Historical Villain Upgrade / Live-Action TV

Historical Villain Upgrades in live-action TV.

---

Examples with real people

Multi-work examples:

• Common on "exposé" made-for-TV movies about popular TV shows: the most controversial cast member will inevitably be depicted as evil incarnate, or very close to it. In a few cases, this has been at the direction of another cast member, indicating some bad blood there:
  • The Gilligan's Island TV movie turned Tina Louise (Ginger) into a selfish, prima donna diva who was furious that this broad slapstick comedy named for another actor's character was not all about her and how glamorous she really, truly was. Who was behind this portrayal? None other than Mary Ann herself, Dawn Wells.
  • The Three's Company TV movie likewise depicted Suzanne Somers (Chrissy) as a stupid and self-centered diva with no regard for anyone. This one was even more blatant in its intentions, for who was always the biggest victim of Sommers's schemes? Why, Joyce DeWitt, who played Janet. And who co-produced the movie, as it happens. Even John Ritter was depicted as having spurned DeWitt (by passing her over for the short-lived spinoff, Three's A Crowd, as if that was his decision) and being 100% in the wrong for it.

Specific series:

• American Horror Story, through its use of Historical Domain Characters, has occasionally done this.
  • There's a lot of mystery surrounding the life of Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau, but she almost certainly didn't sacrifice babies for immortality like she does in Coven.
  • Hotel presents 1920s actors Rudolph Valentino and Natacha Rambova, as well as F.W. Murnau, as vampires.
  • Cult features Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol and wrote the SCUM Manifesto, as the leader of a man-hating cult responsible for the Zodiac murders as an attempt to provoke a gendercide. Unless it was all a lie.
  • Apocalypse does this to Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan. In the show, he seeks to help the Antichrist come into being and fulfill his destiny as son of Satan-a far cry from LaVey in real life who didn't actually even BELIEVE in the Devil or God. LaVeyan Satanism is strictly antitheistic and skeptical of the supernatural and uses imagery of Satan due to regarding Satan as representing free will against what they regard as repressive rules imposed by religious institutions in the name of God.
• In the Band of Brothers episode "The Breaking Point," First Lieutenant Norman Dike is portrayed as a prima donna and a coward who, during the attack on Foy, issues confusing, contradictory orders and stalls the attack, getting good men killed due to his own incompetence. While Dike was never the best officer, the truth was that Dike had been shot twice in the chest very early in the attack. His confused collapse and incoherent breakdown during the battle was caused by blood loss and shock. The heavy cold-weather gear he had been wearing hid the fact that he had two bleeding chest wounds from his fellow soldiers, who merely assumed Dike was just being Dike again. The truth wasn't found out until Dike had been evacuated to the nearest aide station after the invasion of Foy was over.
• Becoming Elizabeth:
  • The historic Catherine Parr was guilty of being naive about her fourth husband's intentions toward her stepdaughter Elizabeth and she was also ambitious and wanted to retain her status at court. However, she was hardly the manipulative schemer portrayed in the show, and she was not spiteful toward her stepdaughter Princess Mary.
  • Thomas Seymour was accused of grooming and behaving inappropriate with his stepdaughter, Princess Elizabeth, and he very likely exploited her crush on him for political gain. However, most historians doubt he actually had a physical affair with her while married to Catherine Parr, although it does appear he planned on marrying Elizabeth after Parr's death.
  • Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somersest, absolutely wanted to stay in power, had a social climbing streak and certainly mistrusted and disliked his brother, but whether or not he was the smug and sneering villain he is early in the series is a matter of debate.
  • The historic John Dudley was known as a competent regent and unusually devoted husband and father who was not known to be abusive to his children. He was also not fanatically protestant, had little or nothing to do with the two heretics burned under Edward VI and never burned Princess Mary's iconography to spite her. In fact, some historians don't even believe he was the instigator in the attempt to put Jane Grey on the throne, but rather went along with Edward VI and Thomas Cranmer out of a combination of ambition and not unjustified fear of what Mary's reign would do to the country.
• An example of this occurs in an episode of The Big Bang Theory. The boys hate being compared to Thomas Edison and prefer Nikola Tesla, seeing the latter as a true scientist and Edison as just a guy who took credit for other people's inventions and was more concerned with being famous than actual science. While Edison did indeed have a Jerkass streak in Real Life, he is often given sole blame for Tesla's never getting some of his inventions out, even the ones that just didn't work (understanding of the laws of physics was much less complete in the late 19th and early 20th centuries than it is today, and some of the theories underlying Tesla's later failed inventions have since been proven incorrect) or that Tesla never actually intended to be used. Though it is true the pair did share an intense one-sided rivalry on Edison's part, who used his influence with the American business community to limit Tesla's opportunities, and slandered his alternating current, making Edison's direct current (a less efficient form) the standard model. At least until Edison's other rival George Westinghouse bought a license to Tesla's patent and gave alternating current the financial backing it needed to compete with Edison's direct current on the open market.
• Blackadder:
  • Played for laughs in Blackadder II, where Queen Elizabeth (called "Queenie" by fans) is a ludicrously exaggerated version of Elizabeth I, using the extremes of anti-Elizabethan propaganda to produce a Psychopathic Womanchild who orders executions on a whim and never does any actual governing. Played With though as Elizabeth does have her more sympathetic and nicer moments especially with Blackadder whom she fancies, which can be rare for adaptations featuring her.
  • The third series turns the Duke of Wellington into a bellowing Blood Knight who is hilariously verbally and physically abusive to his servants. The real life "Iron Duke" was no friend of the lower classes, but there are no accounts of him ever mistreating his staff, and one of the reasons he famously declared Napoleon "no gentleman" is that Napoleon did.
  • In the same series Samuel Johnson the creator of the dictionary is portrayed a bad-tempered and petulant jerkass — far from than the quote “charitable, sensible, and caring” doctor and linguist that he was in real life.
• In The Borgias, Giovanni Sforza is depicted as an abusive husband who rapes Lucrezia on their wedding night. The real Giovanni Sforza didn't touch Lucrezia for months after they married due to how young and childlike she was.
• Chernobyl
  • The series depicts Dyatlov, the chief engineer who was largely responsible for the disaster, as a pretty relentless Hate Sink with a Never My Fault attitude. Though it is true, by all accounts, that he was a Bad Boss and pretty much perfectly created the conditions for the reactor to blow itself apart, the real Dyatlov never attempted to blame his subordinates for what happened. In fact, he actually defended them when they were nearly scapegoated for the disaster, and consistently blamed the reactor's design flaws. He also tried to stay behind and help, which the series skipped over; in fact, the radiation poisoning he suffered was sustained from nearly being splashed by radioactive water.
  • Viktor Bryukhanov, the plant director, advocates against evacuating Pripyat because that would make it obvious that the accident is actually serious and he's trying to convince everyone higher up that it's minor. The real Bryukhanov was in favor of evacuating Pripyat, but the source for this account wasn't translated into English until after filming began—the writer said that he would have written the scene differently if he'd known.
• Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey occasionally does this in the animated segments when dealing with a case of science rivals:
  • The second episode is about Halley and Isaac Newton squaring off against Robert Hooke at the Royal Society. Although Tyson summarizes Hooke's genuine accomplishments, the episode is about the conflict between the three men, in which Hooke can't back up his claims and accuses Newton of plagiarizing his work.
  • Humphry Davy in "The Electric Boy" is portrayed as giving Faraday a futile project to replicate Josef Fraunhofer's perfect optical glass solely to keep Faraday from showing him up again. While Davy was not happy about his lab assistant inventing an electric motor (and indeed falsely accused Faraday of plagiarism), the British government was backing the glass project and it wasn't until a couple of years after Davy's death that Faraday ultimately quit the effort. On the other hand, the episode leaves out the time when Davy invited Faraday on a tour of Europe as a servant, during which time Mrs. Davy frequently mistreated and belittled him.
• Deadwood:
  • Con Stapleton. In real life, Stapleton was a popular, tall Boisterous Bruiser Irish Sheriff in his 20s who did his best to keep order in the growing camp for a year, until he was replaced by Seth Bullock and fell into obscurity. The TV show paints him instead as a pathetic, 50-something fat Butt-Monkey and Dirty Coward, that is in Al Swearengen's pocket before becoming the Bumbling Sidekick of the even worse Cy Tolliver. Con is even handpicked as Sheriff by Swearengen because he will suck at it (his first plan was to leave the position vacant) and renounces the job less than a week later after being confronted by Bullock.
  • George Hearst is changed from a successful mining magnate to a brutal tyrant who crushes all opposition, kills whomever stands in his way, and demands total obedience from everyone in sight.
• Doctor Who: Although Queen Elizabeth I had her faults, ordering her soldiers to murder a man on sight in her presence without a trial, as she does in "The Shakespeare Code", was not among them. Interestingly enough, in the episode where it's revealed exactly why she was so angry at the Doctor, she receives something of a Historical Hero Upgrade instead.
• Double the Fist presents to us the man who discovered Australia, Captain James Cook, as an egotistical Space Pirate who barely flinches at the sight of the ballistic Fist Team. Cook is not generally regarded as a villain, but he fits the bill to some, having essentially taken over an already inhabited land (as with many explorers of the era).
• The Frankenstein Chronicles: Sir Robert Peel is portrayed as blackmailing an opponent into withdrawing his motion against the Anatomy Act so it can be passed, and being pretty ruthless in general for his reforms. Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley participate in an experiment to resurrect the dead, after one of their friends volunteers. However he has to be smothered by Percy and Chester, while the apparatus cannot revive him. Chester then makes it appear to be a suicide. This inspires Mary's novel.
• The BBC miniseries Gunpowder, Treason, and Plot treats Mary, Queen of Scots far more sympathetically than Elizabeth I. Ironically, it portrays James I, the main character, as quite a Jerkass.^note Depicting James I as a Jerkass, however, may be more Truth in Television than it is this trope. Still, John Donne seems to have thought well of him.
• It is fair to say that Adolf Hitler was, by all measurements, a deplorable human being. However, CBS docu-drama Hitler: The Rise of Evil somehow manages to take this overboard. As a child, Hitler manages to kill his father simply by giving him an evil stare. Apparently deciding that this wasn't enough, the writers also twisted the incident of Hitler being awarded the Iron Cross-in real life, for several cases of genuine bravery-into a political farce. Furthermore, the film takes the relationship between Hitler and his niece, Geli Raubal, and presents it as being one of sexual abuse-Hitler's political opponent once threw out such an accusation, but there is no historical documented evidence which supports it. In general, Hitler's every action is accompanied by ominous background music, and when he isn't violently stamping on a dog's head before emptying bullets into its face, he's behaving like the villain from a Saturday morning cartoon show. In addition, the only rhetoric he is ever shown as presenting is antisemitism, with anti-Communism having a brief mention.
• I, Claudius:
  • Livia, the wife of Augustus, is characterized as an Evil Matriarch who carefully eliminates all of Augustus's potential successors, and finally Augustus himself, so that her son Tiberius could become Emperor. Modern historians view the accounts which lend to this interpretation as an historian's equivalent of gossip-mongering, and that while Livia was a politically-savvy advisor to Augustus who did lobby for her son to be named his successor, she almost certainly didn't resort to killing his rivals to succession. The accusation that she was behind Augustus's death in particular seems flimsy when taking into account that he was seventy-five when he died and had a history of life-threatening illnesses that left his contemporaries astonished that he even made it to that age.
  • While Caligula was by all accounts a very, very crappy ruler, his erratic behavior and cruelty were probably more of a mix of mental illness, a traumatic background, and being given the greatest power a man could wield in his time and the pressures that come with it, than him being born evil as the series imply. For starters, it's highly unlikely, not to say impossible, that he was behind his father Germanicus' death, given that Caligula was only six or seven years old at the time of his passing...
  • Some modern historians have cast doubt not only on the extent of Messalina's sexcapades (most of them believing that while Messalina sleeping with men of her entourage really did happen and was her way of gaining influence, the nymphomaniac levels the stories about her reach are likely exaggerated), but also about her marriage to Silius and her plan to install him as Emperor, given how outlandish and even stupid the plan is in hindsight. While it's clear something did happen between Messalina and Silius, leading to their brutal deaths, there's no way of really knowing what actually happened, given that there's no unbiased record of it all and that most public and private representations and records of Messalina were destroyed after her death, on Claudius' orders.
• John Adams does this in its treatment of Alexander Hamilton, flanderizing him from a big government Federalist into a power-mad, would-be dictator agitating for war with France. Understandable considering that Hamilton and the title character were bitter enemies.
• Piero de' Medici is the Big Bad of Leonardo, leading The Conspiracy to use Leo's inventions to overthrow the Duke of Florence. In Real Life Piero was a fairly typical Renaissance nobleman, and the Medicis had been the de facto rulers of Florence since 1434 (since there wasn't a Duke until 1532, when the title was granted to ... the Medicis).
• The Legend of Xiao Chuo: The real Yelü Jing, Emperor Muzong, was certainly no saint but wasn't responsible for Emperor Shizong's death.
• The Masters of Horror episode "The Washingtonians" depicts George Washington, of all people, as a monstrous cannibal.
• The Ministry of Time: The fourth episode of the series depicts Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, and The Spanish Inquisition as a whole, as far more ruthless than their real-life counterparts ever were. The show's version of Torquemada is an unabashed Hanging Judge who will stop at nothing to send Rabbi Abraham Levi to the stake, to the point of disregarding orders from Queen Isabella herself and even papal edicts to free him, lines the real Torquemada would have never dared cross.
• Mussolini: The Untold Story does for its title character what Hitler: The Rise of Evil did for his German counterpart: take a fascist dictator whose real evil ought to be enough to condemn him, and somehow exaggerates it. Namely, the movie includes a scene where Mussolini rapes a foreign journalist (a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Dorothy Thompson, whose experiences in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany inspired her husband, Sinclair Lewis, to write It Can't Happen Here) after a hostile interview. While Mussolini wasn't exactly known for his chivalrous treatment of women, even his harshest biographers never accused him of assaulting a well-known reporter like Thompson who, given her antipathy towards fascism, would almost certainly have broadcast his behavior to the world.
• Mystery Hunters: Discussed as a possibility in the episode looking at the disappearance of Richard III's nephews, Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury. The Yeoman Warder that Araya interviews at the start of the investigation suggests that Richard had them murdered so that he could claim the throne of England for himself. The writing on the Prince's tomb also suggests that the princes were killed on Richard's orders. However, one of other people Araya's interviews though claims that Richard was a good family man who was framed for crimes he didn't commit and that his current reputation is the result of the Tudor dynasty attempts to discredit Richard to make up for their weak claim to the throne.
• Although, as noted elsewhere, Prince John often gets this treatment in Robin Hood stories, The New Adventures of Robin Hood deserves special mention. In the show, Prince John, rather than merely being an evil king, gleefully sacrifices peasants to Celtic goddesses.
• The People v. O. J. Simpson makes Mark Fuhrman out to be a good deal worse than he was in reality, as well as much less complex. He indeed had a history of racism, which he himself even admitted to when he checked himself in for rehabilitation, and past acquaintances had complained that he had made racist remarks in the past. However, independent investigations discovered that, after his rehabilitation, he had a dearth of civilian complaints against him; he had successfully partnered with nonwhite cops (including a black female officer intentionally partnered with him to test to see if his racism continued) who considered him a friend and never felt uncomfortable with him; he had been called to Simpson's residence to answer a domestic disturbance call from Nicole and nevertheless did nothing to Simpson, and he had personally taken it upon himself to protect a black female witness who felt endangered (and befriended her as well; she would go on to defend his post-trial character). Even the infamous tapes were a product of him being paid to exaggerate a "police" style of speech. In the series, he's depicted as little more than a remorseless, two-faced racist who outright lied on the stand and owned Nazi memorabilia.
• The Plot Against America:
  • The show does an inverse on Charles Lindbergh as it does to Winchell. Lindbergh goes from a heroic aviator with outspoken isolationist views to an outright Nazi collaborator who also supports "Americanization" efforts that effectively treat Jewish Americans like aliens. He's eventually assassinated in an effort to put America back on track. In real life, Lindbergh went on to pledge his full support to the American war effort and later served substantially in the Pacific theater. He was also horrified by the revelation of Nazi extermination camps. Though he did have some Nazi sympathies it seems, he'd balked already at Kristallnacht and denounced the Nazis' persecution of Jews.
  • Burton K. Wheeler, Vice President here with Lindbergh, is also given this treatment. He's made out as even more openly antisemitic than Lindbergh, who enacts martial law. In reality, though Wheeler (like Lindbergh) opposed US intervention in the war and was possibly slightly antisemitic, he wasn't an American Nazi as the series makes out. He supported the war after Japan had attacked, and opposed martial law when it had been imposed in his home state of Montana during World War One. Wheeler overall was known for progressive views.
• CBC's miniseries Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story met with criticism in Saskatchewan (the province where Douglas used to be premier) for its portrayal of his political opponent James Gardiner. They kicked up so much of a fuss that CBC stopped airing it on CBC. The other wiki has more on it [1].
• Another Roman example: seductive, manipulative Atia of the Juli in Rome who is essentially unrecognizable from the prim and proper and rather boring historical woman.
• Sanctuary (2007) has Jack the Ripper as a time travelling teleporter, and Nikola Tesla as a electrokinetic vampire.
• Spartacus: Blood and Sand:
  • The pilot episode portrays the Getae people as inhuman savages, in comparison to the noble Thracians. In reality, the Getae were so similar to the Thracians that historians are still a little unsure what the difference was, if anything.
  • Given the perspective, this is done to several real Romans such as Batiatus and Glaber. The reality is that there is relatively little information about either outside of the former being the lanista of the ludus Spartacus escaped from and the latter being one of the first commanders trying to put down the rebellion. Although to be fair, Batiatus isn't actually presented as being all that evil...for a guy who runs a gym training slaves to kill each other for entertainment. He comes off less as an evil person, and more a person who knows he can't afford to be good. Glaber on the other hand, is callous at best and downright sadistic at worst: and raises his son to be the same way.
• Stranger Things:
  • The Russian government get a good dose of this in the third and fourth seasons. The '80s were actually an era of societal improvement for the Russian empire with the crumbling of the Iron Curtain and abolishment of the U.S.S.R. and Soviet Communism thanks in great part to the Chernobyl disaster. The president at the time Gorbachev is to this day praised for his nobility and morality, especially compared to other Russian leaders. Stranger Things however portrays the Russian troops as heartless, cackling, fascist monsters who invade America and build evil bases underneath shopping malls and feed gulag prisoners to the inter-dimensional monsters that they keep trapped, neither of which occurred in real life^* There were actually some functioning gulags in the late 80s but they still weren’t nearly as horrific as the one depicted in Season 4 . Nor was there any reports of Russia trying to open a gateway to another dimension and weaponise the monster inhabitants as far as we know.
  • On the western side the US federal government is portrayed in the show as far more unscrupulous and sinister than they ever were during the 60s to the 80s with one agency having taken children from their mothers and experimented on them to turn them into Psychic Children which didn’t occur in real life. Season 4 even takes it up notch with government troops shooting up the innocent Byers’ home and subjecting the agent who was protecting them to Cold-Blooded Torture. While Reagan‘s government certainly wasn’t spotless nothing like that ever occurred.
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Spectre of the Gun", this Trope was applied in the complete opposite way as it was in the movie Tombstone. Here, the infamous Cowboys - whom Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, and Chekov are forced to portray-are regarded as simply Lovable Rogues, while the Earp Brothers and Doc Holiday are depicted as corrupt and tyrannical lawmen intent on murdering them. Of course, the whole setup is an illusion created by a group of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens called the Melkotians, used to punish the crew for trespassing by forcing them to reenact the famous gunfight at the OK-Corral on the losing side, but it is taken from Kirk's memory (and thus interpretation) of the event.
• The Terror: Almost nothing is known of Cornelius Hickey, caulker's mate on the titular doomed ship, in real life (even his age by the time of the actual lost Franklin Expedition is in doubt), and the only real fame he has even among his fellow ill-fated crew members is that his knife was found among the debris after their collective disappearance with his name carved into the handle. The show has him go from a simple AB questioning the social mores of the Royal Navy to a deranged would-be cult leader, something the real Hickey almost certainly did not do. This turns out to be a subversion, as the man called Cornelius Hickey we see for most of the show turns out to not actually be the in-universe historical Cornelius Hickey, and is in fact an imposter with the never-clarified initials E.C. who did a Kill and Replace on the real Hickey before the expedition ever left England. The showrunners made him an imposter specifically to avoid this trope.
• In Timeless, the Nebulous Evil Organization Rittenhouse turns out to be named after and founded by David Rittenhouse, a scientifically-minded American "Founding Father", who was the first head of the U.S. Mint. While the historic Rittenhouse was by all accounts a normal/likable scholar, the fictional one is presented as a detestable Politically Incorrect Villain. According to Word of God, the creators were fully aware that the historical Rittenhouse was totally innocuous, but chose to make him a villain, because they needed a scientifically-minded Founder for that character role and the only other option was Benjamin Franklin, and they weren't going to present him as a scheming villain.
• Alice Liddell, of all people, in Warehouse 13. From a perfectly ordinary Victorian woman whose only claim to fame was that Lewis Carroll named a character after her when she was a girl, to an Ax-Crazy mirror-spirit.
  • Helena might count as well, if it wasn't for the Heel–Face Revolving Door. Although arguably she's sufficiently detached from the real H. G. Wells to count as an original character.
  • Season 4 gives us Paracelsus as the Big Bad. Granted, the real Paracelsus was not the most pleasant person to be around, but here he's not only evil enough to merit getting bronzed, but he's so evil that that the Regents expunged the records of what he did to merit getting bronzed.
• When They See Us:
  • It has been claimed that all the law enforcement characters get this, as there was more reason to think at first that the 5 were in fact guilty. In particular, Linda Fairstein is not known to have made openly racist statements which would indicate immediate bias against them.
  • Korey's mother didn't reject his sister Marci for being transgender. This has been attested to by his other sister, who is also transgender, who's slammed this portrayal, saying their mother was completely accepting.
• When We Rise: Though Charles Socarides indeed championed the idea homosexuality is a mental illness that can be cured, he never threatened to kill himself when his son came out. Richard said that, although angry at first, he wrote to him that if he was happy being gay, then embrace it.
• The White Queen:
  • The show gives this treatment to both Margaret of Anjou and her son, Edward of Westminster. Margaret is repeatedly described as having ordered the brutal murder of Richard of York by means of having him torn to pieces. In fact, Richard died in battle at Wakefield. It is true that his severed head was put on display. More generally, the show more or less accepts uncritically the view of Margaret of Anjou as a monstrous tyrant. It is true that she was a bad ruler, but that was more because she was a foreigner who did not really understand English politics and customs, and who trusted the wrong people. (The Lady of the Rivers, a prequel to the books which inspired the show, actually depicts her as such.) She was not actively trying to cause harm. Of course, the only reason she had to run the country in the first place was that her husband, King Henry VI, suffered from some sort of mental disease that made him incapable of ruling. As for Henry and Margaret's son, Edward of Westminster, he is depicted as raping his wife, Anne Neville, on their wedding night. There is no evidence for this whatsoever.
  • Interestingly, the show gives a very positive portrayal of the Woodvilles, while at the same time portraying both Jacquetta Woodville, and her daughter Queen Elizabeth, as literal witches.
  • Margaret Beaufort is a dark horse candidate for the murder of the princes in the tower but that theory isn't taken seriously by most historians, though it is popular with fiction writers. The show has her being the instigator of the murder.
• Wolf Hall gives a rare one to Sir Thomas More to go along with its rare depiction of Thomas Cromwell as not mindlessly evil. Specifically it brings to light More's treatment of heretics, depicting him as torturing them in his own house (the real More denied that he tortured them) and burning at the stake people who read aloud from Tyndale's English translation of the Bible, such as James Bainham (which is true). Cromwell even implies that More's famous Defiant to the End self-sacrifice had more to do with More's holier-than-thou ego than an honest stand for his principles.

In-Universe examples

• CSI: In the episode "It Was a Very Good Year", Tommy Grazetti is known for being a club owner and former ruthless gangster who murdered up and coming piano player Ledo Wright way back in the day. At the end of the episode the team learns that Grazetti and Wright were actually friends and Grazetti was the one who died, choking on a chicken bone listening to Wright and their friends. The Grazetti that was being investigated is actually Wright, whose friends convinced him to take Grazetti's identity in order to dodge the draft. The rumor was spread to dodge suspicion.
• In Game of Thrones Ned Stark's attempt to expose that King Joffrey is not the legitimate heir is stopped. Stark is forced to "confess" that he was a liar and trying to usurp the throne. He is forever known as a traitor by all but a few.
• How I Met Your Mother. In season 4, Ted's fiancée, Stella, leaves him at the altar to get back together with her ex, Tony. Then, at the end of season 5 Tony, who has become a successful screenwriter, makes a movie called "The Wedding Bride" which is the same basic story but takes Ted's douche qualities up to eleven with the catchphrase "No can do's-ville, baby doll."
  • May also have been an In-Universe example of Executive Meddling as Tony had previously shown genuine remorse at hurting Ted, considered leaving Stella to atone, and got Ted his teaching job.
• In Once Upon a Time, after the Curse is broken and everyone in Storybrooke get their real memories back, Doctor Whale increasingly begins to show up for work drunk, acting depressed and even contemplates suicide at one point. He reveals that the reason for his depression is because in our world, the name "Frankenstein" has become synonymous with Mad Scientist, or those who perform unethical experiments; when his sole intention was to prevent death and save lives. His "monster" was actually his own brother, who was accidentally killed whilst saving his life.
• The Outer Limits (1995): Played with in "Abaddon". Virgil Nygard was a religious fanatic who had a commune above the Columbia River in 2142. The official history of the North American Corporation, otherwise known as the Company, states that Nygard started a war against it and butchered one million people in the process. When he is found in stasis by the crew of the interplanetary hauling vehicle Pequod in 2298, he claims that the Company turned people against him as they wanted access to the mineral deposits on the commune's property. Nygard admits that he and his followers did kill people but only to defend themselves. The death count was allegedly closer to 10,000 and most of the dead were Nygard's own followers. However, the possibility is raised that Nygard is lying and that the Company's version of history is the correct one. No definite answers are given, other than the fact that the Company lied about having him executed.
• Used in the episode "Living Witness" of Star Trek: Voyager. The Voyager crew and an alien species they were trading with are depicted as a conquering and merciless group of sadistic monsters by the historians of another civilization, even engaging in massive genocide against their ancestors.

---