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  • 24:
    • Early on in the first season, Jack Bauer meets a guest at one of Senator David Palmer's primary appearances who appears to be surprised and honored to meet him, pointing out that he's one of the best motorcycle riders she's ever seen. Even though supplemental material also corroborates the fact that Jack seems to be exceptionally skilled with motorcycles, he never uses one in the series, nor ever demonstrates his (allegedly) high proficiency with one.
    • Ronnie Lobell is introduced as the new Director of Field Operations (a position normally held by badasses like Jack and Curtis Manning) in the fourth season. However, he appears to be extremely by-the-book and practically rolls over and does nothing when a suspected terrorist arrives at CTU. He dies after just two episodes, standing out in the open as he gets flanked and shot down by a pair of assailants.
  • According to Jim: Andy is sometimes described as intelligent. He works as an architect and supposedly got top grades in school. However, he also the show's buttmonkey and to this end he is frequently portrayed as an idiot, if not intellectually sub-normal. He is generally very slow on the uptake and is constantly outwitted by Dana, Jim and his small children.
  • The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.: Played for laughs. Pete Hutter has a nasty reputation. It's repeatedly said that "no one touches Pete's piece", in tones of horror that suggest what does happen to someone who touches Pete's gun. In practice, lots of people (or at least, Brisco, repeatedly) touch Pete's piece, and all Pete does about it is sit there, gibbering in shock that someone was mad enough to touch his piece.
  • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Seemingly played straight with Agent Ward, who is talked up as a brilliant SHIELD agent with skills and intelligence to rival Black Widow, none of which are ever really evidenced — in fact, the character's blandness was a source of frequent humor with the show's viewers. Eventually, however, it was revealed that Ward was working for Hydra and manipulating the team with his bland, no-nonsense act.
  • The Amazing Race:
    • Two or three teams do this to themselves every season. They talk up their abilities before the race starts, only to fall flat on their faces once they're on the course, such as brain dead lawyer Lance in Season 15.
    • An inversion occurred when a contestant described Boston Rob as "dumb as a rock". The only way this makes sense is if you assume the guy thought rocks were smart. Sure enough, Rob found a way to scheme his way past a food-eating challenge, convince a couple of other teams to forfeit it as well, and won the very next round.
  • Angel: With the character of Drogyn. A mystical, thousand-year-old immortal warrior who Angel says could kill Spike. He proceeds to never do anything but get his ass handed to him over and over, and then die. This is probably because he was created last minute as a replacement for Giles when Anthony Stewart Head couldn't make it for filming. The only time he got into anything resembling a fight on-screen was with Hamilton. He did get badly wounded in an off-screen battle with a mook, but that mook did apparently outclass Spike.
  • The Aquabats! Super Show!:
  • On Arrow, Curtis Holt is apparently a bronze medal winning Olympic decathlete, which is constantly referenced by the other characters. This should means that he is among the world's best when it comes to running, jumping and throwing ability. However, he is very much portrayed as a nerd stereotype and is shown to be pretty physically inept (for instance, claiming that Oliver's signature 'salmon ladder' pull-ups are impossible).
  • Being Human: George is described several times as a genius and claims to have an IQ in the 150s. We never see him exhibit any high level of intelligence or knowledge. The smartest thing we see him do is teach basic English to ESL students. He mentions his ability to speak a number of languages, but never does so on camera. He admits to not knowing any Hebrew and can't remember all six words of the Shema prayer, even though this is something any Jew with a cursory knowledge of the religion would know.
  • The Big Bang Theory:
    • Leslie Winkle is supposedly more intelligent than Sheldon (and, by transitivity, the rest of the cast) but never does or says anything to demonstrate this. Her supposed superiority is only demonstrated by her calling Sheldon "dumb-ass" at every opportunity. Word of God states that this is one of several reasons her character was written out.
    • Penny's alleged social life seems to consist entirely of a string of one-night stands. She doesn't have any actual friends outside the main group and their girlfriends; at least the main nerds have buddies at the comic store. When they try to use her as The Face, she ends up relying entirely on physical intimidation.
  • Big Brother US: Rachel is apparently very good at the game; yet she somehow has to rely on a blatantly contrived twist the second she started to fall behind. She also apparently is likable, yet almost all the time, the editors love to show her constantly crying and having to be calmed down by Brendon.
  • In Bones, Brennan often says that she is extremely intelligent and has very high IQ. In practice, she is far from that. Sure, she is very knowledgeable but she finds it difficult to make connections when they are not obvious, something Booth or Hodgins do naturally. This is especially jarring in social situations, because Brennan sometimes compares the situations she witnesses to anthropological trivia, yet sometimes she seems completely lost even though such event should be simple to any anthropologist, even on a purely analytical level.
  • Breaking Bad:
    • Skyler is supposedly an amateur writer who hopes to get published. This comes up all of twice in the first two seasons and never in the third and fourth seasons. No evidence of her writing ability is ever depicted. She does, however, prove to be a Consummate Liar as the series progresses, and is able to come up with a convincing backstory about Walter having a "gambling addiction" to explain where his drug money came from.
    • Occurs in-universe during the episode "Bullet Points", when Skyler and Walter are getting ready for dinner with Marie and Hank so the two of them can fully divulge their full "gambling addiction" cover story to the two of them. The two do their research, going to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, and having Walt practice card-counting strategies just in case they ask him to show them his skills. Walter doesn't manage to get a hang of how to card-count convincingly, so Skyler just comes up with the explanation that Walt is a recovering addict that wants to avoid cards.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • Giles expects Buffy to be able to sense vampires with her Slayer instincts. She never does (though she does sometimes show what might be weak clairvoyance in other ways). It was likely just an element of the Myth Arc that was dropped early on. It was, however, seen in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, where cramps in her abdomen alerted her about the presence of nearby vampires.
    • The Anointed One is said, via vague prophecy, to possess immense power, but never shows us any and is eventually anti-climatically killed by Spike. This was due to the child actor who played him aging too quickly to play an immortal child.
  • Occurs frequently in the short-lived Prime Time Soap Central Park West:
    • The playwright Mark Merrill (the husband of the show's Audience Surrogate) is frequently talked up by other characters, to the point that he is more than once referred to as "one of the voices of a new generation". However, none of his work or writing abilities are ever shown in most of the episodes, although this may also be a case of Stylistic Suck (as he finds it incredibly difficult to get someone to produce his play, which ends up causing his wife to pay someone a lot of money to just read it). The one time the audience gets to see his work (in the series finale, as Jordan Tate reads it), it's disposable supermarket literature.
    • Conversely, Carrie Fairchild is said to be New York's biggest gossip columnist, at a level that (in tandem with her stepfather's support) puts her on the level of high-society folk and the city's biggest influencers. Like Mark, her work is never really seen outside the pilot episode, and during the first season alone, she appears to spend most of her time stringing men along (specifically Mark, to have him break up with Stephanie) instead of doing her job. Her Spiritual Successor, Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City (created by the same producer) averts this due to having Carrie read portions of her columns out loud at the beginning of most episodes.
    • Rachel Dennis is brought onboard by Communique Magazine as their new editor, and is mentioned by Stephanie and others as being a popular, smart and driven woman who led the previous publication she was at to great success. There's little evidence of that in the show proper, though — all of her attempted "big scoops" turn out to be laughably amateurish, the office goes to shambles when she's finally given control of the magazine after Stephanie leaves, and she spends the first few weeks actively trying to sabotage everything instead of doing her job.
  • Charmed:
    • The first season episode "Which Prue Is It Anyway?" featured the sisters facing Gabriel, who was allegedly a demonic Lord of War with a dangerous reputation. However, although he was clearly powerful, in terms of his tactical abilities he made a crucial mistake of assuming that he knew how Prue's power worked based on his experience facing one of her ancestors. As a result, he tried to stop Prue using her power by trapping her hands, only for Prue to throw Gabriel off as she channels her power through her eyes.
    • A good chunk of season 5 onward involves Phoebe's job as an advice columnist where she is repeatedly showered with praise and fame for her "edgy" and "intuitive" advice. While we hear a few snippets of her work over the course of the series (none of which are worth writing home about), Phoebe's success is gained pretty quickly as she already has her own billboard within under a year of working as an advice columnist, a job she got purely on a fluke when the previous columnist quit. It is shown in Seasons 5 and 6 that she's extremely overworked, giving the impression that she's everywhere, and thus endearing her to readers.
  • Chuck:
    • Chuck's love of music. It's mentioned in the pilot. And in season two. And in season three. Other than that, he doesn't even seem to listen to music.
    • Also, Sarah's alleged cold, spy efficiency. We're told that Chuck softened her from a brutal super spy to a more caring individual, but we never saw the former.
  • Coupling: Jane is "the one with the breasts." Now the actress Gina Bellman is a very attractive woman but she is not exceptionally buxom.
  • CSI:
    • One episode had murders taking place at a comedy club, whose native-son star attracted huge crowds even though he was a Jerkass. The few moments of him actually performing were disappointing. Strange, since he was played by the generally funny Jeffrey Ross.
    • CSI also has a character with an informed hair color. The writers are aware of the fact that Marg Helgenberger is a natural redhead; they occasionally seem to forget that her character, Catherine Willows, really isn't, causing her to be referred to in dialogue as "the redhead."
  • Desperate Housewives: Susan Meyer, whom even her actress has called a 'clumsy idiot' and who has certainly never displayed any academic qualities, was casually mentioned as having been valedictorian at her high school.
  • Dexter:
    • Detective Quinn is said to be a good cop despite being wrongfully accused of being a Dirty Cop in the past. Except it would be pretty hard to find any time he's done good work, but plenty where he stole money from crime scenes, slept with a witness, leaked inside info to a journalist and murderer/accomplice to a serial killer, showed up drunk at work, got high on the job, lost his gun, got into a fight with another detective, let Dexter go despite all the indications that he's a murderernote  and most importantly murdering a suspect in the middle of the day, in the strip club he owned, in front of employees and patrons, right next to another detective. And yet Angel was confident that he could be promoted to sergeant.
    • Dexter was trained since childhood by his police officer father to commit "perfect murders" without getting caught, yet he regularly investigates his victims on police computers with traceable search histories and breaks into their homes in broad daylight while his personal vehicle is parked outside. Luckily, the police officers who investigate him never bother building an actual case against him.
  • Doctor Who:
    • Adric is supposed to be a genius, but of all the TARDIS crew travelling at the time, it is inevitably Adric who will somehow screw up the Doctor's latest plan to defeat the bad guy by doing something stupid, or will be gullible enough to be suckered into helping the villain's evil plan regardless of how transparently evil it is. For a supposedly smart person, the character doesn't come across as being particularly smart; and what makes it worse is that Adric is insufferably arrogant about skills that he is rarely demonstrated to actually possess.
      • Adric was specifically a mathematical genius, which is why the Master used him to construct Castrovalva. The rest of him maybe didn't warrant the description. On the gripping hand, it was his mathematical ability that got him killed.
    • Jamie, a piper, rarely, if ever, actually played the bagpipes. Probably for the best.
    • The Weeping Angels are always described as being supernaturally fast, to the point where simply taking a fraction of a second to blink is enough for them to sneak up on you and kill you. However, any time we see them, people will turn away for several seconds, and they never seem to move more than a few feet at a time.
      • It's established that the Weeping Angels like to play with their food.
    • "The Sontaran Stratagem"/"The Poison Sky": The Sontarans are described as being the universe's "greatest soldiers". Sure, they mop the floor with UNIT in their first encounter, but once their blatant cheating (a field that causes the copper jackets of bullets to expand in gun barrels, making the humans incapable of even fighting back) is overcome, the Sontarans are curb-stomped.
    • "Time Heist": The "most secure bank in the universe" apparently cannot afford cameras, regular patrols, or any kind of meaningful security other than the Teller and some intermittently placed breath-based DNA scanners.
    • A lot of Nardole's characterization is established through pieces of dialogue referencing a supposed criminal past involving murder and black markets, which goes against his initially cowardly and oafish persona. The closest we see of his badassery are his computer hacking skills and Vulcan nerve pinch.
  • Entourage: Vinny Chase’s acting ability. Several times on the show, he is constantly spoken of as one of the greatest, if not THE greatest, actors of his generation (his friend Eric reveals that Time Magazine referred to his as “the next Johnny Depp”, in the pilot no less). However, anytime he is actually shown acting, he comes across as no better than any other run of the mill, teen idol.
  • In Everybody Loves Raymond, Ray often is described as a brilliant sportswriter with a dedicated following. However, every time his writing is read out loud, it's trite and uninspired, more on the level of a high school or college journalist.
  • Forever: The song "6 A.M." is hailed by many characters as a seminal jazz piece, so revolutionary and so evocative that it changed the genre. The audience never actually hears more than a few bars.
  • Friends:
    • Inverted Trope in "The One With The Fake Monica" when Monica, Rachel, and Phoebe end up in a tap-dancing class. While Monica and Phoebe struggle to keep up, without any buildup Rachel is able to perform the routine flawlessly. When the other girls look at her in amazement, Rachel simply shrugs and says that it's easy to keep up — all you have to do is tap when the rest of the class taps. Of course, being played by trained dancer Jennifer Aniston tends to make this sort of thing easier.
    • Done intentionally with Fun Bobby. He's apparently the most fun person the cast has ever met, but the first time he appears, his grandfather has just died and he's in mourning, and the second time, he's given up drinking and it turns out that without alcohol he's "Ridiculously Dull Bobby". We never see the "fun" persona at all.
  • Full House: Pulls an inversion similar to the Friends example above. Jesse, who is genuinely horrible on ice, expresses apprehension to Danny who fears he'll probably be rusty too. Then Danny skates expertly out into the rink and performs a triple lutz, landing backwards with his leg extended like a figure skater. He's just as rusty as he feared.
  • Game of Thrones:
    • Renly Baratheon is frequently presented as being intelligent and a serious statesman, but we see very little of this in practice. He does nothing to halt Robert's spendthrift kingdom, which admittedly vexed even Jon Arryn's abilities. Most notably he agrees with Pycelle, Varys and Littlefinger with Robert's desire to assassinate Daenerys Targaryen. Robert on his deathbed even dismisses him as a Yes-Man compared to Ned Stark who was the only one to oppose it. After his death Margaery claims Renly was brave and gallant, however we never see any evidence of this, considering he was planning to attack Stannis with a much larger army. These flaws weren't present in the book, where it is quite clear that Renly is more style then substance, showing no real ruling skills outside of publicity and coming across as a vain and sleazy figure who is basically just engaging in a naked power-grab through Appeal to Force.
    • Their mostly offscreen sack of Astapor aside (which was a sack against non-combatants, not soldiers), the Unsullied don't get much opportunity to to demonstrate that they're the skilled, disciplined army they supposedly are, other than being pretty good at marching. "The Sons of the Harpy" shows them being attacked in small groups of six or two by the titular Sons, unable to put up a fight against dozens of the former slavers in close quarters. This is finally averted in Season 7 where they fight Lannister soldiers and massacre them in close-quarters combat.
    • Stannis is repeatedly referred to as an experienced battle commander, probably the best in Westeros. What few battles he participates in on-screen do not go his way for one reason or another; his actual record is pretty awful.
    • The Greyjoys and the Iron Islanders are supposed to be feared badass vikings who once humiliated Tywin Lannister by torching his fleet at Lannisport. But aside from isolated stealth raids and easy targets against small garrisons, we hardly see any display of their vaunted ferocity and battle prowess. Even Yara Greyjoy, despite her skill in battle and having conscripted the "best killers" in the Iron Islands to aid her quest to rescue Theon, is outfought by a grinning shirtless maniac and is promptly chased away by said maniac's pack of hounds. Weirdly, Theon is the only Greyjoy who has shown decent skill in battle (in particular being an expert archer and one of Robb's best soldiers) and yet he is the hated Butt-Monkey of the Iron Islands and the North. This is explained in Seasons 6 and 7 with their successes in the first rebellion, such as burning the Lannister fleet at anchor, belonged to Euron rather than his older brother Balon. Euron is a cunning strategist in all the ways Balon is not, but then he was gone from the islands, and the ironborn lost their most dangerous commander; when Euron does return, he's shown to be every bit as formidable as the the Ironborn reputation would have you believe, both as a commander and warrior.
    • Jamie Lannister is bigged up as one of the best swordsmen in the 7 kingdoms. Of his two battles on screen, one is inconclusive, and the other has him severely weakened to the point that his opponent can easily defeat him. A far cry from the books, where in the same battle, he was presented as still very skilled and dangerous. Of course, then in season 3, his hand is cut off and he has never been quite the same since.
    • Similarly, Loras Tyrell us meant to basically be his generation's version of Jaime, noted to be the Knight In Shining Armour. In his fight against Gregor Clegane (which he admittedly was unprepared and unequipped for) he lies on the ground getting hit with and in his fight with Brienne she beats him without too much trouble. While he may be a gifted jouster, he is inexperienced in real combat.
    • Speaking of Tyrion, there's his own reputation of being a very smart, politically savvy advisor to his queen, with everybody telling Daenerys just how good he is to have around. His list of successful advice is... dire. In the seventh season alone, he proclaims that Cersei would never abandon Casterly Rock (she does), that they should delay attacking King's Landing (this only gives them time to build up defenses), that they should attempt to starve the city for months to get the populace on their side rather than simply crush the defenders (what?), that Dany shouldn't use dragons due to the potential bad PR (despite the founding king of Westeros using dragons, and them being her strongest weapons), and that they should try to appeal to Cersei's good nature and long-term reasoning (which she doesn't have). It gets to the point where it doesn't make any sense for anyone to have any faith in him anymore, and yet he still gets glowing recommendations by peers. Ironically, he was genuinely pretty clever in earlier seasons, but someone jumping in later on would probably interpret him as somewhere between Plucky Comic Relief and The Millstone.
    • Sansa Stark's intelligence is frequently talked about in later seasons, to the point that Arya—a trained assassin and savvy character herself—calls her "the smartest person I've met". While Sansa has certainly developed from where she started off and managed to survive a lot, she's also made plenty of glaring mistakes, such as nearly getting the Northern army (including Jon, her own brother) slaughtered because she didn't tell them more troops were coming, almost killing her sister thanks to falling for Littlefinger's lies yet again, and antagonizing the North's very powerful ally Daenerys despite her being the only chance the North has to survive. She's managed a few practical matters, like bringing in grain to Winterfell, but that's hardly the work of a genius. It also doesn't help that most characters that enter her vicinity end up carrying the Idiot Ball, meaning she suddenly knows how to make armor better than an actual smith and is more perceptive than practiced politician Tyrion. If anything, she dropped off a bit: she was able to keep her head down around Joffrey and manipulate him with some level of subtlety in the second season, but by the seventh, she's acting snide and needlessly defiant around someone who could boot her out at any moment.
  • Gilmore Girls:
    • Rory Gilmore is repeatedly described as a brilliant writing prodigy who can make the most mundane story come to life with scintillating prose and profound insight. In the rare instances her articles and speeches are actually read aloud, they never rise at all above what any high school student could do. However, when she gets an actual internship she's straight-up told her work isn't professional quality, and in the revival her career never went anywhere.
    • Also, she's constantly described as a great success story, having accomplished so much. But all she ever does is get things handed to her. Her grandparents paid for her expensive private school. Then her grandparents paid for Yale, until such a time as her father started paying for Yale instead. Also, she started dating a really rich guy and got to live in a penthouse apartment instead of staying in a dorm. Throughout the entire run of the series, other than being a reasonably good student, Rory doesn't accomplish or earn anything (though, in all fairness, just getting into those expensive schools, which obviously require intelligence, and her long-shown wit in conversation, contribute to this merely being an understated ability, rather than an Informed one).
  • Glee:
    • Casts a cute guy who's never sung before in the role of a cute guy who's never sung before. Good choice, he plays the part well, and has obvious talent and potential. However, the other characters heap praises on him as if he's superior to the other boys in the club, who are played by (and sound like) trained singers with lots of experience.
    • This is a recurring problem with Glee, in that every single performance is so polished that the audience needs to be told things like when a performance is "bad" and who has the best singing voice. For example, the club's flawless performance in "Sectionals" is stated by a judge to be "good" but "not that rehearsed". However, judging criteria for music competitions tends to be extremely esoteric and focused on minutiae that are not readily apparent to a television audience.
    • Kurt's voice is another example. Will calls it unique and tells him he can do things no one else can - but never gives him a solo to sing. After Kurt transfers to Dalton and joins The Warblers, the cast often makes remarks how Warblers "have Kurt now" — but Blaine is the only soloist we ever see and Kurt is just a background singer, alongside about 10-15 other guys.
    • Rachel's dancing also counts. Rachel's supposedly a good dancer, but a quick comparison with not just Brittany and Santana, but also Tina and Quinn, shows that although she can keep a beat and cope with some footwork, she's at best average. And her ballet, shown on-screen in "Laryngitis", is frankly poor — although she's supposedly been having lessons since she was a small child, she can't even get properly up onto her pointes.
      • This becomes a plot point in later seasons—when Rachel graduates high school and gets into a prestigious college for the arts in New York City, she is clearly inferior to her classmates and is acknowledged as such in-universe. Her biggest story arc in the fourth season involves coming to terms with the fact that what qualified as "extremely talented" in Ohio translates to "amateurish" in New York.
  • Gossip Girl:
    • Dan Humphrey is constantly praised for his fantastic talent as a writer, but we are almost never treated to any examples. In one episode, a story of his is glimpsed briefly, and it's comically bad — no doubt because it was written by the props team.
    • Same goes for Vanessa and her supposed talent for film making and script writing. Some would also say that Jenny's talents as a designer fall under this.
  • Heir To The Throne, a 1987 Taiwanese series based on the life of the anti-Manchurian resistance hero Zheng Cheng-gong (Koxinga in English) does this with some of the enemy captains. Notably, the Manchurian Commander, Yi-ba, is supposed to be so cruel and ruthless to the point where "he leaves behind a corpse every ten steps"... except the show doesn't display any of Yi-ba's misdeeds, as Zheng Cheng-gong tracks down his hideout and kills Yi-ba in an ambush fifteen minutes after Yi-ba's introduction, before the villain could perform any actual onscreen villainy. In contrast, Yi-ba's predecessor, Commander Shih-le, has a far bigger rapsheet of atrocity, ordering a whole town massacred in order to intimidate Zheng Cheng-gong into surrendering besides demanding a prisoner executed by his men every hour until Zheng submits to his rule.
  • Heroes:
    • Mohinder is theoretically a geneticist with some idea of how superpowers work. But he's constantly having plot points and technobabble explained to him by other characters, such as Bennet and Sylar.
  • HEX: It is repeatedly stated that the ghost Thelma will pass through anything living that she touches and thus can't get physical with Cassie outside of dreams. This is never actually shown at any point in the series, nor do they spend any time talking about the fact that she can handle inanimate objects (as she frequently does) without breaking the rules. An Informed Inability.
  • Highlander: The Series: When one immortal beheads another, the winner gains the loser's power. An immortal's chances of winning a fight depend on how many heads each combatant has taken and how much power the owners of those heads had. At least, this is what they say happens. From what is seen in the fight scenes, none of them is any better at fighting than an ordinary human. They don't go around lifting cars over their heads, and they can't fly or, really, do much of anything superhuman other than come back to life if they die from anything except beheading. It's not a case of Power Levels, either; there are plenty of fights in the franchise where the protagonist beats a person who either killed a lot more people or really logically should have (most famously, Connor versus the Kurgan).
  • Hollywood (2020): Jack, Camille, Raymond, and Archie are supposed to be incredible auteurs in their field worthy of Oscars, but from what we see, they don’t come across as particularly impressive. It's more striking when in the show's Alternate History, their fictional movie, Meg is the biggest box office hit of its time and earns Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor and Actress when what we see is nothing but a tawdry melodrama and the performances hardly the type the Academy would have honored this way.
  • How I Met Your Mother:
    • Don, Robin's boyfriend in season 5, also falls into this trope. Marshall and Lily insist to Robin that he's an amazing guy (despite not really knowing anything about him), though all the audience knows is that at first he didn't care about his career, and didn't wear pants, and now he does. Wear pants, that is.
    • Again with Lily, her Chessmaster abilities are very much an informed ability. To the point where actual Chessmaster Barney sings the praises of her abilities. Her every Batman Gambit has either been incredibly simple (all of her breakups of Ted in the past), or backfired badly (her breakups of Ted and Barney with Robin).
  • iCarly:
    • The quality of the titular web show is greatly exaggerated. The characters on the show eat it up and it has become an internet phenomenon so well known it's been hit up for ideas for TV on the show on two separate occasions.
    • Sam's supposed 'tech' ability. Part of her Brilliant, but Lazy character build includes mentions in several character blogs of her ability with computers that she's never used on the show itself.
  • It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia beautifully subverts this as you'll constantly hear about one of the guys having a fantastic ability, from dancing to ice hockey to stand-up comedy, but when we see it, it's absolute crap. The key is that the show is openly acknowledging how the gang fool themselves into thinking they're terrific when anyone outside their circle can clearly see the truth. A key example is them surprised that their dance number at a high school reunion (which they see as being a fantastic affair out of a music video) didn't get applause when the audience sees the truth, that it was a total mess.
  • Jonathan Creek: Joey is initially introduced as Jonathan's intellectual equal, described on a television show as "someone whose powers of deduction and truly phenomenal flair for solving seemingly impossibly puzzles are beyond cool." Yet apart from ascertaining that the Nightmare Room is inescapable and discovering a clue that Jonathan misses (one which ends up being a false lead), she doesn't solve any part of the mystery, and eventually admits: "I'm out of my depth here."
  • Kamen Rider:
    • Every show has an All There in the Manual description full of powers and features that never even come up shown in the show, for obvious reasons. Fans may never know what happens if they got the chance to cut loose.
    • Some of the claims get truly outsize, as higher levels (such as Ultimate Kuuga) could supposedly destroy the world. A Rider's actual power level is best described as "As strong as it takes to have trouble with but eventually beat the Monster of the Week." And then you have first-appearance beef-ups, where a character or power will be utterly invincible the first time and then never, ever again. Biggest offender here is Double.note  Outside of power levels, there's Kamen Rider OOO's "full combos can drive you nuts" thing, which has never been seen to happen (unless it's Putotyra, the feral, dinosaur-based mode, which is always uncontrollable, but that activates on its own when Eiji's under enough duress) and yet using one is still treated as being so dangerous you'd rather take your chances with a monster who overpowers you than risk using one.
    • However, the Greeed in that series being able to 'devour the Earth' turns out to not be an idle boast.
  • Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: All the ADA's who came after Alex Cabot had to endure a bit of time in the Replacement Scrappy box because of how popular she was with fans, but Kim Greylek's contribution to the show was nothing but Informed Ability, to the point that she introduced herself as "The Crusader" and although the audience never saw it, she was also a highly aggressive and competent lawyer from big important D.C. and taking cases in little ol' Manhattan to further her political aspirations (that it said she has). Fans of the show didn't tolerate her very well, and she didn't even last a whole season. This is especially notable when compared to her predecessor, Casey Novak, who, as Cabot's successor, landed into Replacement Scrappy territory just long enough to haul herself out of it by kicking legal ass in magnificent fashion. Which makes Greylek's Informed Ability all the more perplexing; the writers clearly didn't have any problems with writing Novak as a great lawyer, so what happened with Greylek? Also Captain Cragen frequently refers to Benson and Stabler as his best detectives, but they can't go two episodes without one of them doing something illegal, unconstitutional, against police procedure, or just plain stupid. What are his worst detectives like?
  • Lost: His name is Sayid Jarrah, and he is a torturer. Or so he informs us, and so Kelvin Inman, the US soldier who taught Sayid to torture, informed him. But the only time we are even told that he successfully tortured someone is in a flashback, and it is almost all offscreen. This among numerous failed attempts.
  • Lucifer: Maze is presented as "Hell's greatest torturer", but most of the time she just beats up baddies, does bountyhunting, or makes sexual innuendos. The few times Lucifer has her torture someone, she usually gets no result (which is explained that the subject is just that tough and able to handle it). The (chronologically) first time she was brought in to torture, she got so overexcited about the chance to work on a real, living, corporeal human and the wealth of opportunities it would've provided, she ended up having sex with the guy instead. (Though it worked out well enough anyway — the guy told her everything out of sheer sexual bliss. And it should be noted that torturing someone as punishment, which is what she did in hell, is fundamentally different from interrogation.)
  • Married... with Children:
    • Neatly averted in a third-season episode where Kelly is forced to join the school tap-dancing class, gets some extra coaching from neighbor Steve, and finally does an erotic dance with her would-be boyfriend. As Christina Applegate, David Garrison, and the actor who played the boyfriend were all trained dancers themselves, it wasn't much of a stretch for their characters to do it.
    • Played straight (most of the time) with Jefferson's CIA past. Despite various hints that he was an agent, he's never shown to live up to it. Except in one episode, where he meets with Fidel Castro.
  • Merlin (2008): Excalibur is described constantly as a powerful and dangerous sword that can only be wielded safely by Arthur. Yet not only is it used by both Uther and Merlin in two separate episodes with no drastic consequences, by the time Arthur finally gets his hands on it at the end of series four, nothing particularly exceptional is done with it. He can't even defeat Helios without help. The sword lives up to its reputation of being able to kill the dead, but it's neither as awesome in the right hands or as dangerous in the wrong ones as its maker would have you believe.
  • The Mighty Boosh: Played for Laughs with Kirk, a shaman who looks like a normal boy but is apparently a menacing interdimensional being. We never see him do anything, but the other shamans accuse him of being "a vehicular menace," and "an erotic adventurer of the most deranged kind," which he does not deny. They also say that he also has a far greater capacity for narcotics than the other shamans.
  • In Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, the Alien Rangers claimed that Hydro Hog was their Arch-Enemy on Aquator, and could be considered their equivalent of Lord Zedd. While Hydro Hog seemed to live up to his reputation in the two-part episode where he appeared (he really trounced them good for a while) he was defeated eventually and slain with the Shogun Megazord, and because the Alien Rangers' never gave specific details of past battles with him, the viewers can only assume his reputation as a villain was true.
  • The Mindy Project: In one episode, all of the women are surprised to learn that one of the doctors is a good dancer. They have to tell the audience this because none of his moves are the least bit impressive and we only see him dance in tiny snippets with women around him.
  • Monk: In the episode "Mr. Monk Paints His Masterpiece", the audience is repeatedly told that Monk is a terrible artist, which is probably true from an artistic standpoint but not from a technical one. They were essentially 2-D figures made from perfect geometric shapes/lines that took incredible skill and discipline to produce and represented Monk's vision of a perfectly ordered and straight world but were devoid of any individuality or creative genius. Of course, his teacher's preferred entry was blatantly plagiarizing The Scream.
  • Mystery Science Theater 3000: In Seasons 1-10, Tom Servo's hovering ability is only inferred from his design, since he can't actually fly above the height of the desk used to conceal the puppeteers. Starting with Season 11, Servo can fly, but only in the theater.
    • Also played with in that Servo's arms, as he'd frequently point out, don't work and has to have pretty much everything done for him. But only on screen. An informed inability?
  • Nashville: Rayna Jaymes is ostensibly one of the greatest (though not as big as she was) country stars going, while upstart Juliette Barnes hasn't got enough talent to fit inside a thimble and has to fight to prove herself, but Rayna's supposedly authentic act isn't that much (if any) of an artistic advance on Juliette's crossover tracks. It doesn't help that quite a few people believe Hayden Panettiere (Juliette) is a better singer than Connie Britton (Rayna), and some of them are Britton fans. Most tellingly, Panettiere has more songs on the soundtrack album(s)note  than Britton. (The show's constant portrayal of Rayna as a musical legend gets particularly ludicrous when she wins all the CMA Awards she's nominated for in "You're Lookin' At Country.")
  • NCIS has Timothy McGee who is supposedly an experienced Eagle Scout, yet in one episode he blunders into a thicket of poison ivy because he inexplicably has no idea what it looks like.
  • NCIS: Los Angeles plays with this when the team goes up against a rogue Delta special forces team. The Deltas are described as some of the deadliest soldiers trained by the US military but they seem to be making rookie mistakes like spraying a bathroom with gunfire and not actually checking if they killed their target. However, this is then revealed as a ruse since the guy hiding in the bathroom was the inside man and was supposed to survive. The Delta's combat prowess comes into question again when they assault a house defended by two poorly armed NCIS agents and a group of untrained women. This is the type of operation they were trained for and it should have been a cakewalk for them but instead they let themselves be ambushed and would have been in real trouble if their opponents did not run out of ammo. Then comes the big reveal that explains all of it: the bad guys are are actually just a bunch of thugs pretending to be the Delta team in question. The real Deltas show up and take out the imposters in seconds.
  • The Office: Dwight Shrute is hailed as their number one salesman and apparently has the numbers to back it up. While we occasionally see flashes of a polished hard-sell, he usually comes across as abrasive and threatening when on screen, quickly driving away his potential customers. This is especially obvious in the episode where he quits and goes to work for Staples. He immediately breaks records by selling two printers in his first day (off screen), but when we see him, he's chasing off a customer by insulting her printer paper choice. In contrast Michael, likewise touted as an excellent salesman, has been repeatedly shown winning over customers on-screen.
  • One Life to Live: Matthew was basically Sam Weir until he was paralyzed in a car accident in March 2009. Since then, his pre-disability athletic exploits have grown to the point where the yearbook shows him on the 9th grade interscholastic team in every fall and winter sport.
  • Our Miss Brooks: Miss Brooks is said to be a wonderful English teacher. But given that an episode that was actually showed Miss Brooks teaching high school would be rather dull, one has to take it on trust. The few times she is shown tutoring English, it's played for laughs i.e. "The Yodar Kritch Award" sees her give a crash course to Dumb Jock Bones Snodgrass.
  • The Outer Limits (1995): In the episode "Falling Star", the heroine's music is supposed to have such amazing influence that if she lives and succeeds as a pop star, the future will become a Utopia. The heroine is played (and presumably, her music composed) by Sheena Easton.
  • Outsourced: Todd is regarded in-universe as an Everyman trying his best to handle being in a different culture. Out of universe, he's regarded as a culturally insensitive clod who constantly grabs onto the Idiot Ball in order to ensure Culture Clash hijinks.
  • Power Rangers Ninja Steel: Despite having 49 trophies and trying to get his 50th, Victor Vincent never demonstrates any of the physical skill needed to have gained those trophies to begin with. In fact, when trying to get a new trophy or reclaim his title for a previous victory, he always relies on cheating with Monty's help.
  • Power Rangers RPM: The Venjix Virus, the antagonist. This virus took down the entire planet but cannot take down the last city on Earth. Considering this is the most heavily armed city on Earth, this is not a surprise.
  • Power Rangers S.P.D.:
    • In the second half, each episode's alien criminal was said to have committed crimes that were more and more outlandish, until virtually nobody hadn't singlehandedly devastated dozens of planets. Then they come to Earth... alone, with barely effective energy blasts and a Humongous Mecha (typically recently bought from the arms-dealing recurring villain, meaning they didn't have it when they wiped out fifty planets) that's quickly taken out. Especially jarring because earlier in the season, they weren't nearly as ridiculous about this. So the powerful enemy who commanded an army destroyed nine planets... and the powerless enemy with nothing but zappy claws destroyed a hundred. Suuuuuure, we buy that.
    • The original version, Dekaranger, is a little better about it. Usually the only Alienizers that have done any planet-destroying are the ones that practically kill the Dekarangers before they're put down. Most of the rest have often committed quite a few crimes, but they're usually just related to the Alienizer's modus operandi. (Possessing people, stealing stuff, destroying property on a car-to-city scale, putting people on the other side of mirrors, things like that.) The Alienizers also usually arrive in their Kaijuki, rather than buying it from the monstrous sarariman arms dealer, so it's a bit more believable that they pulled off whatever they were doing.
  • The Practice and Boston Legal: Alan Shore is introduced as one of the best anti-trust lawyers in Massachusetts, and that is frequently said to be his real area of expertise. Over the years, he is seen practicing criminal law, tort law, administrative law, constitutional law, procedural law, evidence law and many others. He is never actually seen practicing anti-trust law. Paradoxically, he is introduced as having little-to-no criminal law experience, yet ends up spending most of his time representing criminal defendants.
  • QI: In one episode, Stephen introduces the shoes of a 19th-century entertainer known as "Little Tich", whom he says was one of the greatest comedians of all time, and a huge inspiration on Chaplin. He goes on to say that in 200 years, when the names of Stephen Fry and the panelists on the show are forgotten, Little Tich's name will remain. The panelists point out that his name is already forgotten since no one there except Stephen (including the audience) recognized or had even heard of him. When a video of Little Tich is run, showing him doing a skit with elongated shoes that allow him to lean forward without falling over, the panelists argue that he's not even that funny.
  • Quantum Leap:
    • Sam Beckett. Viewers are informed that he "has an IQ of 197 and graduated from high school at 16. Completed four years worth of classes at MIT in two years. Has seven doctoral degrees and speaks 11 languages." But precious little of this comes through on the show, where he typically arrives at the solution to the Problem of the Week via his intuition more than anything else (although he does speak and understand foreign languages from time to time).
    • Al is a Navy Admiral and ex-astronaut who played baseball at Annapolis, was a Golden Gloves boxer, worked in the circus, is enough of a ladies man to have been married five times... basically, it was often revealed he had done whatever Sam needed to do in his current Leap so he could instruct Sam. Outside of his instructions, Al is almost never actually seen doing any of this — although this is justified as almost all of Al's on-screen time is of him as a hologram in the Imaging Chamber.
  • Queer as Folk (US): Brian, the marketing genius, is really more of a one-trick pony; no matter if he's selling booze, a steakhouse or a mayor candidate, he works the sex angle, and only the sex angle.
  • Raising Hope played this for laughs in an episode that centered around Jimmy's amazing singing ability. When we actually hear him sing, he's terrible, and the characters all realize that the only time they ever heard his supposed "amazing singing" was when they were drunk.
  • The Red Green Show: Gets a Lampshade Hanging and Played for Laughs when Possum Lodge acquires a collection of tubas. One segment has Red seemingly playing the show's theme song on the tuba, and he's pretty good at it. When he's done and the studio audience applauds, the song starts up again before Red kicks the person who's really playing the tuba.
  • Revolution:
    • The Resistance is supposedly causing a lot of problems for the Monroe Republic but beside Nora, none of the rebels the protagonists meet seem competent enough to cause that much trouble. It's possible that the resistance groups in other areas of the Republic are much more competent or maybe the strength of the Monroe Republic is also exaggerated. Episode 3 showed that one rebel group only became a serious threat because they actually their hands on a sniper rifle, while the Monroe militia apparently has to rely on numbers to win battles. Episode 5 showed Ken "Hutch" Hutchinson, who is the last remaining member of his rebel group, and he and Nora got into a violent disagreement over whether or not to bomb the one working train that the militia ever had. Episode 9 showed the rebels apparently don't have any effective method to sniff out moles, because one of their number turned out to be a mole for Monroe and he slaughtered most of group without a problem. Episode 11 had at least one rebel camp being slaughtered by the helicopters, but that's justified, because they don't have any heavy weapons to shoot them down with. Episode 14 made this a Subverted Trope, by having the rebels form a coalition with the Georgia Federation, resulting in an army of 100 rebels and 200 trained Georgian troops. Episode 17 ended up turning it into a Double Subversion, when a mole revealed the coalition's location, and 270 men were wiped out in one drone strike. Interestingly enough, the first season finale revealed that the rebels were more like terrorists at first, but Monroe's execution of a rebel and his entire family, in an ill-conceived attempt to make an example out of them, only added legitimacy to their cause.
    • Likewise, the Monroe Militia makes numerous tactical mistakes and neglects technology that would give it an edge even under the constraints the program has imposed (no bayonets for muskets, no body armor, etc.) Truth in Television, as military dictatorships usually don't have very good militaries. That's why Monroe was so obsessed with getting a fleet of helicopters to work, which happened in episode 10...because he was trying to compensate for his poor military.
  • Riverdale: After the Season 5 Time Skip, Jughead Jones is supposed to be a critically acclaimed writer and rising star. However, his only published book is essentially a retelling of the series with different names and has some parallels to The Outsiders. While it is subverted (He also has severe writer’s block, is in danger of being a One-Hit Wonder and an insane amount of debt.), you’d think that he would have learned more writing styles and had more material from four years in a prestigious writer’s program in Iowa.
  • Robin Hood:
    • The character of Kate in the final season is described on the official website as an "indispensable" member of the team, whose weapon of choice is "her imagination." The former claim is strange enough considering she's entirely useless, but the latter is even more incomprehensible. The heights of her "imagination" involve her secretly palming an arrowhead into Robin's hand and using a sword to pull a key close enough for her to pick it up. Hardly a test of ingenuity.
    • It becomes even less impressive when you realise she's the Replacement Scrappy of a character who once successfully disguised the outlaws' weapons as musical instruments in order to sneak them into the castle.
    • She's also lauded as "compassionate" in the same episode that she a) breaks Much's heart by asking him to help her hook up with Robin, b) demands that Robin leave Isabella to be raped and strangled by her abusive husband, and c) acts like a spoilt six-year-old because nobody's paying her enough attention.
  • Saved by the Bell: Violet is a really amazing singer, so much so that the Glee Club never mentioned before or since manages to finish in third in a singing contest by having her sing solo. But the audience can hear that her amazing singing amounts to being able to carry a tune. Apparently Violet was chosen because they went through all the girls and Violet was the only decent singer so she was chosen as the soloist.
  • The Secret Life of the American Teenager: Any talent or vocation of the main cast that doesn't relate to sex or sexual prowess is talked about but never shown. The most obvious one is Amy and Ricky being members of the school marching band. They're never shown practicing and don't possess any instruments at their homes. The closest Amy gets to touching an instrument while in a marching band is a scene from a flashback episode from band camp where she's tripping over herself because of seeing Ricky for the first time.
  • In the Seinfeld episode "The Cartoon", Sally Weaver's comedy makes her an overnight star and gets her a television show...but we see some of her act and it's just an hour of her slinging generic insults at someone the audience has never met. One of her zingers is about the man getting a manicure- funny, maybe, but not enough to make a living in one of the most competitive, low-paying industries in America.
  • Slings & Arrows: One season focuses on a production of Hamlet in which a young film hunk is cast as the title role. In the end, he rises to the occasion and delivers what we're meant to understand is a masterful performance, but what we see is a montage of the actor staring dreamily into the middle distance while reciting his lines in virtual monotone.
  • Smash. Oh, boy, where to start...
    • From the beginning, the plot of the series is whether Ivy or Karen is the better choice for Marilyn Monroe. The issue is that from the first episode, it's obvious that Ivy is much better a singer, actress and overall presence (mostly due to how Megan Hilty is a truly experienced Broadway star) while Karen is clearly the lesser choice. Yet, it's pushed on how Karen has a "quality" needed to bring the role to life. The show seems to finally get the hint from fans as in season 2, Ivy does win the Marilyn role only for Karen to move onto a new musical.
    • Derek is supposedly a top-notch director but comes off as an short-tempered and arrogant womanizing jerk so it's amazing anyone hires him for anything.
    • Julia and Tom are pushed as truly great songwriters but their musical numbers are so-so to say the least.
    • In season 2, we meet the producers of a new musical, "Hit List" which is supposedly a cutting-edge show meant to capture youth audiences. The numbers are no better than those in "Bombshell" and come off ridiculous.
    • When one of the producers of that show dies in a car accident, the series clearly tries to link it to the same feelings as Jonathan Larson dying before the premiere of Rent. The problem is that "Hit List" is no Rent and having Broadway dim its lights (a tribute only meant for true legends passing) for a guy who did one show is crazy.
  • Sonny with a Chance:
  • So Weird: Annie is supposed to be a great singer, and they manage to work in a song of hers in nearly every episode of the third season. But the actress who plays her (although she has gotten quite a bit better with age) was above-average at best.
  • Spaced: Played with and subverted in which three characters all work in creative professions, but we are never told if they're particularly good. Brian praises his former partner Vulva as a brilliant performance artist when her work is bizarre and incomprehensible, but exactly what someone like Brian (wangsty, pretentious) would speak highly of. Daisy is a writer but is mostly too lazy to get any work done, and Tim is a comic book artist. His sketches were done by real-life comic book artist Simon Bisley (after whom Tim is named), and might even count as an inversion; other characters frequently tend to discuss his work dismissively, usually by describing them as 'cartoons' ("It's a bit more complicated than that.") but when we see them they're actually quite good.
  • Stargate Atlantis: Elizabeth Weir is said to be a skilled and experienced diplomat. You wouldn't know it from her time leading the Atlantis Expedition. Her efforts to negotiate peaceful solutions with other races fail more often than they succeed, her command decisions violate basic human rights conventions multiple times (granted, these aren't "humans" in the traditional sense she's dealing with), and she spends the bulk of the first two seasons dealing with dissent from the other scientists and jockeying with Sheppard for leadership of the Expedition. The argument could be made that this is part of the point - that politics in the Pegasus Galaxy are so unlike what she's used to dealing with on Earth that she's forced to rewrite the rules on the fly - but far too many confrontations end with explosions than would be expected from one of Earth's allegedly greatest diplomats.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • In the "Crossover" episode set in the Mirror Dimension, Intendant Kira praises her own Odo's ability to run an efficient ore processing operation and maintain order among the slaves. The audience saw several examples of him being cruel, but not efficient or orderly. For example, he allowed a thorium containment unit to go unrepaired, despite the warnings of the Mirror Dimension's O'Brien, resulting in a catastrophic thorium leak. Furthermore, at least three Terran slaves escaped under his watch. Finally, he assigned Bashir to a task for which Bashir was physically unsuited, as Odo lampshaded later in the episode.
    • The series has a Running Gag in which Morn is described by others as talkative, eloquent, humorous, and even an accomplished fighter. And yet, you hardly see him doing anything but sit on the same seat in Quark's Bar, drinking and never speaking. This came to be half by accident. Morn was given lines in a few early episode scripts, but his scenes kept getting cut for time. The people making the show noticed the pattern, and decided to run with it. Reportedly the person who built Morn's head prosthetics so that they would allow full movement of mouth for speaking scenes was rather annoyed at the work going to waste.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise:
    • Jonathan Archer is stated to be a trained diplomat in "A Night in Sickbay." That same episode shows him doing everything a diplomat should never do. He's also supposedly a long-time dog lover, yet somehow he hasn't quite figured out that dogs like to pee on trees.
    • The degree to which incompetent diplomatic staff show up in all incarnations of Star Trek should be a trope in itself. Oh wait, there IS a trope for this.
    • These are the Voyages reveals the fact that The Chef basically acted like the ship's counselor; having the ear of the whole crew and being a trusted best friend to all. The problem is that, not only was this never brought up once in the previous four seasons, but we have literally never seen him unless you count a single shot of his legs as he delivered a plate of food — he is basically the Star Trek equivalent of that lady who owns Tom & Jerry's house. For all this episode tries to make out that Chef (and yes he is so close to the crew he is never even given an on-screen name) is the NX-01's version of Guinan or Neelix, he is by all evidence nothing more than a random guy who cooked their dinner. The episode ultimately turns out to be a holodeck program from the Next Gen era, with the chef being the player character; in-universe it's just a plot device to get everyone to talk to the player without the player having any actual effect on events.
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • In the classic series episode "Court Martial", Samuel T. Cogley is, based on his actions in the episode, an idiotic Luddite who would have spectacularly lost Kirk's case without the timely interference of Spock. But everyone spends the whole episode talking about what a brilliant lawyer Cogley is.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • Okona from the episode "The Outrageous Okona". Obviously meant to be a Han Solo pastiche (particularly because he is dressed exactly like Han Solo), the smirking Okona comes across as an overgrown fratboy with a sense of privilege that would stagger Charles I. Riker and Wesley both gush over him (although Picard and Worf think he's a joke from the beginning), and he got a fair bit of tail on the Enterprise.
    • Guinan is said to be an excellent listener, but they weren't going to bring Whoopi Goldberg in to just nod her head, and for dramatic reasons the countless hours of listening to people's problems was omitted from the series. Instead, we simply get the scenes where Guinan has already listened and is now giving advice.
    • Dr. Pulaski was often said by the various characters on the Enterprise that she was caring, considerate, and loving with a terrific bedside manner. This is nowhere to be seen as Pulaski is a pretty extreme example of Dr. Jerk, who often was stand-offish and disrespectful to her fellow crew members. Compounding all of this is a judgemental nature bordering on Fantastic Racism toward Data, often dismissing his abilities, insulting his attempts at trying to become human, and treating him more like a toaster than a teammate.
    • Deanna Troi had empathic abilities which Captain Picard repeatedly described as useful or even invaluable. But it always seemed that everything she "sensed" was already painfully obvious to anyone who was paying attention and never especially helpful.
    • Rear Admiral Norah Satie from "The Drumhead" is spoken of as a skilled investigator; when she comes aboard the Enterprise to help investigate espionage and possible sabotage to the warp drive, Picard is thrilled to have her help. Unfortunately, she does nothing useful, as Worf has already solved the case by the time she arrives; her efforts turn into a Witch Hunt that disgraces a good Starfleet technician simply for being half-Romulan, and her attempt to bring down Picard exposes her as a full-on Insane Admiral.
  • Star Trek: Voyager:
    • Played for Laughs is the Killer Robot from the Adventures of Captain Proton holodeck program. All the holodeck characters act like it's a terrifying menace, yet it's just a slow-moving, inept Tin-Can Robot with a speech impediment.
    • The infamous Neelix. Fans are divided on just how many of the skills he claims to have are examples of this trope and how many of them are just lies/exaggerations (something he admits to in the episode Fair Trade) however he does potentially have a lot of them. He is an expert cook whose food makes people ill (and actually got the ship itself sick once), a morale officer who deliberately starts fights, an intrepid adventurer who is scared of the dark, an expert climber who fell off and injured his team mate, a survival expert whose survival skills indirectly killed two people, a guide whose information is almost always incorrect or inaccurate... you get the point. This is only a taster of what could be a very substantial wall of text.
  • Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip: Writers Matt Albie and Danny Tripp are brought in by TV exec Jordan McDeere to save the supposedly-tanking Show Within a Show of the same name. Their first sketch after coming back on the air with new material (in the episode following the pilot) is a boring and monotonous parody of The Pirates of Penzance — and the sketches don't get any better from there. This is despite the fact that Matt and Danny are frequently described as brilliant and visionary by everyone around them. It doesn't help matters that, of the few times we get to hear about "Peripheral Vision Man" (which, judging from the pilot, was a cartoon animated in the style of Robert Smigel's TV Funhouse), it's more amusing to hear about than anything featured in the so-called "superior" sketches. This has been a key point of criticism of the series, pushed by how Sorkin continues to insist that various actors and writers claimed the sketches were terrific.
  • Super Dave: This trope is the basis for comedian Bob Einstein's character Super Dave Osborne. Super Dave is continually lauded as one of the world's most daring and amazing stuntmen, whose death-defying feats are "astronomically sensational", to quote one such hyperbole. Of course, when we actually see Super Dave perform a stunt, it backfires spectacularly and he's horrifically maimed, twisted, or crushed in some way.
  • Supernatural:
    • Does this a few times when it comes to describing people as intelligent. Besides the odd character like Sam and Ash, who demonstrate that they are especially knowledgeable in certain fields, often the writers will just throw in a toss-away line that explains that the character in question reads/owns a lot of complicated books so they must be smart, despite often making horribly poor decisions and never doing or saying anything that might demonstrate said intelligence.
    • Note that one of the viewpoint characters is a high-school dropout and the other's primary regret in life is not finishing college, so falsely conflating education with intelligence or cleverness is not unexpected. This is even lampshaded a few times when Sam has to reassure Dean that he isn't necessarily "the dumb muscle".
    • In a highly unexpected Subverted Trope — notable for how rarely a show successfully pulls it off, the season 2 episode "Crossroad Blues" features a man who sells his soul in order to become a great artist. They do actually show a number of his artworks, all of which are interesting and emotive. How great they actually are still remains a matter of opinion, of course, and the writers acknowledge this by having the character create artworks that he pours his heart into, but never actually manages to sell.
    • Sam and Dean are sometime praised as "great" hunters which can be laughable at times considering that, once per episode, one of the brothers will be put in harm's way after making a stupid decision, and only get out of it through dumb luck. Often the Monster of the Week is gloating long enough so the other boy can save him just in time.
    • Played straight with Gordon Walker, a hunter who specializes in vampires. He's supposed to be among the best at tracking and killing them, but two of the three vampires we see him fight manage to get the upper hand. The first time he's bailed out by Sam and Dean, the second he's not so lucky.
    • The Leviathans, main enemies of season 7, are supposed to be even more powerful than angels, and demonstrated when Edgar easily dispatches two angel mooks. The problem is there is little outside this scene to indicate this is actually the case. Angels are super strong, able to teleport, Nigh-Invulnerable, capable of healing major injuries and resurrecting the dead, can kill most monsters and demons just by touching them, and can even Time Travel and alter reality. In fact, they're so powerful that in three seasons Sam and Dean only ever managed to outright kill one angel -And even then, only because Dean took him by surprise. Leviathans are also Nigh-Invulnerable and can shapeshift, but have little else going for them, and have actually had trouble fighting demons, witches, ghosts, and even normal humans, all of which were previously established as being much weaker than angels. So rather than actually making the Leviathans seem frightening, the scene just comes off as a desperate attempt to establish the leviathans as a credible threat by invoking The Worf Effect.
    • Subverted in an episode of season nine. Castiel meets with Bartholomew, who goes on at length about what a great strategist Castiel is, but only references past events that all happened offscreen. Then Bartholomew shows Castiel his latest intelligence — and Castiel makes a tactically sound suggestion that Bartholomew hadn't thought of.
  • Superstore: Played for Laughs with the character Brett. Brett is apparently one of the best workers in the store. The rest of the characters always discuss and act jealous of Brett's apparent success within the store. In one episode, he somehow manages to sell an entire shelf of merchandise (and the shelf). Brett never talks, and the audience only ever sees him standing around on the sales floor.
  • That's So Raven: The Musical Episode has everyone act as though Raven put on the best musical performance of anyone. While Raven is a good singer, Annelise Van Der Pol is a Broadway powerhouse whose voice outshines the entire cast without any electronic enhancement, yet her talent isn't even acknowledged. It's also an odd Continuity Drift as a season 1 episode has Raven failing to get the lead in the school musical, being relegated to a character with no lines. Certainly something that wouldn't happen to someone with the aforementioned praise.
  • Ugly Betty: Betty's dream is to be the editor of her own magazine. However, you are repeatedly shown her unprofessional behaviour in meetings and when she is given chances to write something, it is always rejected as unsuitable. This is played as "Evil Mode does not appreciate Betty's fabulousness", but in reality, a talented writer should be able to adopt the correct "voice" to fit into the style of the publication she's writing for. Despite never having a single piece pass muster, it doesn't stop her getting promoted to associate editor in the final season, even though her main competition is someone who has demonstrated far better fashion knowledge/creativity, to the point that he's also offered a job at Vogue, and therefore should have blown Betty away. By contrast, Wilhelmina is a devious, scheming, conniving backstabber, who is always up to no good, but has never been shown to drop the ball with clients/designers and the other characters repeatedly admit her ideas are the best. She also genuinely wants the best for Mode, and will use a good idea even if she hates the person who thought of it (usually Daniel or Betty). That's why she never gets fired (for long).
  • The West Wing: Josh is supposed to be a political savant. He certainly comes off as absurdly smart, if thoroughly arrogant. But in terms of actually playing politics and running campaigns, he screws up. Frequently. His crowning moment as a political operative is taking Jimmy Smits and making him president, but that's more a result of Smits' character taking steps that fly in the face of Josh's advice.
  • The X-Files: David Duchovny himself pointed out in an interview that for all Agent Mulder's alleged skill as an FBI agent, he never solved a single case in nine years.

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