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Fred Sanford liked to fake having a heart attack.
Redd Foxx actually died from one.

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Individual examples

  • The episode of 1000lb Sisters "Smoky Mountain Meltdown" has a scene where Chris tackles trying to ride a roller coaster when he's right at the 375lb weight limit. The scene becomes a lot harder to watch after an incident at ICON Park Orlando where a 14 year old boy fell to his death from a drop tower, with the weight limit being a major factor in his death.
  • The second season of Netflix's highly controversial teen series 13 Reasons Why ends with a just barely avoided school shooting. The season premiered on May 18, 2018, a mere seven hours before the Santa Fe High School shooting, which left ten dead.
  • In 24's third season, after Tony learns that Michelle is trapped inside a hotel whose inhabitants are infected with the Cordilla Virus, Ryan Chappelle tells him that the best way to focus is to assume the worst and think about getting revenge. In Season 7, Tony's desire for revenge for Michelle's death at the start of the fifth season leads him to attempt to curry favor with the main antagonists so that he can meet up with and kill the man responsible, even if thousands of innocent civilians die in the process.
    • And that in turn winds up becoming all the more harsher for the final season when Jack goes down nearly the exact same path to avenge Renee, even justifying starting a world war in order to kill the ones behind her death, at the parallels between Jack's mindset between Seasons 7 and 8 now make things all the more worse. At the very beginning of Season 7 when Renee compares Tony and Jack's situations with their wives' murders, Jack responds he would never go that far. And Jack yelling at Tony that he's betraying everything Michelle believed in is all the more worse when Chloe tells Jack the same thing regarding Renee exactly 24 episodes later.
  • 30 Rock:
    • In "Jack Meets Dennis", Pete wonders if they'll be preempted by a national news event and says "how's Gerald Ford's health?" Gerald Ford died less than a month after the episode aired, and the line was edited out of the DVD release.
    • In "Emanuelle Goes to Dinosaur Land", Liz's British date Wesley says how he doesn't want to go back to England saying that he doesn't want to suffer through the London Olympics. He says "You saw the Beijing opening ceremonies, we don't have that kind of control over our people." This line has become a lot more tragic in the wake of the London riots and later civil liberties violations in the UK.
    • In Season 3, Jack gets someone to impersonate Bill Cosby in order to get Tracy to come back to the show after he (temporarily) quit. Tracy goes on a tirade about how Cosby had done something unspeakable with his aunt in 1971. In 2014, comedian Hannibal Buress went viral with a bit that mentioned Cosby had 13 rape accusations. This, over time, led to more than fifty women coming out and accusing Cosby of sexual assault in the few years since Hannibal's bit. Cosby was convicted on sexual assault charges in 2018. Considering Burress was a staff writer, this may be more a deliberate reference to an open secret in show business (much like the show's jokes about Harvey Weinstein).
  • 7th Heaven had the Season 4 episode "Talk to Me" where Reverend Eric Camden (played by Stephen Collins) counsels a young girl who was molested. Fourteen years later, TMZ leaked an audio recording of Collins admitting to now-ex-wife Faye Grant that he had molested several underage children decades before. The fallout from the scandal probably destroyed the reputation of the entire series as well, as Eric was portrayed as a caring father and pastor who sought to bring his family together in times of stress. Having an actor who was the opposite of that personality is truly shocking. Pretty much any scene in which he looks at, touches, or thinks about an underage girl is now this trope, especially since he admitted it was true.
  • Academy Awards Ceremonies:
    • During the 1993 Academy Awards show, Billy Crystal joked that cult leader David Koresh, holed up with his followers at the Branch Davidian Compound in Texas at the time, would be performing "Friend Like Me" from Aladdin via satellite ("You ain't never had a friend like me!"). Given the gruesome outcome of that standoff, the joke isn't as funny now.
    • During the 2014 Academy Awards, host Ellen DeGeneres made the following quip "Possibility number 1 - 12 Years a Slave wins Best Picture. Possibility number two - you're all racist". The following two ceremonies would see the Oscars embroiled in controversy after having zero non-white nominees in the acting categories, and succeeding ceremonies would heavily scrutinize ensuring diversity in the nominees.
    • Happened to Chris Rock during the 2022 Academy Awards. 22 years earlier at the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards, hosts Shawn and Marlon Wayans parodied Rock, who hosted the previous VMAs with his signature insult comedy, by imitating him in a skit where he insults all the then-current pop stars, who then rush the stage and beat his ass. Fast forward to the 2022 Oscars; Rock, while presenting the award for Best Documentary, made a joke about Jada Pinkett-Smith's alopecia ("G.I. Jane 2, can't wait to see it!"). Her husband Will Smith promptly walked onstage and slapped him on live TV.
  • All in the Family: Archie and Edith's daughter Gloria and her boyfriend – later husband – Mike were the two other main characters on the show, soon joined by their son Joey. However, the scenes with Mike and Gloria being a loving couple are difficult to watch when you're aware that the spinoff Gloria was about her making it as a single mother after Mike divorced her, also becoming a Disappeared Dad to their son.
  • All My Children. In 1997, Maria Santos was "killed" in a plane crash, devastating her husband Edmund. Four years later, the couple (who also were married in Real Life) nearly met with the same fate – they were scheduled to be passengers on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, but postponed to a later flight because she felt ill due to her pregnancy and wanted to sleep in.
  • The Lifetime Movie of the Week Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy portrays the title character as a careless, sociopathic party girl who killed somebody in a sex game gone wrong, with her conviction for murder presented as justice delivered. In real life, not only was the real Amanda Knox acquitted four years later, the prosecution that first convicted her was utterly excoriated for the glaring errors it made, most notably the fact that the lead detective believed the murder to be part of a Satanic ritual without any evidence.
  • The Amanda Show is a lot more painful to watch now considering the circumstances... The unhinged personality of her All That "Ask Ashley" character might strike one as uncomfortable, too, given Amanda's struggles with mental illness.
  • America's Next Top Model Cycle 10 contestant Whitney Thompson was a confident plus-sized model who had her main platform be that "girls need a role model" (i.e., someone who wasn't Hollywood Thin), which the judges apparently agreed with by praising her to the moon and back, portraying her as being much more assertive and competent than the previous heavier models of cycles past and declaring her the winner of that cycle. Unfortunately for Thompson, her unique body type where she was too big for your average runway fashions but not big enough for traditional plus-sized modelingnote  allowed for limited opportunities in the fashion world to the point where she had to lose weight in order to receive more work.
  • Angel:
    • In "Ground State", as Fred goes on an uncharacteristic rant about her increased responsibilities, Gunn jokes he doesn't know what kind of "alien female thing" has replaced her. In season five, she is replaced by an alien female thing, and it is heartbreaking.
    • Similarly, Gunn's argument with Angel in "The Price" is almost word for word what Gunn himself did that contributed to Fred's death.
      Gunn: This is because of you, what you did. Messing with scary-ass mojo no sane person should be messing with.
      Angel: I did what I had to do.
      Gunn: You did what you want to get what you want, to hell with the consequences.
      Angel: My son—
      Gunn: Is dead. Fred's not.
    • In the fourth season, Fred and Gunn are discussing whether or not it's good to feel. Fred says she'd rather feel the pain, she'd "take that over being a shell any day." In the fifth season, she dies and her body is used by the demon Illyria, who repeatedly refers to Fred as a shell.
    • Gunn’s rant to Angel in “The Price” about doing what he wanted to get what he wanted, to hell with the consequences and messing with stuff no sane person should be messing with. It’s already bad but gets worse in an ironic way when Gunn does the same thing in Season 5 and it results in Fred’s death.
  • Are You Being Served? has the episode, "No Sale," in which Grace Brothers attempts an experiment of an earlier morning opening time and it proves a major success with rush sales by hurried customers who are practically throwing money to the staff in their haste. The disgruntled floor staff sabotage it to stop it. Today, with the retail apocalypse business disruption costing thousands of retail jobs, the floor staff come off as a bunch of idiotic whiners who you'd think would be delighted at their store, which throughout the series has been in serious decline, doing splendid business and thus preserving their own jobs.
  • Arrested Development: In the fourth season, Terry Crews plays a character who has multiple accusations of sexual assault against him, which is frequently Played for Laughs. This became extremely difficult to watch since he came forward about being a victim of sexual harassment himself.
  • Babylon 5:
    • In the episode "And the Sky, Full of Stars", Sinclair is tortured and driven mad during an interrogation attempt, including seeing and hearing things that aren't real. At the end of the season, he ends up leaving the station. In 2013, series creator J. Michael Straczynski revealed that Sinclair's actor Michael O'Hare, left the series because he was suffering from severe mental illness (namely schizophrenia). It's hard to watch "Sky Full of Stars" without thinking that it probably contributed to his illness, and in any case had to have been harrowing to film.
    • In "Passing Through Gethsemane", Ivanova challenges "Brother Edward" to bet on the outcome of a chess match. Edward makes a joke that "gambling is one of the lesser sins. I've always felt that if you're gonna sin you should go for one of the really big ones." Turns out "Brother Edward" is actually a mind-wiped serial killer named Charles Dexter, who murdered nine women on an Earth colony. "One of the really big ones" indeed.
    • Jerry Doyle, who played Michael Garibaldi, got into several severe arguments with O'Hare, mistaking his outbreaks of schizophrenia for unprofessional behavior and prima-donna antics. Their relationship deteriorated to the point that when O'Hare returned to guest star in Season 3, Doyle refused to be on set with O'Hare and Doyle frequently spoke derogatorily in interviews about "the whackjob". In hindsight, these make Doyle come off as even more of an ass.
  • Barney Miller: One of the perps arrested by the 12th Precinct in a 1981 episode is a NASA fanboy who is excited about the impending first launch of the space shuttle, which happened in Real Life 17 days after the episode aired. He's even more excited when he's told that he could apply and might be able to fly himself (he's an optician who makes lenses). Dietrich decides to screw with him and says "And listen, don't worry about the tiles." He then explains that the thermal protection tiles are vulnerable to falling off and that "a few critically placed tiles" could fall off and cause the destruction of the whole spacecraft from the heat of re-entry. This actually happened on February 1, 2003. And if that's not good enough, it was Columbia, the spacecraft that made that first shuttle launch, that blew up 22 years later due to heat tiles falling off and killed seven astronauts.
  • Battlestar Galactica (2003): In season four, Kara jokes to her husband that if he turned out to be a Cylon, she'd shoot him in the head. Later on in the season, she finds out that he is a Cylon, but doesn't do anything. Then someone else comes along and literally shoots him in the head, leaving her in grief for the rest of the season.
  • Beverly Hills, 90210:
    • The Season 1 Very Special Episode "It's Only a Test" has a B-plot where Brenda Walsh (played by Shannen Doherty) discovers a lump on her breast, forcing her to get a biopsy. In 2015, Doherty revealed she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, which by 2023 had spread to her brain.
    • Way back in season 2 (1991), Kelly's mom made a joke that she'd end up "dying from skin cancer". She later died of breast cancer in the 90210 reboot.
  • The Big Bang Theory:
    • In a seventh season episode, the gang were asking each other if they had dated other people while dating each other. When Leonard asked Penny, she denied it, then didn't bother asking him the same. When pressed, she scoffed "Really?" This moment becomes darker when in the eighth season finale, Leonard tells Penny just moments before their wedding that he actually cheated (and by "cheated" meaning "accidentally kissed another girl while drunk because he was trying to subconsciously torpedo the wedding because he didn't think he deserved to marry Penny, and the other girl didn't even remember it.") on her while on a work trip.
  • Big Brother 13 US is probably the most slanted season in Big Brother history, with twists that obviously benefit the veterans (All fan favourites) and safeguards in the form of competitions they've already played in left and right, as well as the most obviously slanted challenge for Brendon to return to the game. After a sudden flip around causing one of the fan favourites to be voted out, a bunch of people on sites began to think about how the producers would bail out the two remaining veterans, resulting in one user making this video making fun of how they assumed production worked. This became worse when you consider within a week...almost all the events described to slant the season happened in the most blatantly contrived bailout in Big Brother history. Among these...Pandora's Box offering $5,000 to Porsche, restarting the duo twist, conveniently pitting Jordan and Rachel (The remaining veterans) with each other, and a literal copy of the first Head of Household competition (That Rachel won) for the veto. But with a different prop. One almost wonders if they got the idea for it after watching that video!
  • The comment from Mrs. Miggins in Blackadder regarding a French aristocrat being served a horse's willy instead of a sausage takes on a different meaning after the UK "horsemeat in beef products" scandal.
  • The episode of Black Mirror where the Prime Minister is forced to have sex with a pig became a lot more odd to watch after certain allegations were made about David Cameron. The real-life media's reaction to the event was much like in the episode, with news stations mentioning vague details of the event but not exact details of the social media storm.
    • The episode Black Mirror: Joan is Awful premiered at the same time as a major writer's strike where the use of AI in the entertainment industry was a major point of contention between the writer's union and the entertainment companies, tying into the episode's themes. The episode came to a lot of people's minds again in July 2023, when the actors' union SAG-AFTRA joined the strike too, and the National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator said the AMPTP had proposed an agreement where background actors would get paid for one day's work to have their likeness scanned and those models would then be owned by the company in perpetuity to be used for whatever they wanted, without the actor's consent or any compensation for them; it all felt eerily similar to the events in the episode involving actors having their likeness scanned and used by Streamberry for AI-generated shows and not being able to protest when their image was used in ways they didn't agree with.
  • One early Blue Heelers episode has Dash open a suspicious parcel to find a pig's head, public reaction to a police shooting, and Nick freaks and tears into her because it could have been a bomb. Channel Seven actually reaired the episode on the day the station bombing storyline also ran, which Nick was investigating.
  • Bluestone 42: Nick Medhurst repeatedly jokes about having limbs blown off, notably commenting in series 2 episode 4 (to the visiting Minister for the Armed Forces), "It turns out that having your legs blown off isn't quite as much fun as you might think". This becomes much less funny in series 3 episode 2, when Nick does have his leg blown off, and leaves the team (and show) in consequence.
  • Boston Legal: in the series 4 episode Attack of the Xenophobes, Denny Crane says "I have nothing against the Chinese". Later in the series 5 finale, his law firm of Crane Poole & Schmidt is bought out by a Chinese organisation, against his wishes; they ultimately fire Denny and remove his name from the firm.
  • A key plot point of the episode "Seven the Hard Way" Boy Meets World was a Bad Future where the main characters' relationships were either strained or outright destroyed. While things worked out for Cory and Topanga, the Sequel Series, Girl Meets World, shows that despite what Eric tried to do, Shawn and Angela still didn't work out and Shawn is a traveling writer who's alone.
  • Breaking Bad:
    • A fan who got the chance to watch the finale of Breaking Bad with the cast was later found to have been operating an underground synthetic marijuana distribution scheme.
    • In one episode of season 2, Jesse tries to surprise Jane by cooking breakfast while she sleeps in. She gets up before he finishes, however, which causes Jesse to say "You weren't supposed to get up." Jane jokingly asks "What, ever?" A few episodes later Jane dies in her sleep, choking on her own vomit after a huge drug session. To make it even worse, she also says "I think I threw up in my mouth a little bit..."
    • One of Jesse's insults to Walt is "Heil Hitler, bitch." It comes back to bite him when he gets enslaved by Uncle Jack Welker and his crew of Neo-Nazis.
    • Skyler warning Jesse to stay away from Walt in the second episode was a comedic scene, though rewatching the series, her telling him to stay away or else he'll be "one sorry individual" is a lot less funny considering most of Jesse's pains are a direct result of Walt's actions.
    • Almost everything about Saul Goodman becomes this after watching Better Call Saul. The entire persona of a flashy, tacky, amoral lawyer is a front put on by a deeply wounded Jimmy McGill. Of note:
      • In one episode, Skyler skeptically looks over Saul's degree from the University of American Samoa, which is done for laughs as a way of emphasizing what a tacky and fraudulent lawyer Saul is. It's less funny when you know the struggle, the heartache, and the eventual betrayal from his brother that Saul had in relation to that degree.
      • Similarly, we have Saul's freak-out during Jesse and Walt's plan to scare him in his introductory episode, once you take the ordeal he went through involving the skateboarding twins and Tuco in the Better Call Saul episode "Mijo" into account, given that he was also kidnapped in that episode. By the end of BCS, it's revealed that Lalo killed someone in front of him, held him hostage, and while Lalo died in the same episode, the incident affected Jimmy/Saul so much that his first instinct upon being kidnapped again is that Lalo was behind it.
        Saul: Oh, thank God! Oh, Christ! Oh, I thought... (hyperventilating) What can I do for you, gentlemen?
    • All the scenes with Mike Ehrmantraut and his granddaughter became rather harder to watch after the prequel spinoff Better Call Saul revealed exactly why he's so devoted to her. For one thing, her mother isn't his daughter, but rather, his daughter-in-law through his late son Matty.
    • The second season features Jane Margolis's father, an air traffic controller, suffering from depression, showing up to work obviously unfit, and he causes a mid-air collision with numerous fatalities. In 2015, the clinically depressed pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525 deliberately crashed his plane into the side of a mountain in France, killing 150 people, — although the Breaking Bad incident was an accident caused by a depressed air traffic controller, whereas the latter was intentionally done by a pilot.
  • In Season One of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Terry is assigned to desk duty as he has become so nervous in the field after the birth of his daughters that he empties his gun in screaming terror at anything that moves. That's pretty uncomfortable to watch in 2021, as it's become clear that many police officers do use deadly force at the slightest provocation and cite fear for their safety as an excuse.
  • Burn Notice: S1, Episode 9, "Wanted Man". The Libyan spy that Michael is cultivating comments, "The security forces of my country are not known for being gentle." This has been dramatically proven; as of the day of this edit, the 2011 Libyan Uprising riots are being suppressed — with gunship strafing.
  • Canada's Worst Driver: In Season 5, one episode starts with perpetually distracted driver Crystal announcing "I think I'm going home soon!" A few episodes later, she would be sent home, not by graduating, but after learning that her brother-in-law was killed by a distracted driver.
  • Chappelle's Show:
    • While introducing his infamous Blind Black White Supremacist sketch, Dave said "I haven't been canceled yet. But I'm working on it." Not as funny when you know about all the drama surrounding the end of his show.
    • There's an even worse one during the "Niggar Family" skit, a skit about a white family whose last name happens to be Niggar, allowing the character to make a whole host of n-word puns. Chappelle's character follows up a collection of n-word puns by saying in a humorous tone, "This racism is killing me inside." Guess why he left the show.
    • The final episode of season 2 opens with Dave telling Comedy Central executives that he's burned out and can't do the show anymore. The executives inform him that since the sketches have already been filmed, he's replaceable. Real life played out remarkably similar to this.
  • Charmed: In episode 13 of Season 2, Prue and Piper transport a hostile venomous snake and hostile rabbit respectively. When Prue asks "Why do I get the snake?", Piper's joking response is "You're the oldest; you've lived a full life". Prue dies a season and a half later at the age of 30.
  • After The Chaser's War On Everything was pulled for two weeks following a particularly offensive sketch, the next show they aired showed them doing good things for the community, including: Closing Scientology down for good, getting rid of all the Andre Rieu CDs in the world, and Taking Kyle Sandilands off the air permanently. Four days later, this happens, although, most Australians would argue that this doesn't count, as Mr. Sandilands really is an asshole. Subverted, as Kyle Sandilands just moved to another radio station, where he continued to rise from the ashes with every scathing comment.
  • Cheers: During Season 4's 3-part season finale "Strange Bedfellows" (concerning a local election) worked in a brief guest appearance by Colorado Democratic Senator Gary Hart; and upon seeing him a starstruck Diane remarks that Hart "could have been President" (referring to Hart narrowly losing the Democratic nomination in 1984 to former Vice-President Walter Mondale; who was subsequently annihilated by incumbent Republican President Ronald Reagan) and later adding that Hart "could still be President". At the time, Hart was considered the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in 1988; with many pundits thinking Hart had a good chance to win the general election as well. Then came the Donna Rice sex scandal which knocked Hart out of the racenote . Causing this to fit the trope even further: Hart announced his (initial) withdrawal from the race on May 8, 1987; exactly one year to the day of Hart's guest spot on Cheers.
  • Chuck: The episode where the Buy More employees were being prepared for the chaotic stampede that would ensue on Black Friday, complete with plans for an emergency evacuation if necessary, was a lot funnier before a Wal-Mart store employee was trampled to death in just such a situation on Black Friday.
  • In one episode of Clarissa Explains It All, Clarissa makes a joke comparing being the understudy in a school play to being Princess Diana, "A job with tons of fringe benefits and no downside." Surely, she would've seen one downside in late August 1997.
  • The Colbert Report:
    • An incident, shared with its sister series The Daily Show, followed reports that journalist Robert Novak hit a man with his car in slow-moving traffic, dislocating the man's shoulder, and was completely unaware of it until witnesses approached him after. Both shows used the opportunities to mock Novak's age (77 at the time) as the reason behind his driving and memory loss. The following Monday, it was reported that Novak had been diagnosed over the weekend with a brain tumor, the actual cause of the incident. Jon Stewart responded on-air by apologizing and wishing Novak luck; Stephen explained during that night's show that the news reached him just in time to scrap a planned segment on Novak, and after wishing Novak well, proceeded to fill the remaining time with an "improvised" segment, where he took calls from people thanking him for his courage to not talk about Novak (it was less offensive than it sounds). Novak died a year later.
    • In this segment, Stephen and Billy Crystal had this exchange about Pete Seeger and his nomination in the 2014 Grammy Awards in the same category for which they were nominated.
      Colbert: But what I really meant was that I just hope that Pete Seeger doesn't win.
      Billy Crystal What an asshole.
      Colbert: Yeah, he is. And besides, he already won the Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 1993.
      Billy Crystal Yes, and he keeps on living! It's so selfish!
      Pete Seeger died on January 27, 2014, one day after the 2014 Grammy Awards.
  • Cold Case: The episode "Late Returns" is based upon the 2001 Chandra Levy case. In it, the Gary Condit Expy turns out to be the doer (albeit accidentally), reflecting public opinion of the time about the case. With the revelation that Condit had nothing to do with the murder several years later, this episode becomes as biting as the South Park example with Condit.
  • On Columbo, Barbara Colby and Sal Mineo portrayed murder victims in separate episodes. Both would later be murdered in real life. Colby's killing was never solved.
  • Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee: In January 2016, comedian Garry Shandling appeared in an episode titled "It's Great That Garry Shandling Is Still Alive." Two months later, Shandling was rushed to the hospital with heart problems and died.
  • Commander in Chief:
    • One episode's B-plot featured Horace Calloway (played by Matt Lanter) hosting a party at the White House for his friends. At one point, he makes out with a girl played by Hayden Panettiere. A completely forgettable scene... except that three years later, Lanter and Panettiere were reunited on-screen in Heroes, where they once again made out... only for Matt Lanter's Brock to try to rape Panettiere's Claire Bennet.
  • Community:
    • In "Interpretive Dance," the study group thinks Pierce is dead only to have Pierce come into the room and say "You don't have to keep crossing your fingers. I'm not Mickey Rooney." Not only did Mickey Rooney die four years later, but so did Pierce.
    • In "Curriculum Unavailable" Troy says of Abed that "he's usually adorable weird, like Mork from Ork, but lately he's been creepy weird, like present-day Robin Williams." We now know that said "creepy weirdness" was actually serious depression that ultimately drove him to suicide.
  • Conan did an extended gag about the English nurse who was fooled by an Australian DJ pretending to be the Queen in December 2012. The episode was repeated on Australian television in March 2013, three months after the nurse died of suicide.
  • Concentration: Throughout its long run over three series and 33 years, there likely have been many puzzles featuring then-current celebrities who earn negative notoriety shortly before or after the show airs, references to then-new TV series that are cancelled by the time the show airs, etc. A couple of examples:
    • "The Jimmy Stewart Show," a rebus – seen in some publicity photos that have been featured on the Web – referring to a then-new series starring the legendary actor. The show was cancelled by the time the episode aired. note 
    • "Freddie Prinze Plays Chico," a Double Play rebus in an episode aired in the spring of 1977, shortly after Prinze had died of suicide. The episode itself in which the rebus was featured was taped in December 1976, about a month before Prinze's death.
  • In 2018, a BBC science show called Contagion! The BBC Four Pandemic explored the effect a flu epidemic could have on the United Kingdom, with the first case being in the Surrey town of Haslemere. Two years later, it would be the first town in the United Kingdom to report a case of Covid-19 without travelling to an infected area.
  • Coronation Street: In a 1981 episode, Brian Tilsley's best friend Andy Rowland is named Nick Tilsley's godfather. Brian tells him that he's expected to make a toast after Nick's christening like he did when he was best man at his wedding the previous year. He responds, "Flamin' hell. The wedding, the christening, all that's left's your funeral!" Brian Tilsley is murdered a few years later.
  • The Cosby Show:
    • The season 7 episode, "Last Barbecue," has all of the women getting angry at their partners until Cliff reveals that his barbecue sauce is an aphrodisiac, a fact that he knew well but keeps a secret. Fast forward to the 2010s when allegations of sexual misconduct came out against Bill Cosby who played Cliff Huxtable, including the fact that Cosby often drugged women he intended to assault with quaaludes, and the whole episode becomes very hard to watch.
    • In the first episode, Heathcliff and Theo have an argument over Theo's grades, ending with Heathcliff accusing Theo of being lazy and not trying. This is supposed to show that Heathcliff is a tough but fair father. However, Theo is based on Bill Cosby's own son, who was later discovered to have a learning disability. This was eventually added to Theo's character.
    • In light of the sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby, Dr. Huxtable being an OB/GYN seems a bit...sketchy.
    • Some of the original marketing for the show is also cringe-inducing, such as a promo that prominently featured the phrase "COS YOU TOOK ADVANTAGE OF ME."
  • Counterpart (2018) took on eerily similar parallels to the way the world changed after the COVID-19 pandemic was declared in March 2020.
  • CSI:
    • Season 7 had an episode, "Fannysmacking," where Greg was caught by a group of youths, some black, who made a hobby out of casually assaulting tourists. Cornered, Greg kills one of them in self-defense and is traumatized. It then becomes a running plot for the rest of the season that Greg is put on trial for the killing, with the victim's mother refusing to recognize what her son did and trying to paint Greg as a heartless killer. Following the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman incident, the whole arc takes on... implications.
    • In a Season 1 episode, a bombing suspect mentions how he likes to keep souvenirs — putting a souvenir from a bomb at his workplace, up along the likes of souvenirs from Waco and the WTC. While the latter was obviously in reference to the 1993 bombing, the episode itself aired a mere seven months before the infamous 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.
  • CSI: NY:
    • In the Season 2 episode "Grand Murder at Central Station", Aiden states that she has been tirelessly going after a rape case for a week straight, and declares that "It's killing me!" By the end of the season, she has pursued the case to the point of getting fired and ends up getting killed by the rapist as she continues to investigate him on her own time.
    • During the show's fifth season, Danny, a white cop, is chasing a Chinese-American murder suspect, who tries to hide from him in a storage locker, only for him to casually tip it over door-side-down and sit on it while casually making a phone call to Flack, who's chasing the other suspect. Danny's suspect bangs on the locker and demands that he let her out, but what really kills the funny is that her demands include the phrase "I can't breathe". Since the death of George Floyd in 2020, the image of a white cop putting a non-white civilian in a position where they can't breathe is no longer funny. note 
  • The Daily Show:
    • In possibly the fastest case of this in history, Jon Stewart once summed up the American situation—failing economy, no strong political leadership—in two words: "We're doomed." The date was September 10th, 2001.
    • During the summer of 2013, political pundits were already speculating about the 2016 presidential election, leading guest host John Oliver to do a segment called "Can't You At Least Wait Until Jon Stewart Gets Back?". However, in August 2015, Stewart stepped down as host of the Daily Show, so he didn't get to skewer the 2016 election.
  • Deadliest Catch:
    • Pretty much anything that focused on Captain Phil Harris in Season 6, to deliberate effect. 'Catch' fans knew that Phil's death was going to be documented and thought the four months between his death and the showing would help steel themselves, but it still made it all the more unnerving when it happened on TV. One particular moment: In the episode "Valhalla", which documented the fleet's reactions to the death of Phil, Sig Hansen goes to meet Cornelia Marie relief captain Derek Ray in Saint Paul. While talking with Sig, Derek commented he could only take up so much of Phil's space in the wheelhouse so the only thing he removed was the ashtray. Sig joked that Phil would find that funny. Problem was, none of the fleet knew that Phil had passed yet, so Derek broke the news. It was awkward from that point on.
    • Similarly, Season 3's final moment (as part of the Northwestern crew meeting with their families at the docks at the end of the season) is a shot of Jake Anderson hugging his father, who was waiting for him along with the families of the rest of the crew. Several seasons later, Jake's dad was murdered under mysterious circumstances (the murder remains unsolved), and worse, his body was not found for over 18 months, leaving Jake tormented by the lack of closure.
      • The Jake Anderson/Phil Harris tragedies were made harsher when you consider that they happened at the same time. Worse, was Jake having to repress his anger and jealousy towards Josh and Jake Harris, over the fact that they at least had closure regarding their father's death. At the time of filming, Anderson's father's body had not been found (and ultimately was found between Seasons 7 and 8)
    • This year's After The Catch is/was in New Orleans, where that area's fishermen are experiencing some very bad times due to the Gulf Coast oil spill. This is addressed a few episodes later when the captains see the effects of the spill up close; having lived through the Exxon Valdez oil spill themselves the Gulf spill is especially disturbing. It's also noted that all the fishing-related activities they did have since been shut down indefinitely.
    • In the home video of a crew not associated with the show, one man jokingly said that his friends ought to be on Deadliest Catch. The video aired as part of a special episode after the ship sank with either one or no survivors.
    • At the end of the king crab fishing in season 3, the crew of the Cornelia Marie are harassing Captain Phil's son Jake as Phil looks on and laughs. Jake gets after his father, saying things like "One day, I'm gonna be taking care of you, you'll be in a retirement home, we'll have you chained up in the basement." Captain Phil never made it to retirement.
    • Then in the 2012 season, Wizard greenhorn deckhand Chris Scrambler (who had never even seen the ocean before he took the job) tried to quit in the middle of his first shift, informing Captain Keith that he was too "terrified" to continue working. Keith gave Chris a piece of his mind and told him to get back on deck, grumbling, "If this guy got a bruise he'd probably want to get medevaced out". The very next episode, Chris went into convulsions and had to be airlifted off the boat.
  • At the end of Season 2 of Dexter, Dexter has trapped James Doakes in a cage inside a remote cabin in the Everglades after he found out Dexter was a serial killer. Trying to convince his captor to turn himself in, Doakes describes Dexter's urge to kill as being "like a cancer — and in case you haven't noticed, it's spreading". Michael C. Hall contracted Hodgkin's Lymphoma in 2010, before recovering later that year.
  • Desperate Housewives
    • In Season 2, Lynette eats a lot of raw bacon on a bet and then asks Tom to get her a bucket, indicating that she is about to be sick. This is much harsher if you are aware of Felicity Huffman's struggles with bulimia and realize that she had probably experienced overeating and subsequent vomiting many, many times in her personal life. She was probably not too thrilled to be reminded of those moments.
    • In "Come in, Stranger", Lynette and Tom donate $15,000 to get their twin sons into a prestigious prep school after a failed meeting. The episode would take a more serious turn nowadays given that Felicity Huffman has been charged with bribing a college with, ironically, $15,000 disguised as a charitable donation.
  • In one episode of Doll & Em, Dolly and Emily meet with a producer to convince him to put on their play. Said producer is played by none other than Harvey Weinstein. Got even worse when Emily Mortimer admitted, around the time of the MeToo movement, to having been sexually harassed by colleagues in the past, although she never accused Weinstein specifically.
  • Downton Abbey:
    • The Series 1 finale has Mrs. Hughes warn Tom, following a warm moment with Sybil, "Be careful, my lad, or you'll end up with no job and a broken heart." Come 3x05, that's exactly what has happened, with his wife dead and his job in Ireland forever out of reach.
    • The season 3 finale involves Mary's husband Matthew's death and most of season 4 is her grieving for him and then trying to find a new love for the rest of the series. Already bad enough, but then it became horrifyingly prophetic after Mary's actress Michelle Dockery's fiancé died at age 34 of a rare cancer, shortly after the series final season wrapped production. Yikes...
  • Double Dare (1986) was centered around making huge messes, with tons of wet, gooey multicolored slime getting everywhere. So it's a bit unsettling to watch after the show's host Marc Summers revealed he had pretty severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, especially considering how often he got covered in muck during the show's run. Seriously; go back and watch an episode where the team completes the obstacle course and embrace him, while covered in muck, then go watch him line up the fringe on a throw rug. Very unnerving.
  • In the Dragnet episode "The Big Kidnap", the montage of people at work includes Ed White's spacewalk. The episode aired the night before the Apollo 1 fire claimed the lives of White and his crewmates.
  • Drake & Josh:
  • Ellen: Ellen Degeneres' eponymous show featured an early episode in which Ellen falls all over herself trying to get the romantic attention of a hunky firefighter. Originally an amusing episode in classic Lucille Ball sitcom fashion, the show took on a tragic air when the character Ellen came out as a lesbian (a fairly short time after the comedienne herself did the same) — suddenly, the episode was a tale of a woman desperately lying to herself about her true sexuality by pursuing an unobtainable male.
  • The Ellen DeGeneres Show purported itself to be a happy show where Ellen always rewarded niceness and guests were always treated like family. Of course, the show's moral standing was called into question in August 2020 when reports surfaced of behind-the-scenes workplace abuse, racism, and sexual assault. Even worse than that were allegations that Ellen not only knew about the abuse her staff was getting but refused to do anything about it and even participated in the abuse a few times.
  • The 2006 Emmy Awards featured an opening skit in which Conan O'Brien survives a plane crash, in what was meant to be a parody of Lost. However, it ended up airing just hours after the deadly crash of Comair Flight 5191, with at least one NBC affiliate station broadcasting it alongside a news ticker providing updates about the crash. Given the unfortunate timing, NBC was widely criticized for not pulling this portion of the opening sequence at the last minute.
  • ER: One season 12 (2005) episode shows Maura Tierney's character Abby Lockhart struggling with the idea of getting a mammogram, finally seen going for one at the end of the episode after admitting she's never had one and is at high risk for breast cancer. These scenes are particularly difficult to watch now as in 2009 Tierney was diagnosed with breast cancer (treatment of which forced her to drop out of the TV series Parenthood).
  • Eurovision Song Contest:
    • Romania's second entry ever, "Eu cred" by Malina Olinescu, is a song dedicated to a presumably deceased lover or generally special person in the singer's life, promising that they'll meet again someday. This becomes tragic when you realize Olinescu sadly took her own life in 2011.
    • In a similar vein, Betty Mars' "Come-comedie," the French entry of 1972, a song about how life might throw hurdles your way, but you can always bounce back from them. She met the same fate as Olinescu in 1989.
    • The entire 1990 contest comes off this way, seeing as it was held in Zagreb while it was still a part of Yugoslavia. Within only a few months of the contest, the Yugoslav Wars would begin, with Croatia in particular locked in a vicious battle with Bosnia & Herzegovina and Serbia.
    • Not so much the case with Italy's 1993 entry, Enrico Ruggeri's "Sole d'Europa," as the bittersweet lyrics about hoping for the sun to shine down on Europe in the future were very deliberate - it was Italy's intention to withdraw permanently from the contest after 1993, so the song was something of a farewell. For a more straightforward example, their unexpected comeback in 1997 with Jalisse's "Fiumi di parole" ("Rivers of Words") seems applicable: the song reflects on how two people in a relationship are growing apart, and the singer can't understand their lover's reliance on cliche "talk-show" jargon. It almost feels like Italy reflecting on their splintering relationship with Eurovision as it moved into a new era, and there would indeed be a long "gap of silence" between Italy and Eurovision afterwards: they would withdraw in 1998 and wouldn't return until 2011.
    • Armenia's 2019 entry by Srbuk was called "Walking Out." While they were set to compete in the canceled 2020 contest, they would ultimately withdraw for a year in 2021 due to the aftermath of the Armenia-Azerbaijan War.
      • In 2019, Belarus’ entry, teenage singer Zena, sang “let’s Break the rules” as a line in her apolitical and not particularly provocative pop song “Like It”. In 2021, the country refused to send its publicly selected prospective 2020 entry VAL, as they were open supporters of protests against dictator Alex Lukaschenko and his manipulated elections, and, after opening a submission window which was boycotted, chose pro-Lukaschenko folk act Galasy Z Mesta whose unelected song contained content that would bring the show into disrepute, and were disqualified, with this disqualification applied to the broadcaster for other violations of EBU rules on media freedom shortly after, ruling Belarus out of Eurovision contests for the time being.
      • Another nation who didn’t send their 2020 designate was Russia, as the infamous Little Big decided they had their turn. The Russian public, however, sent a new act Manizha, who was known to be outspoken, and whose song was a commentary on Russian patriarchal society. She got a lot of abuse from conservatives and nationalists, but participated well and placed 9th. However, the next year, the nationalists got their way as Russia invaded Ukraine and after Nordic and Baltic nations warned the EBU that they’d withdraw if Russia was allowed to compete at this time, they were disqualified for the time being, with their prospective 2022 entry having never been publicised, making Russian Woman a poignant and ironic last entry of theirs to the parent contest to date.
      • Several Russian entries have sung about peace but have had ties to the country’s nationalist dictator Vladimir Putin (one example being 2015 runner up Polina Gagrina whose entry to Vienna, “A Million Voices” was about “praying for peace” and unity, but who has repeatedly performed for the regime since, including at rallies defending their war on Ukraine). Also, the only time that Russia won, in 2008, and with Ukraine as their runner up, the Ukrainians got their second place with a singer who had proximity with the key players of Russia’s mainstream scene like Fillip Kirkorov, and therefore their regime.
  • Even Stevens: The turbulent relationship Ren and Louis Stevens had in the show becomes harder to look at when Ren's actress revealed in this article that she was not close to Louis' actor.
  • Everybody Hates Chris's series finale, Chris' mother mocks Chris for trying to justify going for a GED by pointing out Bill Cosby got a GED because Bill Cosby was a comedian. In light of the sexual assault allegations against Cosby, it's a pretty good thing she didn't want Chris to be like him.
  • Everybody Loves Raymond: In a 2000 episode, there is a rather unpleasant scene where Ray tells Debra that he found out that their daughter Ally has been bullying another girl on the school bus. Debra shrugs it off, saying she doesn't think it's a big deal and that it's just kids being kids. When Ray asserts that bullying is indeed a big deal and notes that he and Robert are still scarred from their own experiences, Debra smirks and calls him a wuss, and then starts calling Ray names. The studio audience can be heard roaring with laughter and approval during the whole scene. Over a decade later, the spate of high-profile bullying-related suicides, the bullying of an elderly school employee by children (on the school bus, no less), and other bullying-related incidents have made this scene much more uncomfortable to watch.
  • Family Feud:
    • On an episode, the question was something along the lines of "Name something people think of when they're depressed/have a problem." One of the unrevealed answers wound up being "suicide"; the episode was hosted by Ray Combs, who later died of suicide after being unceremoniously fired from the show, a string of show-business failures, and an automobile accident that left him partially paralyzed. During the show, he even remarked, "No one should think of suicide. Bad survey group! Bad!"
    • An episode from the Steve Harvey era saw a contestant joke that the biggest mistake he made on his wedding day was saying "I do" to his wife. A few years after the episode aired, he was given three life sentences for murdering her.
  • Farscape: D'Argo jokes that he hopes his half-Sebacean son has grown to have "his mother's nose." His son is later revealed to have mutilated his own nose to look less like his father's out of shame at being a hybrid.
  • In the 1984 Mini Series Fatal Vision, based on the story of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, Judith Barsi played one of the murdered MacDonald children. Four years later, Barsi met with the same fate — killed by her father along with her mother, who Ate His Gun after torching their home.
  • Father Ted: In "Tentacles of Doom", one of the visiting bishops tells how he nearly died of a heart attack. Ted replies: "Heart attacks, those are rare enough these days." Dermot Morgan, the actor who played Ted, died from a heart attack, as did Frank Kelly (Father Jack Hackett) exactly 18 years later.
  • Fawlty Towers: One of the best scenes in the whole series is in "The Germans", where Manuel sets fire to the kitchen during a fire drill. The real building (for exteriors, anyway) burned down in 1991.
  • Feel Good: Throughout the first season, Mae frequently uses sex to cope with difficult emotions and especially to distract George from potential conflict. The implications of this become quite horrifying when it is revealed she was in a sexually abusive "relationship" as a teenager, making it likely that she used these tactics in an attempt to appease her abuser and cope with the abuse then carried them into subsequent relationships.
  • Firefly:
    • The scene in "Shindig" where Wash jokes about reading a poem at Zoe's funeral. It's a genuinely sweet and funny scene, until Wash ends up dying in the Serenity.
      "I'm thinking we'll rise again." ("The Train Job)
    • "The Message" has this exchange that isn't so amusing after Serenity:
      Jayne: You'll read over me when it's my time to shuffle off, won't you, preacher?
      Book: Oh, I'm sure you'll outlive us all.
    • Zoe and Wash arguing about having kids in Firefly becomes this after Serenity. Zoe did get pregnant but Wash didn’t get to meet his daughter and it’s uncertain if he even knew before he died.
  • FlashForward (2009) had a subplot, in which Lee Thompson Young's Al Gough died of suicide to prevent his disastrous flash forward from coming true. On August 19th, 2013, some three years later, Lee Thompson Young was found dead at his home from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
  • In the penultimate episode of Flashpoint, some might find it funny that right after a little boy, Ethan, gets his blankie back from another child who took it from him, he immediately drops it on the ground and doesn't even notice. The funny goes away completely when Ethan doubles back to go get the blankie and becomes one of many victims of a bomb that goes off seconds after he picks it up. The blankie is used by Jules to cover his body after confirming he's deceased.
  • The reality TV house flipping show Flip or Flop featured a particularly awesome and heartwarming instance - wherein a nurse spotted a lump on Tarek's throat and wrote the show telling them to urge Tarek to get it checked out. It turned out to be Thyroid cancer. Knowing this, as well as how he was pretty sick for 6 seasons of the show, it can be painful to watch earlier seasons. What's more, he later was diagnosed with testicular cancer and Celiac disease. The poor man just can't catch a break!
  • Frasier:
    • September 11th, 1997 was declared Frasier Crane Day. Frasier's executive producer, David Angell was killed in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11th, 2001.
    • In the episode "Fathers and Sons", Martin suspects that Dr. Leland Barton is Frasier and Niles' real father before he finds out that Barton is actually gay. David Ogden Stiers, who played Barton, came out as gay in 2009, expressing great sorrow that he'd stayed closeted for so long.
  • The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air:
    • In a season 2 episode, Jazz shows up with a life-size cardboard cutout of Bill Cosby, prompting Will to ask what happened to his Whitney Houston cutout. Jazz's response is that she fell apart in the shower. Twenty years later, "falling apart in the shower" would actually be how Whitney Houston's life would end.
    • "Home Is Where the Heart Attack Is", in which Uncle Phil ends up in the hospital with a heart attack brought on by his overeating, can be quite painful to watch after James Avery's death, due to complications from open-heart surgery, in 2013. Worse, there were countless fat jokes directed toward Avery's character Uncle Phil every season. All of them sting now that the actor in real life has passed away because of the heart disease brought on by his weight problems.
    • Inverted during "Bullets Over Bel-Air" where Will was shot and was nearly paralyzed, partially out of fear and anger. Carlton buys a gun to protect himself which finds out while trying to give his cousin a needed hug. Scared that Carlton will go down a similar path of violence, he tells Carlton to "Give him the damn gun", a callback to Boyz n the Hood While Menace tells Trey to "Give him the motherfucking gun." as Trey wanted payback for Ricky's death much like Carlton did.
  • Full House: Lori Loughlin's arrest for her part in a national college admissions scandal, which she got her daughters into USC with a $500,000 bribe, does this to a number of episodes.
    • In "Be True To Your Pre-School", Becky admonishes Jesse for lying about their twins' accomplishments in their preschool application, which she and Jesse later confess to.
    • In "The Test", D.J. has a stress-fueled nightmare about taking the SATs that includes a scene where Jesse tries to help her cheat with an answer sheet he stole.
    • In "Taking the Plunge", Kimmy tries to cheer up D.J. when she receives a rejection letter from Stanford by saying she should have done what she did: "Include a crisp $20 bill with the application." Stanford would be one of the colleges named in the scandal.
  • Gimme a Break!: In the episode "Nell's Friend", Addy talks about the progress of Black Women in modern American society. She says "I'm so glad we're all past that image of the black woman as an Aunt Jemima." Right at that moment, Nell walks in wearing a bandana tied Aunt Jemima-style on her head, wearing a raggedy dress, and carrying a big basket of laundry; at which point the audience roared with laughter. Not quite as funny come 2020 when Quaker Oats excised the Aunt Jemima brand over concerns of racial stereotyping.
  • Glee:
    • The Season 3 box set has a small extra called 'Saying Goodbye'; it was originally supposed to be a 'goodbye' for the characters who graduated high school, but takes on a new meaning due to Cory Monteith's death from a drug overdose on July 13, 2013.
    • There is also a scene in the third season in which his character Finn is devastated to find out his father was an addict who died of a drug overdose, which is similarly made very difficult to watch since Cory died under similar circumstances.
    • The first words ever filmed for Glee was the question to Finn when Will blackmails him into joining the glee club: "Want to tell me how long you've had a drug problem?" Said blackmail also involved planting drugs in his locker, which already was a bit much for some considering Cory's history. As if that's not bad enough, that would have been the scene that Cory auditioned with.
      • Similarly in Season 2 (Furt), when Finn asks, "Is this one of those interventions?"
    • In the episode "Grilled Cheesus" note , one of the songs performed, the Billy Joel classic "Only The Good Die Young" was performed by Noah "Puck" Puckerman. Mark Salling, who played Puck, hanged himself on January 30, 2018, while awaiting a court appearance after entering a guilty plea on child pornography charges.
      • There's also a line where the Glee club is asked where they think they'll be in ten years, and Puck replies, "In jail, or dead. Or both."
    • In "The Quarterback" (in which Finn dies), Santana (Naya Rivera) pays tribute to him by covering The Band Perry song "If I Die Young." On July 8, 2020, Rivera died at age 33 after drowning in Lake Piru in Ventura County, California, while swimming with her 4-year-old son. Due to the poor visibility conditions, her body wasn't found until five days later — July 13, the seven-year anniversary of Monteith's death. The lyric "sink me in the river at dawn" twists the knife even more.
    • April gives Kurt alcohol. When Emma questions him about his breath, he stares at her and says: "Oh, Bambi... I cried so hard when those hunters shot your mommy!" before throwing up on her shoes. If you ignore the fact that Kurt is a teenager who really shouldn't be drinking, that line is quite funny...until you realize that Kurt would've been the age to watch movies like Bambi right around the time when his mother died.
    • Dave Karofsky's fake apology to the Glee club in season 2 mentions 'kids that got bullied so bad they hung themselves'. He nearly becomes one of these kids in On My Way.
    • In "Special Education," Rachel asks Kurt if he's ever tried to imagine his own funeral. Rachel has, including Finn throwing himself on her coffin and all the Glee Club members mourning her. This is a chilling foreshadowing of "The Quarterback."
    • In the season 4 episode "Sadie Hawkins", Kitty asks Puck to the dance. When he asks her how old she is she says "16 but I have a fake ID" and he says "good enough for me". In 2015, Puck's actor Mark Salling was arrested for possession of child pornography.
  • The Golden Girls:
    • At the end of "Sophia's Choice", the girls all made a pact to always take care of each other, even if it means going to the same nursing homes. Having made the promise, Rose (played by Betty White) asks the Armor-Piercing Question: "What happens when there's only one of us left?" Fast forward to New Year's Eve 2021, when White was the last member of the main cast to die (making that line from her SNL monologue, about how she uses an Ouija board instead of Facebook to contact old friends, really sad in an episode that's otherwise considered one of the funniest in recent memory). To rub salt in the wound, the oldest character on the show Sophia (played by Estelle Getty) nonchalantly replies that she'll be able to take care of herself at that point. Getty would be the first of the four to pass away (despite being younger than co-stars White and Bea Arthur).
    • In "That Was No Lady", first aired on December 21, 1985, Sophia tries to temper Rose's excitement over borrowing Blanche's flashy car, noting that it isn't "a seat on the Space Shuttle." About five weeks later, on January 28, 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on launch, killing all seven aboard, and the Space Shuttle program was grounded for two years.
  • Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.: In the 1967 episode "One of our Shells is Missing", Gomer misplaces a mortar shell during a drill, and the rest of the episode involves several characters searching all over for it before someone gets hurt. At one point, a soldier suggests that a couple of teenagers they saw hanging around the mortar range might have stolen it. Sergeant Carter initially blows off the suggestion with "What would a teenager want with a mortar shell?! What's he gonna do, blow up his High School?!". In the wake of many, many school shootings after Columbine, the joke feels a lot less comfortable now that the soldier could simply reply "Yes."
  • Gotham aired an episode in which the Riddler plants a bomb in a train station just 12 hours before the Brussels airport and metro bombings of March 22, 2016.
  • Gossip Girl had Chuck Bass try to rape both Serena and Jenny in the pilot episode. Over a decade later, his actor Ed Westwick is accused of rape by three women. In fact, the entire plotline in the pilot is viewed in a darker light, thanks to the #MeToo movement.
  • The Graham Norton Show: Comedians Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse reprised their roles as parody disc jockeys Smashie and Nicey. At last free to expand on all the little hints that went under the radar in earlier versions (it was hinted, but could only be hinted, that "Smashie" had a thing for young boys), they pulled no punches. Enfield, as "Nicey", made a pompous speech that was full of the character's egotistical sense of self-importance, which Whitehouse, as "Smashie", promptly deflated:
    Smashie: Hi gherkins, I'm quite literally Mike Smash, quite literally Britain's most poptastic DJ.
    Nicey: And I'm the former DJ, formerly known as the rocktastic Sir Dave Nice.
    Smashie: 'Til they took away your title and renamed you Prisoner 13607!
  • The BBC children's drama Grange Hill had a nasty and quite personal example of this back in 2000. The character of Judi Jeffreys was (long story short) locked in a storage room that was on fire. She tried to escape by climbing out of the window onto a nearby fire escape and ended up falling head-first to her death. The actress who played her, Laura Sadler, met her own sad and untimely demise in the exact same way about three years later. (That is, she fell headfirst out of a building to her death; but while drunk and drugged up with vodka and cocaine, not while trying to escape a fire).
  • In another case of bad timing, the Grantchester episode "Love and Arson", in which Canon Sidney Chambers is accused of making unwanted sexual advances towards a photography model who is later murdered (and he's not the guilty party, or else it would be a very short second season even by British television standards), was broadcast by ITV on the very day ex-footballer Adam Johnson was convicted of murder under similar circumstances. Worse, coverage of the case immediately followed the episode.
  • Grey's Anatomy:
    • The episode where Meredith describes the attempted suicide of her mother to her shocked therapist is dramatic, but also slightly cringe-inducing because the actress playing Meredith, Ellen Pompeo, states her earliest memory to be when she was 4 and her elder siblings were trying to wake her mother, who had accidentally overdosed on pain meds, and killed herself. Wonder if the writers knew that when they wrote it.
    • When Izzy was convincing Alex to take a chance on her after his traumatizing experience with Ava, she promised him passionately that she "wasn't going to go crazy." Later that same season, she began hallucinating her dead fiance due to a brain tumor. So much for that promise...
    • In the final two episodes of Season 5; when the gang finds out George enrolled in the army, they start joking about how he'd die. They talk about him over a John Doe that got hit by a bus...and then the bombshell that John Doe is George, who'd left early to start his basic and saved a girl from being hit by that bus, taking the blow himself and dying.
    • In the second season episode "17 Seconds", after a shooting at a local business, Derek remarks "Can you imagine, you're at work, just doing your job and somebody come in and shoots you.". Fast-forward to season 6 finale where Derek is at work, and someone comes in and shoots him.
    • In early season seven, Meredith is lamenting her fertility problems and jokes that April probably has a great uterus. It becomes less funny several seasons later when April finds out her unborn son has a congenital defect and dies shortly after being born
  • Growing Pains:
    • Mike would occasionally make fat jokes about his sister, Carol. At first, it seems like harmless sibling rivalry until you realize that prior to the show, Tracey Gold struggled with anorexia and the jokes caused her to relapse.
    • In the fourth season episode "Feet of Clay," Ben meets his favorite rock star Jonathan Keith (a young Brad Pitt), and is disillusioned when he discovers him cheating on his wife. Ben then questions what other celebrities might be unfaithful... like Bill Cosby. His father reassures him that Cosby would do no such thing, but Ben might have been onto something. There's also the fact that Pitt's real-life marriage to Jennifer Aniston would later end due to his infidelity.
  • The Handmaid's Tale: There's an episode in Season 2 where June is reprimanded for giving her daughter some medicine to suppress the daughter's fever and send her to school in violation of district regulations, saying she was "just a little warm". In 2018, this was intended to show the school district being overly protective of the kids and patronizing towards June having a job. Two years, a global pandemic, and a massive shift to teleworking later, the scene may not quite have the same effect.
  • The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries: the episode "Arson & Old Lace". An arsonist torches a tall skyscraper, trapping Frank Hardy and Nancy Drew in the penthouse with a non-working elevator and the access stairs to the roof welded shut, and Joe Hardy on the office floors with panicking office workers. After helping others find the stairs through heavy smoke and flames, Joe discovers a small child trapped in a dentist's office with leaking chemical tanks nearby. He shields the child from the horrific explosion with his own body, then convinces the child to jump with him out of the shattered window/wall as the fire has cut off all escape routes. Post-9/11 and the WTC tragedy, this episode is hard to watch: people on the upper floors of the WTC were not only trapped by the raging fires below them but couldn't use the access stairs to the roof, as the doors to the stairs had been sealed shut. Many of those jumped to their deaths, rather than be burned alive. On top of that, the explosion in the episode blows out windows and a huge chunk of the outside wall; shot from outside at ground level, it looks disturbingly like an airplane crashing through the building, a nightmarish pre-echo of all the 9/11 footage that caught the jets crashing into and through the WTC. Produced in 1978, the episode had only been meant as a ripoff to The Towering Inferno, but still...
  • In 2007, a news story about Jimmy Savile appeared on Have I Got News for You. The panel made jokes that implied that he may be a pedophile. Everyone laughed. It wasn't so funny five years later. Ultimately, though it was a hoax. Paul Merton and Ian Hislop are both on record as saying so.
  • A first season episode of the re-imagined Hawaii Five-0 was centered around a tsunami — around the same time as the one on March 11, 2011?
    • History Channel's Underwater Universe has been preceded by a sympathy message and filmed-prior-to-3/11/11 disclaimer ever since the quake. This is particularly relevant for the episode featuring a previous tsunami in Samoa.
  • Hell's Kitchen: In a confessional, Rachel from Season 2 jokingly pantomimed shooting herself in the head. She died of a gunshot to the head about a year later.
  • The Hill Street Blues Season 1 episode "Life, Death, Eternity, Etc." features the sudden death of a secondary character due to ill health, causing Sgt. Phil Esterhaus (perhaps the most beloved character in the series, played by Michael Conrad) to ponder the transient nature of life. Michael Conrad would die three years later at the age of 57 due to cancer, with Sgt. Esterhaus dying in a special episode timed to correspond with the actor's death.
  • Holby City: One involves Jonny's wedding with Bonnie. After Jonny arrives late, Bonnie quips that she'll have to put up with this for 40 years. This is three seconds before she is hit by a lorry and killed on impact.
  • Hollyoaks character Amy Barnes had the same name as actress Amy Leigh Barnes, who actually appeared in a minor role in the show, and her domestic violence storyline chillingly echoed the reality of the actress' tragic death.
  • House of Cards (US):
    • The political situation in the United States deteriorating in 2016 onward really made the drama in the show seem quaint in comparison.
    • After allegations regarding Spacey and sexual assault, a lot of the sex scenes in the show are much more unsettling, as well as some of the dialogue.
  • House:
    • Cuddy mocks House in the pilot for thinking he can scare her (either by yelling or hurting her) because she's sure she can outrun him. He does scare her in the season 7 finale, smashing his car into her house, and she ends her appearances on the show hating him.
    • Subtly played with Amber's death in season 4. In episode 12, "Don't Ever Change," House confronts Wilson about why he is dating Amber (since he usually only dates extremely needy women, and Amber is anything but) and asks, jokingly, if she's dying. Wilson's response is a sigh and a "Yes".
    • And Amber's first words to Wilson were "I was never here." Cute at the time because she was acting like a sneaky little CTB, but after she died? Not so much. (Events near the end of season 5 don't help either.)
    • In a Season 3 episode, Wilson is asked by Cuddy why he's late, and he loudly snaps, "The buses suck!" (He was forced to take the bus to work as Detective Tritter impounded his car.) Considering bus-related incidents in the next season, the line isn't quite so funny...
    • They got two harsher moments for the price of one in "Mirror, Mirror": Kutner and Amber are arguing over which one of them their patient will imitate when they notice that the patient's blood has gone solid. Kutner quips, "I'd say he's mimicking whichever one of us happens to be dying." That doesn't narrow it down.
    • They did it again in season 5. The reason for Kutner peeing on House's chair? To quote the man himself: "Blood on my face." Technically it was cranberry juice, but he, uh, fixed that inconsistency two episodes later. Even more poignant in the same episode, when the cat that is said to foretell someone's death strolls around Kutner's legs, House remarks sarcastically:
      "Oh my god! The death cat is attacking your legs! You're gonna die!"
    • In the episode "Painless", the patient of the week attempts suicide, and the fellows argue over his mental status. When Taub attributes Kutner's position on "right to die" to Kutner's tragic childhood, Kutner argues that his past makes him less likely to commit suicide. Figures don't lie — but liars figure.
    • Unintended example: A case is caused by a father accidentally passing his supplemental testosterone on to his children (He made contact with them when it was dissipating from his body). The FDA has issued a warning about exactly this, with exactly the same effects.
    • "The Itch," an episode that aired in the first half of season 5, had as one of its plots House trying to convince Wilson that he really is getting bitten by a mosquito and not imagining it. He is right in the end - he kills the mosquito. Then, in the season finale, it turns out that House hallucinated the sex with Cuddy he had in the previous episode - and was also hallucinating that he had the evidence of that encounter, a lipstick that was really a Vicodin bottle. This at best makes the resolution of that plot "The Itch" unsettling, and at worst destabilizes it all together.
    • Season 5 episode 8, "Emancipation": House tells Wilson 'holding things in can give you cancer.'
    • Season 8 episode 16, "Gut Check": Wilson thinks he has a son who wants to live with him (it's actually a trick House is playing). House tells him It's only six or seven years, unless he can't get into college, in which case it's more a matter of your life expectancy'. Given what's revealed only two episodes later...
    • Some dialog from Season 3, episode 23, regarding treating the patient of the week with magic mushrooms:
      Cuddy: I assume you've considered he could have a psychogenic experience. Possibly suffer a fit of severe paranoia.
      House: Well, I have now. Yeah, it's definitely better that the Dean of Medicine prescribes it instead of an unhinged doctor with a history of drug use. Takes the stink off if the patient decides to put on a cape and fly off the roof.
    • The above lines become quite harsher when watching this episode after seeing the premiere of Season 6, in which one of House's fellow patients at Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital does jump off a parking structure, believing he is a superhero and can fly.
      • And it doesn't help that House made it possible for that fellow mental patient to get into that position.
    • Chase-related example: season 1, "Damned If You Do," Chase admits to having lost his faith, and the nun the team just cured tells him he'll find his way back to the church someday. Season 6 — Chase finally does, out of desperation, try to return to the church — about one month too late.
    • In a season two episode of House "Forever". When House is asking why Chase is working in the NICU and Chase says he can't deal with all the patients lying House says, "Nothing more honest than a dead baby". Not so funny when later in the episode the baby Mikey dies.
  • Happens in-universe in House of the Dragon. In the first episode, after the death of King Viserys' first wife Queen Aemma, Lady Alicent is sent by her father Otto to comfort him. Regardless of Otto's reasons and the age difference between Viserys and Alicent, the two develop a touching bond through a shared love of history and miniatures, and this leads to marriage, and they seem genuinely happy together. But a few episodes later, Viserys is shown to be a pretty crappy husband who openly ridicules Alicent, has no regard for his children by her, and their sex life involves him taking her whenever he feels like it and not caring to give her any kind of pleasure.
  • iCarly:
    • The episode "iFix a Pop Star", in which Carly and company try to stage a comeback for a washed-up performer (a parody of Britney Spears), pokes fun at all the controversies Spears was involved in that permeated the tabloids throughout the mid- to late 2000s, including her head-shaving incident in 2007 and her performance at the MTV Video Music Awards the following year. The early 2020s saw a renewed interest in Spears' conservatorship, which led to a reevaluation of how she was treated by the public and media, making this episode pretty hard to come back to.
    • The special "iPsycho" shows a depressed Gibby saying that he has nothing better to do than to watch Diff'rent Strokes reruns. This episode aired the same week Gary Coleman passed away. Considering the "Awww" that came from the canned laughter, it may be possible that they added it at the last minute to pay tribute to him.
    • The climax of "iRue the Day" involves Nevel having his home raided by a SWAT team while he hacks into the iCarly signal, the whole thing being webcast live. In 2014, a "swatting" prank resulted in armed officers arresting gamer Jordan Mathewson during a livestream.
    • The entire premise of "iMeet Fred", in which Freddie becomes a worldwide pariah for saying that Fred isn't funny, becomes this because it was supposed to herald Nickelodeon's new partnership with Lucas Cruikshank. All the projects that would come out of that deal (a trilogy of Fred TV movies, Fred: The Show and Marvin Marvin), would become massive failures that the network now likes to pretend doesn't exist.
    • The episode "iRock the Vote" features a parody of American Idol's 2007-08 season in which David Archuleta beats contestant Wade Collins, who turns out to be a massive jerk who tries to gain people's sympathy with a sob story about his mother having a terrible illness, a reference to David Cook's mentions of his brother's brain cancer (and implying that's what led to his victory that season). Three months after the episode aired, Adam Cook died from his cancer, and David's loss ended up making the show's parody of him come off as far crueler and petty in hindsight.
    • In "iBelieve in Bigfoot", Freddie watches an episode of Celebrity Underwater in which David Schwimmer drowns, leading him to comment that there "won't be a Friends reunion". In October 2023, Schwimmer's co-star Matthew Perry died from an apparent drowning incident in his hot tub.
    • The series (as well as spin-off Sam & Cat) plays on Sam's often huge appetite. Actress Jeannette McCurdy would later confess that she was suffering from an eating disorder during her time on both shows.
  • I Dream of Jeannie: One of the final episodes was "Mrs. Djinn Djinn", an episode where the other characters mistakenly believe that Jeannie is pregnant and shower her with baffling gifts and praise, all while trying to coax out her (non-existent) secret. In real life, Barbara Eden was struggling with infertility: her second child (conceived shortly after the cancellation of I Dream Of Jeannie) died in utero and she was forced to carry it to term despite knowing the child was already gone. She kept the tragedy a secret and endured two months of strangers congratulating her and asking when "the little genie" would be born without saying a word...the trauma eventually broke up her marriage.
  • In the first episode of the 2017 season of I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!, Declan Donnelly joked that his co-host was "the gorgeous Holly Willoughby" before sharing a sweet moment with his longtime hosting partner Anthony McPartlin — rumors had circulated that McPartlin wouldn't be able to host that series because of his admittance to rehab earlier in the year. By the time of the 2018 season, McPartlin was unable to join Donnelly due to taking a year-long hiatus from TV hosting after a drink driving arrest, so he had to be replaced... by Holly Willoughby.
  • The Incredible Hulk (1977):
    • Bill Bixby's ex-wife Brenda Benet guest-starred during Season 3. Her character talks Dr. Banner out of jumping from a fire escape to his death over an enormous sense of guilt that "the Creature" killed a child. She tells him, "David, suicide is not the answer, it isn't going to bring that boy back." Bixby & Benet's only child Christopher died unexpectedly at the age of 6 just over a year later. On the first anniversary of his death, Benet took her own life.
    • The episode "Homecoming" sees David have a strained relationship with his father DW, though they do repair it. Three years later, the comics would introduce its version of Bruce's father Brian, who was an abusive asshat who killed Bruce's mother Rebecca, abused her and Bruce, and was himself killed by Bruce over those issues with Bruce repressing the memory of the truth of Brian's death.
  • The line "They let us out of work early because there was a shooting," from an episode of Inside Amy Schumer becomes a lot darker knowing about the shooting at a showing of Schumer's movie Trainwreck where two people were killed and nine others were injured.
    • Larry's comments on Otto Frederick Warmbier when he was first arrested, demonstrating absolutely no sympathy for, and mocking, a man who had been sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in North Korea for (allegedly; the video evidence is so indistinct it could literally have been anyone, and his "confession" was so full of broken English and ridiculous statements only a member of North Korea could take seriously that it was obvious it was forced) stealing a propaganda poster. He mocked Otto for being stupid enough to go to North Korea in the first place and described his begging for mercy from the DPRK as "crocodile tears". If the segment was ever funny to begin with, it decidedly isn't now, seeing as Otto is now dead and all evidence points to him having been tortured via oxygen deprivation.
  • The IT Crowd has an episode where Douglas unknowingly dates a trans woman, culminating in the two getting into a violent fight. The episode already wasn't the most sensitive depiction of trans people but has since become deeply uncomfortable to watch due to creator Graham Linehan becoming openly, actively, and intensely transphobic over the following years (made even worse seeing as, according to some sources, it was the offense taken by the trans community at this episode that really kicked off his subsequent views and behaviour).
  • It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Stephen Collins appears in several episodes as an extremely conscientious man who spends all his time working with children's charities, which contrasts humorously with the self-centered gang. Several years later, Collins was recorded admitting to sexually assaulting a minor.
  • There was an episode of Jack & Bobby where teenage Jack gets a track injury that sidelines him for the season. At first, one is inclined to believe that this will only lead to some usual teenage Wangst and nothing more... until the documentary from the future reveals that the injury became a long-term weakness. It gave Jack recurring pains in his knee that eventually led to his not being fast enough to escape an armed robbery after being elected a Congressman in the future, resulting in his death.
  • JAG :
    • At the end of the episode in which Bud meets Harriett, Harm makes a face after they kiss. Mac says "picturing their children?" A long time later, the couple would have a stillborn child.
    • In the episode where Commander Mick Brumby returns to Australia, the cast begins singing "Waltzing Matilda" to him as he departs. Not only would that clip be replayed for a memorial segment after Goddard's death, but considering that the song ends with the jolly swagman's suicide, it takes on a new light after actor Trevor Goddard's suicide.
  • Jappening con Ja had a sketch named "El Enfermo" ("The Sick Man") where actor Jorge Pedreros would play the role of a permanently hospitalized guy who'd become The Chew Toy whenever his friends dropped by to visit him. Pedreros would suffer huge health problems years later, which caused his death as of September 2013. (Link's in Spanish)
  • Jeopardy!:
    • One of the answers on the May 19, 2020 show was "Bruce Wayne is missing and Ruby Rose dons the cowl as this title CW show who's no mere girl." The show is Batwoman (2019). This episode, taped in advance, aired the same day that Ruby Rose announced she was not returning for Batwoman's second season.
    • On the very last episode filmed before Alex Trebek's death, he made an offhand comment in response to something a contestant said about how he had a large number of books that he didn't think he'd get a chance to read.
  • The Jeremy Kyle Show The whole show, especially the ones where Jeremy berates guests or is verbally aggressive or a lie detector segment, make uncomfortable viewing after a guest died of suicide a week after filming an episode after failing a lie detector test which led to the show being cancelled.
  • Jessie: One episode has Jessie offhandedly mention that her father, who is in the military, taught her to use a machine gun when she was five years old. Already shocking for a show aimed at preteens, this joke hasn't aged well thanks to the amount of school shootings in the decade since, especially those whose perpetrators were introduced to guns and "gun culture" at an early age.
  • Judgment Day The John List Story is already dark, concerning Robert Blake plays John List, who was convicted of murdering his family. It was hard to watch in 1993, but it gets harder to watch when he kills his wife, considering Blake's trial.
  • Kaamelott: In one episode, King Arthur finds the two inept knights Perceval and Karadoc trying to break a rock barehanded, and before they inevitably end up breaking their own hand he tells them something which amounts to "You know, for someone like me who often suffers from depression, what you are doing right now is really welcome". A few seasons later, Arthur actually suffers from depression, and tries to kill himself.
  • Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger:
    • All those mentions about piracy in the show (I.E. "We're the pirated versions") might be a little uneasy considering most English-speaking viewers of the show are pirates in a whole different sense.
    • Not to mention the one bill everyone is focused on in 2011, the Stop Online Piracy Act. It's very ironic that it was the Pirate Sentai that was playing during the anti-piracy craze.
    • The "pirating" connotations become more unbearable when one hears stories like this.
  • Kamen Rider Fourze got hit with a few whoppers. Kengo Utahoshi was nicknamed "The King of the Infirmary" because of his mysteriously poor constitution; his actor Ryuki Takahashi announced his retirement due to health reasons. Yuuki Jojima was an oddball outer space Otaku who, in one infamous two-parter, started praying to "rocket gods" in order to pass a test; her actress Fumika Shimizu joined a cult operated by a man who claims to channel the spirits of religious leaders like Jesus, Allah, and the Buddha. What makes matters worse is the fact that both of these events happened in 2017, five years after the show ended; the post-series crossover Movie War Ultimatum was set in that same time frame and showed both Kengo and Yuuki were doing just fine.
  • Kids Incorporated:
    • "NASA Space Week". During "Space Week" at the P*lace, the kids are all writing to NASA, petitioning them to put a kid into space. Mickey mentions that NASA is "going to start taking regular people into space." This episode was filmed in 1984, and what Mickey's referring to is the then-recent announcement of the Teacher In Space project. The fruition of that project was the 1986 shuttle mission STS-51-L, which ended 73 seconds after launch with the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
    • Also, the number of times over the years these prepubescent kids mention how much they want to be like Michael Jackson.
  • In a 2007 episode of Kitchen Nightmares, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay told New Jersey restaurateur Joseph Cerniglia that his business was "about to swim down the Hudson." In 2010, Cerniglia's body was found — in the Hudson — in an apparent suicide.
  • Knots Landing:
    • In "Asked to Rise", Frank tells Julie that he is not going to die and will be around for a long time. Larry Riley, who played Frank, died in June 1992, less than 18 months after this episode aired, of AIDS-related renal failure.
    • Similarly, in "Gone Microfiching", Julie asks Frank what he knows about safe sex and AIDS.
  • Late Night with Conan O'Brien:
    • On the last week, Nathan Lane sang a version of Your Way to Conan. The final verse had such lyrics as:
      Go West! you'll find a place,
      and if you're not the ratings victor,
      you'll live inside a car with Andy Richter...
      Don't ever stop, and if you flop, you'll do it your way!
    • Not quite how it went down, but eerily predictive. Conan sure did leave The Tonight Show his way.
    • One of Conan's "Actual Items" segments featured an ad for a cruise line. Buried in the fine print was a disclaimer that once aboard, guests would be taken captive on behalf of Osama Bin Laden. This installment of "Actual Items" aired in the summer of 2001.
    • On the February 19th, 2004 show, in the recurring sketch "New Stamp Designs", one of the series featured was Donald Trump's Daydreams, with the first part of the series being "President Trump", which came true nearly thirteen years later. See the full sketch here.
  • The Late Show with David Letterman: When David Letterman had Timothy Treadwell as a guest, he asked him the obvious question:
    Letterman: Is it going to happen that one day we read a news article about you being eaten by one of these bears?
  • Invoked in a segment on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver called "And Now Some Clips That Have, To Put It Mildly, Not Aged Well," featuring older news clips praising the likes of Bill Cosby, Matt Lauer, Jared Fogle, Kevin Spacey, and Harvey Weinstein- who have all been accused of sexual misconduct since those clips were recorded.
    • The show has a case that's either this or Hilarious in Hindsight (the comments on the segment lean towards the latter) regarding their segment on the 2016 third party candidates, highlighting the weirdo "Joe Exotic", who John then showed mocking support. As Tiger King showed, a quote in Exotic's campaign video ("I am broke as shit, I have a judgement against me from some bitch down here in Florida") is basically Foreshadowing what would get him imprisoned - he tried to hire a hitman to kill the owner of a big cat shelter who Exotic would have to pay $1 million in damages following a lawsuit - and John's assessment itself is featured, implied to have helped make Joe's delusional mind even worse. As a bonus, John joking about Joe being the kind of guy you'd get drunk enough to try meth with is eerily close to what was going on at his zoo, where Joe convinced straight men into sexual relationships with him by keeping them high on meth 24/7. And when asked about Joe following Tiger King, John noted that an attempt to contact him saw Joe ranting about a woman named Carole (the would-be victim), "And it would've been great if none of us ever knew why."
    • The episode on May 2, 2021, features a gag about Bill Gates' wife Melinda making a bizarre quasi-Suspiciously Specific Denial about the conspiracy theory that he's using the COVID vaccines to plant microchips in people. The very next day, they announced they were divorcing, to which the show's Twitter account even wondered if they were responsible.
  • Its longevity has made Law & Order and its numerous versions teem with examples of this (in-universe and otherwise):
    • In a Season 16 episode of Law & Order, after a hit list is discovered with Jack's name on it, Alexandra Borgia advises him to hand the case off to someone else because it might save his life. Five months later, she's tortured and killed because of a case she's working on. What's more, Arthur Branch tells Jack she would have fought him tooth and nail if he'd tried to take her off the case.
      • Another example would be an early episode called "Second Opinion", where the victim was killed by a quack remedy for her cancer, and Lt. Van Buren and Detective Briscoe are discussing the woman's condition. Briscoe's actor, Jerry Orbach, died of cancer, and a final season story arc involved Van Buren battling early-stage cervical cancer (she does go into remission in the series finale).
    • In an April 2009 episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent entitled "Rock Star", a musician falls to his death in an elevator shaft in a building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In November of that same year, Jerry Fuchs, the drummer for various indie rock bands such as !!! and The Juan Maclean, died pretty much the same way in a similar building in the same neighborhood. However, unlike in the episode, where the musician was pushed down the shaft, Fuchs actually fell while trying to jump from a stalled elevator to the next floor. Still pretty damn eerie.
    • Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
      • An episode about gamers guest-starred Tobuscus, and as pointed out on H 3 H 3 Productions, the episode — of course — depicts gamers in a negative light, implying that they're sexual predators. Tobuscus was later accused by his ex-girlfriend of raping and abusing her, making his appearance in this episode a very disturbing coincidence.
    • In-universe example for Law & Order: UK: An episode in which the detectives are investigating the shooting death of an officer has DS Matt Devlin musing to partner Ronnie Brooks that it must be tough to lose a partner, then immediately cringing as he remembers that Ronnie has lost a partner to violence. Another episode that also involved the shooting death of an officer had Ronnie stating, "God forbid Matty here got himself shot, I'd be out there straight away trying to find who did it and string him up myself"
      • Approximately a year later, Matt was killed in a drive-by shooting. The irony becomes even crueler when you recall that it was always MATT who would flip out if/when Ronnie was in danger.
      • And a more typical one: Matt was killed by someone seeking revenge against the police for bungling the investigation into his brother's murder — something he had nothing to do with. The 2014 murders of two NYPD officers by a man who wanted to avenge the death of Eric Garner (a man suffocated by the cops as they attempted to restrain and arrest him for selling loose cigarettes. The officer who applied the fatal chokehold was not indicted) bears an eerie similarity, right down to the fact that the officers in question had nothing to do with the aforementioned incident and that their killer was intentionally targeting the police.
  • Perhaps the eeriest example was the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, in which The Government nearly succeeds in crashing an airliner into the World Trade Center and thereby creating a new era of conflict. It aired in March 2001. Yikes.
    BYERS SNR: The Cold War's over, John. But with no clear enemy to stockpile against, the arms market's flat. But bring down a fully loaded 727 into the middle of New York City and you'll find a dozen tinpot dictators all over the world just clamoring to take responsibility, and begging to be smart-bombed.
  • Lost:
    • Pilot Frank Lapidus successfully lands a commercial plane on a small runway on the island when the plane undergoes instrument failure as a result of jumping through time. This episode aired a few weeks after (but was clearly written and filmed many months before) Sully Sullenberger became a national hero for successfully landing a commercial jet on the Hudson River with no loss of life. Since no one died, this is thankfully less disturbing than it could be.
    • Unfortunately, the same can not be said for Air France Flight 447. When this passenger jet crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009, some pointed out the loose similarity with Lost. However, as the days passed, more and more eerily Lost-related coincidences began to appear, including the discovery of the plane's tail section (Losts Flight 815 lost its tail section during the crash), the statement that the plane was found on the bottom of the ocean with bodies (Charles Widmore hides a fake Flight 815 and bodies on the bottom of the ocean to throw off investigators), and, most disturbingly, a Spanish pilot's claim that he saw a "flash of bright light" where flight 447 disappeared (Losts flight 316 disappeared in a flash of time travel-related light). Finally, conspiracy theorists began pointing out that the area where Flight 447 vanished is known for heightened electromagnetism as one of the infamous "vile vortices;" Flight 815 on Lost was brought down in an electromagnetic incident. Sure enough, the claim that unusual levels of electromagnetism were in the area on the day of the disappearance was backed up by imaging reports from independent researchers. The last sentence could be rephrased to say, "The crash took place in the vicinity of thunderstorms which were picked up by American and Canadian weather satellites".
  • Mad Men:
    • At one point, Lane says, regarding his office, "I'll be here the rest of my life!" As "Commissions and Fees" shows, that turned out to be quite true...
    • In Season 1, Joan is helping Peggy move to her new office as a result of her promotion, Joan makes some comments about how people who get what they want won't be happy, basically shaming Peggy for her non-domestic ambitions and for supposedly not caring about her looks the way Joan does. Joan even condescendingly says "I said 'Congratulations' didn't I?" Flash-forward to the end of Season 2: Joan is engaged (and was raped) by her fiancee while a perky Peggy gets a new office where she doesn't have to share with the Xerox machine, Peggy sincerely states she's happy they both got what they wanted while Joan represses any urge to tell Peggy how her relationship sucks.
    • Season 1 had Betty commenting to Don that she never wanted to become "old and ugly", flash-forward 10 years later and at age 38, Beautiful Betty is informed she has lung cancer and less than a year to live.
    • Season 6 has shown Betty thinking she has a tumor and dreaming about her death, later meeting an old friend dying from a terminal disease. Then in 7B, she is revealed to have 6 months to a year left in her life after being diagnosed with lung cancer.
    • Don's drinking is even more uncomfortable when you know that Jon Hamm went to rehab for alcoholism before Season 7B aired.
  • Malcolm in the Middle:
    • In one episode, Malcolm questions Lois's authority and asks if she intends to control his life when he's 30 years old and married. In a separate entire episode, he spends the entire episode pondering what he wants to do with his life, but at the end of the episode, decides he'll just continue being a kid while he still is one. As the last episode reveals, the question from the former episode was "Yes", and the point of the latter was moot to begin with because his whole family planned his future out for him from the very beginning. (Could be either this or Hilarious in Hindsight.)
    • Less than a week after Daniel von Bargen's (the man who plays Commandant Edwin Spangler) attempted suicide, a UK television channel aired the episode "Dewey's Dog", in which Spangler shows up drunk and suicidal saying he has nothing to live for.
    • In "Home Alone 4", Malcolm suffers a head injury that's severe enough to require stitches and at one point, he jokes to the audience that he might not remember what happened. Later, his actor Frankie Muniz suffered a mini-stroke in his late twenties that caused him to lose several memories, including that of his time on this show.
    • In the final episode, Malcolm's parents strong-arm him into turning down a six-figure job right out of high school, forcing him to work through college (since they blew a $10,000 college grant that was meant for him), so he'll appreciate the value of hard work. A couple of years after the finale, the economy tanked, and not only did college become more expensive that's only affordable with loans that take years to pay off and good-paying jobs hard to get, but many recent grads often find themselves working in low-paying jobs despite having a degree, so Hal and Lois' actions look incredibly stupid and selfish. Parents today would be overjoyed not having to worry about putting their kids through college.
  • The first episode of the series proper of M.A.N.T.I.S. opens with Miles undergoing a Disney Death (his survival explained by the material of the suit doubling as body armor) and opening narration about his diaries being released after his death, the episode "The Black Dragon" sees Stonebrake express the fear that Miles will get killed as M.A.N.T.I.S., and the episode "The Eyes Beyond" sees the future version of Stonebrake say Miles died long ago as he himself is dying. As the finale shows, Stonebrake's fears were completely valid and he seals away everything connecting Miles to M.A.N.T.I.S. before leaving with the intention to never return.
  • Married... with Children:
    • One episode had Al trying to sell his car, and one of the interested buyers are two stereotypical Middle Eastern terrorists with a clock bomb, asking Al to give them the car and directions to the Sears Tower. This was cut in reruns in 1993 (during the first World Trade Center bombing), 1995 (during the Oklahoma City bombing), and 2001 (during the second one on September 11th), but is now reinstated.
    • The "Peg is pregnant" story arc ended up becoming this after Katey Sagal experienced a stillbirth. The writers ended up having to retcon the whole thing by making it Al's dream... which was, itself, Al's initial reaction upon hearing that Peg was pregnant.
    • At least one episode had a joke about Kelly stuffing her bra, which is no longer funny after Christina Applegate's battle with breast cancer and double mastectomy.
    • In the "Hi, I.Q." episode, at one point, when trying to console Kelly, Al mentions that Buck used to run around all happy and with a lot of energy, but stopped because "obviously, he didn't like [doing] that." This statement becomes pretty sad in the later seasons when you realize that the reason Buck didn't run around as much as he used to is that the Briard who played Buck, Michael, was stricken with arthritis and was physically unable to run around and climb the stairs anymore to the point being relegated to just sitting on the stairs and eventually had to retire.
    • Being considered either this or Hilarious in Hindsight (depending on your sense of humor), the "I Want My Psycho Dad" episode had Bud mentioning a fictional show called Saved by the Bell: The Prison Years. About a decade later, Screech's actor Dustin Diamond was sent to jail for a few months for stabbing a man.
    • In "Peggy Sue Got Work", Peggy gets a job in a department store to earn money for a VCR after Al refuses to buy her one. While working, she overhears a customer talking about Oprah doing a whole week on "Transsexuals: Which Bathroom Should They Use?" No longer funny after 2016 when this very issue became a national controversy.
  • M*A*S*H:
    • Lots of the early episodes have scenes or bits with Henry Blake that have a new meaning now that we know the character's ultimate fate.
      • In "Cowboy," Henry survives repeated attempts on his life by a disgruntled chopper pilot; in "Showtime," his wife back home gives birth to a son whom Henry will never see in person; in "O.R." he mentions his reluctance to go home, as he's done the best work of his career in Korea; and so forth.
      • Hawkeye also reassures him at one point that he'll die an old man in his bed. Not happening.
      • In "For Want Of A Boot", a dentist character says that, "In the great mouth of life, Henry Blake is but a temporary filling." Temporary is right.
      • In "Hot Lips and Empty Arms":
      Margaret: Do you know that you look just like my father before he died?note 
      Henry: Oh, uh, a lot of people have said that.
    • The superbly hilarious early episode, "Bananas, Crackers and Nuts", in which Hawkeye attempts to fake insanity to get some rest away from the camp. A few years later (in real time, it was more like 11, but to Hawkeye, that's probably more what it felt like), Hawkeye is sent to an institution after plowing a jeep through the mess tent.
    • Also, when he has yet another breakdown in "Hawk's Nightmare", Radar expresses surprise at his behavior because he was apparently coping with the war better than anyone. Even before the finale, that really wasn't the case anymore.
    • Margaret's excitement throughout Season Five over marrying Donald is pretty hard to swallow when you know how quickly the marriage went sour, ending in divorce. The inscription on Margaret's wedding ring, according to the episode "Patent 4077", is "Over hill, over dale, our love will never fail". Klinger loses the ring and gets a replacement, which Margaret ends up keeping, but one word in the ring is misspelled; "never" has been engraved as "ever". This is much less funny in light of the marriage's end in the next season.
    • Another example unrelated to Hawkeye or Henry: the Season Nine episode "Blood Brothers" tells the story of a GI who can't give blood because he has terminal cancer. The GI was played by...Patrick Swayze.
    • The episode "Blood Brothers" features Patrick Swayze as Pvt. Sturgis, a wounded soldier diagnosed with leukemia, which in the 1950s had a much higher mortality rate than it does now. Almost thirty years after the episode aired, Swayze himself died of cancer (though it was pancreatic cancer, not leukemia).
      • The same episode had this intentionally written in. When Swayze's character learns he has leukemia, and Hawkeye urges him to go to Tokyo to begin experimental treatments, Swayze's character cynically predicts "they'll have a cure in twenty years!" The episode aired in the early '80s, more than twenty years after the Korean War ended, and no, there's no cure.
    • (In-universe) Watching the episode 'Ceasefire' is a whole lot harder after knowing the outcome of 'Abyssinia, Henry', especially the exchange between Henry and Radar about meeting up after the war ends is heartbreaking.
  • Men at Work has this: In an earlier episode, Neal had a chance to be with a woman who had feelings for him, while he felt that he was in a rut with Amy. However, he chose to stick it out with Amy. The HIH comes in when, two years later, she rejects his marriage proposal and dumps him to try new things.
    • It gets worse when one thinks of the signs that are there: he commits to role-playing while she doesn't have to; she buys a storage room for their stuff, but only his stuff is there, etc.
  • Following a nasty contract dispute, Susan St. James was killed off from McMillan & Wife by having her character and infant son killed in an airplane crash. Nearly 30 years later, St. James' son was killed, and her husband (Dick Ebersol — the same one who was hired to fix Saturday Night Live after Jean Doumanian wrecked it in the early 1980s) and another son critically injured, in a plane crash.
  • Mike & Molly:
    • At the end of one season, Mike admits that he doesn't want Molly to go on a retreat because it will eventually lead to her wanting to be around people who are nothing like him. Molly and Carl reassure him that it won't happen. Cut to the next year, when the success of Molly's book leads to her sucking up to other writers and treating him like crap at a party.
    • Also, Mike predicts that Carl and Victoria having a relationship will only lead to heartbreak for Carl and he will be the one who has to deal with it. Carl and Victoria do have an ugly breakup, and the fallout nearly ends Mike and Carl's friendship.
  • Mock the Week: One 2016 episode featured Sarah Pascoe and John Robins, who had been dating for three and a half years, as guests. Many jokes were made about their relationship, including one other guest remarking, "Better hope that one lasts, or reruns on Dave are going to get really depressing!" A number of moments were shot specifically for the Christmas special, including some apparently good-hearted ribbing about couples fighting at Christmas. Pascoe and Robins broke up later that year...at Christmas.
  • Modern Family:
    • The fourth-season episode "Arrested" has a brief, almost Heartwarming Moment near the end when Haley, who has just been expelled from college six weeks into her freshman year, returns to her room and her younger sister Alex, with whom she normally bickers and feuds, tells her she's happy she's home again (it's quickly subverted when they go back to feuding). Within a week of that episode airing, it was disclosed that Ariel Winter, who plays Alex, had been removed from her mother's custody due to emotional and physical abuse and was now living with ... her own older sister.
    • The very next episode, "Mistery Date," had a scene where Alex, after washing out of a Brain Bowl-type event unusually early, accuses her mother of trying to live through her. Again, a little hard to watch given what was really going on in the actress's life.
    • The final season had an episode of Phil mourning the death of his father Frank. Five months after the episode aired, Frank's actor Fred Willard died.
  • Mom:
    • The season 1 episode "Nietzsche and a Beer Run" has Christy dating a pothead firefighter, David, who refers to himself as "The Professor" in reference to the Gilligan's Island character. Russell Johnson, who played The Professor, died shortly before the episode aired. Chuck Lorre even acknowledges the poor timing in his vanity card for the episode and apologizes.
    • In the season 1 episode "Six Thousand Bootleg T-Shirts And A Prada Handbag", Bonnie jokes about relapsing and that it was surely going to happen. Not only does she relapse, but it happens to her twice.
    • A season 4 episode sees Christy date Marjorie's nephew Nick (played by Chris Pratt, Anna Faris' real-life husband at the time), only to break up with him at the episode's end. Several months after the episode aired, Anna and Chris broke up in real life as well.
    • Any interaction between Christy and Violet in earlier seasons would end up being this after the Season 6 episode "Jell-O Shots and the Truth About Santa", with Violet's podcast tarnishing any hope for them to repair their relationship.
    • The second half of the season 4 episode "Cornbread and a Cashmere Onesie" has Christy trying to talk Jill out of having a child (after the latter was inspired by Marjorie to do so earlier in the same episode), inadvertently hurting Jill's feelings and damaging their relationship in the process. Just three episodes later, in "A Safe Word and a Rib Eye", Jill has a miscarriage on Christy's birthday!
  • The Monkees: In the episode "Monstrous Monkee Mash", Peter, Mike and Mickey are roaming around a Transylvanian castle trying to find a missing Davy. When Mickey tries to get the others to abandon the search, he says "We can form a trio." Davy Jones died in 2012, and The Monkees did indeed carry on intermittently as a trio for reunions. Then Peter disappears, and Mickey says "we could become a duet!" Peter Tork died in 2019, and Mike Nesmith and Mickey Dolenz did carry on the group as a duo. Then Mickey panics, asking what would happen if Mike disappeared, saying "I'd have to be a single" and timidly tries to sing the show's theme song as "Hey, hey, I'm a Monkee...". Mike Nesmith died in 2021, leaving Mickey Dolenz as indeed the last living Monkee. Though out of respect for his bandmates, he's retired the Monkees name and does appear as a strictly solo act.
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus: "The Upper-Class Twit of the Year" involves the twits shooting themselves in the head in the end. However, Oliver's actor Graham Chapman was also the first to die, paralleling that of his character being also the first to die in the sketch.
  • Mork & Mindy:
    • "Clerical Error": Mork decides to become a priest and goes to a church in a black robe. There he meets a man who wants to commit suicide and tells him "Don't you realize that living is a precious thing? It's the Meat in the Sandwich of Life!" In the wake of Robin Williams' suicide, this line can become quite jarring (Of course when the man asks for Help Mork gives him hilarious ways to kill himself like "wear a Tutu and go into a leather bar" or "try and smoke a real camel" and that actually prevents his suicide).
    • In "Mork in Wonderland, pt. 2" having just returned from an Alternate Universe where that world's version of Mindy died, Mork tells the normal one that he wants to die before her so he won't have to deal with the pain of losing her. Sadly, he got his wish.
    • In one episode, Exidor creates a religion based on O.J. Simpson; obviously meant to be funny, given that Exidor is way eccentric, but after everything that's happened with Simpson, it's unlikely anyone would see him as a religious figure.
    • The ending of the episode "Mork Meets Robin Williams", where Mork gives his report to Orson about the downside of fame, which ends with a listing of celebrities who became victims of their own fame (mostly from drug overdoses). About a year later, Robin's friend John Belushi died of a drug overdose. It's also tough looking at that knowing that Robin himself had a pretty nasty cocaine habit at the time. He said that John's death was one of the reasons he quit. Then, Williams' own suicide enters the picture...
  • The Morton Downey Jr. Show: Morton Downey Jr. had a trademark habit of chainsmoking and blowing smoke into guests' faces. This is a bit darker looking back knowing that Morton died from lung cancer and that even later in his life he regretted making smoking look cool.
  • Mr. Bean: In Do-It-Yourself Mr. Bean, the scene where Mr. Bean is cutting a hole in the wall of his flat and cuts through several items including a picture of Princess Diana which he severs right at the neck becomes a lot less funny following Diana's death in a car accident in 1997. Another joke lost its humor with the 2022 death of Queen Elizabeth II, and that was the scene from The Return of Mr. Bean where he headbutts her during a royal film premiere.
  • Mr. Belvedere: In the episode "Commentary", George loses his sportscaster position for criticizing the National Anthem being played at every sporting event. This controversial debate became relevant again in 2016 when Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the anthem in the NFL, claiming that the anthem has a forgotten racist past.
  • The 2005 MTV Video Music Awards were held in Miami, during which Eva Longoria joked about a “small hurricane” outside, which had already canceled much of the pre-show festivities. Well, that hurricane happened to be named Katrina and New Orleans suffered her wrath a day later. To her credit, Longoria not only apologized but auctioned off the dress with the proceeds going to Katrina victims.
  • The Muppet Show:
    • The episode hosted by Zero Mostel contains a skit where he recites a poem about his fears, ending with his greatest fear: something for which he himself is only a fear that can be erased by that realization, upon which he vanishes into thin air. Mostel died suddenly before the episode aired, which must have made the scene pretty eerie.
    • And then there's the scene in Peter Sellers' episode where Kermit finds him dressed in a bizarre mix of costume pieces in his dressing room. ("I was trying to do Queen Victoria, but I've forgotten what she looked like.") When Kermit responds that it's okay for him to be himself on the show, Sellers somberly replies, "But that, you see, my dear Kermit, would be altogether impossible. I could never be myself. You see, there is no me. I do not exist... There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed." The scene has since been quoted many times as summing up Sellers' view of himself as doomed to be seen only as his various characters and not his true self. In fact, he contributed to the sketch in lieu of the show's usual scene of the guest star out of character backstage, due to his discomfort at being seen out of character.
    • One of the show's best moments was Harry Belafonte singing "Turn the World Around" accompanied by African mask-inspired Muppets. The song is upbeat, but it's hard not to cry when you know Belafonte performed the same song at Jim Henson's memorial. The lead-in to the song—which talks about how life is very brief but we can change the world if we care about each other—only makes things worse.
    • In one episode Dr. Bunsen Honeydew enlarges a virus to make it easier to study. (Beaker, of course, gets overwhelmed by it.) The virus is specifically mentioned to be a streptococcus virus. Jim Henson would die of a streptococcus infection a decade later.
  • The Muppets at Walt Disney World was created to metaphorically celebrate the forthcoming sale of The Jim Henson Company to The Walt Disney Company, which would allow Henson to focus on creating new Muppet (and other) works while Disney handled the business side of things. It culminates in Medium Blending when the live-action Muppets meet an animated Mickey Mouse and prove to have similar philosophies in the possibilities of dreams coming true. Unfortunately, Jim Henson died ten days after it originally aired, before he could sign off on the deal. This led to years of sales and resales that fractured the rights to the company's various properties, while new productions were often underpromoted, unheralded, and/or of poorer quality than before. In particular, the popularity of the classic Muppets (which was wavering by The '90s) has never fully recovered from this — a major plot point of the 2011 film The Muppets is that they have to re-establish themselves with today's audiences. As a result, this special and the later tribute The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson (which aired late in '90) come off less as marking the Dawn of an Era of new adventures and creations, and more the heralds of the End of an Age.
  • A Muppets Christmas: Letters to Santa features Nathan Lane as a sadistic TSA officer. He decides he doesn't like the way the Muppets look and pulls them into an interrogation room, planning to perform cruel and humiliating security searches on them. In 2008, it was funny; in 2010, it's a controversial reality.
  • Murder in Small Town X was a reality show that was ultimately won by Angel Juarbe, a New York firefighter. The MiSTX finale airdate? September 4, 2001. Angel died in the attacks one week later.
  • Mystery Science Theater 3000: Notable examples include the host segments of "The Incredible Melting Man", in which Crow's pet script is butchered beyond recognition and has awkward casting decisions forced upon by the Mads, which was originally a reference to their experiences with Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie. However, the following year, Crow's voice actor was replaced by Bill Corbett, who also had a pet script of his own which would eventually be made into a major motion picture... and to which the exact same thing happened, with the end result (Meet Dave) ending up reviled by audiences and critics.
  • The Nanny:
    • There is one episode where the paparazzi, who invent a phony story, hound Fran and Maxwell. Later, they go to the tabloid's office to confront the editor, and he glibly announces his plans to go back to hounding Princess Diana. Given the fact that just a few years later Diana died — while trying to escape from the paparazzi, no less — this scene is certainly much more awkward now.
    • In Season 1's "Schlepped Away," Fran finds evidence that her mother Sylvia is having an affair, but it turns out to be Not What It Looks Like. note  Five seasons later, in "California Here We Come", Sylvia ends up having an affair for real (albeit a non-sexual one).
  • NCIS:
    • In the first season episode "One Shot, One Kill", which aired in 2004, a Marine recruiter is talking to two young men about joining the Marine Corps. About the possibility of being deployed to Iraq, he says:
      "What with boot camp, S-O-I, follow on schools... we're talking over a year and a half of training. Iraq will pretty much be over by the time you boys graduate."
    • In the second season episode "An Eye for an Eye", Tony tells Kate to "Work smarter, not harder - you'll live longer." Six episodes later, Kate is killed on the job.
    • In the third season episode "Head Case", Ziva retells a story where her friend's head was sent to his family in a box, commenting that that was the time that she decided she "would never be captured alive". In season six episode "Aliyah", Ziva was captured by Somali pirates and held hostage for a number of months.
    • In the same episode, one of her captors is seen ripping the Star of David necklace from around her neck. In a later flashback, set around a month before this incident, Ziva is seen saying to someone "I would sooner die than take this necklace off."
    • A short-term one "Alleged": Tony and Bishop confront a suspect at a bar and he makes a run for it, dashing out the back door, and straight into a conveniently-placed dumpster. It becomes a lot less funny when it turns out that the Victim of the Week was thrown into the same dumpster earlier, accidentally resulting in the injury that eventually killed him.
    • Gibbs's reaction to finding out the Man Behind the Man was the father in "See No Evil" may just possibly be the most massive in-universe Fridge Tearjerker in history. After seeing another man ready to throw away what he himself would do anything to get back, nobody can fault him for having a crack in his armor.
    • In a similar vein, Gibbs was asked in "UnSEALed" if he knew what it was like to spend every free moment dreaming of being home with his wife and kids, then come home and find that it was all gone. Gibbs replied that that didn't justify murder. Becomes this when you remember that his wife and daughter were murdered while he was in Iraq during Desert Storm. It's even worse considering that he killed the man responsible.
  • NewsRadio:
    • One of the more severe examples comes from the Titanic episode. At the end of the episode, Phil Hartman addresses the audience as Phil Hartman (rather than his character Bill McNeal), and explains that no one in the cast really died, at which point the rest of the cast show up and explain that Dave (Foley) drowned while filming the last scene. Hartman then explains that "Okay, so only one person died..." This was Hartman's last scene ever: he was killed soon after this episode aired. This scene was removed in syndication, probably for this reason, but kept in the DVD release.
    • The last in-character scene of that Titanic episode ended with the implication of, as Phil Hartman put it, "Matthew and I eating each other". Matthew was played by Andy Dick, whom Jon Lovitz claims indirectly caused Hartman's death by re-introducing Hartman's wife to the cocaine that contributed to her murder-suicide.
    • Another cringe-inducing moment comes in an earlier episode where McNeal is arrested, and Dave concludes that the only way the police could have dealt with him would have been to shoot him.
    • The Halloween one, where the whole B plot revolves around Bill being depressed that a psychic tells him he's going to die 'so soon' (for him, although it was still far in the future) but ends when the psychic gets tired of him and tells him he'll live a ridiculously long time. Funny then, but in retrospect...
    • Then there are references to Bill's crazy ex-girlfriend Linda and Bill is oblivious to her behavior as being abnormal. (Ep. 218 "Led Zeppelin"). In Ep. 410 "Look Who's Talking", the woman he was seeing tried to set fire to his hair while he was sleeping.
    • Lest anyone think Phil Hartman's death is the only HiH material on NewsRadio, the Aborted Arc with a character played by Lauren Graham being brought in as Mr. James' "Plan B" for the station became a little cringe-worthy in 2009 when Lauren Graham replaced NewsRadio alumnus Maura Tierney on Parenthood after Tierney left to undergo treatment for breast cancer.
  • Night Court:
    • Well over a decade before 9/11, Mac's TRS80-esque computer starts picking up air traffic control data. Right after he announces that he fixed it by wiping the information, everyone hears the roar of a jet engine. Dan looks out the window to deliver the punchline "You should see the looks on their faces!"
    • In the Season 8 episode "Death Takes a Halloween", Harry jails a defendant who claims to be the Angel of Death. As a result, no one is able to die. The episode has a scene where Harry, while speaking on the telephone, makes some offhand or throwaway joke about people jumping off the World Trade Center and miraculously surviving.
  • Night Gallery In the pilot movie for Night Gallery, one of the stories is called "Eyes." It stars Joan Crawford in one of her last roles as a selfish, spoiled, mean-spirited woman who only cares about herself. Given her relationships with her children and the plot of Mommie Dearest, it seems that she was well suited for the role.
  • The Nightly Show:
    • When dealing with the Bill Cosby rape allegations, Larry Wilmore asked "I just have to ask: Why don't we believe these women?" A later deposition by Cosby had him admit to getting date-rape drugs just for that purpose and was later convicted.
  • Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation has a scene in the episode "Turtles' Night Out" where Michelangelo is talking to one of the callers of his pirate radio show, condemning drug use. Casey Morrow, brother of the late Kirby Morrow, who voiced Mikey, revealed that Kirby's death was the result of a history of substance abuse.
  • The Noddy Shop: "Stop, Listen And Learn" has Noah become sick and refuses to take medicine given to him by Aunt Agatha. When Noah's actor Sean McCann died in 2019 after years of fighting heart disease, it made that particular scene even sadder, as it might cause viewers to think that Noah's illness may have gotten worse had he not listened to Aunt Agatha's advice in the end.
  • A sketch on a 1980 episode of Not the Nine O'Clock News featured men running around abducting children, dragging them away against their will, and loading them into the back of a truck. The joke at the end was that the van was taking them off to a recording of Rolf on Saturday OK, with the implication that this was the only way to drum up an audience for the typically awful weekend programmes of the time. This sketch became decidedly less funny when said show's host, Rolf Harris, was convicted of several charges of indecent assault against children in 2014. It didn't help that throughout the rest of the decade and into the present, this was the most common way children like Adam Walsh and Michaela Garecht were being abducted and killed.
  • Tori Spelling's short-lived sitcom So No Torious was a self-parodying look at her life as a struggling actress and daughter of Hollywood royalty. It featured caricatured versions of her parents: her mother as a glamorous yet passive-aggressive nutjob, and her father as... basically the speaker box from Charlie's Angels. A year later, Aaron Spelling dies, and Candy Spelling basically disinherits Tori. Maybe she hit a nerve there...
  • On the first episode of PBS' Nova ScienceNow, Peter Standring said that one of the biggest fears of New Orleans was that if a major storm had a direct hit there, the effect would be devastating; thousands of lives lost, millions homeless, and an entire city underwater, since the majority of the city lies below sea level, and, therefore, the city is protected by levees. The episode aired on January 25, 2005, about seven months before Hurricane Katrina would cause such damage for real; about 1,500 died in New Orleans alone, millions of people were left homeless, and 80% of the city was underwater, after the levees broke.
  • NUMB3RS:
    • Vector: Weaver's actions is based on fear of a hypothetical scenario where a flu-like virus emerges and becomes a deadly epidemic because adequate vaccines and treatments aren't available. While [Weaver's particular obsession was centered around the Spanish Flu virus from 1918, it's not hard to see the parallels between the scenario he was imagining and the COVID-19 Pandemic.
    • In "One Hour", Don and his therapist talk about David having had "split loyalties" as he was assigned to Don's team by the SAC in essence to monitor them. Come the season finale, Don is going to learn a lot more about split loyalties.
  • Mexican Telenovela Nunca te olvidaré starts with the protagonist Esperanza losing her mother while she's a teenager due to an unspecified illness. The thing is, Esperanza's mother is played by Edith González, before González goes on portray adult Esperanza herself, seemingly to evoke Strong Family Resemblance. As such, seeing González portray a woman who dies and leaves a teenage daughter behind would become uncomfortable to watch after in real life González herself died in 2019 from ovarian cancer, leaving a teenage daughter behind (who at the time was of about the same age as the child actress playing Esperanza during Esperanza's mother death scene).
  • Odd Squad:
    • In "The Briefcase", Olive screams at both the sight of the Shapeshifter's head and the sight of Oprah's briefcase, both of which have been turned into pies on separate occasions. The first time around, Otto incredulously asks Olive, "Your greatest fear is pie?" only for her to tell him that it's a long story. The episode "Life of O'Brian" also has Olive shuddering when two agents-in-training are shown carrying a large painting of a tornado made of pies. Come "Training Day", and Olive's fearful reactions are put into an entirely new light, showing that she has a fear of pies that stems from Odd Todd, her old partner, attempting to kill her co-workers with them when he performed a Face–Heel Turn and became a villain, and that she has trauma stemming from the incident. Not only that, but she refused to tell Otto the entire story until he offered to help her, for reasons unknown.
    • In "Mid-Day in the Garden of Good and Odd", it's revealed that Olympia doesn't believe in villains making Heel-Face Turns, and also doesn't believe that Odd Todd has reformed despite evidence proving otherwise. The Season 2 finale has her being challenged on this belief by Xavier and Xena during Otis' trial when it's discovered that he used to be a villain. Even after he spills his entire Backstory to her, explaining how he became the White Sheep of his adopted duck family, she is set in her ways and admits the truth to him at the X's behest via a truth helmet, which severs their friendship. Olympia and Otis later end up apologizing to each other and make up.
    • Throughout Season 3, Opal is frequently antagonized by The Shadow, who seeks to destroy her as well as the rest of the Mobile Unit, with her first villainous act being to drown them and their van into the Lake of Goo. The 3-part finale of the first half of the season would later reveal that The Shadow's real name is Olizabeth, and that she is the younger sister of Opal who made a Face–Heel Turn and became a villain because Opal was too overprotective of her. In addition, it reveals that Omar, Orla, and Oswald were subject to Revenge by Proxy, and Opal never giving Olizabeth a chance to be The Ace like she wanted is why she targeted the agent specifically (and is also another reason why she became a villain). It puts "Slow Your Roll" in a whole new light, considering that Olizabeth essentially tries to murder her sister and her friends with no regrets whatsoever. By the end of "End of the Road", however, Olizabeth and Opal reconcile, and Opal leaves the Mobile Unit to help her sister fix the damage she's caused.
  • Only Fools and Horses:
    • The ending of "The Sky's the Limit", where an aircraft is heading for Trotter Towers.
    • In the 1983 Christmas special "Thicker Than Water", Reg Trotter returns, and comes close to convincing his sons that he isn't really Del's father. Much later, the 1987 and 2003 Christmas specials "The Frog's Legacy" and "Sleepless in Peckham" would suggest that Rodney wasn't Reg's son (although "Thicker Than Water" already had a pretty strong implication of that itself - or at least that Del had reason to have always thought it was a possibility, yet he didn't know the truth until a drunk Albert told him).
  • The Only Way Is Essex: Any of Lauren Goodger's appearances qualify as this now given her break-up with Mark, and the fact that she has become something of a media sensation now. Lampshaded on a few British football forums. Watching any episode of The Only Way Is Essex or reading about her in the media shows how this comes into play.
  • Padre Coraje: In a situation that occurred during a rerun of this soap opera on the Argentinian channel Volver, the episode rerun on March 5, 2013, was about people thinking that dictator Manuel Costa had "died", and got divided into two halves: those who openly celebrated his death, and those who tried to give him the respect Due to the Dead. A funeral was hosted at the church... and Manuel Costa, who was Not Quite Dead, interrupted it shouting "Don't celebrate yet!". On the same day, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez died. Obviously unintentional, but really eerie nonetheless.
  • Parks and Recreation: One second season episode revolves around a Venezuelan delegation visiting Pawnee. They spend the entire visit bragging about their oil wealth, throwing wads of money around, mocking Pawnee for being so unimpressive, and generally acting like rich jerks. Five years later, between the drop in oil prices and general financial mismanagement, Venezuela is in dire economic straits that are far from funny.
    • In the final season of the show, set in the then-future of 2017, a character is bragging and listing all his accomplishments, and says "James Woods follows my niece on Twitter." In September 2017, actress Amber Tamblyn publicly called out James Woods for hitting on her and a friend when the girls were only 16.
  • Patty Duke would remark in her 1987 autobiography Call Me Anna of the odd coincidence that she would get to play identical cousins with differing personalities on The Patty Duke Show after meeting with producer/series creator Sherwood Schwartz and having the producer note the multiple sides of her personality, suggesting half-jokingly that he may have in a way detected her bipolar disorder long before it was medically diagnosed in the early 1980s.
  • The Pete Holmes Show: One "Ex-Men" sketch has Xavier saying that he'll "kill everyone with his mind" if he loses another golf game to Scott. In Logan, Xavier suffered a telepathic seizure which caused him to accidentally kill several X-Men.
  • Pitchmen: In one early episode, Anthony Sullivan is looking over recorded footage of Billy Mays driving for a commercial spot. When remarking on Billy's acting (as it's obvious he's not really driving), Anthony exclaims "It looks like he's about to have a heart attack!" Two months after airing, Billy Mays died of a previously unknown heart condition.
  • In early episodes of The Price Is Right, it was common for female contestants who got their Contestant's Row bid exactly right to retrieve their cash bonus directly from Bob Barker's pocket. Then he was accused of taking liberties with some of the models on the show...
  • QI: Earlier series sometimes featured jokes where Alan Davies would be handed a doll as part of a gag, experiment, or demonstration and Stephen Fry would make a "show us on the doll where the man touched you" crack. In 2020, Davies published a book revealing that his father sexually abused him for a large portion of his childhood into his early adolescence.
  • Queer as Folk (US): In Season 2, when Ted temporarily becomes "addicted" to porn, his best friend Emmett admonishes him that, "You're not sucking me into your black hole of depravity." When Emmett tells the others that they need to stage an intervention, Brian sarcastically guesses that Ted is addicted to crystal meth. In a later season, Ted really does become addicted to crystal meth, and tragically self-destructs while coming very close to dragging Emmett down with him. What is especially funny-turned-cringeworthy is Brian's comment that Ted is a schmuck who couldn't even get a decent addiction.
  • On Real Husbands of Hollywood, the jokes Kevin Hart made at Robin Thicke's expense (such as telling him his 15 minutes of fame are over as well as jokes about his then-wife Paula Patton) are now seen in a different light now after the backlash towards his song "Blurred Lines", his divorce, and the reveal that he was unfaithful to his wife.
  • Red Dwarf:
    • The show managed to pull this in a single episode in series VII, episode "Stoke Me a Clipper". The opening shows dimension-hopping hero Ace Rimmer rescuing a princess from parallel-dimension Nazis, a process which involves jumping out of an aeroplane, skyboarding on a live crocodile gunning down a platoon's worth of Nazis in midair, and performing several stunts on a motorcycle. Ace gets shot in the process, but only quips "This is my best top, dammit!" (as befits his macho character) and goes back to work. However the rest of the episode takes a dark turn since it is shown that Ace is not only dying from the wound, he's also a Hard Light Hologram disguised to look like the original Ace Rimmer, which in turn means that the real Ace (who was a popular guest character in earlier series) is dead, and has been for a very long time. Ultimately we see a graveyard of countless millions of Ace Rimmers, of which the Ace Rimmer from "Dimension Jump" was only the first.
    • In the season one episode "Balance of Power" there's a flashback to life aboard the ship before the crew were wiped out, in which we see Lister crack a joke to his drinking buddies that his uncle's brain is in a jar and it's really sad... because it's not dead yet. Given what happens to Lister in a (possible) future we glimpse at the end of season six...
  • On The Red Skelton Show, Red often told stories in his monologue about his family- his wife Georgia, and his children, Richard and Valentina. The cute jokes are very hard to watch if you know that his son Richard died of leukemia just short of his 10th birthday, and Red took it very hard. Later, he was divorced from Georgia, and Georgia died of suicide on the 18th anniversary of Richard's death.
  • Revolution: The original trailer showed Wrigley Field with 2012 World Champion Chicago Cubs on it. The Cubs had one of their worst seasons ever in 2012 losing over 100 games. This was changed by the time the pilot episode aired. As it turns out, if they had set their story four years later, they would've gotten Life Imitates Art instead (the Cubs won over 100 games, topping the league, and FINALLY broke their legendary drought in 2016).
  • Robot Wars: Craig Charles' quite prophetic introduction to the European Championship. This was recorded in about 2002, many years before the financial crisis and subsequent political turmoil:
    Craig: I have in my hand a piece of paper, but it does not promise peace in our time, 'cause we have a continent in crisis! ... Yes, the borders have gone back up! We've said, "See you!" to the EU, and European harmony most definitely stops here!
  • Seeing footage of Crowded House drummer Paul Hester on shows such as Rockwiz and his own Hessie's Shed can be painful given that his goofy public persona masked depression that eventually led to suicide.
  • Room 101: In one episode, Nick Hancock lists Jimmy Savile as one of the worst things in the world. It feels less like a joke now that Savile has been outed as a child molester.
  • Roseanne:
    • An early episode has Roseanne and Dan planning out what will happen after they die, climaxing in Dan reassuring a distraught DJ that he's going to live for a long time/looks forward to seeing him getting married one day/everything fictional parents usually say when they're reassuring their kids that they won't die. Sweet at the time, but becomes painful when you remember that Dan ends up dying while DJ is still just a teenager.
    • In another early episode, Roseanne gets a call from the school that D.J. has been neglecting his school work, his excuse being that Dan died, and he has so many responsibilities at home now.
    • In another one, Roseanne gets a call from the school that D.J. had obscene materials, and Dan goes there, and since they haven't seen Mr. Conner before, he jokes that he's her oldest son and Mrs. Conner's a widow. Also, given that he died of a heart attack, any joke about Dan's weight qualifies.
      • All these, however, were negated after Dan’s death was Retconned in the 2018 revival.
      • And then kind of brought back when Roseanne herself died unexpectedly between seasons.
    • In the original episode "Go Cubs", Roseanne meets her Muslim neighbors while stopping by their house in the middle of the night to borrow their Wi-Fi password because her granddaughter wanted to Skype her mom Geena who is in Afghanistan note . Later, Roseanne offers to pay for her neighbor's groceries and defends her after the cashier makes Islamophobic comments in front of both of them and Roseanne calls her out on her bigotry. The reboot was later cancelled and ABC announced that the sitcom would be retooled as The Conners, which will not include Roseanne on the show due to racist remarks that she posted on Twitter.
  • Samantha Who?: In the second episode, Samantha goes to a prescheduled doctor's appointment, assuming he's a neurologist, only to find out halfway through that he's a plastic surgeon; pre-amnesia, Sam had planned to go to him for breast implants. The year after this episode aired, Christina Applegate, who plays Samantha, was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a double mastectomy.
  • Sanford and Son: The famous running gag of Fred Sanford faking a heart attack is painful to watch now since Redd Foxx died of a heart attack years later while relaxing between takes of The Royal Family. He might have survived had everyone around him not thought he was just doing his old schtick.
  • The Sarah Jane Adventures story "Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith" is about Sarah Jane struggling with senility brought on by a terminal illness. In fact, the illness was fabricated by Sarah Jane's replacement, and once she's defeated, Sarah Jane instantly recovers. And to think Elisabeth Sladen must have known she was ill when she filmed them. The episode was also the last one to air while Lis Sladen was still alive.
    • Even worse, in the fourth episode of the fifth series, which was aired after her death, Sarah Jane says, "It feels like someone has died."
  • Saved by the Bell: There was a particularly brutal one in one episode. Kelly, who is running for homecoming queen, says that she's always wanted to be a princess. Lisa's response: "Well, if anything ever happens to Princess Di..."
  • Scream Queens (2015): The scene where the Red Devil's mentor, dressed in a robe and mask to make them resemble Justice Antonin Scalia, is beaten up by Dean Munsch while the latter screams rebuttals against Scalia's real-world political views in their face. Regardless of your politics, re-watching the scene hits new highs of discomfort knowing that Scalia died suddenly less than three months after the episode aired.
  • Scrubs:
    • In one of John Ritter's appearances as JD's father, he utters the line "Heart murmurs? I love those things!" Ritter died of an aortic dissection, an undetectable heart condition. The character died, as well, of a massive heart attack.
    • In the fourth season episode "My First Kill", Dr. Cox tells J.D. that every doctor eventually kills a patient. When J.D. asks if he's ever killed a patient, Cox replies, "No, but I'm the exception that proves the rule". The following season, he ends up killing three patients and becomes almost catatonic with guilt, grief, and self-doubt.
    • Dr. Cox reacted badly to the birth of Jack, feeling ignored and like he couldn't love him. He's critical of Jordan for paying too much attention to the baby. Harmless, until we find out three years later that Jordan had post-partum depression.
  • SCTV's famous CCCP1-Russian Television episode, in which the show is "taken over" by a Soviet broadcast, includes several sketches deriding Uzbeks, like a PSA about them being "the weak link in the great chain of socialism", a warning against giving them matches and the famous line "Uzbeks drank my battery fluid!" At the time race relations in the USSR were pretty peaceful and if any Russians saw that episode then they probably found the suggestion that Russians hate Uzbeks as something completely farcical. Nowadays, it does not seem that unrealistic, since Uzbekistan is one of the largest sources of illegal immigrants to Russia, and people from Central Asia are now the primary targets of hate crimes committed by Russian Neo-Nazi thugs.
  • The SeaQuest DSV episode "The Regulator" contains the following dialogue relating to a character who faked his death in 2003:
    Crocker: Not dead either.
    Bridger: Might as well be. A genius whose every effort failed. And then he fakes a suicide to escape the ridicule of his peers.
    Lucas: I can sympathize with that.
    • Pretty depressing considering Jonathan Brandis (who played Lucas) died of suicide in 2003.
  • Seinfeld:
    • In one episode that originally aired in 1993, Elaine is anxious for her boyfriend Joel Rifkin to change his name, in order to avoid being confused with the famous serial killer, and picks out the name "O.J." for him from a football magazine. Seven months later, O. J. Simpson was accused and tried for the murder of his wife, making him one of the most notorious murder suspects of the 20th century.
    • The episodes where Kramer gets Mistaken for Racist (e.g. "The Puerto Rican Day") are a lot less funny since Kramer's actor, Michael Richards, wound up in hot water for using the N-word against some hecklers while performing standup comedy in 2006.
  • Sesame Street:
    • Kermit's song "I Wonder 'Bout the World Above" becomes harder to take when you realize it's one of the last segments Jim Henson ever filmed for the show. He didn't have to wonder for much longer...
    • A magazine cover from The '70s showcases a giant Cookie Monster attacking the World Trade Center (parodying King Kong). 25 years later, it isn't really funny at all.
    • The 2001 "Hurricane on Sesame Street" story arc became this when Hurricane Sandy struck New York in 2012.
  • The Seven Days episode "Pinball Wizard" featured an aircraft being crashed into the The Pentagon during an attack, complete with faux footage of the building with one side blown in, and faux news coverage of the wreckage and mass casualties. It was filmed in 1999.
    • There was also an episode where a bunch of terrorists rammed a helicopter full of explosives into the Statue of Liberty.
  • Sherlock: in "The Great Game", Moriarty is found to be using the first name "Jim" for his consulting criminal business as a reference to the children's program Jim'll Fix It.note  In "The Reichenbach Fall", Moriarty returns as a Depraved Kids' Show Host. Later that year, it was discovered that Jimmy Savile, the presenter of Jim'll Fix It, was a pedophile.
  • The Granada Sherlock Holmes episode "The Dying Detective" takes on a whole new significance when you know that Jeremy Brett, who played Holmes, died the year after it was filmed. (Also of note: The A&E Biography of Sherlock Holmes — featuring Jeremy Brett's costar David Burke — aired the same day Jeremy Brett died.) In fact, "The Dying Detective" was filmed the way it was, putting more focus on Watson than the original story really had, because Brett was dying; this is also true of "The Mazarin Stone," which featured Watson and Sherlock's brother Mycroft.
  • Shipping Wars: After a harrowing run that turned out to be part of a practice paramilitary exercise, a client jokes with Roy that he hoped he didn't give him a heart attack. Just a few days after the episode originally aired, Roy in fact passed away from a heart attack.
  • Silicon Valley: In an amusingly awkward scene, Gavin Belson compliments Peter Gregory on how healthy he looks. However, the actor who plays Peter Gregory died of lung cancer before the season finished shooting.
  • Skins:
    • Going back in time, we find that the series is actually quite fond of this: in every generation, one main character dies, and before said death, there is a harsher in hindsight moment...
      • For the first generation: in series 2, Chris delivers this line to Cassie as a joke before she goes to meet with Sid (and in the following episode, he dies in Cassie's arms):
        Chris: Yeah, you'll move in with him and I could be, like, dying, yeah, and you wouldn't even know about it."
      • Literally so in Chris's case since he dies of a subarachnoid haemorrhage, which are often caused by a brain aneurysm bursting.
      • For the second generation: on Freddie's centric episode in series 3, Naomi answers a question in English class about Hamlet, comparing Hamlet to a teenage boy and very obviously drawing parallels between him and Freddie. She finishes by saying (paraphrasing here) "... he ends up so boring somebody has to kill him." Until Effy's episode in Series 4, that was a harmless joke.
      • For the third generation: in series 6, Grace dies, which makes it painfully hard for fans to re-watch the following exchange in series 5:
        Rich: "Where are you going?"
        Grace: "To a fucking castle in the clouds."
  • Skithouse featured a sketch called "Irwin Stevens: Suicidal D***head", parodying Crocodile Hunter host, Steve Irwin. 2-3 years after the sketch aired, Irwin was killed by a stingray while filming.
  • The Sooty Show features a constant running joke in one episode where Soo criticizes Matthew for his bad taste in music - with Matthew arguing that his music isn't in bad taste as he's a massive fan of Gary Glitter. At one point he even turns to the audience, says: "I do like Gary Glitter, don't you"? and winks. After Gary Glitter's arrest over having child porn on his computer, the line takes on a disturbing new meaning.
  • The Sopranos. During Christopher's drug intervention, he counters Tony's criticism of his addiction by decrying Tony's weight and says that he's gonna die of a heart attack by the time he's 50. James Gandolfini died of just that on 19 June 2013, at the age of 51.
  • The Soup made hay with an Alternative Character Interpretation of reality show Jon and Kate Plus 8 which portrayed Jon as a henpecked husband to needlessly bossy Kate; one skit took an argument over coupons and ended with him dying of suicide. As it turns out, the marriage was indeed miserable, and while The Soup — irreverent by nature — kept up with the show and its stars even after they officially filed for divorce in June 2009 (the show continued for a while as Kate Plus 8), one episode joked that it was "just kind of sad now".
  • Spaced: Tim's portrayal as a Caustic Critic/Fan Hater of the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy and Jar Jar Binks in particular became less amusing after Jake Lloyd, who played Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace, admitted to being bullied for his performance in the years afterward, but even more so after 2018, where not only has toxicity in nerd culture become a hot topic in the wake of the online harassment of Kelly Marie Tran over her role as Rose in The Last Jedi, it was revealed that Jar Jar's actor, Ahmed Best, contemplated suicide over similar harassment. It got to the point that Simon Pegg not only chewed out the people responsible for the harassment but even though he admits to only criticizing Jar Jar the character, he also felt shame for possibly having a hand in influencing Best's harassment.
  • Spatz, a British sitcom set in a fast-food restaurant, featured a character named Stanley, a ditz who was nevertheless surprisingly skilled with computers (and ballroom dancing). In one episode he tells his colleagues about a girl he's been talking to over the internet and they encourage him to ask her on a date - this was in 1990 when the internet was still far from mainstream and internet dating was practically unheard of. When Stanley eventually meets her at the end of the episode, she turns out to be about nine years old. This was meant as an innocent joke (silly Stanley never thought to ask her how old she is) but has a more sinister resonance now given the rise of online 'grooming' of children by sexual predators.
  • Spitting Image, being a sketch show, had this happen multiple times.
    • Prince Andrew's song from the first series, 'I'm Just a Prince Who Can't Say No' already comedically dark due to allegations at the time of infidelity on his part, is even worse now due to allegations of assault against an underage girl.
    • Terry Waite was introduced in one of the first episodes as admitting that he only became Robert Runcie's Assistant for Anglican Communion Affairs and a Hostage Negotiator so he could buy lots of goods Duty Free. Then, the real-life version was taken hostage.
  • Stargate SG-1:
    • The initial oohing and ahhing about their UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicle), to be followed by their casual use in pretty much every other episode of the series, takes on a whole new tone when you look at what the Real Life version of that technology lead to.
    • In the episode "2010" (which aired in 2000/2001 but takes place in 2010), it is stated that General Hammond died of a heart attack a couple of years previously. Don S. Davis (General Hammond's actor) actually died of a heart attack in 2008. The series does The Character Died with Him and had Hammond die off-screen of a heart attack, after which the latest BC-304 ship was named after him.
    • The season 9 two-parter "The Fourth Horseman" involves a flu-like alien virus spreading across the globe, hospitalizing and killing many people, gaining mass media coverage, and causing widespread panic and disruption of everyday life. Needless to say, watching this feels quite a bit different after the year 2020.
    • Also, In the Season 7 two-parter finale (the end of the first part, more specifically), when introduced to Hammond's temporary replacement, Weaver, Bra'tac asks if Hammond of Texas (his term of respect for the General) had fallen in battle. It becomes a lot more harsh when watching it after Davis' death.
  • Stargate Atlantis: Back in season 3, when Rodney was blasted by some weird Ancient technology and worrying about the effects it could have on him, Elizabeth jokingly asked Dr. Beckett, "What are the chances it could make him more pleasant?" Then, in season 5, Rodney contracts a brain parasite whose effects are to take away his memory, drastically reduce his intelligence, and make him much friendlier.
  • Star Trek:
    • Star Trek: The Original Series:
      • The ending of "Space Seed", especially Spock's comment about "return[ing] to that world in a hundred years to learn what crop has sprung from the seed [Kirk] planted". As Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan tells us, the planet will be destroyed by a natural disaster in six months; the future they're all envisioning doesn't exist, and furthermore, Khan, who is at this point grateful for the opportunity, will come to blame Kirk for their suffering and hate him for it.
      • The Enterprise crew goes back in time for the episode "Assignment: Earth". Spock mentions that an unnamed important person is supposed to be assassinated on that day. Since the episode was meant as a "backdoor pilot" for another show, this was not elaborated upon. However, six days after the episode first aired on March 29, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. This episode ended up being a lot more eerily prescient than just that. It's not that far ahead of Robert Kennedy's assassination either, and on top of that, Gary Seven was attempting to stop the launch of a nuclear weapons platform into orbit. On the same day as MLK's assassination, NASA also launched a Saturn V rocket (not, however, carrying nuclear weapons) which suffered a malfunction and ended up going way off course, leading to a fan theory that within the Star Trek universe, this was the Saturn V launch, and the real-life cause of the crash was a cover story for the events of the episode. Spock's prediction of an uprising in Asia is also sometimes tied to a coup in Iraq, but that was over three months later.
      • At the end of "The Changeling", Kirk cracks a joke about the Monster of the Week they just beat: "It's not easy to lose a bright and promising son. [...] Kind of gets you right there, doesn't it?" Oh... ow... yes. Yes, it does.
      • There exists a PSA poster where TOS Spock encourages people not to smoke and participate in the Great American Smokeout. The PSA poster was released in 1989, 25 years before Spock's actor Leonard Nimoy publicly disclosed he had COPD, which was brought upon by years of smoking, eventually dying from it a year later.
    • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
      • "Half a Life" featured David Ogden Stiers as a scientist who starts a relationship with Lwaxana Troi, but despairs that it's too late for them to truly be together as he turns sixty in a few days, which is when his species undergoes compulsory euthanasia. Stiers came out of the closet at age 66, expressing his regrets that keeping his homosexuality secret for so long had prevented him from having any kind of stable relationship and that he hoped to finally have one in his remaining years. He died nine years later.
      • In "Symbiosis", Merritt Butrick (better known to Trek fans as David Marcus, Captain Kirk's son) played an alien suffering from a worldwidw plague. Less than a year after the episode aired, he died of AIDS. What makes things even harsher is the (probably unintentional) Reality Subtext, as the entire reason why Buttrick took the role was that he needed money for his AIDS medication.
      • Star Trek: Generations twisted the final moment of the TNG episode "Family" from a Heartwarming Moment into this kind of moment. The final scene shows Picard's brother Robert and his wife Marie looking out their back window at their son Rene as he sits gazing at the stars. At the time, it implied Rene might follow in his uncle's footsteps. No, he won't, since Generations reveals that he and his father both died in a fire offscreen. (And that final scene in "Family" even has a blazing fireplace in the background!) Poor Marie.
      • At the end of "Lower Decks", Picard ends up having to make an announcement to the crew when Ensign Sito is presumed killed after she takes part in an espionage mission, with him even mentioning how "Her loss will be deeply felt by all who knew her". As we later learn in the show of the same name, her friend Mariner is still reeling from her death 11 years after the fact to the point that she actively sabotages her own career just so she'll never have to be in a position where she might have to send one of her other friends off to die.
      • While not exactly funny, episodes involving Romulus have gained a little bit of a bittersweet overtone since their airing. "The Defector" had a disgraced and banished Romulan general who'd defected to stop an all-out Romulan/Federation war (actually part of a ploy by Romulus to start said war, albeit the general didn't know that), leaving behind a suicide note to be delivered to his child; the ending played up the hopes that, one day, relations would eventually be good enough between the two sides that the Federation could deliver it personally. The two-parter "Unification" ends on a hopeful note that the young of Romulus will eventually replace their warmongering elders and embrace their relationship with Vulcan on far more friendly terms. Neither will happen; the Romulus of this universe was canonically vaporized by a supernova in Star Trek (2009), giving Nero the impetus to go back in time and screw around with the alternate universe of the Abrams films. This is subverted in Star Trek: Discovery, where it's revealed in the far future that the remnants of the Romulan Empire did indeed peacefully reunite with the Vulcans.
      • The second season episode "Pen Pals" has Wesley Crusher confiding to Commander Riker that he's scared of making a mistake where someone dies. Wesley ends up making a stupid mistake that kills a Starfleet classmate in the fifth season episode "The First Duty".
      • Also in Season 2, in "Up The Long Ladder", Riker gets offered the opportunity to be cloned. But he refuses, giving an impassioned speech about how cloning him diminishes him in ways he can't even imagine. In the sixth season episode "Second Chances", he finds out that he's had an identical duplicate, created by a Teleporter Accident, for years!
      • "The Wounded", the first episode to feature the Cardassians, has Picard hunting down Capt. Benjamin Maxwell, who has been conducting coordinated attacks against the Cardassians, suspecting that they've been rearming themselves, and asks Picard for his assistance. Although he is correct, he still gets arrested by Picard, who decides keeping the peace is more worthwhile, but he tells the Cardassian leaders "We'll be watching..." But, in light of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which showed the Cardassians helping spark the Dominion War, you can't help but wonder whether Picard should have taken Maxwell's advice after all. Maxwell's line "I have prevented war, or at the very least delayed it a good long time." stings more than ever.
      • In "Redemption: Part II", when the Enterprise crew first encounters Sela, the Half-Human Hybrid daughter of the alternate timeline Tasha Yar from "Yesterday's Enterprise", Dr. Crusher initially believes she was Tasha's clone created to try to undermine Starfleet. In Star Trek: Nemesis, Picard learns the Romulans had created a clone of him meant to Kill and Replace him, hoping to undermine Starfleet.
      • In "Yesterday's Enterprise", the alternate timeline Enterprise-D tries to hold off a Klingon attack, and experiences a coolant leak which starts a warp core breach. In Star Trek: Generations, the actual Enterprise-D get destroyed the same way. Thankfully, the actual Enterprise had a little more time to escape (5 minutes versus "Yesterday's Enterprise"'s 2 minutes).
      • At the end of "Descent: Part II", Data reasons against trying to install the emotion chip because in part he hates having placed his friend Geordi in danger while under its influence. In Star Trek: Generations, he elects to install the chip, only for it to malfunction and for him to find himself paralyzed by fear while Geordi gets beaten up and kidnapped by Soren on the observatory, proving his initial fears correct and leaving him feeling guilty.
    • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
      • The two-part episode "Past Tense" sends Sisko, Bashir, and Dax back to San Francisco in the year 2024 by way of a transporter malfunction. They are separated when Sisko and Bashir get taken to a Sanctuary District, a walled-off part of the city where the city's homeless and destitute are left to live in squalor. The reason these places exist in the first place is because of widespread joblessness due to a wrecked economy, with hints of anarchy in Europe. The references to the economy are particularly cringe-inducing, given the current state of our own. Fortunately for our heroes, all of these conditions force tension in the Sanctuary Districts to come to a head. Riots break out, and through a series of events the normal timeline is restored, and so is the Federation.
      • Not only that, but as the episode was filming, the Mayor of Los Angeles proposed moving the homeless population into walled-off districts, much like in the episode. The producers were understandably freaked out.
      • Now about that anarchy in Europe...Yeah. They made a movie about it in 2006: District 13.
    • Still on Star Trek, the protesters against the current regime in Thailand could not have chosen a more prophetic name.
  • Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi opens with a flashback taking place during the Order 66 sequence in Revenge of the Sith, showing a Jedi Master trying to protect his youngling students from the attacking clonetroopers. The series suffered the misfortune of premiering shortly after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 schoolchildren and 2 teachers were slain, thus necessitating a disclaimer pointing out the proper context to the scene. It got worse when the series revealed that Reva, the Third Sister, was a youngling who survived the attacks by feigning death, hiding among the slain younglings, similar to how one of the surviving Uvalde students survived the shooting by hiding among her murdered classmates.
  • St. Elsewhere:
    • The last episode, released in 1988, had a Logo Joke where throughout the credits, Mimsie, the cat from the MTM logo, was seen on a hospital bed as the beeps of a life monitor played in the background. When the credits ended, Mimsie flatlined. Mimsie died for real that exact same year.
    • While the rapist is terrorizing the hospital, Dr. Fiscus offers to escort some of the female nurses to their cars and is turned down because the women don't know if he's the rapist or not. He tells Dr. Morrison offhand that he feels bad because they don't know what the women are going through... until a couple of seasons later when Morrison is himself raped.
  • The supposedly humorous subplot of an episode of Strong Medicine has Dr. Jackson informing the staff that the hospital is preparing an emergency response team in the event of a terrorist or nuclear attack. Even though someone specifically asks, "You mean like another World Trade Center bombing?", everyone basically scoffs at the idea, and he and Lana (the receptionist) are viewed as ridiculously overreacting to an unlikely scenario — particularly when she flips out when she thinks a repairman is trying to spread a biological or toxic agent. The storyline became completely unfunny when one month after the episode aired, the 9/11 attack took place, with the anthrax attacks beginning a week later.
    • Dr. Jackson even uses the term "weapons of mass destruction" at one point, which rapidly became part of the country's vernacular following the attack, to the point of parody.
  • Supernatural:
    • While the internal Mood Whiplash of "Mystery Spot" made Dean's (fake) deaths slightly less funny, his being killed (at least until the 2008 fall season premiere) made them, and all of his other deaths and death wishes, unbelievably painful to watch during the summer of 2008.
    • The Trickster's antics in "Tall Tales" (one of their breather episodes) become a hell of a lot less funny when you learn just how cruel the Trickster can be—specifically, that he could kill Dean over and over again to stop Sam from thinking that he could save him. Not to mention when you find out that the Trickster knows how it feels to have your family ripped apart, but still does it anyway to try and teach them a lesson.
    • The angel-in-a-whorehouse sequence in season 5's "Free to Be You and Me" is funny. But the next episode, "The End," involves a burnt-out, alcoholic, heavily stoned version of that angel, who apparently holds orgies on a regular basis. Then when Dean gets back to his own time, he claps a hand on Castiel's shoulder and tells him, "Don't ever change." Come Season 6...
    • The hunter accusing Sam of bringing about the Apocalypse is a lot less funny when you realize that he ( and Dean, it was a team effort ) actually does end up bringing about the Apocalypse, albeit accidentally.
    • Dean's banter with Bela about her father becomes a lot less funny when we learn later that she was sexually abused as a child.
    • A small one, but in "Lazarus Rising", Bobby greets Pamela with "Well aren't you a sight for sore eyes." This promptly becomes less funny when her eyes burn out in the next scene.
    • In "Appointment In Samarra", Tessa explains to Dean, who gets to be Death for a day, that when people die, they will ask him a few questions, and Dean jokingly says "how did Betty White outlast me?" Sadly since December 31, 2021, it would be the other way around.
  • Survivor:
    • A running gag from the Survivor Sucks message board involved posters pretending that B.B. Andersen died as a trick to play on newbies. After October 29, 2013, the date when he actually died, that joke became a lot less funny.
    • Another running gag on the same forum involved a picture of Africa's Silas Gaither shirtless at a charity event in a suggestive pose. A thread revolved around taking this picture and posting it alongside pictures of other people to simulate Silas "screwing" the person. This thread became harsher in hindsight following Gaither's November 2019 arrest for rape.
  • The pilot of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles opens with Sarah Connor having a nightmare of a Terminator shooting her son John point-blank, resulting in his death, with Sarah unable to do anything to save him. It was all just a nightmare then…until Terminator: Dark Fate opened with a T-800 Terminator (“Carl”) fatally shooting John at point-blank range, with Sarah unable to do anything to save him, after they had succeeded at erasing Skynet from history. And this time, it wasn’t merely a nightmare - it happened for real.
  • That '70s Show:
    • A good in-universe example of something almost immediately harsher in hindsight:
      Eric: You know, it wouldn't kill you to be nice once in a while.
    • The same episode does have a heartbreaking real-world example though during the otherwise hilarious funeral scene when each character observes Grandma Forman's open casket and we hear the thoughts that run through their head. Laurie reflects on how life is complicated because you "get all old and die... thank God I'm young and hot!" In light of the death of actress Lisa Robin Kelly at the age of 43, it's cringe-inducing.
    • At one point Red fakes a heart attack to get Kitty to get off his ass about something. A few seasons later he actually has one. Additionally, the episode "Cat Fight Club" features Red imagining how he thought the year 1997 would turn out and bemoaning that he'll have a heart attack before getting a jetpack. At first a joke about there being no jetpacks in 2000 (the year the episode aired), little did Red know how right he was.
    • During the episode where the gang, Red, and Bob went to see a wrestling match, Donna starts wrestling Eric, only for Eric not to wrestle back, and Hyde quip "why would he?" when Donna asks about it. Additionally, when Hyde takes the fall for Jackie buying pot, the gang makes so cracks about Hyde becoming someone's "girlfriend" while in jail. Danny Masterson, who played Hyde, was fired from The Ranch after being accused of rape. He would later be convicted in May 2023.
    • A big deal is made of Bob and Midge renewing their vows, which is particularly sweet after they'd fought and argued for so long. And then Midge abruptly leaves him and Donna just two seasons later.
  • That Mitchell and Webb Look: One 2007 sketch began with the last minute of a news story about then-beloved comedian Jimmy Savile (mentioned elsewhere on this page) being given three life sentences for unspoken crimes.
    Newsreader: A spokesman said, "You think you know a guy, and then he goes and does something like that."
  • That Was the Week That Was ended most episodes with presenter David Frost reading from the next day's papers, and on 29 December 1962, one of the excerpts he read was from the Sunday Express column "Cross-Bencher", the unreliable predictions of which had been mocked earlier in the episode. Cross-Bencher said that Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell, who had been making regular hospital visits for some time but was reportedly on the mend, had nothing to worry about on the health front, prompting Frost to remark, "Sorry, Hugh!" Three weeks later, Gaitskell died suddenly from lupus erythematosus.
  • The first episode of the short-lived ABC sitcom Thea had a reference by the oldest son in which he fantasized about rescuing Whitney Houston from drowning becomes quite uncomfortably considering how Houston died.
  • The Thick of It:
    • Chris Langham oozes sarcasm as Hugh Abbot. "What, Hugh Abbot as Home Secretary? But the man's a social spastic and probably a registered nonce." Not such a funny line in light of later events.
    • In the first episode, Hugh Abbot hosts a press conference in a school. Considering the fact he was arrested for watching CP, it can make it not as funny.
    • In another episode, Abbot complains that the photo attached to his press releases makes him "look like a disgraced geography teacher."
  • Titus:
    • In the episode in which Shannon (Titus's sister) reunites with her Swedish boyfriend, Stefan, Titus tells her not to do it because Stefan wanted her to have an abortion to get rid of the baby (which already died when she had a miscarriage), but Shannon goes with Stefan anyway because she wanted to stand up for herself and make a decision that she knew was right. In Neverlution, it's revealed that Shannon died of suicide because her boyfriend kept breaking up with her and the constant rejection pretty much drove her crazy (and nothing about it was funny, not even in a dark way).
    • "Houseboat":
      • One of the Neutral Spacenote  moments has Titus holding a present and telling the audience that his dad finally understands that love and forgiveness is better than hatred and vengeance, then adds, "Next year, we'll teach him that heart attacks are not like women; you just can't keep having them." According to The Fifth Annual End of the World Tour, Titus's dad really did die of a heart attack.
      • The flashback of Dave (as a child) reviving Ken after the paramedics pronounced him dead from a heart attack by opening a can of beer (with Ken spitting out the beer because it's warm, then hitting on the female paramedic operating the defibrillator). In fact, all of the references to Ken's heart attacks (especially the first season finale "Episode Eleven") are considerably less funny in hindsight.
    • There were a lot of moments in which Titus's dad doubted that his son and Erin would be together forever, which Titus tried to prove wrong time and again. In reality, Christopher Titus and his wife Erin Carden (the inspiration for the character's girlfriend) divorced three years after the show was canceled (and, in the comedy special Love Is Evol, Titus revealed that Erin [renamed "Kate" for legal reasons] tried to ruin his life to the point that Titus wanted to kill himself and denounce his faith in God — until he found love with a woman who wasn't a psycho-bitch and had a normal, loving family, something that Titus initially found odd as he's never been around mentally stable women or loving, functional families).
  • Today: On December 30, 2014, the show aired an original musical production involving both on-air personalities and off-air staffers. One scene involved Matt Lauer taking off his pants and ironing them in the hallway as the show's female anchors enter the hallway. Lauer, with his back to the camera, opens his suit jacket as if to expose himself to the women as they walk by in disgust, showing the shirt and tie he was wearing. This scene now looks cringe-worthy in light of his 2017 firing due to sexual harassment allegations and even worse with newer allegations rising to the level of being accused of rape.
    • This also clouds some of Lauer's pre-Today career. On October 27, 1993; Lauer (then a local anchor who co-anchored the 5:00 "Live at Five" newscasts for NBC flagship station WNBC-TV 4 in New York City) was on set while co-anchor Sue Simmons interviewed Howard Stern on his book when Stern made several suggestive comments toward Simmons, while on at least one instancenote  Lauer seems to be taking some enjoyment out of watching Stern talk about trying to kiss Simmons; while shortly afterwards (following Stern appearing to attempt to kiss a blonde named Katherine who he jokingly identified as the girlfriend of Simmons' longtime 11:00 co-anchor Chuck Scarborough) Sue (around the 40:10 mark) jokes that Matt wanted to get in on the act, followed by an additional joke by Howard about Lauer having worked for the Playboy channel.
  • The Tonight Show:
    • This appearance by Robert Blake on New Year's Eve 1976, includes a discussion about what happens when Blake fights with his (then) wife, Sondra Kerr: "The blood flows," he says. In 2002, Blake would be arrested and tried (though ultimately acquitted) for the murder of his second wife, Bonnie Lee Bakley.
    • Blake's appearance as a satanic figure (or embodiment of wrath and violence...or whatever...freakin' David Lynch...) in the film Lost Highway is primarily concerned with a man who is arrested for murdering his wife.
  • The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien featured Will Ferrell as a guest in the first episode. At the end of his segment, Ferrell sings a farewell song for Conan as a joke, who is bewildered as it is only his first night on the job. Ferrell explains that considering how fickle the networks are, they could pull the plug on his show any time. Ferrell was also Conan's final guest on the show, sending him off with a proper goodbye song this time.
  • Top Gear:
    • Absolutely anything that Richard Hammond says in episodes relating to "flying through the Pearly Gates backwards in a fireball" (or similar) that was recorded before his miraculously non-fatal high-speed crash.
      Richard: I love that vision of just blasting through the gates, backwards, in a flaming Swedish supercar! "Yes! I'm here! Where are the women?"
      • Clearly doing it upside-down in a rocket car at 288 mph is the only way to top that.
      • Similarly, there is a clip of Jeremy Clarkson saying that "no series would be complete without an earnest attempt to kill Richard Hammond"; the BBC had to remove that from its website some time after the crash.
      • Reruns of the episode where Hammond managed to roll his van during the police chase challenge have omitted Clarkson's "Well, we've just killed Richard Hammond. If you'd like a job presenting Top Gear, please write to the BBC..." gag. In a particular irony, that van show (S08-E08) was the last aired episode of Top Gear before Hammond's accident, which (had it not gone wrong) was intended to have been a feature in series 9. The footage was still shown in S09-E01, but it wasn't the footage they expected to have.
      • There was even a real-time moment when the crash footage was aired: The entire studio audience, plus co-presenters Clarkson and James May, winced when the videotaped Hammond (in what was meant to be the lead-up to an uneventful segment) described the 10,000hp afterburner on the Vampire as "possibly the biggest accident you've ever seen in your life." Clarkson unfailingly pointed out that the fateful line was meant to be funny.
      • In a double whammy for this show and Ashes to Ashes (2008), the crossover Richard did with the cast of Ashes to Ashes for Children in Need becomes this when you find out in the series finale that Ashes to Ashes takes place in a purgatory for dead and dying police officers. Granted, Richard's not a police officer, but still. Creepy.
      • Of course, since the Hammster returned to filming, they have gone right back to making jokes. Including jokes related to how badly injured Hammond was.
    • Clarkson was given a CD in a challenge to drive across Europe, supposedly to keep him awake; it was full of nothing but Margaret Thatcher speeches. He listened anyway, and him cheering about the British defense of the Falkland Islands makes you wince after later events involving a trip to Patagonia. Towards the end of their journey, Clarkson's car's number plate was misinterpreted by Argentinians as a mocking jab at the battle, and the ensuing outcry had them and their crew literally run out of town by an angry mob.
    • There is an episode where the presenters try their luck at classic fairground machines, including one that measures the strength of a punch. Jeremy Clarkson punches the crap out of it, having the strongest punching power of any of the three...
  • Top of the Pops and Jim'll Fix It:
    • Several BBC shows hosted by Jimmy Savile have him copping feels whenever he gets the chance live on air. At the time no one thought anything of it and it just looked like he was being playful. Then it turned out he'd molested over 400 children, reportedly. Similarly, one episode of pre-school show Tweenies has one character impersonating Savile.
    • There are popular clips on YouTube of such things as incidents where a young woman standing next to him on Top of the Pops suddenly jumps and squeals in a way that suggests she's just been grabbed, with the horrifying subtext that this sort of thing was happening right in front of the whole country the whole time.
  • Torchwood:
    • Gwen in "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang": "Maybe you didn't realize: you can beat, shoot, threaten and even poison us and we'll keep coming back, stronger every time." Yeah...
    • In a way, the show's opening monologue makes the grade: for the first two series, viewers were told at the start of each episode that Torchwood would "be ready" for the challenges of the 21st century; series 3's miniseries Children of Earth effectively proved that the team was anything but ready. Although it's actually an aversion too. The almost-arc phrase, "The 21st century is when everything changes", comes true. The 21st century IS when everything changed for the team. It just took a couple of series for it to happen.
  • There's a scene in Torchwood: Children of Earth where Jack and Ianto attempt to get some alone time and try to make the most of the time they have together, but it's prevented because Rhys is making beans. The scene goes from funny to sad when Ianto dies in the next episode.
  • Tweenies: In the episode "Favourite Songs", Max, one of the owners of the playgroup the titular characters attend, dresses up as Jimmy Savile to present a talent contest, complete with his mannerisms. What may have seemed like a homage to a well-loved TV personality in the early Noughties can be seen in a very different light now... The CBeebies channel even made the mistake of repeating it in January 2013, by which time the comedian's abuse had long come to light, causing parents watching the show to complain that the episode was in poor taste, leading to "Favourite Songs" becoming a Banned Episode.
  • The Twilight Zone (1959): "The Midnight Sun"'s conflict is the Earth heating up at a rapid pace to the point of becoming uninhabitable, by sheer dumb luck. In the 21st century where global warming is making that all too real a possibility, the idea of it being caused by being knocked out of orbit seems almost quaint today. Notably, the Comic-Book Adaptation in 2009 removes any mention of Earth being thrown off its axis, leaving the reader to infer that global warming is the cause of the impending apocalypse.
  • In an episode of Twin Peaks' second season, the character Richard Tremayne casually produces a cigarette and asks "Got a light?" For over twenty years, this was just a single throwaway line, and not especially memorable. Then Twin Peaks: The Return turned the line into a Mind Screw Nightmare Fuel Catchphrase.
  • One episode of Two and a Half Men had this exchange:
    Berta: You ever gonna stop drinking?
    Charlie: No, I'll just stop waking up.
    • Meant as a joke, but considering that Charlie died due to his hedonismnote  as of Season 9... it's not.
    • Consider that Charlie's lifestyle led to dire consequences for the character, and now consider the recent revelation that Charlie Sheen is HIV positive...
  • Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: In the 2015 pilot, after the four so-called "mole women" have been freed from years of captivity, they are interviewed by Matt Lauer (playing himself). Upon hearing one of them relate how she was lured into being kidnapped, he remarks "I’m always amazed at what women will do because they’re afraid of being rude." In 2017 came revelations of decades of sexual harassment/misconduct on Lauer's part. One detail with a particularly disturbing parallel to the show: his desk had a button that could lock the doors of his office (although NBC claimed this wasn't unique to him).
  • One episode of the Jim Davidson starring sitcom Up the Elephant and Round the Castle sees his character being forced to pay a heavy tax bill or be made bankrupt. Davidson really went bankrupt in 2006, in part due to a tax bill.
  • The final episode of Season 1 of Watchmen (2019) features the death of Dr. Manhattan. Three days later, his death in the series becomes one of quickest examples of type 1 of Death by Adaptation to type 2 as the final issue of Doomsday Clock also features the death of Dr. Manhattan.
  • The West Wing:
    • In the very first episode, President Bartlet limps around the White House with a cane due to riding Leo's bicycle into a cyprus tree (it was part his own klutziness and part him being so angry about his granddaughter being threatened he didn't look where he was going). In the last two seasons, he has had to use a cane regularly because the relapses of his Multiple Sclerosis severely weakened him.
    • During the Season 5 finale, Leo suffers a major heart attack. 2 years later, John Spencer died from a massive heart attack.
      • Made even harsher by the fact that in one of the last episodes Spencer appears, Josh asks Leo to take a bigger role in the presidential campaign to which Leo responds "You're all trying to kill me." And then within weeks, Spencer was dead.
    • Also, in the two-part Season 2 premiere "In the Shadow of Two Gunmen," which is about an assassination attempt, the National Security Advisor notes that they don't know the whereabouts of several international terrorists, including Osama bin Laden. This aired in September of 2000 when Bin Laden was known for implementing several acts of terror, but not as universally known as he would be just one year later.
    • In an early Season 1 episode, President Bartlett tells his youngest daughter Zoey that the scariest thing that could happen would be if she was kidnapped because that would mean the US wouldn't have a president but "a father who's out of his mind because his little girl is somewhere in a shack […] with a gun to her head". This happens at the end of the fourth season, with Bartlett being so distraught he has to temporarily step down from the presidency.
    • After President Bartlet fires Leo McGarry, Leo wanders off into the woods around Camp David and has a massive heart attack. Though he survives, it takes until the morning for security to find him. During the filming of the seventh season, John Spencer, Leo's actor, died quite suddenly of a heart attack, necessitating the killing off of his character (by the same method).
    • When Leo returns to work after his heart attack, the rest of the senior staff pitches in to buy him a present: A defibrillator. Not quite so funny now...
    • The clearest example, though, is in the first episode of season 7. Leo suggests that maybe he shouldn't be Santos's running mate, to which Santos replies, "I'm not gonna fire you. You wanna get out of this, you're gonna have to drum up another heart attack or something." Of course, Leo dies of another heart attack and does "get out of" being VP.
    • Also in the episode that aired directly after John Spencer's death, which had been preceded by a message from Martin Sheen relaying the news, Toby Zeigler has the line "Disappointed to reach me? Somebody dead?" when Josh complains about how hard it was to reach him by phone.
    • This was a case of Real Life Writes the Plot, as John Spencer was having heart problems before he died; they wrote all those scenes in as a way to reduce his screen time.
    • The first season finale is a twofer — the plot both concerns reentry problems with the Space Shuttle Columbia and has the President half-seriously threaten to invade Baghdad.
    • One episode is centered on a free-trade agreement that caused thousands of programming jobs to move to India, and one union representative laments that it may end up with him working at a video rental counter. While it sounded like being forced to work a dead-end job when it aired in 2004, the mass closure of video rental stores less than a decade later makes it sound even more hopeless.
    • The show ruthlessly attacks the political left-wing, frequently deriding them as mindless contrarians with baseless criticisms of moderate politics. To those watching with the benefit of hindsight, they would see these dismissals of the left wing as a major factor that led to the rise of far-right leaders during The New '10s, most notably Donald Trump's surprise win against Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election.
  • In Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Bob, seeing his friend Terry note  slumping into aimless unemployed lethargy, warns him that he is turning into Andy Capp. Terry retorts that he is proud to be compared to a working-class Geordie icon like Andy Capp. Scroll forward fifteen years or so to the live-action TV remake of Andy Capp. Who should be playing Andy but James Bolam?
  • Wheel of Fortune:
    • On April Fool's Day 1991, Vanna had a cushion under her dress in the final segment, as a means of tricking Pat and viewers into thinking she was pregnant. This suddenly became much less funny when she had a miscarriage in September 1992.
    • The 1992 puzzle VANNA'S PREGNANT also became this when said miscarriage happened before the episode could air in November of that year. The puzzle was edited out.
  • Parodied in The Whitest Kids U' Know when a hunter is making a tasteless joke about hunting accidents at the expense of a friend — the friend died in a hunting accident just the other day. He insists that this makes it exceptionally funny, while the other members of the hunting party are more reluctant to laugh.
  • In Season 5 of Will & Grace, Gene Wilder appears in several episodes as Mr. Stein, one of the head partners of Will's law firm. In his introductory episode, Stein is extremely absentminded and has short-term memory loss, and routinely needs to be reminded of his identity and surroundings. Will later finds him having a breakdown in the men's room, and Stein admits that he's been absent from the firm because he was in a mental hospital; he claimed he was working in the firm's London office in order to protect his professional reputation. After Wilder's death in 2016, his family revealed that he was suffering from Alzheimer's, and that he'd kept his illness a secret to avoid upsetting and disappointing young fans of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
  • Whose Line Is It Anyway?:
    • In another episode, also for the skit "Weird Newscasters", Ryan was to do the weather as "Siegfried and Roy whose act is going dangerously wrong." In October of 2003, Roy was mauled by one of their male white tigers, Montecore, during a performance in Las Vegas.
    • During this game of "Scenes From a Hat", Wayne's suggestion of "The shortest books ever written" was "The Life and Times of Gary Coleman". At the time it was merely a crack at Coleman's height, but his early death in 2010 rendered it this trope.
    • A famous disallowed game of "Sitcom" featured "Bill Cosby and Hitler". It was disallowed because the producers didn't want to joke about Hitler. Now, after Cosby's been hit with numerous rape allegations, they probably wouldn't want to joke about him, either.
  • There is a show on the History Channel called Wild West Tech, hosted by David Carradine. A 2005 episode featured him detailing the differences between two noose knots. It gets better: at the end of the segment, he signs off: "Don't try this at home." Considering he died by erotic self-asphyxiation gone wrong, the reruns since 2009 are...uncomfortable.
  • Wings: There was an episode where Joe and Brian are hiring a temp and one of the applicants is a gorgeous woman. Although she's more than qualified, Brian insists they don't hire her because she is so beautiful he'll be tempted to sleep with her. Joe agrees because he thinks Helen will be jealous. Mildly amusing when the episode aired in the late 90s, but in 2012 a woman in Iowa was fired by her married employer because he found her looks too tempting and he was afraid he would try to sleep with her and ruin his marriage.
  • The X-Files episode "Beyond the Sea" opens with Captain William Scully, Scully's father, dying of a massive coronary off-screen. Fourteen years later, Don S. Davis who played him would die of the exact same thing.
    • In "Duane Barry", Mulder tries to intimidate a skeptical detective by asking if she'd like to know what aliens do to a woman's ovaries after an abduction. The end of the same episode sees Scully abducted, an experience which she later finds out leaves her unable to have children; her ova were extracted as part of the experiments to which she was subjected.
    • In-Universe Example: In "Requiem" there are two notable scenes, one in which Mulder longingly watches Scully play with a witness's baby and the next scene, where he tells her the quest isn't worth it. These scenes are emotional enough but become even more heartbreaking after watching Season 8 and learning that at the time "Requiem" was set, Mulder and Scully had gone through a round of IVF — which failed, and Mulder was secretly dying of brain cancer and did not expect to live long.
    • The recurring gag about Mulder's porn fetish is suddenly a lot less funny after David Duchovny admitted that he had a severe sex addiction and went in for rehab in 2008.
    • Then there was the time a comic-relief stoner (played by Seth Green) sarcastically suggests that Area 51 is a testing ground for "robot planes for Gulf War II".
  • Shortly after they were acquired by G4, X-Play responded to a question from a fan concerned about future changes to the show that might result. Between shots, Adam Sessler was replaced with another actor. Years later, Adam would be unceremoniously fired while the show was being recorded.
  • As shown in the documentary Senna, when Formula One legend Ayrton Senna visited the kids show Xou da Xuxa, hosted by his then-girlfriend, she started kissing him, giving a reason for every smack - "My discovery of '88. Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! Happy '90! Happy '91! Happy '92! Happy '93!" The one year after Xuxa stopped was the one where Senna died in a race. Years later, a request to play the clip on her show got Xuxa sad as she noted the tragic coincidence.
  • The Travel Channel special Xtreme Waterparks had a behind-the-scenes look at the construction of Verrückt, the tallest waterslide in the world at Kansas City Schlitterbahn. Jokes made by the crew early in the construction process about the rafts flying off the slide, hoping not to die when the first passenger test run occurred, and remarks about how they proved the engineers and mathematicians wrong by building the slide became hard to watch without wincing in the aftermath of the accident that killed 10-year-old Caleb Schwab (in which his raft became airborne and hit the netting, decapitating him.)
  • Young Sheldon:
    • This exchange in "An Eagle Feather, a String Bean, and an Eskimo", after Georgie drops out of school in Season 5.
      Georgie: As soon as I graduate high school, I'm gonna be a professional male model.
      Connie: That is hilarious.
      Georgie: What? I'm good-looking.
      Connie: No, that you think you'll graduate high school.
    • In "Quirky Eggheads and Texas Snow Globes", Georgie reminds everyone about the time that there was snow in Texas, in order to sell snow globes. Less than two years after this episode aired, there was indeed snow in Texas, only it led to the worst power outage in state history, causing hundreds of deaths and billions of dollars in damage.
    • In "A Clogged Pore, a Little Spanish and the Future", Sheldon brings up monkeypox to the doctor who is checking out his pimple and assures the doctor that it may not sound real, but it is. Following this episode's production was a real-life outbreak of monkeypox in the UK, which quickly spread around the world.
  • On an episode of Zoom from 1999, the kids are engaging in a chat about where they will be in ten years. Jared remarks that in ten years, he will be living in the sky. His humorous and ad-libbed line stopped being funny when, in 2006, he was killed in a car accident less than ten years after the airing of that episode.
  • The much-admired musician and TV personality Rolf Harris has entered this territory, since being convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault in 2014. This includes a comic speech by Rowan Atkinson playing an Australian who has mistakenly been called to speak instead of Sir Alec Guinness, and asked to recite verse by his country's greatest bard. He recites something from 'the collected works of Rolf Harris'. It has a wallaby in it. Post-scandal, Australia is now distancing itself from Rolf Harris.
  • On this theme, a sketch on Not the Nine O'Clock News broadcast in 1980, depicts Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith and Gryff Rhys Jones forcibly abducting a group of terrified and crying children and forcing them into the back of a van. As it drives away, the logo on the side of the van reveals that they are working for the BBC and are in fact rounding up the studio audience for the Rolf Harris show on children's TV, with the implication that none of them would have attended willingly. Four decades on, the idea of children being forced onto a television show hosted by an entertainer who now has a record for sexual crime would be even more edgy.
  • One of those "cops with cameras" TV shows, the sort which are on a never-ending repeat loop on British TV, was filmed in Salisbury, Wiltshire. A cop, threatened with a large and truculent person, actually said, on camera, "If you carry on offering me violence, somebody is going to get gassed in this town." The cop meant his pepper spray, CS Gas, or whatever. However, in the light of more recent events in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England...

Alternative Title(s): Live Action TV

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