History EnforcedMethodActing / LiveActionTV

* ''Series/TheBradyBunch'': In the episode "Bobby's Hero", where Bobby took up outlaw Jesse James as a role model, the episode ends with a dream sequence where Jesse James shows up and shoots Bobby's entire family (even ''Alice''!) to death (in an extremely silly-looking way, of course). To counteract the silly action, Lloyd Schwartz took actor Mike Lookinland alone to a closed set and began to describe to him how the scene would look in graphic, horrid detail, using Lookinland's real-life family as an example. The looks of terror you see in Bobby's eyes are from Schwartz screaming at him about how his real-life parents and siblings (even his ''pets''!) were screaming in pain, suffering, bleeding, and dying. Schwartz, in his memoir about the series, says he and his father, Sherwood, were proud of how the episode came off as a non-preachy "anti-gun" episode.

** In "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS18E7Logopolis Logopolis]]", after the Fifth Doctor sits up after having regenerated from the Fourth, Creator/PeterDavison interpreted the tone of the director telling him to do it as an indication that he'd done something wrong, and so broke character briefly. Fortunately, this works really well, because he looks at the camera with a look of nervous, surprised confusion which perfectly sums up how one would feel upon turning into an entirely different person after dying doing some reckless stunt.

* Speaking of the Muppets, in the TV special ''The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson'' Steve Whitmire had only recently taken over the role of Kermit the Frog from the recently deceased Henson. He was told prior to filming that there would only be a small group of the core Muppet performers there with their signature characters. The rehearsals were emotional and difficult for everyone involved so when filming finally came around [[SugarWiki/HeartwarmingMoments every single living Muppet performer and almost every character they could cram in at the time (including Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock characters) crowded into the tiny set in a show of support for Steve.]] [[http://web.archive.org/web/20150517145910/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd72rX6c6Kk Here it is in all its glory.]]

* This is the reason why the actors in ''Series/TimAndEricAwesomeShowGreatJob'' seem really awkward at times. For instance, [[http://www.avclub.com/articles/tim-and-eric,22902/2/ they tell Steve Brule's actor what to do right before they say "action" so he doesn't have enough time to process the directions. And while they were filming a commercial for season 4, they told the cameraman to zoom in, but the woman on screen didn't know where the camera was, so she kept making funny faces.]] In other examples, the producers would quite literally pull people who had never acted before off the street for bit parts or hire actors via Craigslist ads, meaning that the cast rarely had any idea what was happening (or, in some cases, had no acting experience whatsoever).

* On a few episodes of ''Series/WheelOfFortune'', contestants have solved their bonus puzzles on the buzzer, which of course requires a stop-tape while the judge reviews to see whether the answer was in time or not. In a few cases, the contestants are not told what the rulings are until the cameras start rolling again, leading to a more natural reaction to being declared a winner -- as the home audience sees only the contestant solving on the buzzer, a near-seamless edit, then a natural reaction to the win.
* This was more or less the complete case in ''Series/WhoseLineIsItAnyway''.

** Filming [[Characters/DoctorWhoClaraOswald Clara Oswald's]] farewell to the Twelfth Doctor in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS35E12HellBent Hell Bent]]" was emotionally difficult for Creator/JennaColeman, due to her having to say goodbye to her co-star Creator/PeterCapaldi, who had become a close friend. As such, numerous takes were required because she either kept breaking down in tears or playing the scene more sadly than the hopeful AndTheAdventureContinues tone that was intended. The fact Peter was playing Clara's theme on an acoustic guitar off-camera (as the Doctor does in the final scene) didn't help.

** The ending is a crossover of this and WagTheDirector: [[spoiler:Gareth Thomas]] was fed up with the show and really determined that [[spoiler:Blake]] would be [[DeaderThanDead so unambiguously dead]] that there would be no way to bring him back if the show got renewed again. Therefore at every opportunity he went back to the special effects crew to ask them to put another {{Squib}} and bloodbag under his costume. As a result, when the shooting scene finally happened the blow to his chest was hard enough to really wind him and leave him cut and bruised.