and Dr. Turner after a hard delivery!
  • The resolution to Mary's story: her daughter is taken from her without her consent and put up for adoption, given that Mary is only 15, homeless, and both uneducated and untrained. This is portrayed by the priest as being the best possible outcome to her situation, but it still triggers a Heroic BSoD in Mary.
  • When the Redmond baby was abducted, no one apparently thought it was unusual that the mother left the baby outside and alone in her pram on the sidewalk of a busy street, while she herself stayed inside to do the laundry.
    • In 1950s Britain it wasn't uncommon for people to leave their babies in prams outside their houses while they did something inside. It wasn't necessarily something everyone did, but it was considered safe to do so by the people who did. It was taken as obvious that sleeping outdoors was good for children, and many houses had no yard or garden — it was also normal for children from poor areas to play in the street almost as soon as they could walk (there were very few cars and so many children played there it was assumed the older ones were watching.)
    • It was still not unusual in the late sixties for baby to be left to sleep, in a pram not dissimilar to the ones we see in CTM, on the front path looking out into the street. This was partly for the fresh air, partly because it decreased the likelihood of the baby waking up bumping up the steps and partly, it was said, because they'd have something to look at when they woke.
  • The Golly dolls that Sister Monica Joan knits are now almost universally recognized in Britain as an extremely regressive and stereotypical image of black people. Trixie refers to them as "Gollies" rather than "Golliwogs" since this was probably at the point when "wog" on its own started being used as a slur against Black people.
  • Sister Bernadette and Sister Julienne's respective conflicts between their religious calling and their romantic feelings might not have had the same outcome in modern times. The Church of England started ordaining women as vicars in 1994, so it's possible that they might have chosen that option if it had been available to them at the time.
  • In Season 4 Episode 3, the kindhearted Sergeant Noakes testifies against a man in court for homosexual behavior. Later Fred asks the same man to leave a community organization.
• Candy (2022) is based on the 1980 murder of Betty Gore. Set in pre-Reagan Texas, offering multiple instances of this trope:
  • The scandal over the pastor getting divorced from her husband, with Candy's friend Shelly hissing that "it never happens here".
  • Elaine is helping widower Allan with dinner, at the same time monitoring and controlling his young daughter Christina's food intake because she'll "thank me when you are older".
  • Betty's strict, even hard, demeanor with children (like foster kid Davey and her students) was standard when she was growing up (in the 1950s) but by the 1970s, it was falling out of favor.
  • The lack of understanding around mental health, especially for women and mothers, like Betty being mocked or dismissed as "needy" when she is depressed and lonely.
• Chappelle's Show:
  • One sketch has Paul Mooney as a black film critic who watches Gone with the Wind alongside two white female reviewers. The white women laud the film for being powerful and feminist, while Mooney savages it for the blatant racism and whitewashed depiction of slavery.
  • A sketch has Mooney remarking on the casual racism in The Godfather, though in this film it's also Deliberate Values Dissonance.
• Cold Case played this for all it was worth. Expect at least five episodes a season to make the era the case's real monster, while savagely taking a Chris Avellone-level Deconstructor Fleet to the notion that earlier decades were happier, more innocent times.
• The Confessions of Frannie Langton: Even the people who are nice to Frannie frequently see her as a strange, exotic person due to being black in England at a time when the country was far whiter. Others view her as naturally inferior and fit only to be a slave or at best a curiosity. Homophobia and classism are also rampant, so her relationship with her mistress Marguerite is thus condemned doubly.
• Deadwood:
  • Even the sympathetic characters toss about what would be considered ethnic slurs today: Bullock calling Mr. Wu a "Chinaman", Calamity Jane addressing General Fields as "a short nigger", Trixie making frequent anti-Semitic remarks in reference to her Jewish lover Sol, and Charlie Utter often calling Indians "heathens". Then again, the nastier characters (Swearengen and Tolliver particularly) do it even more.
  • Prostitutes in town are little more than sexual slaves to their masters. This is treated as just a natural part of life in the frontier. The show also doesn't shy away from the Stockholm Syndrome felt by prostitutes toward their pimps.
  • As was considered appropriate in the time period, Mrs. Garret does not go outside without a male escort, even if the escort is a simpleton who couldn't be expected to perform any useful function.
• Dickinson:
  • Being the 1850s, women writers are frowned upon, same-sex relationships cannot be open, and Edward's view of opposing slavery but not wanting to go to war over it is viewed as reasonable and centrist.
  • When Emily invites Henry, who is black, to play Othello with her Shakespeare club, George protests at once about mingling with "his kind" and the others agree.
  • If a woman's husband divorces her, it's simply a given that he'll get sole custody of their child.
  • People can be committed to mental institutions with the sole consent of their nearest male relative, for things such as being politically active or transgender, where they will languish indefinitely in terrible conditions.
  • The US Army doesn't trust black soldiers yet, so they're left without guns for months and only get them before battle due to strings being pulled.
  • Women can't own property themselves. As such Emily's father doesn't even consider giving the house to her in his will, saying if he did it likely wouldn't even be honored, as he'd be thought insane. He goes on to voice the common view of the time, claiming women are too emotional to handle property and so their male relatives handle it, even saying this is a burden she's free from. It leads to a very deep disappointment for her, Emily denouncing his words and tearfully storming out.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Idiot's Lantern": Since it's The '50s, no one in the house reacts when Eddie Connolly mentions he's going to beat his son later, just for wanting to see his grandmother. It's hard to tell if everyone else just thought he was joking, since no one but Tommy saw Eddie's face go from jovial to angry, or whether they just don't care.
  • Martha Jones worries in "The Shakespeare Code" about a black woman wandering around London in 1599, but the Doctor assures her that London has always been a place of many peoples and she should be fine. Indeed, the worst thing that happens is Shakespeare flirting with her by using several terms for "black person" that were common in the day, but not by any means considered politically correct now. (He eventually settles on "My Dark Lady", a term that anyone who knows Shakespeare's sonnets might find a little familiar.)
  • "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood": In 1913, Martha has the students mocking her ("With hands like those, how can you tell when something's clean?"), Joan not believing that Martha could ever train as a doctor because she's black and female, and John Smith believing that Martha can't understand the difference between fictional literature and reality. The best part is that Joan has almost no trouble believing that John Smith was the Doctor and an alien, but can't seem to get her head around a black woman training to be a doctor. Additionally, the aforementioned Family of Blood two-parter shows the young boys at the boarding school being repeatedly insulted and scolded by their teachers for showing "cowardice unbecoming a man of the Empire" (read: symptoms of PTSD) after being forced to use firearms in self-defense, and the uncomfortable jingoism and rampant imperialist attitudes among the British are highlighted and shown to be self-destructive and foolish.
  • In "The Unicorn and the Wasp", Donna feels sympathy for the footman Davenport because his lover Lord Roger has been murdered and, since it is the 1920s, he cannot openly mourn or acknowledge that they were anything other than master and servant, even though everyone in the household appears to have known.
  • "The Next Doctor": The men attending Reverend Fairchild's funeral are openly shocked when Miss Hartigan turns up at the grave, and the priest interrupts his speech to tell her how inappropriate she is. On top of that, she deliberately showed up in a red dress and carrying a red parasol.
  • Played for laughs in "Vastra Investigates", a prequel to "The Snowmen"; a Victorian policeman takes it fairly in stride that the detective he's working with is a reptilian woman from Earth's distant past employing a genetically-engineered warrior from space. The fact that she's romantically involved with her maid visibly freaks him out, though. The actual episode makes a Discriminate and Switch joke out of this, with Simeon apparently being more disgusted that the Veiled Detective is a woman as opposed to not being human, and is especially derisive of her and Jenny's relationship. Vastra rejects his accusations of impropriety; they are married after all.
  • In "The Eaters of Light", Bill is surprised by a Roman legion's casual acceptance of her lesbianism and their Token Gay member's homosexuality. They describe being interested in men and women as "normal", and consider monosexuality to be a fad. Also, the legionnaires do not even mention the fact that Bill or two of their own are black, yet are openly racist towards the white Scottish "barbarians". They are also all teenagers (the eldest is 18), and find nothing weird about being in the army at their age, and are ashamed at being scared of an alien monster because soldiers aren't supposed to feel afraid.
  • Played for Laughs in "Twice Upon a Time", where the First Doctor makes several casually sexist remarks toward Bill, in keeping with his character (who was written in the 1960s). The Twelfth Doctor is deeply ashamed and tries to get his past self to cut it out.^note While this attracted criticism among fans who felt it was Flanderizing the First Doctor, given that these incidents were much fewer and farther-between in his own time, the novelization indicates that One was doing it deliberately to wind up Twelve.
  • Played for Drama in "Rosa". While walking around in 1955 Alabama, Ryan notices a passing white woman drop one of her gloves and goes to return it to her. His reward for this innocent gesture is a slap to the face and a warning from her husband, infuriated that a black man would have the temerity to approach a white woman. It almost results in a scuffle. Really, this whole episode underscores the point that a non-white time traveler would be made to feel uncomfortable or even in danger in many periods and places of Earth's history.
  • In "The Witchfinders", the Doctor, now in a female body, is subject to this for the first time in 17th Century rural England, when King James I assumes her companion Graham (an older white male) is the Witchfinder General, not her. His bias is so strong that even the psychic paper reflects it! She also gets accused of witchcraft in the same episode, which she believes would not have happened if she was still in a male body.
  Doctor: Honestly, if I was still a bloke, I could get on with the job and not have to waste time defending myself.
• Doom Patrol (2019) showcases this for a multitude of the main characters' backstories, each of them having grown up in different time periods:
  • Rita Farr/Elastiwoman was shown to have willingly allowed top talent managers to sleep around with attractive women in order to land herself prominent roles (and a traumatic flashback to her childhood shows her mother did the same on behalf of her daughter)—actions of which became far more infamous and unacceptable in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the subsequent #MeToo movement that spawned out of it, but were considered acceptable practices during the 1950s.
  • Larry Trainor/Negative Man initially harbors doubts about his sexuality, having grown up during the 1930s when homosexual lifestyles were considered to be unacceptable, and spent his initial adult life married to a woman and having two kids, yet secretly having a relationship with another gay man, during the equally intolerant period of the 1960s. Of course, such attitudes have changed by the modern day, but he struggles to accept that his attitude about it is outdated for a while, though he eventually comes to accept it.
  • Kay Challis/Crazy Jane is a victim of childhood molestation at the hands of her own father, with the resulting trauma and the subsequent medical procedures she was subjected too resulting in the splitting of 64 different personalities designed to further protect the young Kay from further harm. Such blatant ignorance of molestation is not tolerated under any circumstance in the modern day, but was tragically ignored during the 1960s and 70s.
  • Cliff Steele/Robotman was very much a wild Manchild during the days before his accident, riding high off the fame and fortune his racing career came with. Such behaviors are not acceptable now, but were accepted practices during the 1980s.
• Dracula (2013): The series is set in the 1890s, and doesn't shy away from the homophobia, racism and sexism of the period. LGBT+ people must remain closeted, or else face social ruin, with their status leaving them open for blackmail as well. Renfield is African-American here, and though a qualified attorney was unable to find work because of his race in the US, along with being attacked trying to even practice. Even wealthy women like Mina and Lucy have many restrictions against what they can do. Dracula is notable because he doesn't share these prejudices.
• Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman:
  • It features a female doctor/adoptive mom coming to work in a frontier town, without Politically Correct History coming into play. "Dr. Mike" and her children are exceptionally enlightened, as might be expected, but most plots derive from the ignorance of the townsfolk over natives, Jewish immigrants, Reconstruction, Darwinian evolution, or (most commonly, given the series' focus) single mothers as doctors.
  • Even Mike herself falls victim to this. She is at first very apprehensive about the Native Americans, having never even seen them before moving to Colorado Springs, as well as uncomfortable about her son Brian's friendship with Walt Whitman after hearing rumors about Whitman's sexuality.
• The Eternal Love:
  • Shows up when Xiao Tan is confronted with the differences between the present and the past. She calls Lian Cheng a womaniser because he has two concubines. Jing Xin points out that as a prince he's expected to have concubines.
  • Lian Cheng doesn't think marrying another woman is cheating on Xiao Tan and can't understand why she's so angry about it.
• Eureka has a downplayed example on a trip to the past when Henry dryly notes how easily he should be able to blend in. "Eureka was always progressive, but still, nobody would look twice at a black mechanic in 1947."
• In the Korean drama Faith, Choi Young (a warrior from the 14th century) travels to the present day to find a doctor after the queen is wounded. To test a doctor he found, he slashes open the throat of a perfectly innocent guard to see if she can save him. After she does, he's actually surprised when she tries to escape rather than immediately follow him.
• Fellow Travelers: The series highlights not only homophobia in the 1950s, which was pervasive and forced LGBT+ people to stay hidden, but also institutionalized racism and how McCarthyism destroyed many lives in the anti-communist persecution.
• Firefly: The series is set several centuries in the future, but it is repeatedly emphasized that social mores don't always evolve going into the future, especially when humanity has spread itself across dozens of terraformed planets and moons and technology has yet to advance to the point of The Singularity. Slavery is actually legal for some worlds in the Alliance, entire villages see nothing wrong with kidnapping travelers, witch trials show up, and some women are sold as property, but the most notable is the Companions. Companions are treated with high-ranking respect, making it a preferable life choice that some women idealize. This has driven criticism from some feminist groups, due to the in-universe admiration Companions earn, while forgetting the much less appealing portrayal of life for more ordinary prostitutes. In part to amend this issue, the episode "Heart of Gold" is about a prostitute who's bearing the child of the most powerful man on that moon, who intends to take the child to raise as his own even if he has to cut it out of her body. And this is because these are lucky prostitutes — the current madame is a former Companion, but before she showed up most of the girls were cruelly abused and heavily addicted to drugs so they could be kept in line.
• A French Village: The series showcases attitudes common in 1940s France. For instance, many French people are antisemites, with officials happily helping strip Jews of their property and rights. Lucienne's father also thanks Jules for marrying her, because being a single mother would dishonor their family. Homosexuality is also viewed pretty poorly, with De Kervern initially suspecting Jérôme murdered his lover Louis because he asserts that "crimes of passion are common among queers". Lucienne, though very sweet usually, reacts quite negatively to learning Marguerite is a lesbian, saying "people like you" should be locked up and fearing she's a danger to the underage girls they teach. Many A lot of men don't like taking orders from women either, or express disbelief when they find they're in positions of authority.
• Galavant, being set in the 13th century, mines this for comedy all over the place. A notable example is when one society invents democracy... and then performs an elaborate musical number detailing all the people who aren't allowed to vote (women, non-Christians, the poor, etc). Galavant lampshades that its still "progressive, for the Middle Ages".
• Game of Thrones: As with the novels, this is a notable theme of the series:
  • Zigzagged by Sansa and Tyrion in Season 3. Sansa specifically calls Littlefinger too old for her, but makes no mention of this regarding Tyrion, who (while younger than Littlefinger) is still at least twice her age. Conversely, only Tyrion seems to take issue with Sansa's age, even though he admits to bedding girls not much older. (The implication is that in his case these were sex workers, which both from profession and from social standing would be perceived quite differently from a highborn lady.)
  • In "The Mountain and the Viper", Yohn Royce criticizes Petyr Baelish's Braavosi ancestry and insinuates that his lowborn hands are only good for handling money. Littlefinger's bland reaction implies that these racist and classist attitudes are something he has dealt with all his life.
  • Sacred Hospitality is a really big deal in Westeros. If you're of higher social standing you can do pretty much whatever the hell you want, but don't invite someone over for dinner and then backstab them. The Freys do this with the Red Wedding and everybody, even their allies, turns on them.
  • True to the medieval period in Real Life, while the laws and customs of war make clear distinctions between civilians and combatants in combat, in a city under siege that has rejected all calls to surrender the distinction ceases to exist as the responsibility for the safety of the local population falls to the defender. So from a medieval perspective, Daenerys' decision to torch King's Landing with Drogon makes sense, though it horrifies her allies and completely tarnishes her character in the eyes of modern viewers.
  • In the show's finale, after the death of Daenerys at the hands of Jon leaves the throne to the Seven Kingdoms open without a clear successor, the nobles of Westeros are gathered to decide a solution. Samwell Tarly, ever the Nice Guy, suggests that the new monarch be chosen by the smallfolk of Westeros in an election... and nearly every person present laughs at him. Even if they are the "good" guys, they are still nobles from a feudal society, so the idea of smallfolk democracy is utterly ridiculous to them. But they are still more receptive to the idea of Westeros becoming an Elective Monarchy (since they get to elect the monarch).
• House of the Dragon:
  • The central Succession Crisis is about the Greens opposing Rhaenyra's (the late king's firstborn) claim to the throne and instead supporting her younger half-brother Aegon (the late king's firstborn son). This is nominally on the grounds of Heir Club for Men, which, if played straight, would be Deliberate Values Dissonance — but it's actually a Zig-Zagging Trope. The twist is that few characters actually appear to feel strongly about the question of a female monarch. That's merely the ideological guise for a conflict which is really more of a Realpolitik power struggle between houses Targaryen, Hightower, and Velaryon, each perusing their own family's self-interest.
  • Corlys Velaryon offers his twelve-year-old daughter in marriage to the middle aged King Viserys. Although Viserys is creeped out by this, everyone else considers Laena's age a minor concern. Her mother does assure her that she won't have to consummate the marriage until she's older — as in once she's turned fourteen. Viserys ultimately decides to marry Alicent, who's still creepily young by modern standards, but is at least near adulthood. He also doesn't seem to bother asking her before he announces the marriage (though she was working toward that goal all along at her father's behest).
• The Glamorous Imperial Concubine: A man can rape his wife without anyone caring, as shown by Lian Cheng raping Xiang Yun.
• GLOW (2017) is set in the 1980's. Ruth's acting carreer is heavily stymied by all the roles being offered being just bit roles as spouses and secretaries. Debbie was written out from her role in a soap opera for being too vocal. Sam Sylvia is a coked up schlock horror director with some deeply seated issues with women (Cherry Bomb's husband Keith does say he is "more sexist than racist") who even says she doesn't care if Justine is 18 when he tries to kiss her right before she blurts out he's her biological father. Bash is a deeply closeted gay spoiled brat who immediately pitches all the girls racial stereotypes to perform as, and when asking his mother for money to film the series pilot, Birdie jokes "since when do we talk about money, are we Jewish?". Many of the male wrestlers we meet scoff at female wrestling as a sideshow, Debbie tells Ruth that she should have played along with the network executive's Casting Couch advances, the pair of Las Vegas show producers think nothing of walking into the girls' dressing room uninvited and start talking out loud about breast sizes. And late in season 3, an AIDS benefit ball thrown in the Fan Tan casino is target of a Homophobic Hate Crime as someone has set a fire and spraypainted an anti-gay message on the wall. And Everybody Smokes.
• The Golden Girls: Discussed in-universe when Rose catches her daughter Kirsten in bed with Dorothy's son. When mother and daughter finally talk about it, Rose says she wanted Kirsten's "first time" to be special. Kirsten replies that her first time was special...four years ago. Rose is horrified to learn her daughter has had a sex life this whole time, but to modern viewers it's perfectly reasonable that a young woman born in the 1960's wouldn't be a virgin in her 20's.
• Halt and Catch Fire takes place in the 1980s to the mid 1990s, so this crops up. Most noticeably, homophobia is rampant. Joe, as a bisexual man, is in the closet about his relationships with men. He severs a business deal because a business partner starts cracking sadistic jokes about AIDS. In the final season, the teenage Haley is an in-the-closet lesbian in the 90s. Part of why she's so interested in the internet is implied to be because she can "be herself" online.
• The Handmaid's Tale: As with the book, the series is full of this since it involves a misogynistic and homophobic fundamentalist regime taking over the United States following a Sterility Plague. They push the clock back so far that even reading is now forbidden to women. Birth control is now illegal, and adultery is illegal and punished by death.
• Very much Played for Laughs on Harry Enfield and Chums during the sketches featuring Miles Cholmondley-Warner and his assistant Grayson. The Public Information Film Women: Know Your Limits is a particularly well-known example.
• A flashback episode of Heroes takes place before the civil rights movement and involves Angela Shaw (future Angela Petrelli) as a teenage girl running away from the military base with three boys her age, one of whom is Charles Deveaux, who is black. At a local diner, Charles asks Angela for a dance, but they stop when the customers (all white) stare at them and the cook tells that they don't tolerate that sort of thing there. Charles promptly uses his telepathic ability to have the customers and the employees forget this ever happened.
• A notable theme in the series History Bites is playing this and The Dung Ages trope for Black Comedy. Everybody is a victim of bias, and everybody is a carrier of bias, even if they don't even realize it. At worst, some of the characters are blatant about their biases.
• Horatio Hornblower: In "Duty", Horatio rescues an American sailor at sea... and promptly presses him into the crew by force. American viewers with a good grasp of history might know that this is not Horatio being a heel, he's just following usual Royal Navy procedure at the time in real life — by some estimates around 15,000 American sailors were pressed into crews on British ships in real life, and this was what in part caused the United States to declare war on the British Empire in 1812 (that and a lack of a decent postal service).
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): In Louisiana during the early 20th century, there is institutionalized racism and homophobia in the form of racial segregation, anti-miscegenation and anti-homosexuality laws. Louis de Pointe du Lac is an African American, and as a second-class citizen, his options are very limited — the only section of New Orleans where he's permitted to own and operate his own business is in Storyville, but he loses that in 1917 when City Ordinance 4118 shuts down all colored businesses, and to add insult to injury, he's prohibited from buying property in the French Quarter because of his race. The French Opera House on Bourbon and Toulouse forbids non-Caucasians on its premises with the exception of servants, so Louis can only gain entry by acting as a valet to Lestat de Lioncourt, a white man. While talking with Jonah Macon, a fellow black man, Louis mentions that they live in a country which makes them use the side entrance. In a streetcar, Louis and Claudia (a black woman) must sit in the back. Louis and his boyfriend Lestat are a same-sex and interracial couple, so their romance is felonious twice over, so this forces them to remain in the closet. Deputy Habersham attempts to intimidate the pair when he informs them that they could spend five years behind bars for "crimes against nature" after he notices that there's only one bed in their master bedroom.
• Jack Ryan: Suleiman tells his young children the story of how he married their mother: Her father offered her to him for the night when she was 16, but he decided he'd rather marry her, which her father permitted the very next day. Suleiman seems to think that this is a romantic story in spite of it involving a teenage girl being prostituted and then forcibly married without her consent.
• In Kaamelott:
  • Even though Arthur is very ahead of his time, this trope is sometimes used to remind the viewers that no, despite the way they're talking, the protagonists are not modern people in fancy costumes, but really fifth-century barbarians.
    Loth: Kids, those days, they read, they read... end result: they're still virgins at ten.
  • King Arthur is one of the only characters to dislike torture and public executions of criminals, and he allows them nonetheless. He also has several official mistresses, and not even his wife minds it. Every character find the idea of monogamy utterly ridiculous, and when a random woman Arthur has only met once refuses to become his new mistress, the other knights see it as an affront. And even then, many warlords dislike how much of a "progressive" the king is, which in their mind clearly means "pussy".
  • One episode has Arthur discussing various upcoming executions. Léodagan thinks burning them alive is still good, while the breaking wheel is a family event (everyone brings their staff and gets their turn beating the condemned to death), Lancelot supports drawing and quartering (it's more suspenseful, you don't know whether the arms or legs will come off first), as Arthur floats the idea of abolishing the death penalty. Everyone, including Lancelot, looks at him like he's crazy.
• The King's Woman: Surprisingly, considering China's infamous censorship, the series doesn't shy away from showing some of the historical Ying Zheng's most reprehensible actions like killing his half-brothers.
• It's inevitable on The Knick, which is set in the year 1900 in New York City. Most of the white characters are casual racists, at least one of them is a hardcore social Darwinist, and most male characters are equally casually sexist.
  Dr. Algernon Edwards: Is your race listed on your credentials?
  Dr. John Thackery: There's no need for it to be.
• The Law According to Lidia Poët: Lidia faces constant incredulity or hostility over being Italy's first female lawyer, and then gets disbarred as the courts decide her enrollment was illegal, because it's unsuitable for women to participate in legal discussions and their role is at home, which devastates her, but even her own family agrees with this. Also, her suggestion that fingerprinting can be used for evidence also gets dismissed at first, as this was a very new idea at the time. In 1x4, the issue of women in society gets highlighted again with one of the few female professors tried for murder, while she's hated widely not just for the charge but daring to go beyond what most people viewed as women's place at the time.
• Legends of Tomorrow regularly invokes this, being a show about Time Travel featuring a reasonably diverse cast. Examples include:
  • Jax and Amaya, the two crew members of color, experiencing first-hand the horrors of Civil War-era slavery. Additionally, Jax's full name, Jefferson Jackson, is remarked upon as being composed of the names of two prolific slave owners by some slaves they meet.
  • Sara's bisexuality is shocking to various people throughout history.
  • Amaya, being from the 1940s, having some markedly different views compared to the rest of the cast, all of whom were born decades after her. Most notably, when the team visits the Vietnam War, she finds the behavior of the GIs and the overall moral ambiguity of the conflict hard to reconcile with the more clear-cut and idealistic World War II.
  • Rex Tyler/Hourman of the JSA (also from the 1940s) assumes Martin Stein to be their leader by virtue of him being the eldest of the white men of the team.
• Gene Hunt on Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes is a racist sexist gay-basher who gives out Police Brutality like presents. He still has enough redeeming qualities to qualify for Noble Bigot with a Badge, but essentially no one wouldn't want him on a modern police force.
• In the Chilean series Los 80, which recounts the experiences of a Chilean middle-class family in the 1980s, Everybody Smokes, including fathers in front of their children, and when the father and head of the family loses his job, he feels humiliated because his wife must now look for a job to support the family.
• Lovecraft Country: The series pulls no punches about depicting the massive institutional racism and sexism prevalent in the US at the time.
  • The creators spend an entire episode focusing on the Korean War and don't hold back on the war crimes America committed.
  • It also shows that different social issues were viewed differently. Just because black people were dealing with racism didn't mean they were too sympathetic to homosexuals who were also facing prejudice of their own. When Atticus witnesses his closeted father trying to stop his boyfriend from leaving after a fight, Atticus sadly says his father is "a faggot".
  • Working at a department store is shown to be a well respected middle class profession rather than a job that pays minimum wage.
• Mad Men, set in the early 1960s:
  • Male characters smoke like chimneys, drink like fishes, and regularly display what would today be considered firing offenses with regards to sexually harassing female co-workers.
  • The women on the show also display period behavior, especially with regards to their married lives or with the actions of their female peers.
  • Decidedly non-kosher shrimp cocktails are served at a lunch meeting with a Jewish family ^note  though it should be noted that antisemitism was unpopular in the early '60's thanks to The Holocaust, but someone in real life would have at least thought to ask .
  • Peggy's gynecologist openly disparages his patient, up to and including accusing her of promiscuity, because she's an unmarried woman asking for birth control.
  • Pete Campbell's pragmatic idea of marketing TV sets to black people so disgusts the clients they almost drop Sterling Cooper.
  • One of the younger men working freelance for Sterling Cooper tells his colleagues he's gay, leading to awkward silence and people talking behind his back, and Betty nicknames her daughter "daddy's little lesbian" because of the daughter's love of handiwork.
  • Betty's low-speed car crash had the kids (restrained only by the friction of their clothing against the car's vinyl seats) thrown into the footwell.
  • One scene of the Drapers leaving all of their garbage behind after a picnic in a public park seemed so outlandish that some viewers wondered whether the show was accentuating the negative on purpose.
  • When Betty sees a psychologist, the psychologist reports to Don about Betty's progress in therapy. Nowadays, this would be considered a breach of doctor/patient confidentiality, but, at the time, a common attitude was that wives were expected to let their husbands make the serious decisions about their health.
  • Later in the series, however, it becomes clear that many of the reprehensible actions on the show are personal and not even fair for their day.
• Mad TV:
  • A sitcom produced by the History Channel is about a medieval king who travels forward in time and had to work in a fast food joint. He is sexist, racist and casually violent but the characters constantly remind viewers his behavior was perfectly acceptable in his time.
  • Played for Cringe Comedy on the sketch Your New Neighbors. The skit is imagined as a 1956 infomercial. The father is a misogynist who orders his wife and daughter to get the door, the black family moving next door is greeted by the white family with a mixture of Stunned Silence, unintentionally racist remarks, and near violence, the narrator blames African Americans for the civil war, and the infomercial hawks asbestos products.
• Merlin has rigid class structures be an obstacle for Arthur and Guinevere.
• Mindhunter is set in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Holden Ford is very awkward around black people and Bill Tench is often casually homophobic. Many in the FBI would prefer to shoot first and ask questions later, police keep bringing up satanic cults as suspects in the crimes they investigate, women at the FBI have to accept unwelcome flirting at work events, and everyone is smoking and drinking all the time, including several law enforcement officials casually driving drunk. Part of this is to show what were some of the flaws in police work that lead to many of the serial killers get away for so long.
• Frequently invoked on mixed•ish, especially as the show features a mixed race black/white family in the 80's (the show notes that the Loving V. Virginia US Supreme Court decision striking down all bans on interracial marriage was decided only 18 years prior to when the series' events started), as well as the gender roles with Paul staying at home and Alicia being in the workplace as well as common racial microaggressions in the office.
• In Modern Family, Gloria takes Lilly to get clothes and "hairings". Mitch agrees to this, not understanding that Gloria intended to pierce his child's ears. Gloria, being Colombian born where this is common and accepted, cannot understand Mitch's shock when his daughter returns with earrings.
• Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: In The '50s storyline, the male authority figures that female Japanese doctor Keiko interacts with are often bemused to learn upon the first meeting that she's a female esteemed scientist who also has a doctorate. Even Lee Shaw, who later became a close friend of hers, found it hard to wrap his head around at first, and he thinks it's a sign the government doesn't take their mission very seriously.
• Moon Lovers:
  • More than once it's mentioned that killing is a perfectly logical and necessary choice one has to make in order to survive in that time.
  • Polygamy and Brother–Sister Incest are normal in the royal family. Yeon-hwa has an affair with one of her half-brothers then later marries another, and no one bats an eyelid at this.
  • Wang So has to agree to marry his niece (who's just a child) to stop her father sending her off to Khitan. He isn't happy with the situation... because it drives a wedge between him and the woman he actually wants to marry, not because of the incest or the girl's age.
• Murdoch Mysteries:
  • Inspector Brackenreid refers to a woman with undiagnosed mental problems as an "imbecile". George is quick to correct him, "They don't use that word any more, it's insensitive. The accepted term is 'moron'."
  • There's a similar joke with Murdoch 'improving' on Brackenreid's "negro" with the term "coloured".
  • People who haven't met Julia are patronizing towards her at best and outright prejudiced at worst. Even the people she works with who have come to terms with her being a doctor don't view her as entirely equal; when it comes to light that some women have been dressing up as men and living double lives that way, Brackenreid rants (in her presence, mind) that women don't understand the complexities of life and are foolish for impersonating men.
  • Eugenics (the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable) is depicted as a widely accepted policy.
  • The Catholic William Murdoch has deep reservations about abortion and homosexuality. He can't help but see them as sins, even if he's deeply troubled by the conflict between his religion and the pain he sees in the people who are discriminated against because of these things.
  • It's also stated that his religion is an impediment to his advancement on the force, due to the Protestant town elite's distrust of "papists".
  • People of African and Chinese descent are shown to continually suffer harassment and discrimination from groups ranging from the police to private restaurants. The effects of Canadian colonialism on First Nations people is also grimly depicted.
  • Inspector Brackenreid is a textbook example of a Noble Bigot with a Badge. He readily admits that a black murder suspect's race initially led him to think she was guilty, he arrests a group of Romani for a series of break-ins to further his political career (though he later lets them go once he tracks down the real thieves), and he dislikes Francophone people. However, he also subverts this trope by keeping Dr. Emily Grace's lesbianism a secret when he finds out about it, is perfectly civil to the black Rebecca James and is far ahead of his time in recognizing eugenics as nonsense.
• My Country: The New Age:
  • Hui-jae is willing to kill a child. (Because she thought they were about to be captured by enemy soldiers and he'd be killed anyway if they were, but still...)
  • Seon-ho kills a horse and no one does anything to stop him.
  • Lampshaded in-universe: it's legal for General Jung to beat a commoner to death, but he'd be executed if anyone found out he was gambling. Seon-ho finds this darkly amusing.
• A good amount of humor in Mystery Science Theater 3000 can be derived from this. For example, in the 1950s short "A Date With Your Family", Servo Gag Dubs for the teen daughter, "Daddy, I'm dating a Negro!"
• Aurora in Once Upon a Time had a mild moment where she is in disbelief that there is a female warrior (Mulan) traveling and fighting alongside Prince Phillip. Part of it may be contributed to Green-Eyed Monster as she might have felt threatened by this beautiful, exotic Action Girl.
• The Orville:
  • It's mentioned that humans in the future no longer have zoos, discussing it as a barbaric practice.
  • In a mix with Author Tract, religion is treated as a sign of unadvanced society by humans in the current day.
  • Marijuana is now openly accepted, to the point that it is possible to freely order pot brownies via the ship's food replicator.
  • Boxing and other "blood sports" stopped being practiced on Earth centuries ago.
  • Most Moclans are male, so the rare female is viewed as an aberration to be corrected. When the human crew points out the fact that gender is not an aberration in their societies, they are called out on it, with several Moclans noting that what is right for one species is not necessarily right for another. Zigzagged as Bortus eventually comes to the conclusion that trying to force Topa to be male was wrong.
  • Klyden attempts to murder Bortus in his sleep to the horror of the crew of The Orville, who want to put Klyden on trial for his actions. Bortus explains that Klyden wanted a divorce, and divorce involves killing one's spouse in Moclan society.
  • Isaac is a member of the Kaylon, a xenophobic race of artificial beings. As time goes on, he becomes torn between the Kaylon's core values and his growing affection for humankind.
  • It's noted in "Krill" that space-faring societies tend to become very secular. The Krill are an exception, and their religion teaches that all other beings are on par with how we see bugs.
  • Darulio's people are apparently so casual about sex that they consider turning down an offer to roll in the sheets to be rude and are oblivious to the concept of consent.
• Outlander:
  • This is often explored In-Universe since Claire is from the 1940s, finds herself transported back to the very different era of the 1740s, and experiences first-hand that some of the values and standards of the 1740s are... different. Claire's 18th-century husband Jamie is a very sympathetic character — but when Claire disobeys him and puts their group in danger, he feels morally obligated to take a belt to her bottom... It doesn't go well for anyone. Jamie later swears on his knife never to lay a hand on Claire again and she tells him — while they're having sex — that if he ever does, she'll cut his heart out and eat it for breakfast. Said while holding the knife to his throat, no less.
  • Jarring to modern audiences is Claire drinking alcohol during her Season 2 pregnancy in Paris. Yet, though Claire is an educated and well-versed nurse trained in the 20th century, she is still from the 1940s and even she couldn't have known alcohol use could have been harmful to her baby because it was not well-known before the 1970s.
  • Jamie's quite unhappy at seeing a photo of Brianna in her bikini which Claire shows him, since it's scandalously indecent for his time. He gets over it.
  • Even though it was to defend his mistress, Ulysses killing a white man means he must go underground.
• Pan Am is also set in the 1960s and has some pretty clear examples in the way the stewardesses are treated, but others include the strong taboo against interracial relationships (shown in the outcome of the public display between Laura and a black sailor) and the treatment of women's sexuality.
• Paper Girls: Mac's brother informs her how a few of the derogatory insults kids threw around in 1988 aren't as acceptable in 2019.
• Parks and Recreation:
  • It's a Running Gag that all of the murals in Pawnee's City Hall are incredibly racist. They proudly depict various sordid events in the town's history that are shocking by today's standards. Leslie shows them off with some embarrassment:
    "She was one of the first feminist leaders in Pawnee! She was the first to dare wearing pants on a Sunday, she spent 30 years in prison for that."
    "In 1867, the progressive Reverend Turnbill officiated a wedding between a white woman and a Wamapoke Indian chief. The secret ceremony was beautiful and romantic. But then word got out and the reception was a bloodbath. Fortunately, there were two survivors. Unfortunately, they were both horses."
  • In one episode, we find out that every year, the entire town uses an obscure, misprinted loophole in the town charter to legally harass a man named Ted. Ted finally becomes fed up and decides to use other obscure clauses in the town charter, namely the extremely racist and sexist ones, to bully Tom and Leslie and teach them a lesson about why the laws of the Pawnee founders shouldn't be held in such reverence.
  • Leslie, looking forlorn, stands in front of a map of Pawnee. The map is blue, with a few scattered white dots on it.
    Leslie: This is a map of all the atrocities the Pawnee settlers inflicted upon the Wamapoke Indians.
    [Beat]
    Leslie: invoked The atrocities are in blue.
  • When trying to find a legal loophole in "The Trial of Leslie Knope", the Parks team keep finding old laws that are technically still on the books: black people aren't allowed to use sidewalks, every sexual position besides missionary is banned (with an addendum that missionary was also banned two years later), women who laugh are witches, and a woman who exposes her elbow must be immediately sentenced to death.
• Penny Dreadful: City of Angels: Endemic, casual racism from the nearly all-white LAPD (along with many civilians) is shown toward Latinos (plus other minorities mentioned). It's made clear that Townsend, who's gay, cannot be out about this (and a film of him having sex with a man is made for blackmail if necessary).
• Perry Mason (2020):
  • The series explicitly shows racism in the early 1930s. Drake laments that even as a black police officer, he's still lower on the social ladder than a white murderer.
  • Della has to stay in the closet about being lesbian due to homophobia. They maintain separate rooms at their boarding house and only occasionally can spend the night with each other in spite of being in a monogamous relationship. Hamilton Burger, being gay, also must keep this hidden. Both of them pretend they're dating for that purpose.
  • In the first episode, Perry starts smoking in the Dodsons’ house without asking permission, and when Mrs. Dodson catches him, she’s not mad and he even offers her a cigarette. Nowadays, smoking in a stranger’s house without permission would often get you thrown out.
  • The Polish-American conspirators in the kidnapping are repeatedly referred to as "Polacks," even by Mason. In modern times, the word is considered a slur.
  • In 1932, Prohibition is still technically on the books, though most people seem to have no difficulty drinking in public. When confronted for having a hidden flask, Mason correctly notes that it's not illegal to drink alcohol, just produce, transport or sell it. FDR would have just been elected into the presidency this year on a campaign promise of repealing Prohibition, which he did the next year.
• Pose has a lot of this, as it takes place in the 1980s. There is a lot more casual homophobia, and even within the gay community Blanca is thrown out of a gay bar for being black and trans. Additionally, the trans characters refer to themselves as "transsexual" as that was the "correct" term at that time.
• Quantum Leap, all the time — for example, when Sam leaps into a black man in the pre-civil rights era South, or a secretary in 1961 who's being sexually harassed by her boss. One famous episode dealt with gay people in the military, and has Sam contend not only with the gay-bashing (and -killing) cadets at the academy, but his own partner Al, who doesn't believe gay people should be allowed to serve and changes his mind over the course of the episode.
• Quantum Leap (2022) continues this tradition. In one episode set in 1934, a doctor suggests that a young woman's "demonic possession" could be cured with electroshock or a lobotomy. Ben, who is originally from 2022, is aghast.
• Queens Gambit: When Beth was in an orphanage as a kid, it was normal for years to keep the kids sedated using pharmaceutical tranquilizers, until the state bans them, at which point the kids, and notably Beth who had formed an addiction, are cut off cold turkey. Beth's adoptive mom is an alcoholic, and Beth also starts drinking at a very young age. At her first tournament, the male players are dismissive towards her as a young girl playing chess, however she soon develops a reputation. To get funding to go play in the Soviet Union, Beth is expected to take money from a fundamentalist Christian anti-communist organization.
• Rome:
  • Lucius Vorenus is devoted to a code of honor that often seems barbaric from a modern point of view; at one point he's willing to kill his wife's illegitimate son to preserve honor. In Real Life ancient Rome, the man who did not put his wife's illegitimate newborn to death would be considered not just dishonorable but immoral. However, if the child was older and freeborn (or if the mother had been married to the biological father at the time of conception), killing it would be a felony punishable by death.
  • There was also a hilarious bit when Atia took a servant's rumors of Caesar and Octavian coming out of a pantry at the same time after making some strange noises (Caesar was having an epileptic fit) and ran with it. This also becomes a case of deliberate hypocrisy later when she beats Octavia for being in a lesbian relationship with Servilia, an enemy of the family, as immoral. Of course, in the show this relationship led to the downfall of Caesar, but that was a ways off and due to a single seemingly unimportant comment to all involved.
    Atia: For what reason, I wonder, would you and Caesar possibly be skulking around in a cupboard...?
    Octavian: What? We were... it was nothing.
    Atia: "Nothing"? It doesn't sound like nothing. [beams] You seduced him, you sly little fox!
    Octavian: I did not!
    Atia: I am not clear it is decent, him being your great uncle... but who's to say what's decent in times like these? In any case, well done. Let's see Servilia compete with a soft young boy like you. What power we shall wield...!
  • The final straw for the conspirators who assassinated Caesar? He had the gall of offering common Roman people and non-Roman conquered peoples a seat in the Senate... thus giving everyone a say (well, every male at least). This is offensive to the Patricians, while in the modern day and age it would be viewed as progressive and natural. As a result, the conspirators look less like freedom fighters for the Republic and more like Evil Aristocrats trying to preserve their own power.
  • Sex is treated very casually, sometimes to a hilarious degree. The teenage Octavian frequently gets chewed out by his mother for not having enough sex, and she eventually forces him to visit a brothel so that he won't dishonor his family by being a virgin. Earlier in Season 1, she also forces him to eat sheep testicles to make him more virile, telling him "When my mother's father was your age, there was not a slave girl safe!"
  • In Ancient Rome basically any sexual partner was acceptable for a free man, the only limits would be very young children, close blood relatives, another man's wife, or another man's daughter or slave (without permission). However, while homosexual encounters were not only tolerated and sometimes actively encouraged, it would have been shameful to be the receiving partner. This unspoken assumption that Every Man is Bi runs in the background of many interactions: i.e. Octavian is offered his choice of male and female Sex Slaves; meanwhile uber-macho Marc Antony doesn't bat an eyelid when Atia suggests he has had sex with a male slave, but the implication he would have taken the "woman's role" in such an encounter drives him into a violent fury.
  • Slavery is prevalent in Roman life and it is okay to beat them or have sex in front of them.
    • Slaves would rather die with their masters than live without them. The well-fed domestic slaves at least.
    • When Pullo kills Eirene's husband out of jealousy, Vorenus chastises him only for destroying his property and doing it indiscreetly.
    • Vorenus gets his share of the spoils from Alesia in slaves. When all but one of them die of the plague before he can sell them, the audience is moved by how bad this is for him and his family.
  • Antisemitism is just a normal part of Roman life. When Herod visits, the news reader announces that Jew mockery is to be kept at an "appropriate minimum".
  • Characters partake in pagan ceremonies shocking to modern audiences. Examples include Atia bathing in bull's blood for good fortune and Vorenus and Niobe having (simulated) sex on a plot of land in front of their children for a good harvest.
  • Marriages occur as soon as couples are able to breed. Niobe apparently married Vorenus when she was just 13.
  • In Rome, A Real Man Is a Killer. Young Octavian has no qualms about killing. It's fighting he has no talent for.
  • Octavian bluntly proposes to his wife Livia while she is already married. Livia isn't remotely upset at the idea and both she and her mother are visibly excited at her trading up for a richer and more powerful husband. The fact that the two have a child isn't seen as any encumbrance to a swift divorce (in fact, Livia's proven fertility is a selling point), it's simply assumed that Livia's husband will happily hand over his wife and child to another man as a matter of patriotic duty. And he does.
  • While a mob is about to batter down their front door, Atia and her household discuss their own suicides to avoid rape and dishonor. She wants to kill her daughter Octavia, and then have her head slave kill her, and then himself, since it would be improper for him to stay alive without her, to which he readily agrees. Octavia, who is still angry with her mother for an incident from earlier in the episode, protests that she would really rather be killed by someone else. Octavian asserts his independence by insisting on killing himself rather than letting someone else kill him (prompting a So Proud of You moment from Atia for his manly action), and Atia plays hostess by offering a visiting Servilia and Brutus the services of their slaves to kill them, which Servilia graciously declines, saying they'll "sort [themselves] out somehow". There's never any dispute that they will all kill themselves and each other, they're just quibbling over who will kill whom.
  • When one character suggests that she might like to marry someone she loves, her parents consider it very funny and remark that "strange marriage it would be" if a couple loved each other from the start.
• Roots (1977). Black characters are always called "niggers"; a white sailor describes them as being essentially animals, their languages being no more than grunts. Rape of black women is widespread and accepted. The owners discuss how teaching them to read — if it be possible — would only make them unhappy. (Of course, the entire point of Roots is to describe this sort of thing.)
• Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace:
  • Polygamy is normal and the characters express incredulity at the idea of a man having only one wife.
  • Hongli rapes Hailan then marries her and no one, not even Ruyi, bats an eyelid.
  • Muping is sixteen when Zhen Huan chooses her as a concubine for Hongli, who's at least twenty years older than her.
  • Cutting your hair is a very serious matter. So serious, in fact, that Ruyi loses her title over it.
• In the Sanctuary episode "Tempus", Helen Magnus travels back in time to Victorian England to stop Adam Worth from destroying the timeline. While she is familiar with the culture of the time, being over 150 years old, she arrives in modern clothing, including mild cleavage and form-fitting leggings, and is described by the local police as being "half-dressed". She is forced to raid her past self's closet to better fit in.
• Scarlet Heart: Ruo Lan is surprised that Zhang Xiao isn't happy with the idea of her future husband having concubines.
• Schmigadoon!: Josh and Melissa are modern doctors from the "real world" who are at odds with the parodic Golden Age musical theater town Schmigadoon's patriarchal, old-timey values (eg. reacting negatively to the suggestion a man should smack his girlfriend if they are fighting). Melissa makes a scene at a picnic basket auction (really a front for buying a date with a girl), while the villainous Mildred Layton keeps a stern eye on any deviations from the puritan handbook (even destroying books).
• The Sopranos, in its desire to authentically depict the Italian-American criminal subculture, does not shy away from the casual racism, sexism, gay-bashing and Moral Myopia that are commonplace within it, even among the (by comparison) more sympathetic characters. Among other things, Tony disapproves that his daughter dates a black man in college; it's seen as normal for mafiosos to have affairs with women but a mob boss's wife having an affair is generally not tolerated; the crew are considering giving the gay Vito a pass for his homosexual activity until they find out he's the receiver; and even Tony's and Junior's Jewish friend catches a few slurs (clearly intended as affectionate, but the character often seems to be holding back irritation when it happens).
• The Spy: Given that it's The '60s in the Middle East, being gay is out of the question. When Eli Cohen seems to register that Ma'avi has a sexual interest in him, he turns him away in disgust without even acknowledging the matter. Later, Cohen is advised to get a girlfriend so his cover identity isn't thought to be "funny in that way."
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • When a simulation of Abraham Lincoln is projected onto the Enterprise, he immediately notices Uhura is black, noting "What a charming Negress." This is a bit of an inaccurate portrayal, as although some of the plans Lincoln advocated early in his life regarding slaves (such as the government buying them, freeing them, and then sending them to Liberia) would seem bothersome today due to Values Dissonance, he was remarked about at least once for not reminding people of their race.
    Frederick Douglass: In his company I was never in any way reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color.
    • Uhura's response is an example as well; she implies that humanity has "outgrown" categorizing people by race, or being offended by archaic labels such as "Negress". Needless to say, while there are those who believe we should aspire to this, we're not there yet.
    • In "Metamorphisis", the crew finds Zefram Cochrane on a planetoid being cared for by an energy being, which he assumes to be asexual. When it is revealed to be female and in love with him he is horrified, much to the bafflement of the 23rd century crewmembers. Spock even calls his reaction a "provincial attitude". Specifically, it's the alien part that bothered him, not the "female" part.
    • A lot of episodes dealt with alien cultures which often starkly depart from human values in some way. For instance, one planet has an annual day-long orgy of violence and destruction while they are endlessly polite and controlled the rest of the year; one world modeled their culture on the prohibition era, with murder and lawlessness as the norm; at least two planets practice slavery, one of them with televised gladiatorial fights; two planets are engaged in a centuries-long war which has essentially become a massive LARP with people willingly committing suicide if a computer decides they had died; etc.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • In "Half A Life", the people of Kaelon II view it as immoral for the elderly to expect their children to take care of them when they're feeble, thus, they undergo euthanasia, or "Resolution", upon turning 60. They're so dedicated to this concept that they won't make an exception even for the most prominent scientist trying to save their planet from extinction.
    • Worf's spine is seriously injured in "Ethics" that results in him being paralyzed. To the horror of his human friends he insists on being allowed to commit suicide since Klingons in similar situations take thier own lives. Captain Picard has to remind both Crusher and Riker that Worf has a different set of values than most humans have.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Numerous in-universe examples between the various alien races that inhabit the series.
    • A particular is in "Tribunal", when Miles O'Brien is put on trial in a Cardassian court. The Cardassian justice system is based around the notion that the state is infallible and therefore anyone accused must be guilty. The purpose of the trial is simply to publicly present their guilt and reconcile criminals to the justice they must face. To them, the notion of risking a guilty person going free is unthinkable, as is the idea of an innocent person being forced to stand trial, therefore all accused persons must be criminals. Miles's attorney is downright flummoxed when Miles tries to put up any form of defense — and is horrified when he wins the case.
    • Cardassian society has a few, very specific examples of sexism or, more accurately, gender essentialism. While most occupations, e.g. art, law and the Obsidian Order are open to anyone, science and engineering are seen as strictly female professions, while the military is almost exclusively male. This does not mean one is more prestigious than the other, as prominent scientists are well respected and privileged, but any man trying to work in technical fields will find himself ostracised and with his work constantly scrutinised and criticised^note it's not entirely clear how universal this is; the one time we saw it on screen the female engineer in question turned out to intend it as flirting. Similarly, according to spin-off media, while women can join the military if they want, there is a significant glass ceiling and they tend not to rise above the equivalent of Lieutenant. However, medicine seems to be more egalitarian, as mention is made of several prominent male doctors and medical researchers (the most prominent Cardassian medical researcher, who might be described as Mengele if he had practiced the scientific method, is male).
    • In "Sons and Daughters", Martok dresses Worf down for stopping a knife fight in the mess hall. Martok considers the fight — between Worf's son Alexander and a more senior warrior — to have been a potentially important formative experience for Alexander, and sees Worf's intervention as a failing in both his capacity as the Rotarran's first officer, and as Alexander's father.
    Martok: Ch'Targh might have cut him a little and maybe broken a few bones, but nothing more. You told me Alexander never wanted to be a warrior. Clearly he has changed his mind. Worf, you are his First Officer. Teach him to survive. The Jem'Hadar will be less forgiving than Ch'Targh.
    • Cardassian art — and Cardassian attitudes towards others' art — are in-universe versions of this trope. Garak, for example, claims that Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is not tragedy to the Cardassian perspective — that such a great man could not see the plotting all around him could only be the stuff of farce. Meanwhile, Bashir finds a Cardassian genre, the "repetitive epic", to be boring — the same things happening to different members of the same family over generations (the most well-regarded repetitive epic, "The Never-Ending Sacrifice", details seven generations of a Cardassian family's selfless service to the state). Garak claims that the repetitive epic is the highest form of Cardassian storytelling art. And in "Improbable Cause", after Dr. Bashir tells him the story of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", Garak argues that the actual Aesop isn't "Don't lie", but rather "Don't tell the same lie twice". Further, after Bashir reveals the boy's ultimate fate of the wolf gobbling him up, Garak is horrified that this is supposed to be a children's story. Cardassians are very family oriented to the point that abuse of one's own child is a career-ending scandal. (Of course, this only appears to apply to legitimate children — killing an illegitimate child to "protect" one's official family, while not openly condoned, is apparently common enough that Dukat seems honestly baffled by why Kira is so vehemently opposed to letting him do so.)
    • "Far Beyond The Stars" pulls no punches in showing the racism and sexism of 1950s New York City, right down to the only occurrence of the N-word in the Trek franchise.
    • For the Ferengi, capitalism is a religion while the rest of the cast have a post-scarcity economy and no need for wealth. When a terrorist attack occurs on Earth (the first in 100 years), Quark does offer what seems to be a genuine sympathy by saying he felt the same way during a major market crash on his home planet. Miles and Julian don't see this as a remotely close comparison and Quark is offended by this.
    • Not just the Federation, but this comes up in the Dominion ranks as well. The Vorta are political officers to the Jem'Hadar and the two have no understanding of each other despite both serving the founders as gods. The Vorta are pragmatic schemers and the Jem'Hadar are spartan honorable warriors and the latter respect the former because their gods said to, but view them as dishonorable, while the Vorta see the Jem'Hadar as disposable. Ironically, the Jem'Hadar respect the Federation and the Klingons as they can understand that they both have rules of engagement. In a twist, Sisko meets a Jem'Hadar commander that is willing to kill a Vorta for all the trouble the Vorta puts him through, but a later episode reveals that this one is the one out of cultural step with his people: the Jem'Hadar will follow a Vorta's commands no matter what, even if it's quite clear the Vorta is trying to get the entire unit killed by walking into a trap.
• Strange Empire runs on this trope, considering the show's primary purpose is to show exactly how awful the Wild West was for anyone who wasn't white, straight and male. (Specific attention is given to female (especially prostituted women), Native American, Black (ex-slave), Chinese, lesbian, transgender, and mentally atypical perspectives.)
• Stranger Things: Some due to taking place in the 1980s.
  • The show doesn't shy away from some of the less squeaky clean parts of the '80s, such as the very pervasive homophobia or the rather casual attitude towards bullying, two things which are greatly looked down upon today. Robin is revealed to be a closeted homosexual who is very conflicted about coming out to Steve. His understated reaction is borderline Politically Correct History, but by that time he's already seen such extreme stuff that this is nothing by comparison.
  • Two teenagers, Nancy and Jonathan, buying bear traps, a sledgehammer, nails, gasoline and revolver ammo in bulk from a hardware store doesn't get much from the clerk beyond a weird look and Nancy can even get away with snarking (or not) about going "monster hunting" with it all. In a post-Columbine world, the clerk would most likely jump to the conclusion that they were planning to terrorize their school. Nancy's comment would make it a one-way trip to juvi hall!
  • And of course, Everybody Smokes. Hopper smokes when on the job dealing with the public and Joyce smokes around her kids. Hopper also smokes in a restaurant. Smoking in most public places wouldn't be outlawed until the late '90s, and smoking around your kids would be considered child abuse in most modern circles.
  • The kids being able to wander as much as they do can seem like this in the 21st century. The kids stay over at each other's houses regularly, are often out with fairly flimsy excuses, and in Season 2 they disappear for a lengthy period of time. And while the parents are somewhat concerned, they don't generally get too worried. Today, some of this might well lead to less friendly neighbors calling social services on damn near everyone, but in the 80s and earlier decades, suburban kids absolutely had that much freedom to roam.
  • The Season 3 premiere features a pool scene where middle-aged mothers are ogling Billy and Billy fat-shames a kid ("Lard Ass") in public and no adult attempts to step to the child's defense. Karen and her friends still find him attractive.
  • The tabloid news show references the Satanic Panic around Dungeons & Dragons that sprang up in the 1980s and is now considered quaint.
• Taken:
  • In "Beyond the Sky", two Army Air Force officers listening to the radio on July 7, 1947 hear that Larry Doby has become the second black player to break baseball's color barrier after Jackie Robinson in April of that year. One of the officers says that there is no turning back after "letting them in" while the other believes that it is the end of the world as they know it.
  • In "High Hopes", Owen Crawford takes up smoking to relieve tension at the request of his doctor in October 1962. In "Acid Tests", he dies of a stroke on May 4, 1970, which may have brought on by his smoking.
  • Also in "High Hopes", two young black men enter the diner in Ogden, Utah where Russell and Jesse are having lunch on October 18, 1962 and order a cup of coffee. The owner Gus pours them a cup and spits in it. A racist diner patron then fires his shotgun through the window at the two men but Jesse pushes them out of the way. Russell, who visibly disapproved of the racist attitudes of the other white people in the diner, later asks Jesse if "those two colored guys" were alright after he recovers from his seizure, having heard the shooting.
• That'll Teach 'Em is a British show in which modern teenagers go to a boarding school emulating 50s or 60s. Part of the premise is seeing the modern teenagers deal with the values of the past, some of which really clash with modern sensibilities. This is really notable when it comes to gender roles.
  • During career advice in Series 1, whenever a boy aims for a high status job, he is encouraged to pursue it. When girls aim to do the same, they are discouraged and told it might interfere with their role as housewife and mother. They are instead encouraged to marry a man holding the job they desire.
  • Series 2 takes it a step further, as boys are taught skills useful on the workfloor, like repairing cars and woodworking, while girls are taught to be good housewives, learning skills like cooking, cleaning and taking care of children.
  • The general behavior of the teachers would probably get teachers at modern schools fired. They frequently insult their pupils' intelligence, yell at them for the slightest infractions and give out nasty punishments. Off course, during the 50s and 60s, this was acceptable behavior and actually encouraged as a way to shape students into well adjusted members of society.
• Tokyo Vice takes place in 1990s Tokyo.
  • Westerners living in Tokyo must contend with almost daily racism, from the Innocently Insensitive to the overtly abusive.
  • Emi must hide the fact that she's ethnically Korean from her coworkers to avoid discrimination.
  • One of Jake's coworkers is a closeted gay man in a time and place where LGBT acceptance was much less mainstream.
• Torchwood has Clem, a 60+ year old man had been in a fugue state since he was about twelve, spout this Non Sequitur after he had already smelled that Gwen was pregnant.
  Clem: [Indicating Ianto] So who's the Queer?
  [Ianto turns around, outraged]
  Ianto: OI!!! This is not 1965 anymore!
  Clem: [matter-of-fact] He's a Queer — I can smell it.
• Trotsky: Trotsky faces open antisemitism quite frequently, and it's made clear he could never be Russia's leader simply because he's Jewish. His father also gets brutally beaten up by antisemites just for being Jewish and disagreeing with something they said.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "No Time Like the Past", Hanford, one of Paul Driscoll's fellow boarders in Homeville, Indiana in 1881, expounds at length on his views regarding American imperialism at dinner. He believes that the United States will remain isolated and weak if it does not expand its sphere of influence by conquering the Orient and Australia before going back across the Pacific to South America. Hanford repeatedly says that they must plant the American flag as they go. He also believes that the US government was too conciliatory to the Native Americans during the Indian Wars five years earlier, describing them as "savages" and "Redskins" who should have been wiped out by 20 George Custers leading 100,000 men.
• The Twilight Zone (1985):
  • In "The Once and Future King", Mr. Harris, Elvis Presley's boss at the Crown Electric Company in Memphis, Tennessee, is disgusted that the Elvis Impersonator Gary Pitkin has a picture of a "nigger" on his undershirt. Gary, a time traveler from 1986, is wearing a Chuck Berry T-shirt.
  • In "The Junction", Ray Dobson, a miner trapped in a cave-in in 1912, is initially reluctant to let John Parker, a similarly trapped African-American miner from 1986, touch him. He later notes that he didn't know that there were any "colored" working on his shift. When John suggests that Ray talk to his union rep as he only makes $50 per month, Ray angrily tells him that the only union men in the mine are dead ones.
• The Unusuals has the episode "The Circle Line", which is a forty-three-minute-long attempt to justify the "blue wall".
• Victoria: Naturally, as a period piece, there is a lot of this. Victoria is distrusted by even her uncle as a female monarch who is felt to need a man's supervision. Lord Melbourne, though a liberal and progressive for his time, refers to the Chartist petition for universal suffrage, among other "radical" reforms, as impossible (all are taken for granted now). Even Victoria scoffs at the idea of women having the right to vote. All Truth in Television, of course.
• WandaVision: With many episodes taking place during the latter half of the 20th Century (at least on the Show Within a Show) and each one parodying the sitcoms that Wanda grew up watching as a child, Westview is often shown as having the values of the time being spoofed.
  • During "Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience", which is set in The '50s, it's shown that all the women in town always wear dresses whatever the occasion. Vision's Mean Boss Mr. Hart fires an employee just because he wore a turtleneck sweater during his Dinner with the Boss, calling him a "beatnik". The fact that Wanda is from Eastern Europe also prompts disgust from Mr. Hart, who calls her a Dirty Commie, because the Cold War and the Red Scare were very much a thing back then. Wanda and Vision are also interrogated about why they don't have children because, while that wouldn't be significant at present it was very much expected at the time. The start of the second episode also shows that they sleep in separate beds during this time period.
  • During "Don't Touch That Dial", which is set in The '60s, Wanda changes her wardrobe to include pants and low heels, since the feminist movement was in full swing by then. However, she's the only woman who does so, and it's still treated as odd when she wears them to a semi-official function. Also, where the first episode only had one non-white character, this episode shows a few more.
  • "Now in Color", which is set in The '70s, Dr. Nielsen showcases a casual sexism that was normal for the time, such as dumbing down his pregnancy terminology when speaking to Wanda or telling Geraldine that she'd make a great nurse (rather than doctor) despite her delivering a baby on her own.
  • The faux-commercials shown Once per Episode in the middle of each story are purposely misogynistic in ways that go unremarked upon.
  1950s: "Is your husband tired of you burning his toast? Try our new and improved ToastMate 2000. It's the go-to for clever housewives."
  1960s: "They say a man is never fully dressed without two important accessories: his special lady, and his Strücker [wristwatch]."
• Warm Springs is a 2005 HBO movie about Franklin Roosevelt's recovery from paralysis. Set in The Roaring '20s, the treatment of physically handicapped people as deviants can disgust the modern viewer. A teenage polio victim is locked in a baggage car and starved. Franklin's mother refers to the spa as a "leper colony". The film portrays Roosevelt's understanding of this injustice as turning him into the man that would fight human suffering as president.
• The War of the Worlds (2019):
  • In order to make its point about the evil of imperialism, the series shows just how widely popular this was, with British government officials publicly touting it early on.
  • The way George and Amy are treated for "living in sin". The couple are shunned by the locals, George is disowned by his own brother, and Amy is regarded as little better than a whore.
• In the PBS game show, Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego, Kevin is sometimes met with In-Universe Values Dissonance, especially in the Cluefinder sketches involving someone from the future. Among other people, we meet a 13th century barber surgeon who uses leeches and bloodletting to cure people, a Proper Lady from 1892 who thinks her sister is practically naked for wearing bloomers, and an Ellis Island official from c. 1900 who changes the names of immigrants because she can't understand what they are trying to say.
• The White Queen: In the final episode, Queen Anne, consort of King Richard III, becomes upset with her husband because she believes he is having an affair with his niece, Elizabeth of York. He explains that he is not, he is just deliberately creating the rumor that he is, because Henry Tudor, a rival claimant to the throne, had betrothed himself to Elizabeth. Therefore, by making people believe that he is sleeping with her, Richard is, in effect, cuckolding his adversary, humiliating Tudor and costing him political support. Of course, to a modern audience, the idea of a man having an affair with his own niece is much worse than the idea of a man's fiancée cheating on him (especially when they are forced to live apart from each other for a long time), and certainly much worse for one's political career. However, the show leaves at least some ambiguity about whether Richard was being sincere in his explanation to Anne, and about whether there really was an affair.^note Also, it should go without saying that the series took some large liberties with the historical record in any case.
• Why Women Kill:
  • 1960s: Rob Stanton is every bit as sexist as a typical straight, white cisgender man from the sixties, and Beth Ann doesn't think it unusual or have a problem with it. (Or at least, she claims she doesn't have a problem with it.) Sheila recognizes and calls out how chauvinist his behavior is, but her own husband deems it "militant" and reacts in amusement.
  • 1980s: The segments set in the eighties depict a dated view of gay people — though, in Simone's case, she seems less angry that Karl is gay and more angry that he lied to her about it. Karl (and by extension Simone) is shunned and treated like a leper once his AIDS diagnosis is made public, which is as much compassion as he would have received from most people in the eighties (she's the exception).
• The Wire has a very Grey-and-Gray Morality. While the show humanizes the criminals it follows, it also shows their Politically Incorrect Villain tendencies, such as Avon Barksdale doubling the bounty on Omar after finding out he's gay, and both him and Stringer Bell using homophobic slurs when talking about him, and shows the Barksdale soldiers having sex with a woman who is already nodding off on drugs and unceremoniously dumping her body rolled up in a rug into a dumpster after finding out she had died soon after. Meanwhile, the police consider Drinking on Duty to be a perk of the job, are routinely shown to lie about how they obtained evidence, cover for eachother during extramarital affairs and even the more morally upright ones aren't above Police Brutality.
  • A great example happens in an early episode. During a police raid, resident dumbasses Herc and Carver mess up securing a suspect, he mouths off, and they start beating him up on the stoop. Word gets around to Kima, one of the nicer officers and often the Only Sane Man. She immediately runs over ... and joins the beating too. Someone who mouths off during a raid is apparently just fair game.
  • Nicky and Ziggy Sobotka do both work for a very diverse trade union, but are not above using the N-word very derisively.
  • Cutty Would Hit a Girl, which even shocks the other gang members he's working with.
• Wolf Hall shows just how fragile a woman's life was in the 1500s. Katherine of Aragon is discarded for being unable to provide a male heir and it's taken as read that her daughter Mary can't become regent not because of her ill constitution but her gender. Anne Boleyn's position depends solely on whether or not she can give birth to a healthy boy and when she doesn't, Henry disposes of her in even more brutal fashion. Her father and uncle don't care because her only value was as influence with the king; her uncle also wishes he could dispose of his wife because she's old and he doesn't want to have sex with her anymore (or rather, she's the same age as him). Jane Seymour's brothers discuss her as a commodity to be traded right to her face. For all this, both of Henry's daughters would become England's first Queens Regnant, and Elizabeth's long reign was so iconic that her name is now used to describe the era.
• Young Sheldon is set in 1980's-era Texas, and doesn't shy away from the fact that American society, especially in a small Southern town, was a lot less sensitive and enlightened back then than it is today. Its mostly Played for Laughs, but there are some times it is very serious, for example the Coopers are essentially shunned by the community when Georgie has a child out of wedlock.
  • In "An Entrepenuerist And A Swat On The Bottom" Connie spanks Sheldon for disobeying her and being rude. While in this day and age spanking (especially if it's not your own child) is considered a controversial form of discipline, in the time period this show takes place it was still somewhat acceptable.

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