Domestic Abuse / Live-Action TV

• Season 2 of 24 has one of these. The husband is actually fairly psychotic, and ends up killing the wife.
• In 55 Degrees North/The Night Detective, a man stabs his abusive wife in self-defense. Even though the wife has only minor injuries and is also clearly in the wrong, the man asks to be arrested because he would rather have people thinking that he's a jerk who abuses his wife than let them know that it's actually the other way around.
• 9-1-1: Maddie, Buck's older sister, arrives at his apartment in season 2, after leaving her abusive husband, Doug. The show regularly delves into flashbacks regarding her marriage with Doug, and it's rough. He finds her and kidnaps her, ending with her stabbing him to death in self-defense.
• Seen a couple of times every season throughout Adam-12's seven-year run. While most are played straight, there is at least one situation — a mammoth-sized ogre and his pint-sized wife engaged in a surprisingly even battle — played more for laughs, as Malloy and Reed get the worst of things.
• All Rise: Emily suffered abuse from her ex-husband. As a result, she's highly concerned with helping fellow abuse victims.
• The premiere of Army Wives pairs this Bait-and-Switch. One of the wives, Denise, is seen with bruises on her arm. The viewer naturally assumes it's her husband who's been hitting her. Then her son gets a rejection letter from the prestigious military college he's applied to and slaps her in a fit of rage, revealing that he is her abuser.
• Banshee: The webisodes reveal that Deputy Siobhan Kelly was an abused wife before she Took a Level in Badass, divorced her husband, and became a no-nonsense deputy.
• Being Human (UK): Poor Annie has terrible luck. It turns out that her fiance, Owen, murdered her after falsely accusing her of cheating on him. When she confronts him about it, he proceeds to emotionally abuse her some more. It's also implied that he abused her before killing her, since it's mentioned that he got her to move away from her friends and family, and her mom realized that Annie was deeply unhappy by the change. She later tries to have relationships with Tully and Saul. The first ends when Tully grabs her, tries to corner her, and crudely propositions her, terrifying her into teleporting from the house. The second ends when Saul decides to take advice from ghosts in a TV and begins forcibly kissing her. He later tries to drag her to Hell, thinking it will bring him back to life. Her relationship with Mitchell goes pretty well, until he goes insane thinking he's destined to be killed by a werewolf, leading him to lash out and verbally abuse her. She reveals later that she and Nina even had a joke about how all the men she dated ended badly. Not long after this, she tries to become closer to a ghost sent to help look after Eve. He turns out to be a serial killer and verbally abuses her until she seems to fade away to nothing. She gets better, but you feel sorry for the woman!
• Being Human (US):
  • Sally was killed by her ex-boyfriend throwing her down the stairs in a fit of rage, after he'd been becoming increasingly controlling and jealous already.
  • Nora was severely burned on her stomach by her ex-boyfriend, requiring multiple skin grafts. In her case, she considers herself lucky to have gotten out alive.
• Big Little Lies: In both the book and the miniseries, Perry Wright is a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, as he and Celeste disguise their marriage and family as picture perfect. No other characters, with the eventual exception of Celeste's therapist, the one who brought this fact to her attention in the first place, are aware until the final episode of Season One — even those who've known them both for years. An interesting play, however, as the genuine abuse (not to be confused with consensual and safe-worded BDSM) often leads to a "passionate" sex life that many are jealous of.
• Black Mirror: It is very easy to see the conflict in "USS Callister" as an allegory of this trope. The story is, when you boil away the sci-fi elements, about a young woman trying to escape the grasp of a dangerous man with a serious abusive streak, and dreading what he might do if he catches her acting out of line.
• Lucy's husband in The Bletchley Circle. He's domineering and unkind, then beats her after her Near-Rape Experience.
• In the UK television series Blue Murder, the episodes "Private Sins (Parts One and Two)" show a woman who is violently abusive to her husband, and in one case, pours battery acid on her ex-husband while he's sleeping.
• Boy Meets World: In "Dangerous Secret", Shawn helps to hide a girl named Claire Ferguson who is being beaten by her father. He later ropes Cory into helping him.
• Britains Darkest Taboos has domestic violence be a major factor in many of the episodes. Most of the victims are killed when they try to leave their abusive partners, either because they've had enough or they don't want their children to suffer through the violence. More often than not the abusers are so entitled they resort to murder because it's unthinkable to them that their partner would ever disobey them.
• Coronation Street:
  • Charlie Stubb's abuse of Michelle.
  • In a rare example of a woman's abuse of a man, there is an agonizingly long abuse story-arc in which nice guy Tyrone Dodds is the victim of some fairly horrendous psychological and physical abuse from unhinged wife Kirsty. This reaches its nadir when she leads everyone to believe that he's the offender, heaving him friendless and in prison.
• In a mild subversion, the CSI episode "Down the Drain" suggests that the mother of the house was thoroughly cowed not only by her domineering husband, but by her teenage son as well, to the point that she helped the son attempt to conceal murder evidence.
• Dark Desire: Alma is a law professor who teaches about violence and gender, which includes domestic violence. She also starts to suffer it herself from her lover Darío, who gets increasingly controlling and then abusive before Alma breaks off the relationship. Alma explains how many people want to see the good in those they love, even if they're abusive, so they don't do this. Plus, this usually builds up slowly, as she explains with the "boiling frog" analogy.
• Dark Winds: People quickly determine that Sally is being abused by her baby's father, and the police investigate. It turns out they were never in a relationship — he'd raped her, which conceived her baby.
• Deadly Class: Maria gets a lot of abuse from her boyfriend Chico, who is a very jealous partner to her and highly controlling so she won't leave him.
• Death in Paradise: In "Pirates of the Murder Scene", a much darker episode than normal, the Victim of the Week turns out to have been an abusive husband who suffered Death by Falling Over when his wife fought back for the first time.
• Degrassi High includes a story arc about Kathleen and an abusive —- both emotionally and physically — boyfriend. The relationship ends only when he breaks her arm.
• In Degrassi: The Next Generation, Alli falls in love with a French guy named Leo who she meets on a trip to Paris. He starts out shoving her, then eventually slaps and punches her.
• Doctor Who:
  • Series 3 sees the Master masquerading as the human "Mr. Saxon" and taking a human trophy wife. His abusiveness toward her came back to bite him.
  • Eddie Connolly in "The Idiot's Lantern" verbally abuses his wife and son.
  • Amy Pond sees no issue with frequently hitting Rory in the face, and not in a consensual flirty way.
• In Drive (2007), Wendy Patrakas enters the race so she can use the prize money to escape her abusive husband.
• EastEnders has done many storylines about domestic violence, such notable examples including Little Mo and Trevor Morgan, Zainab Masood and Yusef Khan, Tina Carter and Tosh Mackintosh, and Chantelle and Gray Atkins.
• Endeavour: The B-plot in "Quartet" involves Thursday, the increasing violence being inflicted by a newsagent on his wife, and attempting to get her to report him. His abuse eventually lands her in the hospital and when, after she returns home, he dies in a fatal Staircase Tumble, Thursday chooses to turn a blind eye.
• Euphoria: Nate strangles his girlfriend Maddy. Despite her trying to cover this up later, and vehemently not wanting to press charges, this is quickly discovered. He gets arrested, suspended, cut from the football team and the students are made to watch a film about abuse. Maddy still insists he loves her no matter what, and meets with him at a motel when he calls.
• Farscape: In "Mental as Anything", D'Argo's Peacekeeper brother-in-law, Macton, tells D'Argo that his wife lived in fear of him and that D'Argo actually did kill her, he just doesn't remember it. This is because D'Argo is a Luxan, and his species is prone to fits of hyper-rage, a state in which they go violently mad, with no memory of what they do once it passes; for this reason, young Luxan males aren't permitted to marry, as they're much more susceptible than mature Luxans. Macton tells him that whenever he fell into a rage, he would lash out at Lo'Laa. Eventually, it's revealed that Macton did kill her... because despite any possible abuse, she refused to leave D'Argo, and tried to kill Macton when he went to have D'Argo arrested. His Peacekeeper training kicked in, and he killed her purely by instinct in self-defense. The episode leaves it ambiguous whether or not D'Argo ever actually struck Lo'Laa, though some scenes imply that she did but lied about it because D'Argo promised he would leave if he ever hurt her. Even if he did restrain himself from becoming physically violent with her, seven-odd foot and several hundred pounds of enraged and screaming Luxan would be downright terrifying to deal with as a domestic partner, even if you know it's something he physically can't control.
• The O'Learys in Father Ted — both of them, to each other. It's Played for Laughs, as they alternately try to kill each other and then pretend to be a happy couple whenever they run into any of the main characters.
• Fellow Travelers: In 1979, an enraged Hawkins Fuller strangles his lover Craig while roaring "I will fucking kill you!" when he discovers that the latter had looked through his photo album without his permission and removed the picture of Hawk's deceased son Jackson from its pocket. (Hawk intended to keep this a secret from Craig.) Fortunately, Timothy Laughlin is able to stop Hawk after several seconds, which allows Craig to get away.
• Flashpoint:
  • The subject in "Asking for Flowers" is a woman who attacks her sister's abusive husband. She is said to feel responsible because she is the one who introduced the couple.
  • The same episode reveals that Wordy's wife, Shelley, was previously married to a man who abused her.
• Although never specifically described as such, perhaps due to the genders involved, Niles's wife Maris from Frasier had a laundry list of actions proving her to be a vicious, controlling, obsessive, manipulative bitch, and inflicted emotional and psychological (and occasionally physical) abuse on her husband on a regular basis. She also progressed to financial abuse during the couple's messy divorce, bankrupting Niles purely out of spite despite initially getting a handsome settlement, though this changes when Nile's divorce lawyer found out that her family's fortune was made through urinal cakes, and not lumber as she had told everyone.
  • This is a good example of a case in which the abuse is recognized by the other characters in the show. Whenever Maris is involved, Frasier and Martin are typically protesting the way she treats Niles and encouraging him to stand up to her or not to give in when she is threatening him somehow. Everyone is happy when they divorce, and try to help him avoid falling into the same submissive trap with later relationships.
  • Even so, Niles' short-lived second marriage, (where he rebound-marries Mel but leaves her when his true love Daphne suddenly becomes available) shows Mel to be another Maris — cold-blooded, controlling and vindictive. Lightning does hit the same man twice.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Robert is not above smacking Cersei around when she insults his masculinity, (though he immediately regrets it as "not kingly") and it's probably a factor in his death.
  • When Joffrey is pissed off, he has his knights beat Sansa, because his mother told him "A king should not strike his lady."
  • Rhaegar Targaryen's cruelest actions were usually directed at his wife, Elia. While not physical or intentionally cruel, they included spurning her at the tourney in favor of Lyanna and annulling his marriage to her in her own homeland.
• General Hospital tackled the rarely seen version of teen dating violence when Kristina is beaten by her boyfriend Kiefer.
• Ghost Whisperer: In the episode appropriately titled "A Vicious Cycle", the Woobie of the Week is a woman who at first seems to have died in the cold after she abandoned her husband and daughter, but it turns out that she ran away because she was abused by her husband. What's more, she didn't abandon her daughter, she took her with her when she ran away, only to crash in the forest and die trying to keep her warm. Since the girl was so little, she didn't remember, and her father lied, telling her mom left her. What's worse, just like the title says, Lainey, now a grown woman, is being domestically abused by her own fiancé, suggesting that seeing what happened to her mom did have effects on her subconscious.
• Ginny and Georgia: It's revealed that Gil became abusive to Georgia after they had been together for some time. She revealed his embezzlement so he would be jailed and she'd get free of him. Unfortunately, he comes back after being released, angrily assaulting Georgia in her own home. Their son shoots him to defend her (it's only a graze).
• A season 3 plotline of Glee involves Coach Beiste being abused by her new husband. She eventually leaves him.
• In The Handmaid's Tale, Commander Fred Waterford whips his wife Serena Joy for stepping out of her assigned role as a Wife in the theocratic Republic of Gilead during the time when he was incapacitated. Given the androcentric nature of the religious society, this trope is basically a given.
• Hollyoaks:
  • There are two domestic abuse plotlines involving Ste — the first with him abusing Amy, and the second with him as the victim at the hands of Brandon.
  • A later story deals with Patrick abusing Maxine.
• The Honeymooners gets laughs out of Ralph's empty threats to his wife: "One of these days, Alice. Pow! Right in the kisser!" These are comedic because Alice (and the viewer) knows he's just blustering and would never follow through — he's actually shown to be afraid of Alice's wrath.
• iCarly: Sam and Freddie enter a relationship in Season 5, and in "iCan't Take It", we find out that Sam is still hitting Freddie. Carly says that it's sweet that Sam doesn't hit him in the face anymore. She also tells them, after several episodes of non-stop fighting that essentially subverts the Belligerent Sexual Tension angle the shippers generally go for between the two, that if they can't quit fighting then something's wrong and they shouldn't be in a relationship at all.
• Intergalactic: Tula was beaten often by her husband before finally she killed him.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022):
  • In "A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart", Claudia attempts to persuade Louis to leave Lestat and go with her to look for other vampires. In anger at what he sees as her taking his love away from him, Lestat grabs Claudia by the neck, causing Louis to tackle Lestat and the two men fight. After smashing Louis against the walls of their home, Lestat gains the upper hand, and he sits on top of Louis, punching him repeatedly. Lestat then drags Louis outside by his chin with only his sharp vampire fingernails, and flies with Louis into the air. After asking Louis to say he'll never love him, Louis just yells for Lestat to let him go. Lestat does so, and Louis suffers a long and agonizing fall. Taking away all the fantasy/vampire elements, the entire scene is basically an abusive husband/boyfriend assaulting his partner within an inch of his life. What makes this situation even more frightening is that Lestat claims that he had restrained his violent impulses in the past, which means that he wanted to beat Louis many times before.
    Lestat: [to Louis] I fought myself a million times, fought my nature, controlled my temper. I never once harmed you.
  • Overall, throughout the show, Lestat is very emotionally abusive and manipulative, isolating Louis from his friends and family, cheating on him, love-bombing him, and stalking/watching him without his consent. Claudia has observed that Lestat keeps Louis on a tight leash.
    Claudia: [telepathically to Louis] His love is a small box he keeps you in. Don't stay in it.
  • In "Like Angels Put in Hell by God", Lestat is also abusive towards his mistress Antoinette. While they're in a Ponchatoula hotel room, his fangs have left behind two large puncture wounds on her neck, but he doesn't heal them with his vampire blood, so he's treating her worse than Louis after Their First Time (when Lestat put in the effort to mend the injury he caused). After Antoinette asks "How am I supposed to make a career here?", Lestat abruptly puts his hand around her throat and replies "I seek refuge from complaints when I visit you, dear." He somehow persuaded her to cut off her finger so that he can fake her death in order to win back Louis — who is Antoinette's romantic adversary — and for her trouble, she now has a maimed right hand that she must conceal with a glove ("That's what gloves are for", as he callously tells her). She then meekly says to Lestat "I didn't mean to make you mad", which sadly illustrates that Antoinette is thoroughly under his thumb.
• In the Heat of the Night:
  • One episode combines this with Parental Abandonment. A woman kills her abusive husband, flees to another city where she changes her name and gets a new life, all while she left her daughter behind in an empty house.
  • The episode "Love, Honor, Obey" deals with the stock plot of a battered wife who's too afraid/ashamed to admit to it.
• One Las Vegas episode's B-plot deals with a man who is in the Montecito to have an affair. When his wife comes looking for him, desperately wanting to find him, the characters help arrange a meeting and peaceful resolution, but then he comes down with bruises on him from her hurting him. He tells them how he, fearful of someone hurting her, encouraged her to take martial arts — so now a 5' tall woman can easily handle her 6' husband. After talking with some of the characters again, the guy decides to resolve the problem with his wife. He ties her up in their room and leaves his ring with the main characters to give to her, while he drives away happy and free.
• Law & Order:
  • In "Helpless", the suspect is a gynecologist accused of molesting his patient who allegedly also abused his ex-wife:
    Celia Walsh: Six blissful years of marriage that took ten years of therapy to forget.
    Det. Cerreta: He abused you?
    Celia Walsh: It's amazing what people put up with under the heading of 'love'.
  • In "Black, White, and Blue", the investigation reveals that one of the police officers involved was abusive towards his wife, and going through court-mandated therapy at the time of the victims' death.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has quite a few cases involving domestic abuse (since that would usually be considered an SVU case), but special mention goes to "Persona", which features two DV-related cases in a single episode. The Victim of the Week is a domestic violence victim who is murdered by her husband; an examination of the crime scene reveals that the victim's downstairs neighbor is a fugitive who killed her own abusive husband decades earlier.
• Little House on the Prairie: Several episodes play this up dramatically and straight, and rightly so. However, in Season 5's "There's No Place Like Home", this trope is used in a comic sense... and it is the only time that Nels Oleson threatens his wife, Harriet, with physical harm. Frustrated that neither she nor his children are eager to help clean up Walnut Grove (from its dilapidated state), he orders both Nellie and Willie to find some way to help out. Mrs. Oleson overhears her husband making his demands (not unreasonably), and comes out to reprimand her husband. "Since when do you wear the pants in this family?" she asks. Bad move –- he pulls out a scythe and showing it to her and then shouts at her "Since I've got this! NOW GET TO WORK, WOMAN! NNNNNNOOOOOWWWW!", sending Mrs. Oleson off in sheer (comic) terror.
• In Mad Men, Don frequently lied and argued with Betty, and treated her like a child. Though for the most part he tried hard to avoid violence, as he grew up in an abusive house. The worst he ever physically got with Betty was the both of them getting in an aggressive shoving match.
• Maid:
  • Alex left Sean due to him being an alcoholic and abusive; while never physically hitting her, he had violent and alcohol-fueled fits that involved him throwing things at her, punching holes in the wall (sometimes next to her head), and would verbally abuse and intimidate her. Alex finally drew the line when he threw an item that left her picking broken glass out of Maddy's hair. He also shows abusive control issues; when Alex returns to Sean, he takes away her car to make her dependent on him, refuses to let her have her own cell phone (saying they can share one), demand she ends her cleaning business so she can stay home, and refuses to let Regina talk to Alex when she stops by to see her.
  • The topic of what counts as "real" abuse is brought up. Given that Alex was never physically hit, she questions why she should stay at a domestic violence shelter as she wasn't abused "for real". She's rightfully told that verbal abuse counts just as much as physical abuse and is fully considered domestic violence; also pointedly reminded that she left because she felt unsafe. Eventually, Alex accepts that she's an abuse survivor, proudly declaring in a therapy group she starts leading for abused women that she's "a survivor of domestic violence". However, she's faced an uphill battle on this since Washington state law does not take non-physical abuse as seriously, and she still has a difficulty proving it in court. Thankfully, that's avoided when Sean gives up custody.
  • Domestic abuse is also why Paula left Alex's father, who was an alcoholic and would beat Paula during his alcohol-induced episodes. Seeing her mother abused and battered stayed with Alex as she grew older, traumatized at seeing her mother horrifically beaten.
• The Mentalist:
  • The bad guy in "Ring Around the Rosie" is, in addition to everything else, a domestic abuser. Van Pelt convinces his wife to help them (she could allow them to search the house without a warrant) by telling her she can pay her husband back by helping to get him arrested.
  • In a couple of other episodes, Jane figured out that the murder they were investigating had to do with domestic abuse in some way.
• In Midnight Caller, one of the first calls Jack gets is from a woman beaten by her husband. Jack tells her to leave as soon as possible.
• Midsomer Murders has the female-on-male version in the episode "The Ghost of Causton Abbey". When Amani Taylor is found dead with severe injuries, the detectives' initial assumption is that she was being abused by her husband. It turns out that her drinking problems made her severely abusive to her husband. He accepted it because he didn't think she was harming the kids from his previous marriage, but his ex-wife discovering that it was still severely traumatising to them led to two murders.
• Motive: The Victim of the Week in "The Vanishing Policeman" is a cop who is physically abusing his wife and emotionally abusing his son. He is murdered by his estranged brother, who sees him turning into a clone of their abusive father.
• Mr. Robot: After being brainwashed by Whiterose, Angela subjects Elliot to emotional and mental abuse so that she can complete Stage 2. She constantly gaslights him without any remorse and doesn't care about the fact that she's making him miserable. When Elliot finds out, she blames him for it and disowns him.
• The Murders: "Toxic" involves a protected witness who, after discovering that her mobster husband is torturing someone, confronts him and is beaten by him severely. She testifies against him after the federal authorities approach her following this.
• The Office (US): When Jan moves in with Michael, she eventually becomes incredibly emotionally abusive and controlling of him. She forces him to adjust his house to her and contributes to his debt, merely allowing Michael to live in the house and support her. Season 4's "Dinner Party" showcases this in full, though initially Played for Laughs, it's eventually Played for Drama as Michael is revealed to have gone through various vasectomies to conform to Jan's constantly changing feelings about having kids (the fact that fatherhood is perhaps Michael's greatest desire makes the whole thing even more heartbreaking). She also forces him to give up on things that make him happy, makes him sleep on a tiny bench at the end of her bed and destroys his things, throwing them around when mad (such as when she throws one of his Dundies at his prized plasma screen TV). It's revealed that she makes him uncomfortable in the bedroom, too (mostly because of her bizarre fetishes)- even "forgetting" their Safe Word at one point. She also keeps listening to a song from her ex-assistant that is clearly about him losing his virginity to her, despite Michael vocally saying he dislikes it. Things get so bad that the police get involved and Michael winds up leaving and moving in with Dwight.
• The Outer Limits (1995):
  • In "Unnatural Selection", Howard and Joanne Sharp believe that their close friend and neighbor Tony Blake is abusing his wife Fran due to the frequent sounds of objects being broken coming from their house and the presence of a bruise on her face on one occasion. However, it turns out that both were caused by the Blakes' son Timmy, whom they are hiding because he is suffering from Genetic Rejection Syndrome.
  • In "Mary 25", Charlie Bouton regularly beats and psychologically abuses his wife Teryl, reducing her to tears on a daily basis. It turns out that he murdered her some time earlier and replaced her with an android copy to cover his tracks.
  • In "The Balance of Nature", Greg Matheson physically and verbally abuses his wife Barbara.
  • In "The Gun", Matthew Logan served 22 months of a four-year sentence for beating his wife Sandra to within an inch of her life. He had been abusing her for quite some time beforehand. The first thing that he does once he gets out of prison is buy a gun and kill her.
  • In "Mona Lisa", Teddy Madden was abused by her ex-husband Al during their marriage.
• Person of Interest:
  • Reese's ex-girlfriend Jessica was accidentally killed by her abusive husband. Since then, whenever he encounters spousal abuse, he makes a point of showing the abuser what a real monster looks like.
  • When a battered wife was plotting to kill her abusive husband, Samaritan, in a Pet the Dog moment, killed him first.
• There are implications that Chelsea's ex-husband from Raven's Home was abusive. It's shown that he was financially manipulating Chelsea and implied that he was at minimum emotionally abusive as well.
• Roseanne: Roseanne's sister, Jackie, was frequently involved in unstable, unhappy relationships, and the one fitting this trope involves a man named Fisher, who was her boyfriend during the 1992-1993 season; Darlene accidentally walks in on a nude Jackie in the bathroom and notices bruises.
• Jordan and Perry Cox in Scrubs — we've seen her Groin Attack him, heard she broke his jaw, and seen her slap him multiple times. It's assumed to be mutual, though we've never seen him actively attack her, just be a bit rough to her. Unusually, they still have a relatively stable and loving relationship and seem to positively enjoy physically and verbally attacking each other. In one episode she even mentions a vague desire to stick a knife into him while he's sleeping to see how far she can go before he wakes up. Later in that episode, she nonchalantly asks if he ever figured out how he received a wound on his arm (which was bandaged).
• Siren (2018): Susan was involved with Glen, her dealer, after she'd gotten back to using drugs. He soon began to hit her before she left him.
• Near the end Southland, abrasive cop Dewey is mentioned to be this. His grownup daughter tells Cooper how, after a bad day at work, he would sometimes hit her mother. She mentions one particular instance where this happened after a bad day at work, after which he sat down and cried on the stairs, but it sounds like far from the only instance of him doing that.
• Special Ops: Lioness: Cruz ran from an abusive boyfriend to the US Marines, joining them out of gratitude (as a Marine recruiter stopped her boyfriend attacking her) and for a permanent escape.
• The Spencer Sisters: It turns out Sam, Victoria's deceased husband (Darby's father) had verbally and psychologically abused her, constantly belittling her and stopping Victoria getting a career of her own.
• That's My Bush! references the above Honeymooners line, with President Bush's catchphrase: "One of these days, Laura, I'm gonna punch you in the face!" This is said in unison with an excited studio audience.
• Occasionally happens in This is Wonderland:
  • One episode has the twist that the woman (who has psychological problems and is entirely reliant on her husband) really did start it, but he gets punished anyway.
  • Another episode has a crazy guy who makes regular death threats against his wife, whom he suspects of cheating on him with his boss. He isn't treated anywhere near so sympathetically.
• Trinkets: Tabitha and Brady. Also implied for Tabitha's parents, at least to some degree. It's later revealed that Brady is also abusive to his girlfriend after Tabitha. After she learns about this, Tabitha reveals all his abuse using messages and photos to their whole school.
• The Tudors portrays Henry VIII as emotionally and sometimes physically abusive to both Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, and hints at it with future wives, including Jane Seymour. This is over and above him being a megalomaniacal psychopath, mind you.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • In "The Last Night of a Jockey", Michael Grady threatens to slap his old girlfriend's face off when she refuses to go on a date with him now that he is big.
  • In "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain", Flora Gordon verbally abuses her much older husband Harmon at every opportunity, belittling him over his age and correspondingly slower lifestyle. She mockingly refers to him as "Big Daddy" and says that if they ever visited Egypt, she might leave him for a mummy. Harmon says himself that she can barely stand to be around him, but he tolerates her treatment of him, as he loves her deeply.
  • In "Spur of the Moment", in 1964, David Mitchell is verbally abusive towards his long-suffering wife Anne and takes delight in mocking her for marrying him for love 25 years earlier, which she now bitterly regrets.
  • In "Mr. Garrity and the Graves", the town drunk Gooberman's wife Zelda broke his arm six times. After she returns from the dead, she plans to do so again.
• The Twilight Zone (1985):
  • In "Dead Woman's Shoes", Kyle Montgomery physically abused his wife Susan on a regular basis and eventually pushed her off the balcony to her death. He later claimed that it was an accident. When Susan's spirit takes over Maddie Duncan's body and returns to confront Kyle, he hits her once again.
  • In "Shelter Skelter", Harry Dobbs verbally abuses his wife Sally on a regular basis. He belittles her, orders her around and bullies her into going along with his wishes. Before she goes to Kansas City, the abuse turns physical as he grabs Sally roughly by the arm and warns her not to tell her sister Wendy about their fallout shelter.
  • In "Acts of Terror", Jack Simonson takes every opportunity that he can to physically abuse his wife Louise and has seemingly been doing so for a long time. He is also emotionally abusive and controlling as he refuses to let her open a package from her sister Susan until she has made his lunch, which is five minutes late. The package contains a porcelain Doberman and Louise soon discovers that her anger and hatred towards Jack causes a real Doberman to manifest and attack him.
• The Twilight Zone (2002): In "Azoth the Azenger is a Friend of Mine", a man is physically and emotionally abusive to his wife and son. The son tries to solve the problem by wishing a hero from his favorite comic into existence. It doesn't work, as the father beats the hero unconscious. The father is "defeated" when he goes to attack the kid and the mother, finally at her breaking point, attacks him from behind.
• The Twilight Zone (2019): In "Meet in the Middle", Annie implies that her husband is abusive toward her. How much of it is true is never made clear.
• In Twin Peaks, Leo Johnson, an evil cocaine-smuggler, frequently beats his wife Shelly, even trying to kill her at one point.
• Vida: Emma and Lyn's father Victor used to beat up their mother, Vidalia. Lyn insists he's changed, while Emma is reluctant to accept this. It's revealed that he had beaten Vida within an inch of her life when she tried to defend teenage Emma after he had found her exploring her sexuality.
• In The Walking Dead (2010), Ed refuses to allow a little thing like the Zombie Apocalypse stop him from being a world-class wife-beating asshole. As is typical of the genre, he quickly becomes an Asshole Victim — twice.
• Why Women Kill:
  • In 1963, Beth Ann finds out that her neighbor, Mary, is physically abused by her husband, Ralph. He even threatens her with a loaded gun to keep her from leaving him.
    • April, Beth Ann's love rival, saw her mother physically abused as well. She was the one who figured out Mary's situation through clues, like the way Ralph acts around Mary compared to how he acts around new people, and how Mary wears a lot of makeup, just like April's mother wore a lot of makeup to cover her bruises. An interesting take on the whole mess is that Beth Ann at first refuses to believe that a successful and well-off man like Ralph could be abusive. April tells her that her father was a doctor when he abused her mother.
  • Jade gets Eli and Taylor to let her stay in their house because her violent felon ex-boyfriend Duke was stalking her. She later kills him while attempting to kill Eli and Taylor, her new lovers.
• Depending on if you pick up the Ho Yay in Xena: Warrior Princess, the infamous Gab Drag scene at the start of "The Bitter Suite".
• Y: The Last Man (2021):
  • After learning Mike hasn't left his wife for her, Hero angrily throws stuff at him. He then slams her up against a cabinet. After he lets go, Hero starts throwing things again, and kills him accidentally with one.
  • The Daughters of the Amazons are here re-imagined as a group with many domestic abuse survivors (it was only implied in the comic that their members suffered this and other abuses).
• Once shown as a problem even good coppers are prone to in Z Cars.

---