Live-Action TV / Imaginary Friend

In 7th Heaven, Ruthie has an imaginary friend named Hoowie for a good part of the first season; he even has part of an episode's plot focused on him when she claims that Simon "sat on him and squished him".
In an episode of 30 Rock, Tracy randomly refers to Dot Com, one of the show's regular characters, as his "imaginary friend". Dot Com tries to point out that he's not imaginary, but Tracy keeps interrupting and telling him to stop talking since no one can hear him anyway.
In The 4400, a Muggle who takes Promicin to get powers ends up with an imaginary friend who gives him seemingly prescient instructions.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
- In a heartbreaking example, Fitz hallucinates his best friend Simmons after suffering a traumatic brain injury. The hallucination helps him to organize his thoughts in her absense, though it has the unfortunate side-effect of inhibiting his recovery and isolating him from the rest of the team.
- Fitz again hallucinates his sociopathic Framework self, "The Doctor", during a psychotic split in order to deal with the stress of saving the world. It doesn't end well.
The Andy Griffith Show:
- The preeminent example comes in "Mr. McBeevee". Yes, Mr. McBeevee is very much real, and the trope is eventually subverted, but the way an overly excited Opie describes his new friend, a telephone lineman he had met in the woods, to his Pa, it seems that this man is fictional. After all, anybody who (as Opie describes him) walks in the treetops, wears a silver hat, has 12 extra hands, blows smoke from his ears and jingles when he walks as though he has rings on his fingers and bells on his toes is surely fictional, right? Andy laughs it off as a childhood phase and even encourages Opie... but the fun and games end when Opie brings back a quarter McBeevee had given him, as Andy suspects that Opie may have stolen it.^note Opie stands his ground, but after going to McBeevee's work site only to find him not there (McBeevee had been called away to assist another worker on his team), Andy threatens his son with a spanking; even then Opie tells him McBeevee is real ... and Andy relents. In the end, Andy's faith in Opie is rewarded: He walks past a tree in the woods and fumes, "Mr. McBeevee"... and on cue, McBeevee greets his new friend and is confirmed as real.
- During the original airing, a commercial for Jello pudding played on the episode's theme of imaginary friends, with Barney complaining that Opie has gone too far with his imaginary friends,^note including a black stallion named Blacky. As if on cue, a black horse with physical features just as Opie described sticks his head through the kitchen window, once again proving Barney wrong. The commercial is included as a bonus feature on the Season 3 DVD set.
The A-Team has Murdock's invisible dog, Billy. At the end of one episode, it appears that Billy actually knocks Murdock over and drags him along the ground.
This is the premise of Barney & Friends. Barney is actually a stuffed doll the children on the show have, and the whole series is them pretending to go on adventures with an imagined version of the doll that's adult-sized.
The Big Bang Theory establishes Sheldon as having these, though he refers to them as imaginary colleagues.
Merton spends most of an episode of Big Wolf on Campus trying to convince his friends that his imaginary friend Vince really is real, really does have superpowers, and really is trying to kill them all.
Bones:
- The non-supernatural interpretation of the episode in which Booth is trapped on a soon-to-be-sunken navy ship is that "Parker" is his Hallucinatory Friend rather than a ghost. This presumes that the obstacles that Parker helps Booth get past are also hallucinations brought on by his brain tumor, and that he's really just stumbling around at random below deck.
- "The Psychic in the Soup" has an "is it or isn't it" version with Christine and "Buddy". Booth and Brennan discuss whether imaginary friends are okay, and Christine says things that leave questions as to whether Buddy is really imaginary... or actually Sweets' ghost.
In one episode of Boy Meets World, Manchild Eric makes an imaginary friend version of his former mentor Mr. Feeny to help him with his college work. At the end of the episode, the imaginary Feeny convinces him that he has the skills to do well without him, so Eric lets him go.
Charmed (1998) uses the evil version of an imaginary friend; in this case, it's a demon trying to turn Wyatt evil. Like many Charmed episode titles, this one consists of a pun; it's titled "Imaginary Fiends".
A rather dark version appears in one episode of Criminal Minds in which a man's imaginary friends (actually hallucinations caused by schizophrenia or another similar disorder) continue to push him into killing people.
The Daily Show: During a report on "Imaginary Black on White Crime", Wyatt Cenac says at one point that all of the imaginary friends he grew up with are now "either dead or in jail" thanks to a terrible "imaginary public school system that has failed a whole generation of imaginary youth".
Desperate Housewives: The strain in the Scavo household brought on by Lynette returning to the workplace and Tom becoming a stay-at-home dad at the start of season 2 is such that in the episode "My Heart Belongs to Daddy", their son Parker copes by creating an imaginary British nanny named "Mrs. Mulberry".
Tom: Oh, Mrs. Mulberry. Parker has an imaginary friend. Um, British nanny. I think he really locked into the whole Mary Poppins thing.
Lynette: Is that why he's sleeping with an umbrella?
Tom: He carries it with him everywhere. It's a security blanket.
Lynette: When did this start?
Tom: About a week ago, I guess.
Lynette: And you don't find it odd that Parker's new nanny made her appearance right at the time I went back to work?
Tom: Kids have imaginary friends. It's no big deal.
Lynette: I agree with you to a point when they're flying kangaroos or giant robots, not surrogate mommies.
Tom: Hey, Parker is having a little trouble adjusting, that's all. Apparently, so are you. Honey, don't be so sensitive.
Anthony from Doc Martin, an invisible 6-foot squirrel.
Doctor Who:
- In "The Girl in the Fireplace", the Doctor appears in a little girl's bedroom to save her from the Monster of the Week. When he next pops in to check on her, he's accidentally jumped forward in time and discovers that She Is All Grown Up.
  Reinette: It is customary, I think, to have an imaginary friend only during one's childhood. You are to be congratulated on your persistence.
- In "The Eleventh Hour", young Amy Pond's first meeting with the Doctor has such a profound effect on her that as she grows up, he becomes a part of her play, almost as if an imaginary friend, to the point of four psychiatrists trying to tell her that he's not real. However, as it turns out, he's real — very real — and recognized by everyone Amy knows, from the days of childhood play.
  The Doctor: Hello, everyone! I'm Amy's imaginary friend... but I came anyway.
- In "The Lie of the Land", Bill creates an imaginary version of her deceased mother as a confident on a brainwashed Vichy Earth.
  Bill: I, er, made up a version of her. Yeah, I talk to her all the time.
  Nardole: Oh, well, that's not that weird. I used to have an imaginary friend, 'til he left me for someone else.
Niles Crane in Frasier is revealed to have had an "imaginary protegé" named Sheldon during early childhood, who he blames for wetting his bed and running away.
Friends: Chandler and Joey both had imaginary friends as children. Joey's was a Space Cowboy called Maurice. Chandler semi-jokingly claims that his parents liked his imaginary friend more than they liked him.
Gen V: After she made her brother disappear with her powers, Cate Dunlap was locked away in her bedroom by her parents and treated as a monster, and had very little contact with other people for nine years. When she hit puberty, she coped with the loneliness by creating an imaginary boyfriend modeled on Soldier Boy.
In Ghost Whisperer, the title character is aware some children can see ghosts. The child of a storekeeper on the same square as her antique store, Dylan, appears to have the full-fledged medium gift, and his mother reacts poorly to her son talking to people who aren't there.
The Golden Girls: In the episode "The Truth Will Out", Rose's granddaughter Charley has an imaginary friend whose visage, according to the little girl, is modeled after Bruce Springsteen, lives in a castle and has a personality based off of what she has been told about her late grandfather (being an upstanding man who works very hard). Rose is thrilled about the character and explains that she once had an imaginary friend herself, but "he never would tell me his name".
The Haunting Hour: In "My Imaginary Friend", Shawn has an imaginary friend named Travis who quickly becomes all too real and dangerous. Shawn's older brother David convinces Shawn that he has outgrown the need for imaginary friends, which dispels Travis. Sadly, David was also Shawn's imaginary friend all along, and Shawn has to let him go as well.
House goes a somewhat dark route with this trope near the end of Season 5, as House starts hallucinating that Amber, a.k.a. "Cutthroat Bitch", is following him around at all times. House knows that it's got to be a hallucination and ends up taking advantage of the relationship, seeing as Amber represents "an all-access pass to [his] own subconscious" — that is, until Amber's arrangements for Chase's bachelor party result in him going into anaphylactic shock due to an allergy House would've known about... which leads to him wondering why he would possibly want Chase dead. It gets worse, much worse, as he starts to lose his grip on reality and ends up getting committed to a mental hospital at the end of the season.
In Huff, the title character imagines and develops a good friendship with a Hungarian composer.
A Running Gag in Impractical Jokers is Joe Gatto calling for his imaginary friend Larry. This is even featured in the intro to the show.
One episode of The Invisible Man features a little girl who's witnessed a murder and only wants to talk about it to her imaginary friend. Cue the protagonist pretending to be him.
In the Korean drama Its Okay Thats Love, protagonist Jang Jae-yeol has an imaginary friend, high schooler Han Kang-woo, born of childhood trauma and guilt.
In Jessie, Zuri has at least one imaginary friend, Millie the Mermaid. Used as a plot point in one episode when Jessie assumes that her new friend Nana Banana (Joanne Worley) is imaginary.
Kamen Rider Ex-Aid: Emu Hojo was a lonely child who wished for a friend. This happens to be a problem for someone who is Patient Zero of a video game disease, as the idea materialized into Parado, Psychopathic Manchild Monster of the Week.
In one episode of Lizzie McGuire, Lizzie's little brother Matt seems to have made up an imaginary friend much to the concern of their parents as Matt is far too old for such things. The parents react by showering Matt in attention and gifts, but it doesn't seem to be working... until Mrs. McGuire hears Matt talking to a real friend on the phone. It turns out that there was no Jasper, Matt was faking in attempt to trick his parents into giving him all their attention (and gifts). He is punished for this prank by being forced to wash an invisible donkey.
Played very darkly in Lost. Hurley's best friend while he was in a mental institution was Dave, a bad influence who encouraged Hurley to overeat, try to escape the hospital, and other bad ideas. Hurley only started improving after he accepted that Dave wasn't real, rather a manifestation of his darker impulses. We learn all this in flashback during an episode where Dave shows up on the Island. He tries to convince Hurley that the island, not him, is the hallucination, and tries to prove it by pointing out all the unlikely things that have happened to Hurley since he left the institution. However, it gets more complicated when it turns out that Hurley can see and interact with the spirits of the dead, meaning that Institution!Dave could very well have been real. Also, the Big Bad of the series turns out to be capable of taking on the form of those who have died, creating another possibility for the identity of the island's Dave.
Medium: In "Night of the Wolf", this is how Allison realizes that her daughter Bridget has inherited her psychic powers — she starts playing with an invisible friend who turns out to be a child's ghost.
In Monty Python's Flying Circus, Dinsdale Pirahna is perfectly normal... except that he is convinced that he is being watched by a gigantic hedgehog named Spiny Norman. Normally, Norman is wont to be about eight to ten feet from snout to tail, but when Dinsdale is really depressed, Norman can anywhere up to eight hundred yards long.
Martin from Moone Boy has Sean Murphy. All the other children have them as well, and the imaginary friends are capable of interacting with each other, even having a bar they all hang around in.
In an episode of The Nanny, Gracie is traumatized when Fran unwittingly "kills" her imaginary friend, going so far as to hold a funeral for her (burying her in a shoebox containing Fran's favorite boots). After talking with a family counselor though, Gracie admits that she'd been looking for an excuse to get rid of her imaginary friend anyway, since she created her shortly after her mother died, and Fran's presence was filling that void in her life. Fran is touched, but she still isn't happy about having to sacrifice her boots.
Niles: The Lord & Taylor giveth, the Lord & Taylor taketh away.
Powerpuff: Blossom developed an imaginary version of her younger self to help her get through difficult decisions.
One Saturday Night Live sketch features an "imaginary friend-off" competition, which has guest star Fred Savage talk about his imaginary friend Mike Podium.
A long-running gag in Sesame Street is that everyone thinks that Mr. Snuffleupagus is Big Bird's imaginary friend. This idea was dropped in 1986 by revealing Snuffleupagus to the adults once the producers decided that it might lead kids to think that Adults Are Useless and therefore might not believe a kid's "unbelievable" story about, say, molestation. Of course, since Snuffy is real, you could technically categorize this as an It Was Here, I Swear! situation.
In Six Feet Under, David is prone to having imaginary conversations with his dead father and the other corpses he's working on as an undertaker. David is also a devout Christian who struggles to reconcile his homosexuality with his faith, and one of the most memorable of his imaginary "friends" is a young gay man who follows him around, taunting him about how he will go to Hell. There's also a young gang member who had been killed in a turf war, and who convinces the normally meek David to take an aggressive stand in a business meeting with a rival company. The imaginary friends make David seem a little bit schizophrenic, but they're a useful storytelling device because otherwise David, who is very introverted, anal-retentive and poor at communicating his feelings, would have come across as very one-dimensional and incomprehensible. His imaginary friends also seem to make him more functional, both because they act as a support network for him and because they make him more sensitive to the needs of his clients.
The Sketch Show: One sketch takes this to an over-the-top degree. The sketch concerns a psychiatrist running a group therapy session to persuade people that their imaginary friends aren't real; her patients are a guy who uses his imaginary friend as a cover for alcoholism, a lonely and lovesick woman, and a guy who thinks that he himself is the imaginary one. At the very end of the sketch, it turns out that the psychiatrist is actually addressing an empty room.
One set of sketches in Sorry, I've Got No Head features a character with one of these. The imaginary friend can be seen by anyone, apparently because of how well he is imagined, and can interact with real objects, but still prefers to use imaginary versions.
In Space Cases, Suzee is not Catalina's "imaginary" friend, she's her "invisible" friend. At first, it's thought to be a case of Insistent Terminology. She even insists that she's the only one who can see her, and gives various scientific explanations for why Suzee is "invisible", and not "imaginary", but then a Negative Space Wedgie brings Suzee out from another dimension and places Catalina in that dimension, revealing that Suzee literally was Catalina's "invisible" friend.^note
Star Trek:
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: In the episode "Imaginary Friend", the title character turns out to be quite real. And she manifests herself as August Leffler.
- Star Trek: Enterprise: In the Mirror Universe episode "In a Mirror, Darkly", Mirror Archer is furious to discover that his alternate universe self is a famous explorer who becomes President of The Federation, as Mirror Archer has yet to be assigned his first command. As Mirror Archer sinks into resentment and paranoia, his alternate self keeps appearing, taunting Mirror Archer into greater acts of ambition and recklessness.
In The Strange Case of Arthur Conan Doyle, Doyle, between writing "The Final Problem" and The Hound of the Baskervilles, meets a man called Seldon, who wants to write his biography, and in doing so forces him to confront the shadows of his past. It eventually transpires that Seldon is a manifestation of his guilt over his father, and is also Sherlock Holmes himself.
Supernatural:
- In "Playthings", two little girls, Tyler and Maggie, are shown playing, and it's implied that they're sisters. It's only revealed later that Maggie is Tyler's imaginary friend and the other characters can't see her. She turns out to be the ghost of Tyler's great-aunt, who died decades ago in the same house.
- "Just My Imagination" shows that Sam had a Not-So-Imaginary Friend named Sully when he was a kid, part of a race of imaginary friends named Zanna. And now, Sully needs his help to find and deal with who or whatever is killing Zanna...
In the mini-series Syndrome E, Sharko is followed around by his deceased fifteen-year old daughter (in the original novel by Franck Thilliez & Anbara Salam, it's his wife). While she's often aggravating, he refuses to receive treatment for what could be either a brain tumor or mental condition, as he's unable to give her up.
Tales from the Crypt: "Operation Friendship" features an adult nerdy video game designer with an imaginary friend. Their relationship sours when the man starts dating a psychologist and the imaginary friend, in fear for his existence, tries to turn the man against her. In the end, the imaginary friend takes over his body.
The producers of Teen Wolf have set forth that Greenberg, the student Coach Finstock yells at often, may or may not exist. He's never been shown onscreen, at any rate
In the The Twilight Zone (1985) episode "What Are Friends For?", a dad scoffs at his son's imaginary friend, then is shocked to realize that he can see and hear the friend as well.
An episode of The Weird Al Show has Weird Al talking about his imaginary friend Gilbert Gottfried. Who is standing there the whole time, trying to prove that he's a real guy.
Would I Lie to You?:
- In one episode, David Mitchell claims to have had a painted bucket he played board games with called "Stephen Tatlock":
  Holly Walsh: I don't think many people give their imaginary friends surnames.
  Lee Mack: He's one of the few...
- Robert Webb claims in series 5 that he has so many imaginary friends that he formed an imaginary gang.

Imaginary Friend / Live-Action TV

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