Failed A Spot Check / Live-Action TV

Failing to notice the highly obvious in live-action TV.

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• 1000 Ways to Die:
  • A criminal planning to rob a jewelry store at gunpoint failed to notice that he entered the wrong store... and found himself attempting to hold up a gun shop.
  • Related is the tale of a would-be robber who tried to hold up a gun store, despite walking past a marked police cruiser sitting outside. Featured in the Darwin Awards.
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
  • A surprisingly non-lethal variant, when Simmons walks into the lab and immediately starts telling Fitz about the covert research they've been conducting together, failing to notice that Android May is standing literally right next to him. Luckily, Fitz is able to stop her from giving away anything definitely incriminating, and the other agents are mercifully better at spot-checks.
  • Another benign one in "Parting Shot" where Hunter and Bobbi, the former being an expert soldier and mercenary and the latter one of the best spies in the world, somehow fail to notice that all of their former co-workers are in the bar with them at the end of the episode. Especially strange since they managed to peg a complete stranger as a tail in the same scene. Luckily, the people involved aren't hostile.
• Happens all the time on The Amazing Race when a team walks by a clue, and their cameraman points it out for the audience.
  • Particularly good in season 17 when almost every team somehow fails to notice the cypher key covering an entire building wall.
  • In season 3, several teams happily fill up their cars with unleaded gasoline, despite the warning on the gas cap that the vehicle takes diesel fuel only.
• Awaken: Ji-wan is so preoccupied by looking for cards that he doesn't notice the table-cloth being changed or Hye-won and Jung-woo changing their clothes.
• Bones: In season 12, Max gets a pacemaker implant. Neither he nor anyone else realizes that, since the guy who’s after Brennan and the whole family is a paramedic, he knows how to access data from said pacemaker. He follows it right to where Max and the kids are supposed to be kept safe and besides the agents in the safe house dying, Max dies protecting his grandchildren because his heart can’t take it.
• Breaking Bad:
  • The Nazis just plain forget to check under the damn car until Walt points it out.
  • In "Face Off", the final episode of the 4th season, Tyrus Kitt, a goon of Gustavo Fring does a thorough check for cameras, wires, etc., in Hector "Tio" Salamanca's room at Casa Tranquila Nursing Home, however, he still misses the bomb underneath Tio's wheelchair, which Tio detonates to kill Tyrus and Tio, and also blow half of Gustavo Fring's face off (and he still survives barely long enough to fix his tie).
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Xander doesn't even notice Willow's bloody shirt after Tara is killed, because he's so shocked over Buffy taking a bullet.
  • Throughout the early part of Season Six, Buffy repeatedly fails to notice that Willow has developed an addiction to magic, even after said addiction drives Tara away; it isn't until said addiction leads to Willow causing a car crash that lands Dawn in the hospital that she finally catches on.
  • Played for Laughs on one or two occasions when Buffy is waiting for a vampire to Rise from Your Grave, but doesn't notice because she's too busy yakking to one of the Scoobies. At least one vampire is smart enough to quietly sneak off when he sees the waiting stakes and crossbows.
• Cheers:
  • One episode has Norm, not paying attention, mistake a bag of trash left on a barstool for Cliff, assuming everyone's insulting him when they are trying to correct him.
  • Apparently Norm never noticed the bar had a smoking section until Sam points it out to him in the middle of season 11 (and Norm has been at Cheers since before Sam owned it). Sam tells him it's in the corner with the piano, itself a prop that has largely gone unused over the years, which Norm is surprised to see - it's off to the right and Norm rarely turns his head that way.
  Norm: Whoa. I gotta turn my head more often.
• In a 2008 game of Deal or No Deal, host Howie Mandel secretly invited a player's sister to appear as a model with a suitcase. He'd tried prodding the player into realizing her sister was there, but she, and her parents who were also there, kept missing it. It was a good thing Howie shaved off his hair otherwise he'd have ripped it out. One wonders if the sister was The Un-Favourite in the family.
  Player: Am I missing something?
  Howie: Are you missing something? YES! Look at the model holding the briefcase!
• The classic Diagnosis: Murder episode "Till Death Do Us Part" has Cindy and Phillip coming up with the "perfect" murder of Cindy's father Wayde. They Imagine Spot how it will go down, killing Wade and framing Cindy's stepmother Denise for the crime, all planned out. Cue the actual murder where nothing goes to plan and their attempts to roll with their screwups only giving them away. Among the many problems is that the pair are so determined to keep to the plan they had they miss obvious bits that would throw it off. A good example is how Cindy tries to get Denise to go into the kitchen so she can plant evidence by asking Denise to get her special nail polish. Cue Cindy's Oh, Crap! when Denise points out the bottle of nail polish is on the counter next to her.
• In Doctor Syn ("The Scarecrow"), Syn, Mipps, and John all sneak into Dover Castle disguised as a press-gang to free the prisoners inside. Lieutenant Brackenbury sees through at once, but he lets them through as he's doing a Heel–Face Turn. When General Pugh berates him later for "not recognizing" them, Brackenbury points out that Pugh met them himself and failed to pick up on it, despite seeing Syn all the time at the Squire's house.
• Doctor Who:
  • This trope is common throughout the classic series, where the Doctor and/or his companions will be "concealed" so long as the villain doesn't casually glance in their direction. Which they never do, of course.
  • "The Dominators": The Doctor notes that a volcano is erupting on the island he is on, but needs to have it pointed out to him that he should probably leave because a volcano is erupting on the island he is on.
  • "The Mind Robber": The Doctor spectacularly fails to remember what Jamie is supposed to look like when he has to reassemble his face. This gave rise to a headcanon that Time Lords are slightly face-blind, or don't recognize other people in the same way as others.
  • "Earthshock": In the first episode, a pair of assassin robots dart down a corridor just before a soldier turns to look. While the robots themselves are out of view, their shadows are clearly visible retreating down the passage; however, the soldier completely fails to notice despite staring straight at them.
  • The technology of "perception filters" are often used as a Handwave whenever the plot demands that something not be noticed until it needs to be dramatically revealed. The basic principle is that perception filters don't stop you physically seeing something eyeball-wise, but will stop you noticing something unless you are either already aware of it or are specifically looking for it, and even then it takes effort to consciously spot it. For things that you would never consciously think about, like the number of rooms in your house or whether your house actually has an upstairs, the filters are pretty fool-proof, thus concealing an extra room or level that you never use, and even the Doctor is not immune to their effects. At one point the Doctor incorporates the technology in keys around their necks so he and his companions can sneak around. While demonstrating it and telling Martha to focus on looking at him, she described the effect as "It's like... I know you're there, but I don't want to know."
  • "Rose": The Ninth Doctor and Rose are discussing the Nestene invasion plans by the Thames, with a clear view of the London Eye^*A large Ferris wheel that exists in real-life London, and the Doctor mentions that the Nestenes will need an enormous transmitter. "What's it look like?" "Like a transmitter, round and massive. Smack dab in the middle of London, must be completely invisible." She has to make him turn around three times before the penny drops.
  • "Bad Wolf": Captain Jack Harkness finds himself on an, unbeknownst to him, killer version of What Not to Wear, and doesn't notice that the host robots are pulling out chainsaw and blade attachments until they are almost used on him — whereupon Jack retrieves his gun and uses it on them.
  • "School Reunion": After the school is locked down, Mickey, trying to get in, asks Robot Buddy K-9 if he has any kind of lock-picking device. K-9 has to state that they are in a car several times before Mickey catches on.
  • "Human Nature": John Smith gets so nervous and flustered while talking to the attractive Joan Redfern that he fails to notice that he's backing towards some stairs, which she tries to point out. He promptly falls down them.
  • "Utopia": No one in the bunker notices the Futurekind woman who snuck in, despite the fact that she's constantly hissing or snarling and baring her fangs. Her not having the tattoos and piercings that the others do is enough of a disguise, it seems.
  • "Partners in Crime":
    • The TARDIS noise had been previously established in the new series to be quite loud, especially to those who have been previously exposed to it. Donna does not hear it when it materializes in the same alleyway where she just parked her car as she walks away.
    • When hiding in the women's toilets at Adipose Industries, Donna fails to notice that reporter Penny Carter is in the stall next to hers, possibly for the entire time Donna was hiding in the stall, until her presence is revealed during the Searching the Stalls scene.
    • During the climax, for the laughs, Wilfred Mott, stargazing with headphones on, fails to notice the extremely loud and visible Adipose spaceship fly behind him. He does, however, get to see the TARDIS fly by at the end of the episode.
  • The Master isn't immune either. In "The End of Time", he converts 99.9999999...% of the human race into copies of himself and still fails a spot check, something which the Tenth Doctor is only too delighted to point out.
    The Doctor: Six billion pairs of eyes and you still can't see the obvious, can you?
    The Master: And what's that?
    The Doctor: [gesturing to the guard aiming a gun at Wilfred Mott] That guard is one inch too tall. [guard knocks the Master flat on his back]
  • "The Eleventh Hour": The Doctor fails to notice anything unusual about the "policewoman" who's captured him, such as the fact that her skirt is just a bit too short...
  • "The Time of Angels": The Eleventh Doctor and River Song fail to notice that while the Aplan race who built the catacombs had two heads, the statues they supposedly put there are one-headed... so all the statues are Weeping Angels that have lost their wings.
    River Song: How could we miss that?
    The Doctor: Low-level perception filter, or maybe we're thick.
  • "The Pandorica Opens" has Eleven do it again. He's in ancient Britain during the time of the Roman occupation when one of the Roman soldiers who've joined his cause turns out to be Rory Williams, who had died thousands of years in the future and then was erased completely from ever having existed by a crack in the universe. The Doctor is the only person who still remembers him. He tries to approach the Doctor but the Doctor, lost in thought about the other aspects of their situation, asks him to be quiet while he tries to figure it out.
    The Doctor: I'm missing something, obvious, Rory! Something big, right slap in front of me, I can feel it!
    Rory: Yeah, I think you probably are.
    The Doctor: Well, I'll get it in a minute. [walks out of the room carrying two Cyber guns]
    [a loud clatter is heard from outside]
    The Doctor: [slowly walks back into the room, staring at Rory, and pokes him in the chest]
    Rory: [rocks back on his heels from the poke]
    The Doctor: ... Hello again.
  • "Let's Kill Hitler": A flashback establishes that Amy took ten years before she realized that Rory was not gay and that there was one girl he paid attention to: Amy.
  • "The Wedding of River Song": With all of time crashing in on itself, the Doctor pleads with Amy to remember who he is... while absently picking up a model of the TARDIS on a nearby table and ignoring various sketches on her office walls depicting her adventures with the Doctor.
  • "Time Heist": Early on, the Doctor ponders why he isn't just using the TARDIS to do this job. Clara then brings up the more obvious question: where is the TARDIS? The Doctor admits he should have led with that.
  • "Dark Water": While touring 3W, the Doctor massively fails to notice all the Cyberman imagery everywhere.
  • "The Pilot": Bill takes a while to realize the TARDIS is Bigger on the Inside after entering it — mainly because she's known the Doctor for months by then and has only ever seen the TARDIS parked in the corner of his office, flush against two walls, and thus assumes it's a knock-through. Even after he pulls the lever to take off, she assumes it's a lift. It takes exiting in a completely new location for her to catch on, which is lampshaded by the Doctor and Nardole.
  • "Arachnids in the UK": Graham and Ryan get so wrapped up in conversation they don't notice the spider the size of a van on the ceiling.
  • "The Tsuranga Conundrum": The Doctor berates herself for doing this because, after waking up in a medical facility and wandering around looking for an exit, she failed to notice the telltale engine vibrations signifying she's on a spaceship.
  • "Demons of the Punjab": Upon finding the body of the holy man in the woods, the Doctor examines it, but fails to notice the gunshot wound that killed him, only realizing the cause of death later.
• Drake & Josh:
  • Walter and Audrey somehow never catch onto Megan's gadgets, gizmos, and shenanigans, including those she openly posted online.
  • In "Foam Finger", Josh doesn't bat an eye when Megan switches the note on his apple strudel container.
  • In "Theater Thug", Josh has the titular crook on the ground for the police. The police instead arrest Josh while completely missing the actual crook, allowing the crook to flee the scene.
  • In "Tree House", Drake failed to notice ahead of time there was no door for him and Josh to get out of the tree house. It was only until he walks into the wall that he starts putting two and two together.
• On Dynasty (2017), Sam is upset he's not invited to "Lance Bash," a major gay pride event in Atlanta. He decides to hit back at this "insult" by throwing his own big pride party. He gets upset with Michael and Kirby for not following his demands (ignoring they had literally 24 hours to put this together) but realizes he was coming off as a jerk. Sam apologizes to the pair with a bottle of champagne someone dropped off at his place a few days earlier. It takes Kirby and Michael five seconds to see what Sam has missed, which is the bottle's label quite clearly has an invitation to Lance Bash, meaning Sam just blew a few thousand dollars on an unneeded party.
• On ER, Amanda Lee is hired as the new chief thanks to a great background of papers at Cornell and a good reputation. She supervises well, seems on the ball and even romancing Mark. But Mark is struck when he looks up one of "A. Lee's" papers to find a photograph of another woman. Amanda tries to brush it off as a mistake but when Mark digs deeper, she locks him into a scanning room and takes off. It turns out "Amanda Lee" is a mentally unbalanced con artist who never earned a license and simply took the identity of the real Lee to get into a residency program with no one bothering to talk to Cornell about her "credentials". She also impersonated a lawyer and an architect. Needless to say, the hospital board has some egg on their face and worries about the legal repercussions of giving the chief resident job to someone who never set foot in medical school.
• Extraordinary Attorney Woo: In Episode 6, Young-woo and Soo-yeon are so focused on trying to find a way to reduce their client's sentence to probation, they forget that the client has already confessed to the crime, which is already enough reason for the sentencing to be reduced. They lampshade this.
• It takes Father Ted a few minutes before he realizes the living room is full of rabbits.
• Basil Fawlty of Fawlty Towers completely fails to notice that one of his guests has died as he's serving him breakfast in bed. Basil, we suspect, tends to think of most of his guests as somebody else's problem.
• On Fire Country the hunt for a serial arsonist eventually leads to Colin O'Reilly, a new trainee who's talked of his late father, Kirk O'Reilly. But after already sensing something off about the guy, Bode and Manny do a quick check to find Kirk had no children. "Colin" is really Alex Showcross, who's been setting the fires so he can look better stopping them. Notably, it's lampshaded that sooner or later "Colin" had to know someone would look up Kirk's obituary and find out the truth but he laughs on how long he got away with it.
• Game of Thrones:
  • In "Baelor", Arya is by far the most conspicuous person in the crowd, yet no-one but Ned notices her outright.
  • Despite suffering Flaying Alive Fingore on an X-shaped crucifix, Theon fails to guess his torturers are House Bolton, whose sigil is literally a flayed man on just such a cross.
  • While scouting by dragonback Danaerys manages to completely miss a small fleet of ships on a clear day, allowing one of her dragons to be sniped by a ballista. The much-mocked writer's explanation was "Dany kind of forgot about the Iron Fleet," which besides being rather unlikely doesn't explain why she failed to see them.
• One episode of The Golden Girls has Sophia get misplaced while in the hospital. She ends up in an elevator. Meanwhile, Dorothy and Blanche go to the hospital to search for her. At one point, they get into said elevator, take it to a different floor, and get out without Dorothy and Blanche or Sophia noticing each other.
• Garth Marenghis Darkplace:
  • Hospital staff consistently fail to notice that the water supply has turned an unusual neon green color, to detrimental effect.
• Good Omens (2019): Shadwell filled his Witchfinder organization with fake names to justify a bigger budget (since their pay rates are centuries out of date). Crowley never notices anything odd about the obviously fake ledger because he doesn't care enough to check. Aziraphale, on the other hand, honestly believes that there are Witchfinder officers named "Saucepan" and "Milk Bottle".
  Aziraphale: Oh, and I should have asked about Witchfinder Major Milkbottle. I was so sorry to hear of his untimely end. I sent flowers.
  Shadwell: Aye, the flowers were appreciated.
• Father Jez Herriot (aka Remial the Deceiver) from HEX fails to realize the student beating him senseless at kendo is Ella and not Leon until she removes her mask. This is despite the fact Leon towers over him and Ella doesn't.
• In the House episode "Skin Deep", Dr. Wilson gave a patient an ultrasound and failed to notice that she doesn't have a uterus. Actually tends to be a common medical hangup among less experienced doctors (or alternatively, medical technicians and such who have worked so long everything has become routine). Generally caused by patients having a specific problem, and the doctor searching for and then treating that specific problem... only to miss the cancerous growth over the heart.
• iCarly:
  • Gibby in "iWin a Date":
    Carly: We have to keep the game clean and fair.
    Gibby: How would I know which one is Shannon?
    Sam: Listen. There will be three girls: Girl Number 1, GIRL NUMBER 2, and Girl Number 3.
    Gibby: So, which one is Shannon?
    Carly: If you want TWO go on a date with Shannon, you got TWO choose carefully.
    Carly & Sam: That is all you have TWO do.
    Gibby: O-kaaaaay!
  • Spencer runs into the apartment excited about a girl he just met in "iThink They Kissed", and doesn't notice that the Power Trio is tied together with duct tape.
• GSN game show Idiotest exploits this as its premise. The visual puzzles presented to contestants are designed to test their observation skills. While often filled with misleads and misdirection, the correct answer is usually blatantly obvious, and the host is not afraid to call you out if you can't figure it out.
• In From the Cold: The colleague of a woman whom Jenny impersonates with her body morphing power fails to notice she's now in a completely different outfit than he last saw her just a minute ago.
• In the Dark: Gene and Josh are so busy arguing they don't even notice as Murphy is escaping from the interrogation room.
• Inventing Anna is based on the true story of Anna Delvey, who tricked scores of New York socialites into thinking she was an heiress. A recurring theme of the show is that it would have been ridiculously easy for anyone to find out Anna was a fraud but no one bothered to do a basic background check on her, allowing her to get away with it all.
  • Alan Reed is a Wall Street executive who's seen one con and fraud after another come and go and should have seen through Anna fast. Instead, he falls for a "banker" (actually Anna on a voicebox) to sign off a million-dollar loan for her "business."
  • Kacy admits she's now kicking herself that on a trip to Marakesh, she didn't find it odd Anna refused to leave the hotel (where she could charge everything to the room) rather than explore the city, where she'd have to pay for things herself.
• Irma Vep: Eamonn and Lianna are so busy having sex in bed that neither notices as Mira (who's also in the suite with neither knowing) sneaks past them to leave. It helps that they have the covers obscuring them.
• Janda Kembang: At the start of the second episode, Malik and Rais spy on Salmah and her mysterious guest, then hide behind behind the guest's car. In spite of them no longer hiding behind anything the moment the car leaves and Rais saying "I'm invisible" as a mantra repeatedly, Salmah doesn't notice and just goes back to her house.
• The Knights of the Round Table, Karadoc and Perceval, from the French Kaamelott TV series are rather oblivious as a general rule. In the spin-off comic book Le Serpent Géant du lac de l'Ombre ("The Giant Snake from Shadow Lake"), they however take it to a whole new level. While rowing on the title lake in search of the eponymous giant snake, a huge coil of said monster rises above the water behind them... and they don't notice. Then its tail strikes their boat, and they wonder if they hit a rock. Finally, a stronger tail lash capsizes their boat and sends both in the water. Their conclusion? There's no giant snake in this damn lake, they're just wasting their time.
• Played for Laughs in the Crossover between Kamen Rider Gaim and Ressha Sentai Toqger, where Takatora gets a phone call about the Humongous Mecha vs. Giant Monster battle going on, then looks out the window at the exact moment the two giants leave his field of vision. He tells the person on the other end of the line "That's ridiculous, get back to work" and wonders if he's the Only Sane Man in the company.
  • He usually is.
  • The gag was repeated the next year in the crossover between Kamen Rider Drive and Shuriken Sentai Ninninger, except this time Brain saw the battle and desperately tried to point it out to a disbelieving Heart and Medic.
• Kamen Rider Ex-Aid
  • This happens to Kuroto Dan in the web spin-off Kamen Sentai Gorider where he fails to understand the nature of the Kamen Rider he is disguised as, leading to his plans falling apart in spectacular fashion.
• Like the aforementioned Gaim-Toqger example^note and coincidentally, by the writer of Toqger, Played for Laughs in the Den-O-Decade crossover movie The Onigashima Battleship, where Kuchihiko (the Big Bad of the movie) fails to notice Teddy/Neotaros standing right in front of him when he was riding the Denliner. To a lesser extent, the GelNewts also did this, not noticing the other Imagin, the crew of the Denliner, Ryotaro, and Kotaro faking the train passing through time.
• On Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a woman claims on a TV program that she was gang-raped at Hudson University, naming one of the players on their team. The guy is arrested, the case becomes a sensation...then the guy's attorney reveals that on that particular night, his client was on video playing in a game nine hours away. When Benson questions the reporter on his sources, he admits the only people he talked to were the girl and her professor (Carisi cracks, "isn't investigation part of being an investigate journalist?") It turns out the girl was raped but her professor urged her to make it sound like a bigger deal to expose the culture on the campus but the blatant lie not only throws the case out but makes it harder for any future assault victims to be believed.
• In Legends of the Hidden Temple, if a team enters with 1 and a half pendants (used to make a temple guard go away, and you need a whole pendant to do so), another half pendant is hidden somewhere in the temple. It's usually hanging from a button that needs to be pressed to open the only unlocked door, but the teammate that needs it usually walks right by it.
• Played for Laughs in one episode of Leverage, where Parker and Hardison have a conversation in front of the mixing desk in a recording studio... and completely fail to notice Eliot fighting a bunch of goons behind the soundproof window next to them.
• Little Britain: In the first series, each episode ends with somebody trying to beat a world record, but every attempt fails on a small and obvious practicality.
  • When becoming the "tallest man", he is told that they're only measuring from the top of the head down; he is wearing an extremely tall hat.
  • When building the biggest house of cards, he is told (having built an enormous house of cards) that he is not allowed to use sticky tape.
  • When lying in a bath of baked beans, they only have one tin of baked beans.
  • When making the largest pie, it is too big to fit in the oven.
  • The "world's smallest ant" cannot be found.
• M*A*S*H: A number of episodes deal with the surgeons failing to find bullets, shrapnel, or other foreign objects in the bodies of the wounded.
  • Frank Burns was noted as being particularly bad at missing foreign objects that had entered the bodies of wounded soldiers, forcing the other 4077 surgeons in the camp to cover for him, or other doctors further down the line at places like Seoul or Tokyo. He would often make excuses like he missed nothing or they all had been too busy even when confronted with evidence like x-rays.
  • In the episode "O.R." Frank doesn't even bother to look at a wounded soldier's x-ray, which shows the guy only has one kidney. He's in the process of taking the kidney out - which likely would've killed the soldier - when he yells at the other surgeons that it wasn't easy to remove a kidney. Trapper comes over to look and finds the soldier only has one kidney and stops Frank from removing the kidney.
  • Frank's replacement Charles Emerson Winchester III was a vastly superior surgeon compared to Frank but he wasn't immune to making medical errors, including giving a patient curare instead of morphine even though the bottle was clearly labeled as curare. That nearly cost the soldier his life.
  • The other surgeons at the 4077th were not immune to making medical mistakes. In "Trick or Treatment a wounded soldier is brought in wearing a toe tag. This results in the surgeons assuming the soldier was already dead without even giving him a cursory check which might have revealed he was still alive sooner. It's not until Father Mulchaey gets back and starts to give the soldier last rites that it becomes evident the soldier is still alive.
• In the second episode of Mimpi Metropolitan, Alan is confused why nobody wants to buy his pirated DVD. Camera pans up to reveal that he is sitting below a big anti-piracy sign. He only spots it on the next day, and only because one of the people passing-by points it out.
• On the Discovery Channel series Mind Blast, to demonstrate this trope in action, they had a clown on a unicycle ride through a crowded plaza. The people on their cell phones were completely oblivious to the existence of said clown, even saying they saw no clown when they were asked about it later.
• On Moesha, the title character gets a job writing for the local paper and meets a young boy who talks about being illiterate, his mom in the hospital all the time and he has no steady home. Moesha writes a great story that gets attention, a fundraising for the boy and about to be picked up by national papers. At which point, the boy shows up in a nice suit to read the story as it turns out he was just looking for attention (he has no steady home as his dad is in the Army and his mom is in the hospital all the time because she's an anesthesiologist among other fibs). Moesha confesses to the paper's editor, expecting him to blame the boy as she is. Instead, the editor rightly puts the blame on Moesha, pointing out she didn't bother talking to anyone like teachers or the "sick" mother who would have revealed the truth. He makes it clear she needs to learn basic reporting skills if she ever wants to write again.
• For more British goodness, a blow-away priest in one Monty Python's Flying Circus episode utterly fails to notice a very large cannon pointing out of a grave at his face, just so the Bishop could get there too late to save him.
• The 2018 revival of Murphy Brown has Corky happy to hear a woman (Brooke Shields) has awoken from a ten-year coma. Corky has long defended the woman's husband, accused of trying to kill her, with the woman seeming to confirm his story she tripped over their cat and fell down the stairs. But in a live interview, the woman reveals her husband did indeed push her. When a stunned Corky asks about the cat, the woman rolls her eyes to ask how, in a decade covering this, Corky missed the detail she's allergic to cats.
• NCIS:
  • In an episode, Gibbs comes upon the aftermath of a shootout in Mexico. Ocean on one side, desert on the other, and as soon as Gibbs dismounts there's a man with a gun behind him. We guess he was hiding behind the horse?
  • In the episode "Jurisdiction", Gibbs and DiNozzo go into a house with guns drawn and searching for bad guys, and DiNozzo calls "clear!" on a room with a CGIS agent in it that DiNozzo would have easily seen, if he'd bothered to look anywhere but straight ahead.
• Odd Squad:
  • In the Cold Open of "Blob on the Job", after helping a woman whose lock and doorbell makes car sounds, Olive and Otto fail to notice her house beginning to take off like a rocket. Even worse is that they tempt fate by saying that the case was easier than they thought it was gonna be.
  • Despite working in the Medical Bay for a long time, Dr. O failed to realize that there was a water cooler in her office up until "The Odd Antidote". Before Olive and Otto reminded her, she used to retrieve water from inside a dragon's cave every Monday, and believed that the liquid was a rarity.
  • The opening of "Training Day" has Olive, Otto, the security guard, and Otto's gadget (which scans an entire area for signs of odd activity) miss the very-obvious Odd Todd hiding in one of the paintings at the museum. Although it does make for quite the shocking reveal when the ex-agent comes out of hiding.
  • Otis manages to lampshade the fact that he and Olympia missed a sizeable CPU server only a few feet away from Olympia's desk in "Not OK Computer".
  Otis: I can't believe we missed this! You know, you just get so caught up in work and-
  O'Seth: This is dangerous! You cannot be on the computer while it's being fixed!
  • In "License to Science", Oona is so distressed over her upcoming test to receive a Lab Director license that when counting, she fails to realize she has another hand and five more fingers to count with when Otis is helping her study. Said other hand is gripping a gadget that she could easily set down.
  • In "Slow Day", both Olympia and Otis don't realize that the clients they have are moving in slow-motion, and as a result, anything they ask them to say or do can take hours. Otis in particular makes the mistake of asking them where they were before they started moving slowly, and ends up suffering the consequences. Oona also fails to grasp the slow-motion of all the affected clients later on at her party, when she tells them to put their hands up and they do so slowly.
  • In "Wax On Wax Odd", Omar has to ask Orla if the evil snow rabbit — which is bipedal, stands taller than any of the agents, uses snowballs as a weapon, and came out of an otherworldly portal — is a regular rabbit. A thrown snowball that whizzes past him and a "yes, I am quite certain" from Orla answers his question.
  • "Follow the Leader" has a disguised Opal lead fellow villains Star Wipe, William Ocean, and Cardboard Carl into the Mobile Unit van without them noticing the giant Odd Squad seal plastered onto the side. Subverted when Star Wipe manages to figure out where she is, at which point Opal rips off part of her disguise and a battle ensues.
  • In the final part of the Grand Finale, "Odd Together Now", Orla begins taking things out from her hammerspace spine to lure the Zap-Me-Not to the portal, while ignoring the many three-dimensional objects surrounding her.
• Player: Investigator Maeng calls In-gyu to tell him Ha-ri and the team have been captured. Behind him the team have just freed themselves and are in the middle of fighting his own men, but he doesn't notice a thing until Ha-ri steals his phone.
• Lily Charles of Pushing Daisies misses the fact that Chuck, her daughter who thinks she's her niece, is back from the dead despite Chuck standing right in front of her. While Lily is missing an eye, it's her right eye that's missing/blind, and in the scene in question the obstruction was to her right — so the eye that was best placed to see Chuck was actually her good eye.
• In Riverdale, the Stonies conspire to murder Jughead and make Betty think she did it while in a hypnotic trance. The Stonies are stunned when a very much alive and well Jughead saunters into their meeting room to mock them on how, in all their expert and detailed planning, "none of you Einsteins" ever considered checking his pulse to make sure Jughead was dead.
• Robyn Hood (2023): The entire Sheriff's department must be blind and deaf for how often they miss the Hood gang.
  • No one ever notices the Hood sneaking around in masks that have bright LED lights on them.
  • The Sheriff doesn't hear Much loudly shout Robyn's name half a second after stepping out of Much's apartment.
  • Robyn evades the police in Sherwood apartments by wearing her hood up, but still looks straight ahead and more than one officer looks directly at her face.
• On She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Dennis (the epitome of Small Name, Big Ego) is conned out of $175,000 by Runa, an Asgardian shapeshifter who made Dennis believe she was Megan Thee Stallion. It's quickly clear that the only reason Runa got away with it is that Dennis' delusion he could win her over made him miss Runa acting nothing like the real Megan Thee Stallion, that she was somehow able to date him when the real Megan Thee Stallion was posting videos from her worldwide tour, and the tiny fact he thought this rich, stylish international music star drove a Volkswagen Passat. Runa uses the defense that Dennis had to know this was a role play and there was no way he believed she was Megan Thee Stallion. But Pug wins the case by having Jennifer testify to the court that yes, Dennis is egotistical enough to believe he was dating the real music star and thus miss all the obvious signs in front of him this was an imposter.
• Strange Empire: Very few recognized Kat as having First Nations ancestry (aside from Caleb, who's of mixed heritage like her), although it's fairly obvious. They then act like she "lied" about it to boot.
• The final task of series two of Taskmaster involves the contestants building a bridge that can support a potato on a model field using materials like spaghetti, straws, elastic bands, playing cards, etc. Nobody notices the three separate clues that there were useful building materials attached to the underside of the table; the words "debajo de la messa" — Spanish for under the table — painted on the side of a toy boat; a button on the table which lights up a clue under the table; and a sign above the doorway that tells the contestant to look under the table.
  • An earlier task in the same episode requires the contestants to transfer two large bags of grocery items from one side of a canal to a shopping trolley (with sabotaged wheels) on the other side. One of them grabs the bags, charges through the canal, and throws the items into the trolley, all of which would have looked like a very impressive and decisive piece of action... had he not seconds later noted the presence of not one but two nearby bridges he could have used, in a tone of loud astonishment. The contestant was still kicking himself in the studio weeks later.
  • One task required contestants to find which of many socks hanging on a laundry line contained a small fruit. The wrong socks contained a decoy item, such as a billiard ball, and there were lots of confusing rules about how the contestants could inspect the socks. Or, they could look behind them and see a giant number 8.
• Temps de chien: At the vet hospital, Antoine brings Dr. Gauthier (who's a drug addict) to a room to talk to him in private. It's only after removing at once a fentanyl patch from Gauthier's body and firing him that Antoine notices a customer waiting in the room with her cat. She then tells him she hopes he'll be sweeter with her cat, causing Antoine to smile nervously.
• The tape 00083 for the family 00437 in This House Has People in It has the family failing to see the very obvious presence of the pink humanoid.
• Tidelands (Netflix): Bill is so overjoyed to see Genoveva back, he doesn't notice as Adrielle and Leandra come up behind him, with the latter quickly knocking him down. Adrielle then kills Genoveva while he's Forced to Watch.
• Two Sentence Horror Stories: In "Instinct" neither the police nor Anika notice the photos of Patrick's previous victims that fall out of the framed picture which she tears down. He has to point them out to her later on the floor.
• In Underbelly: Vanishing Act, when Melissa Caddick vanishes, her loved ones are stunned to discover the woman's "investment firm" is really a massive Ponzi Scheme that stole nearly $40 million from investors, including family and friends. When some protest by showing the sheets "proving" how much they had, the investigators have to break it to them that real investment account numbers contain eight digits, not six, meaning these accounts don't exist.
• The Walking Dead, being a horror series, naturally has a few of these but episode 1 of season 2 has a particularly egregious example. Dale, who is perched on top of his RV on a highway, specifically being there as an outlook, somehow manages to completely overlook this horde of walkers until it almost hits the group◊.
• When They See Us: One of the cops interrogating Matias Reyes failed to notice the similarities between his attacks and the attack on Tricia Meili, despite one having taken place very near to where Meili was assaulted only two days before.
• Wipeout has the "Where's the pole?" incident (at 1:30). To wit, the contestant — one Ariel Tweeto — was doing great in her run, including being the first person in the show's history to ever successfully clear the course's Big Balls obstacle without falling. The next obstacle needed her to ride down a pole onto another ball. However, Tweeto was unable to find a thirty-foot pole that was right in front of her. The show laid down the sound of screeching tires, the hosts threw in a snarky "We might have hit a snag", and the show paused itself to point at the pole that she missed with dozens of arrows. There was absolutely nothing blocking her view of the pole, either; Tweeto just entirely missed it, necessitating her to jump in the water and take a time penalty. When shown the pole after completing the course, Tweeto said that she thought the pole was supposed to be yellow.
• In episode 2 of the British kids' show The Witches and the Grinnygog, the children's mother reports a theft from the store where she works, a dummy wearing a white dress and yellow wig. Later, she takes in a pair of lodgers, a woman, and her ill daughter. The daughter is being carried by a local boy and is quite blatantly a dummy in a white dress and yellow wig. Absolutely no one realizes it, not even the boy carrying her! Possibly justified in that the woman is a witch, after all, and might be manipulating what the children see.
• Wonder Woman: In early episodes, Wonder Woman protected her Secret Identity via Clark Kenting. But towards the end of the series, she didn't bother to wear glasses or a ponytail. So Diana was essentially walking around looking exactly like Wonder Woman — and the entire world failed their spot check for reasons that were never addressed.
• In the final episode of the 1998 series of The Worst Witch; Maud, Enid and Ruby try to summon a unicorn from The Tome of Eldritch Lore from Miss Cackle's office but accidently summon the Uninvited (the evil fairy from Sleeping Beauty). Mildred inspects the book and notices the page containing the unicorn summoning spell and the entry on the Uninvited is missing.

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