Failure Is The Only Option / Live-Action TV

• Shows that center around searching for proof of the supernatural, such as Ghost Hunters and Finding Bigfoot, is set up for failure by their very premise as not only would the shows conclude if they were ever successful but any legitimate evidence of the supernatural they found would likely be publicly reported long before any episode was edited and aired.
• 24. It gets tricky — Goal: stop the threat immediately (i.e. in less than 24 hrs). You know that the threat won't, in fact, be stopped by episode 7. But this is lampshaded in that, usually one threat is thwarted, but then the heroes are surprised with back-up plans or secondary plots; thus the show's love affair with the trope. Conversely, in the final episode of the season, you know that no matter how well they've planned, the Big Bad has to lose.
• Averted on Alias, when SD6 is, surprisingly, defeated in the middle of the second season. They are, of course, replaced by a new series of goals, some of which are also resolved before the end of the series. Played straight with Sloane himself, though. At least as straight as it can be when a Heel–Face Revolving Door is involved.
• All That had a running sketch of a gameshow, literally called "You Can't Win". Questions asked (if they're not skipped over entirely — because who cares, they'll never get it right anyway) include such examples as "Who am I thinking of right now?" or simply "How many shoes?" The one time a contestant actually got a question right, the host claimed he couldn't hear him so it didn't count. There are also physical challenges, such as teaching a basset hound Spanish within ten seconds, or eating exactly 400 meatballs in 30 seconds (the contestant lost by eating the full amount given — 404 meatballs).
• Angel has this theme in a more upbeat fashion. While Angel & Co. try to fight the Senior Partners (and evil in general), they come to realize throughout the series that they can never defeat their adversaries. However, the point is not whether they will win against evil, but that they will fight the good fight regardless, issuing quotes like "We're not running a race, we're doing a job" and "If nothing we do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do". In the Series Finale, they engage in a mostly suicidal mission that won't defeat Wolfram & Hart, but will hopefully set them back a few decades.
• Arrested Development embodies this trope from the very first scene in the pilot to the last scene of the finale. It ends with the two characters who moved in with the family in the pilot to help them out basically saying, "Screw This, I'm Outta Here" and running away to Mexico.
• Arrow crosses this with Foregone Conclusion in the flashback scenes. Oliver can never actually succeed in getting home to his family (at least, not until five years after he's shipwrecked on the island). However, it's also revealed that not all the 5 years was on the island; and he did spend some time in his home city in year 3, he just couldn't tell anyone or let them see him.
• A twist on this trope is The A-Team, wherein one of the goals: to evade capture by government forces, was met continuously until the show was Un-Canceled after four seasons with the fifth, in which they are captured and subsequently work for a covert federal agency headed by Robert Vaughn. (However, the underlying goal, clearing their name or at least getting a pardon, was never achieved.)
• The Babylon 5 sequel Crusade was meant to feature a subversion, with the supposed plot hook of finding a cure for the Drakh plague that will kill all humans in five years resolved in just one season. Then the means of finding the cure would lead to more story arcs involving corruption of the Earth government and the manipulation of leftover Shadow technology that were what J. Michael Straczynski really wanted the show to be about; the plague story had been forced on him by executives who wanted the show's core premise to be able to be summed up in a few words. Unfortunately, it was cancelled long before this could happen.
• Bar Rescue is built upon the premise that Jon Taffer and his various experts can turn a sinking bar around in a matter of days. However, there are some bars that are beyond help. The bad apples neglect the advice given to them, revert back to failing ways, reject a new name or theme or even both, lose ownership, succumb to bankruptcy, or outright quit. Sometimes, Jon will actually refuse to save a bar because the people are so toxic that it would look bad on his reputation. A large number of Yelp reviews reveal a huge number of flipped bars are either closed for good, torn down, or sold/repurposed. The coronavirus outbreak caused a major collapse in the hospitality sector of business; bars closed because people stopped coming in and bills keep swamping the establishments, forcing even high-end bars to say sayonara. Consequently, it gave Jon many more bars to save.
• In Battlestar Galactica (1978), the goal was to find the mythical planet Earth. In the followup series Galactica 1980, the Galactica did in fact find Earth. The resulting episodes were bad enough to guarantee that there would be no Galactica 1981.
• In Battlestar Galactica (2003), they find Earth before the end of the series...only to find the planet in an post-apocalyptic state, presumably from nuclear war. Later, they get a Deus ex Machina trip to another habitable planet that they also call Earth, mingle with the locals, and 150,000 years later we develop Roombas. This could be said to be an aversion, as current humans are much more savvy about the danger of building machines that could turn against them. The earliest warning against this (the story of the golem) goes back several hundred years.
• Between the Lions character Cliffhanger. Goal: Get himself off the cliff he's hanging from. Invariably, some Contrived Coincidence will return him to the perilous branch he hangs from. When the author got tired of writing the books, he ended the series with Cliff being washed onto a beach, free from the cliff. Cliff enjoys himself at first, but becomes bored due to the lack of danger, and the lions convince the author to continue the series, having Cliff being washed back onto the cliff branch.
• Both 1960s/1970s TV Westerns The Big Valley and Bonanza had the same thing happening: every time a male character on the show got serious with a woman or got married, she got killed off in some gruesome fashion or died of some horrible disease, or in childbirth, on the same episode. (Exception: Hoss' mother on Bonanza lasted two episodes.) In fact, the Cartwright Curse is named for Bonanza's Cartwright family. The Big Valley was a Dueling Work with Bonanza, and basically the same but with a female lead and a daughter to better represent women.
• In the afterparty of the nineteenth season of the US version of Big Brother, Paul Raffi Abrahamian pokes fun at how he came in second twice in a row the exact same way and is now going to shoot for second every season he comes back as a Running Gag that he just can't win.
• Blackadder's goals:
  • Series 1 — to become heir to the throne, or at least get noticed by his father. He becomes King after murdering everyone in his way, then dies 30 seconds later.
  • Series 2 — not as clear as other seasons, but apparently to marry Queenie and become the richest and most powerful man in England. He always seems on the cusp of doing so but the Queen's short attention span means she's no longer interested in his achievements every time he comes back to her.
  • Series 3 — To get rich and improve his station. He finally achieves this after Prince George is shot and Blackadder becomes the new Prince Regent thanks to the madness of King George.
  • Series 4 — the clearest example of this, Captain Blackadder's endless attempts to get out of the trenches before he dies. He fails. Cue one of the most famous Tearjerker Downer Endings in the history of, well, history.
• Blake's 7 - The objective of Blake's Seven — or at least of Blake himself — was to destroy the Federation. Even with the most advanced ship in human hands, it's not very likely you're going to do that with a crew of seven. The first three seasons had several successes, but by season 4 the Liberator was destroyed and every single thing they tried failed. The ending was inevitable.
• The Bob Newhart Show: Bob Hartley is a psychologist with a core group of dysfunctional regular patients; episodes may end with him making a minor breakthrough with them, but they never actually get better.
• Burn Notice. Every time Michael thinks he's found out who and what's really behind his Burn, he discovers it's only another layer of obfuscation. As of the end of season two he's decided to finally forget about finding out who burned him and move on with his life — only for Big Bad Gilroy to come waltzing into the picture. Michael is still looking into the mystery in Season 5. Even now that he's back in the CIA, he's still got loose plot threads to tie up.
• On Castle, any time Beckett comes close to finding her mother's killer, she fails. She first shoots the trigger man to save Castle before finding out who hired him, finds the next killer in the chain only for him to escape custody and kill Montgomery, is shot by a sniper, and after finding him is later thrown off a roof by that same sniper. With the beginning of season 5 it is finally averted when she finally finds the The Man Behind the Man but she is still unable to prove it. When she thinks she might finally have a chance it is yanked away when it turns out that the mastermind is innocent of the current crime and she saves his life instead.
  • Averted by the end of season six with the conclusion of that story line. Used in small scale with the season six finale episode dealing with getting the wedding. Beckett spends the entire episode tracking down and getting a husband she didn't know she had to sign annulment paperwork, which was complicated by his being kidnapped right in front of her. Interspersed through this are a series of dramas including the wedding venue burning down, a water pipe bursting in her apartment that ruined her dress, trying to relocate and coordinate the shuttling of all the guests within a few days, and Castle getting run off the road and his car set on fire while on the way to the wedding from submitting the annulment paperwork.
• Charlie Jade — Goal: Get back to his home dimension. Achieved, but soon he has to leave to stop the Big Bad's plot, which as far as he knows requires a Heroic Sacrifice. The series' last scene before cancellation reveals that he survived after all.
• Chuck — Goal for the first two seasons: Get the Intersect out of Chuck's head, and/or find out how to build another one so the government doesn't need to depend on a bumbling flighty geek. At least a quarter of the episodes of the first two seasons revolved around pursuing one of those goals, and failure was the only option for them. As of season three, the trope was finally averted and the show continues with a related premise.
• Come Back Mrs. Noah: The format of the show meant that any attempt to return the Britannia Seven to Earth was doomed to fail. The series ended with the space station being sent spiralling even further into deep space.
• Doctor Who went through such periods when he'd have a companion or companions who didn't actually want to travel with him. This was actually the show's original premise with Ian and Barbara. Later, attempts to get Tegan back to Heathrow and her flight attendant job failed for quite a bit. When they finally dropped her off, it was found out in the next story she'd been fired and she willingly joined the crew.
• Dollhouse. Viewers may empathise with Ballard's (ineptly pursued) goal of bringing Dollhouse down and freeing the Actives, but if he were successful, the show would be over. He, Echo and the others do manage that. In the penultimate episode. Though it turns out that doesn't totally fix things. They probably indirectly caused the bad things that would happen. If they had publicized both the technology and the vaccine people would have been ready, and no-one would have had a monopoly over the information, but instead they thought that blowing up a mainframe and covering up the rest was enough to foil the evil corporation's plans. Of course, that's what the Big Bad (Boyd) told them — the genie is out of the bottle. They didn't believe him.
• The Dukes of Hazzard - Goal: Frame the Duke boys, foreclose on Jesse Duke's farm and send him and Daisy packing once Bo and Luke have been convicted on charges they are innocent of. To do so, you must come up with a fool-proof scheme to rob the bank, conduct black market sales or otherwise embezzle money from various businesses or sources and then somehow make it so that the Duke boys were engaged in the illegal activity. But when you're Boss Hogg, and overambitious in seemingly wild schemes to destroy your rival — who, by the way, forced you out of illegal moonshine production by reporting the activities to the government (if only to avoid felony charges yourself) — and have a bumbling stooge of a brother-in-law who seemingly got his law enforcement training off the back of a kiddie's cereal box and seemingly could not understand the simplest of instructions to save his life, viewers would soon come to know what happens next ... but it was sure fun watching Boss and Rosco play the part of Wile E. Coyote.
• Farscape - Crichton's obsession throughout the series is finding a way back to Earth—which would end his adventures and the series. Subverted magnificently in the middle of fourth and last season, where Crichton manages to get back to Earth... only to realize that his experiences have changed his perspective so much that he really can't be happy there anymore, causing him to head back out for deep space. The entire situation is deconstructed to the Moon and back (rather literally). And, of course, this being Farscape, John Crichton lampshades this, referring to various pop-culture pieces in the process.
• Father Ted — Goal for the priests (well, Ted at least): get sent to a parish not on the island. For Ted this would require him to replace the money that was "just resting in [his] account".
  • Goal achieved by subversion in "The Passion of St. Tibulas" then inverted in order to maintain the status quo. Charged with a task from Bishop Brennon, not only does Ted fail in the task he achieves the opposite effect. Thus the Bishop having had enough of them sends them to even worse parishes, where they won't be his problem. Inverted when they successfully blackmail the Bishop on his vows of celibacy.
  • Also achieved in the first episode of the third season. Ted, possibly as a reward for his actions in the Christmas Special, is sent to a much nicer parish. But when his fellow priests notice some irregularities in the accounts, Ted is promptly sent back to Craggy Island ... where he discovers Mrs. Doyle bent almost double due to back trouble, Dougal's pet hamster riding around on a miniature bicycle, and Father Jack living in the chimney.
  • The finale looks to be the eventual ending of this, with Ted being offered a place at a parish in Los Angeles by an American priest who was very impressed by Teds managing to talk a suicidal priest off a ledge. Subverted when he quits when the priest actually tells him it's a Parish in a gang warfare zone. Lampshaded by Dougal, when he says Ted is stuck with them forever.
• Firefly played with it, as at least twice the crew pulled off heists that, if successful, would let them live their lives in a significantly less impoverished state while still on the run. However, we find in the next episode that, for one reason or another, they are unable to capitalize on the gains. Arguably, in Serenity, it is the fact that the crew is actually able to pull off the heist at the beginning and then cash in on it in the next scene that makes all the forthcoming fighting-the-power action plausible.
  
  This is actually a long-running minor trope in Firefly, as mentioned by Mal Reynolds at least once: "It never goes smooth. Why does it never go smooth?" (In the Serenity RPG, "Things don't go smooth" is actually a character trait you can take. Mal has the major version of it.)
• In the first episode of For the People, the lead federal public defender tells her idealistic new proteges that "You are going to lose". Their opponent is the US Federal Government, who have unlimited money and power and win 95% of their cases. Indeed, almost every case ends with a conviction or, best case scenario, a plea deal for reduced prison time. Unusually for a Courtroom Drama, outright acquittals are very rare.
• Frasier is just not meant to find love.
• Formula 1: Drive to Survive: While given the documentary format this isn't actually true the show frames Willams' dismal situation in this manner, with their chief technical director Paddy Lowe being fired before the Formula One season even starts in 2019 and excluding the team's single point of 2019 from coverage.
• The Fugitive - Goal: Get the one-armed man jailed to clear your name. Resolved in the Grand Finale.
• Gilligan's Island - Goal: Get off the island. The series was abruptly cancelled after Season Three, so they never did achieve this in the series. They did finally get rescued years later in a reunion movie, but in the second movie (when they met up again for a reunion trip in the first one after they were rescued, they got washed up right back on the same island; they were rescued for good in the second one) it turned out they hated life on the mainland so much that they returned. At least this time, they were no longer stranded, and set the island up as a resort.
• Gold Rush!: Played straight to varying degrees in different seasons.
  • During the first season, the guys frequently lament that they are in danger of going into foreclosure on their houses back home. Failure to find any gold means going home not just broke, but deeper in debt than when they started. Unfortunately, by the end of season one, they have failed to find more than a few ounces of gold valued in the tens of thousands of dollars. They need more than 100 ounces worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
  • Season 2 saw the Hoffman crew kicked off their Porcupine Creek claim as well as recovering a relatively small amount of gold.
  • Season 4 saw the Hoffman crew pretty much lose everything in the jungles of Guyana.
  • Parker's first few seasons mining from his grandfather's Big Nugget mine were nothing but disappointment.
  • Although they finally meet their 1000 and 2000 ounce goals by the end of season 5, after the "final" cleanouts, we learn that they need more gold to secure mining rights for the next season (Hoffman crew) or afford to buy a new claim (Parker Schnabel).
  • For season 6, Tony Beets wanted to produce 900 ounces or 1 million dollars worth of gold with his decades-old resurrected dredge. He missed that goal by about 100 ounces. But his high efficiency methods gave him a 50 to 60% return on the digging efforts. (Vs 10 to 30% for stationary washplants.) Operating the dredge taught him and the crew how to do the job correctly and Tony plans on buying a second dredge during the 2016 mining season (season 7).
  • Eight episodes into season 7 and Tony Beets's dredge has been sunk not just once, but twice.
    • The next episode, the inspector declares his top-heavy tugboat unseaworthy, requiring him to go out and find another means of pushing/towing/hauling his new dredge downriver.
    • 2 weeks later, the bucket ladder return pulley suffers a broken bearing, sidelining the entire machine.
  • The Hoffman Crew found mining at the High Bar mine in Oregon's Blue Mountains to be much like their first two seasons and their South American season. The Buckland claim didn't help them fill their 5000 ounce wish list either.
  • Near the end of season 7, Tony learned that while he does indeed own his second, larger dredge, he lacks the proper land use permits he needs in order to move the behemoth dredge (or its larger removed components) to the river.
  • For season 8, everybody is having a hard time meeting their gold recovery goals.
• Good Times - Goal: Get out of the projects. Resolved in the final episode by all (except Bookman). Michael moves into a dormitory. Thelma and Keith move into a duplex when his football career rebounds, only to have Florida move in with them. JJ gets his own place. Willona and Penny move to the same duplex.
• Hogan's Heroes:
  • Colonel Klink's actor Werner Klemperer only participated in the show under the condition that the Nazis would never, ever come out on top in anything. This being a comedy and Nazis being acceptable targets, it wasn't hard to pull off.
  • In an in-universe semi-example, Klink thought this was true of Hogan and his eponymous heroes. Of course, they could have escaped any time; they just didn't want to because they were being so effective where they were.
• Homicide: Life on the Street: Every episode centering around Lewis and Kellerman's efforts to find enough evidence to convict their Arch-Enemy drug lord Luther Mahoney ended in failure. Luther always found a way to escape charges, often while killing whatever ally the detectives had that had provided them an advantage over him. It was subverted and deconstructed in his final appearance, where Kellerman cements his Face–Heel Turn by shooting a defenseless Luther during a raid to prevent him from being a Karma Houdini once again.
• How I Met Your Mother - Goal: Meet wife and mother of children. Although, as opposed to most examples on this page, we know that it will succeed, thanks to the premise. It just that for exactly the same reason it can't happen until the final minutes of the show, so so long as the series goes on...
  • Also goes with Barney and Robin now that it's revealed they're getting married: Any other relationship one or the other is in is 100% guaranteed to fail.
• The Incredible Hulk (1977) - Goal: Find a cure to the Hulk transformation and a way to control the raging spirit that dwells within.
• The Invaders (1967) subjected both the hero and the villains to this trope. David Vincent was trying to prove the existence of alien invaders disguised as humans on Earth; in turn, the aliens were trying to silence him. The series format depended on neither side being able to accomplish their goal. However, near the end of the series, Vincent met the Believers, a group of people who were already aware of the invaders, which changed the status quo since at least he now had dependable allies.
• iZombie - Goal: Find a cure for zombiism. The working cures thus far have either been temporary or had nasty side effects.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: With very rare exceptions, just about anything any of the main cast tries doing is going to end up failing miserably. The prominent of these is Charlie's crush on the unnamed Waitress; no matter what he does she's never going to fall for him.
• Jessie: All of Jessie's attempts to make it big (trying to get a song recorded, auditioning for a part, trying to get a short story published, etc.) all end in disaster at best.
  • Her most successful attempt was when she got a role in Mayan Mayhem ... as a stuntwoman.
  • She also auditioned for an In-Universe show called Worthington Manner. She would have gotten the role if it wasn't for an injury she got (no thanks to Ravi).
  • Averted in season 3 where she starred in an off Brodway musical and a kitchen utensil video.
• Kamen Rider Wizard sets every single character up as this: the Phantoms never succeed in reproducing by turning magic-capable humans into new Phantoms. Wizard never succeeds in restoring his Revenant Zombie love interest to life before her zombie status can expire. The Big Bad behind the initial batch of Phantoms turns out to have the same goal as Wizard, and he equally fails. The only character who gets anything he wants by the end of the story is Nitou, who successfully gets out of his bargain with his Clingy MacGuffin.
• Kitchen Nightmares is about famed chef Gordon Ramsay attempting to save troubled restaurants. However, there are too many to count that still crumble because the restaurant industry is savage and highly competitive, and dysfunctional people often doom the place because they have a very poor understanding of what goes into running an eatery or lack fundamental culinary skills.
• Kung Fu (1972) - Goal: Find Kwai-Chang Caine's long lost half-brother. Achieved in the four-part Series Finale.
• Land of the Giants. Their goal was to get out of the titular place. However, something inevitably went wrong every time there was a chance of doing that. Fitzhugh was no help.
• Land of the Lost: Escape the Land Of The Lost. Sid and Marty Krofft Productions had quite a few of these, with H.R. Pufnstuf, Lidsville, Doctor Shrinker, Far Out Space Nuts, and The Lost Saucer.
• Lazarus Churchyard - Goal: Die
• LazyTown. It makes sense that Robbie Rotten's schemes always fail. If they succeeded, there would be no more show.
• Life On Mars - Goal: Return to 2006. Achieved in the last episode, only to have the main character realize it was not what he wanted after all.
  
  Subverted in the American version when it's revealed that Sam isn't a cop from 2008 after all but an astronaut in 2035 caught up in a glitched virtual reality program.
  • This trope also applies to spin-off Ashes to Ashes (2008), with Alex's main goal always being to get back to 2008 and make it to her daughter's birthday party. This appeared to have been achieved at the end of series 2, only for episode 1 of series 3 to reveal it was just a Dream Within a Dream. And unlike Sam Alex never even got a choice - the final episode revealed she never could have gotten back as she was Dead All Along!
• Lost: With the premise of "people stranded on a deserted Island", it was pretty obvious to viewers that any attempts to get off said Island were doomed to fail. It was then famously subverted when some characters left the Island and their goal became to get back there. And then totally inverted in the final season: the goal of the main characters becomes to stop the Big Bad from leaving the Island - something they have attempted themselves for so long early in the series. The other goal is to figure out what the hell is going on. Characters and the viewers alike were fated to fail here.
• Lost in Space - Goal: Find Earth Alpha Centauri.
• Klinger of M*A*S*H fame attempting to get out of the army by acting crazy (getting a Section 8). This was of the every episode variety, at least until later seasons. After Radar leaves, Klinger takes over the job of company clerk and quits the routine, except for a couple of occasions. Later, he has a bad dream where he does arrive in Toledo, but then looks back at the scenery and sees the 4077th operating room and himself as the patient, heavily implying that he will carry a guilty conscience if he ever calls it quits on everyone and runs away from the war. After this experience, Klinger abandons all schemes of bucking for a Section 8 forever.
  • Inverted in the finale, when the war is officially over and everyone is being discharged. Klinger elects to stay in Korea to help his new wife find her missing family.
  Klinger: I can't believe I'm saying this. I'm staying in Korea.
  Hawkeye: You don't have to act crazy now. We're all getting out.
  • Also, Winchester trying to get out of the 4077th. Shown less often than Klinger's, he mostly tried to throw his weight around to get transferred back to Tokyo.
• Monk - Goal: discover the truth surrounding Trudy's death (achieved in series finale). There's also Monk's OCD, which isn't exactly a problem that the characters actively attempt to solve, but it is an essential part of the series' premise. Monk is occasionally cured of this ailment, but it is always undone by means of the Reset Button because he doesn't have his crime-solving abilities without it (not to mention because Status Quo Is God).
• The Monkees: Goal: get big break and reach success as a rock and roll band. Often when it seems as though they've finally found their chance at stardom, something always ends up getting in the way, causing chaos, and numerous epic fails.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 (especially the later seasons) - Goal: Escape the Satellite of Love and return to Earth. Achieved in the final episode.
  
  Also achieved by Joel in the middle of the 5th season (Mitchell), though ironically he had grown content with his life aboard the Satellite and was tricked into leaving by Gypsy because she thought the Mads were going to kill him. The Mads then send Mike into space and continue from there. Later, Crow got Mike off the Satellite retroactively using Time Travel to convince him to stop temping. He returned to learn that he died pursuing his dream of being a rock star and his Jerkass older brother was launched into space in his stead, so he went back and undid the change.
• Baking show Nailed It! revolves around terrible bakers having to recreate professionally decorated cakes in intentionally way too short of a time period. It goes about as well as can be expected, to hilarious effect.
• Northern Exposure: Joel Fleischman's Character Development from being a stereotypical neurotic New Yorker to embracing the folksy wisdom of the inhabitants of Cicely, Alaska was the point of the show. They dragged this premise out for about five seasons until Joel's actor left the show, the character found enlightenment, and the show imploded on itself.
• Only Fools and Horses. Goal: make a fortune ("This time next year, we'll be millionaires!"). Heartwarmingly achieved in the finale (with something that's been lying in their garage for years), then undone for a Christmas Special some years later, only to be slightly fixed by a dead relative's will.
• Our Miss Brooks - Miss Brooks can't get Mr. Boynton to propose marriage . . . that is until the cinematic grand finale where, with the help of Mrs. Davis, she succeeds in marrying Mr. Boynton and living happily ever after.
• Peep Show is built on this trope, because it's a Crapsack World and Status Quo Is God. Likewise, Armstrong and Bain's sitcom The Old Guys.
• Phil of the Future - The time machine being fixed so the Diffys can return to the future. Slightly subverted in that Lloyd purposefully procrastinated/sabotaged the systems because the family enjoyed the 21st century so much. He really could've just fixed it at any time.
• Power Rangers lampshades this in a comedic scene in Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie. When the new villain Divatox asks the more experienced Rita Repulsa for advice in how to deal with the Power Rangers, Rita and Zedd seem to have given up their battle against the rangers entirely. Rita even sarcastically advises Divatox to just run from the Rangers, knowing full well that when the Power Rangers get into the picture, this trope comes to play.
• Prison Break's first season was Exactly What It Says on the Tin, but also had an overarching conspiracy for the characters to get to the bottom of. The actual prison break was obviously unachievable until near the end of the season, but the conspiracy dogged the characters for another three seasons.
• The Prisoner (1967) - Goal: Escape from the Village. Achieved at the series end. Or is it? Also, McGoohan's repeated return to the village is, arguably, one of the themes of the series.
  • A far more straight example, the bad guys have the goal "find out why Number 6 quit being a spy." Since teasing that answer out would also end the show, they are also doomed to failure at every turn.
• Quantum Leap - Goal: Stop leaping and go home. In a twist, the series ended with Sam realizing he could go home if he wanted, but he chose to continue leaping. Of course, that's because no one has bothered to remind him that he has a wife back home and he can't remember.
• Red Dwarf - Goal: Get back to Earth, and several smaller themes such as Rimmer wanting a real body, the Cat wanting a mate, and Holly wanting his/her intelligence restored.
  • In the later seasons, many of the smaller themes have actually been achieved in some way - albeit happening in sometimes almost literal Deal with the Devil way of going horribly, horribly wrong. Rimmer, for example, got a body by getting a Hard Light drive for his holographic body, after which he left to become the next Ace Rimmer; later, in Series VIII, a new version of him was reincarnated in human form with no memories of his death or his time as a hologram. Holly was done similarly, with a completely different Holly being restored alongside the crew in Series VIII, with his IQ back to the original 6000. Most of the minor goals searched for were technically achieved, just not the way we thought. Except the Cat, but that's more of a problem with a script being scrapped in Series VII.
  • Lister's desire to get back to Earth is so unachievable (its going to take at least 3 million years to get back to Earth) that the second episode Future Echos shows a 170-something Lister still on Red Dwarf.
• Saturday Night Live:
  • The "It's Pat" sketches — Goal: To find out whether Pat is a man or a woman. Interestingly, for this example, it's a bigger consequence if the audience finds out as opposed to the characters, since with the exception of Chris (who knows Pat's gender and whose gender is equally ambiguous), there are no recurring characters in these segments. One sketch was even interrupted with a fake NBC News Special Report just to preserve the mystery.
  • "Celebrity Jeopardy!" — Goal: Make the game easy enough for the celebrities to win.
    [shows picture of Batman]
    Trebek: Is this Batman or Robin? Chris Tucker.
    Chris Tucker: Yo I know this, man. That's Robin!
    Trebek: No. So since it's not Robin, that leaves only one correct answer. Anne Heche.
    Anne Heche: Who is Robin?
    Trebek: Amazing. Sean Connery.
    Sean Connery: What is Robin?
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World - Goal: find a way out of the Plateau. But the series would end if the explorers ever did. So, predictably, any lead they discovered to a way out never panned out as they hoped.
• Sliders - Goal: 'Slide' back to our dimension. This goal was actually achieved at the start of the fourth season. There was also a much earlier instance where they were implied to get back to their own dimension... but did not realize it, and moved on to the next one.
• Space: 1999: Goal: Find a planet to settle down on.
• Stargate Atlantis - Goal: Secure enough ZPMs to fully power Atlantis. In the first season, there were concerns in the fandom that Failure Would Be The Only Option for the expedition's attempts to contact Earth, thus turning it into the Stargate equivalent of Star Trek: Voyager, but these fears turned out to be unfounded. They do in fact end up getting three ZPMs after the Asurans temporarily take over and leave a set behind. However, Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs - in the Stargate-verse, people who are not main characters also need ZPMs, so Atlantis only gets to keep one anyway.
  
  In the last episode Todd supplies two ZPMs stolen from Asuras before it went kaboom. Though Earth was saved from invasion, it is very unlikely that the IOA will let Atlantis take off for Pegasus since with it floating conveniently in the Bay of San Francisco, they can mine the tech without danger from the Wraith.
• Stargate Universe - In episode 7, there's a plan to get everybody back home. It's not much of a spoiler to point out that this is not a seven-episode series. (A couple of episodes earlier, everybody's worried that the ship may be destroyed outright. Well, everybody but the audience, anyway.)
• Star Trek: Voyager - Goal: find a way home. They finally do it in the last episode, thanks to a time travel paradox. A while in the writers realized some of the backdraws of this trope, and began to allow partial successes; they can't get all the way home, but they can use whatever the technology of the week is to cross some substantial amount of space in a matter of minutes, shaving years off the journey. In a few cases, it's even set up in advance that the expectation is for said technology to get them X years closer to home rather than getting all the way there, so achieving that number is an unequivocal success even if their ultimate goal is still incomplete. (Having them succeed was also considered as an option for Retooling the show, but this never came to fruition.)
• Subverted painfully in Supernatural. The show starts off with the boys searching for their dad and what killed their mom and after some close calls, it looks like failure will only ever be their only option. Then they succeed by the ends of seasons 1 and 2. Of course their father dies and gets sent to Hell shortly after being reunited with them and the demon that killed their mom was a Magnificent Bastard who ended up winning anyway due to a Batman Gambit centred on Sam. After that things get much worse.
  • Season 3's goal: Save Dean from his Deal with the Devil. Dean goes to Hell anyway. Though he did get better.
  • Season 4's goals: Prevent Lucifer from rising and kill Lilith. Sam succeeds in killing Lilith, only for it to turn out that doing this broke the final seal, resulting in Lucifer being released anyway.
  • Season 5's goal: For the boys to stop the apocalypse without saying "yes" to Michael and Lucifer, and hence preventing pushing the entire world beyond the Godzilla Threshold, which would happen if the angels made it their battlefield. Sam says yes to Lucifer in order to trap both him, Lucifer and Michael (along with Adam) in the Pit, and the world still gets worked over by Lucifer in the upcoming months, and then worked over by Mother in season 6. And that's ignoring all the psychological torment and torture both Sam and Dean went through in that period of time. Let's just say, you don't get many happy endings in Supernatural. If you do, there will be a catch.
• In Teen Wolf, if a werewolf kills the Alpha that bit him he can either be cured or take a Klingon Promotion. Knowing this Derek kills Alpha Peter Hale while Scott begs him to stop.
• In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the characters can try to keep casualties to a minimum (it doesn't work) and/or delay Judgment Day as long as possible, but "winning" much of anything would end the series.
• This Morning with Richard not Judy - In the weekly Nostrodamus routine the terms for success get two out of three predictions correct. So, the trope was played usually by having one obvious prediction and two laughable to think that they'd come true, thus always failing. One week, a laughable prediction was "A member of Boyzone will come out as being homosexual." Shock — horror, within a week a member of Boyzone came out! This would have been a simple aversion, had it not been for the predictable prediction being a Lampshade Hanging: "Nostrodamus will fail to get two of his predictions correct." Consequently causing a Played Straight/Aversion feedback loop.
• Like Lost in Space and Land of the Giants, The Time Tunnel was an Irwin Allen series in which the protagonists were lost and trying to return home. In this case, two scientists were bounced back and forth through history by the titular Time Machine, while their colleagues tried to retrieve them. As with the other series, Time Tunnel was canceled before the heroes could accomplish their goal.
• The Trailer Park Boys are always coming up with various illegal schemes to make enough money to retire from crime. Most of their schemes fail for one reason or another, and the Boys quickly blow through the money they make for the schemes that actually succeed. This is subverted by the end of the seventh season, where the Boys make over $450,000 in a scheme that involves shipping marijuana to the United States and getting contraband cigarettes in exchange, which they sell at cut-rate prices in Canada.
  • Which they end up losing later, proving that this trope always takes precedence in this show. If that wasn't bad enough, virtually everyone ends up going to jail due to a well-crafted plan by Mr. Lahey. The Grand Finale movie was more of the same.
• The 3rd season of The Vampire Diaries focuses on the main characters war with the Original Vampires, the source of every other Vampire in the show. Just when they had completed their ultimate weapon to defeat all of them, it's revealed that the death of an Original means the death of every Vampire connected to that Original's Sire line. The cast lose the war once they learn this, because far too many of their friends (and the series 3 leads) are Vampires and the show would have to do some serious recasting and concept altering if they wanted to have a Season 4.
• The Wire is a perfect example of this. In a show with cops, drug dealers, politicians, union workers, and school students barely anyone really wins in the end. "The game is rigged, but you cannot lose if you do not play." Practically every major character on the show experiences this:
  • Detective McNulty's goal is to stop Marlo Stanfield by fabricating a series of murders to "juke the stats" and divert police resources to the Major Crimes Unit. While he does arrest Marlo and his crew, the victory is hollow: the fabricated murders are discovered, leading McNulty, Rhonda Pearlman and Commissioner Daniels to all fall on their swords. Marlo ends up getting off scot-free (with caveats), the reporter who covered the fake serial killer story (whom the Detective chewed out) wins a Pulitzer Prize for his stories, and McNulty realizes in the end that he can't change the system.
  • The kids introduced in the fourth season (and, by extension, the entire Baltimore school system). Roland Prezbylewski realizes that nothing he does can curb the school system's trend of cutting corners and mismanaging internal resources, even though he tries to give the kids a better education. Most of the main students end up becoming "hard" to the Baltimore street life and take up the roles of past main characters (Dukie becomes a drug user like Bubbles, Michael becomes a stick-up artist like Omar, and Randy becomes a thug in a group home).
• WKRP in Cincinnati slowly moves away from this, with the goal of making the radio station truly successful after being dead last in the city. Their ratings do improve, but hardly to the degree that the lead character, program manager Andy Travis, is trying to reach. It was revealed in one episode that the station's original dead-last performance was in fact deliberate on the part of the owner, Carlson's mother, who had been using the cash-hemorrhaging station as a tax write-off.
• Wonder Woman: The goal of the first season was to defeat the Nazis and win World War II, but to actually do so would end the series. Fortunately, it was picked up by CBS and moved to The '70s for season 2.
• The X-Files - Goal: Find the truth behind the conspiracy. Achieved by the last couple seasons of the series, opening the door to the far more insurmountable... Goal: Stop the conspiracy.
• Z Nation - Goal: Get the one guy with a zombie cure in his blood to a working laboratory so someone can synthesize a vaccine and the rest of humanity can be saved from the Zombie Apocalypse. Naturally the group transporting the guy keeps running into problems that delay them and send them off by several states from wherever the lab is.