Intrepid Reporter / Live-Action TV

Intrepid Reporters in Live-Action TV series.

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Series:

• Jim Kyle, the protagonist of the dystopian BBC series 1990, is one of these and a reporter for one of the last 'free' presses in the U.K. and does what he can through the newspaper (as wrapped up in red tape as that press is), but it also comes in handy in that his press card and status as a reporter gives him a way to talk to people who are in trouble with the Public Control Department so he can help them without arousing suspicion.
• The Adventures of Slim Goodbody: Despite working in law enforcement, Agent B-12 has shades of this, often holding a microphone and explaining the situation to Body Control as if she were a news reporter. Since her main (but not only) role seems to be gathering information for headquarters, this is plausible.
• Played semi-straight in Alias in the first season, the character of Will Tippen is a reporter, idealistic and thus easily manipulated into a situation that is far over his head.
• The Andromeda Strain: Nash is a reporter dedicated to uncovering the Government Conspiracy behind Andromeda, despite knowing he's putting his life in danger in the process as both the government and military try to have him assassinated.
• Beforeigners: Deconstructed. Othilia Winter is a highly skilled investigative journalist, but she hasn't been able to adapt to 21st century reporting standards, meaning that her work is sensationalist and slanted to the point that only the sleaziest taabloids will print it. The villains take full advantage, and feed Othilia bits of information knowing full well she will rile people up and draw attention way from what they're trying to do.
• Word of God says that part of Stephen Colbert's persona on The Colbert Report is mistakenly thinking he's an intrepid reporter and was inspired by TV journalists who act like they're breaking Watergate every time they do a "hard-hitting" exposé on playground violence or what have you. He specifically cited Geraldo Rivera as somebody who seems to believe "that he really is changing the world with every interview he does."
• The Victim of the Week in the Cold Case episode "Breaking News". Determined to get out of reporting "fluff" pieces, she stumbled upon corporate corruption and was murdered by a fellow reporter who'd been taking payments to keep the story quiet.
• Parodied in Community, where Britta attempts to be a gritty war-time (read: pillow fight) photographer. She sucks at it.
• Mac Taylor's stepson Reed Garrett is a 21st-century version of this, an internet blogger, on CSI: NY. Reed inherited his mother's headstrong, stubborn streak and used to push Mac a lot for info on cases. Mac told him that he would give him what he legally and ethically could, but couldn't treat him specially. Reed kept getting close to the action, and eventually got himself kidnapped by a killer Mac and the team were trying to catch. He left clues in the blog posts he was forced to make for Mac to find him but was left with a slit throat and a permanent scar. He's a bit wiser later on, still coming to Mac a few times when he found trouble, but not putting himself in as much danger and accepting whatever info Mac could give.
• Ben Urich in Daredevil (2015) chums it up with retired mobsters, and works with Karen Page to expose Wilson Fisk through the media. He's a more cynical version, warning Karen to exercise caution in going up against Fisk. After Fisk kills Urich, Karen assumes this role for season 2 to dig into Frank Castle's past with the backing of Ben's editor Mitchell Ellison.
• Doctor Who:
  • Sarah Jane Smith started out this way but rapidly became more interested in saving the planet.
    • On her own spinoff show, Sarah Jane has returned to being a journalist, though she is far more interested in defending the Earth from aliens than getting a scoop. Luckily, the two tend to go hand-in-hand. Still, her job is usually just a device to get the plot of the week rolling.
  • "Partners in Crime": Penny Carter, science correspondent for the Observer, wants to know the secret behind Adipose Industries' diet pills enough to sneak into the building on two occasions. She ends up captured and tied up twice for her trouble, the second time after ignoring the Doctor's advice to leave. She ends up having to take the chair with her to get out after the second time.
• Özge Egeli in Fi. Even after getting fired from her magazine, she never lets up her pursuit of Can Manay's darkest secrets.
• Ghostwriter: Fannie Mae Banner. She hosts a news show called Caught Ya where she helps regular people with their problems by finding and exposing anyone who's been caught doing something wrong, like corrupt landlords, stores overcharging customers, or people burying toxic waste.
• One late-season episode of The Golden Girls sees Rose, who's taken a job at the local news station as an assistant to a reporter, try to become an on-screen reporter herself. Sophia urges her to follow this trope, insisting that "a good reporter gets the story, no matter what." Rose is given a test assignment of covering a local dog show, and it looks like she'll have a shot at success when an armed robber shows up at the event and she's the only news correspondent at the scene. She remembers Sophia's advice to get the story, and does just that...unfortunately, she sticks to her original job and literally covers the dog show ("We're here with something truly shocking—dogs who look like their owners!") while the crook robs the terrified participants.
• In Hannah Montana, Miley constantly lives under threat of these people. This has resulted in a minor recurring character, an annoying Paparazzi guy that is apparently desperate enough for a picture that he actually FOLLOWS HER HOME after a concert. In The Movie, another reporter hears Miley talking about her secret (that she is Hannah Montana) and becomes desperate to find out what the secret is. When he finally finds out and snaps a picture, his daughters make him change his mind.
• Hannibal gives us crime blogger Freddie Lounds (a Gender Flip of the tabloid reporter character from Red Dragon), who is certainly one of the more antagonistic characters on that show. She's a headstrong, intelligent and self-motivated writer, but her tactics often veer into the flat-out illegal: in her first appearance alone, she lies to the police, publishes details on an ongoing murder investigation, and spies on psychiatric sessions. She's also determined to paint Will Graham (admittedly a very unstable criminal profiler) as an insane, psychopathic would-be killer.
• Randi McFarland in season 1 of Highlander. The original version of her who paid Richie to follow Duncan in the pilot was cut but she kept following him in later episodes. She was determined to find out his secret and why he was always involved in trouble. Once, it got her kidnapped. She was dropped after season 1 though.
• Homicide: Life on the Street: Sam Thorne is an investigative journalist and an old friend of Giardello's who has pissed off many powerful people with his newspaper. He's eventually assasinated on the orders of a Columbian drug cartel he was investigating.
• The Hour's Freddie Lyon is stubborn to the extreme, and if he senses a story, he will stop at nothing until he has all the information. He's gotten into trouble several times when he stubbornly continued to pursue clues even after being encouraged, ordered or threatened to drop the matter. However, most of the other journalists on the show are somewhat more realistic.
• Jack McGee in The Incredible Hulk (1977). He may be chasing a tabloid-like tale of a giant green monster (and gets mocked for it by his colleagues), but he's keen on reporting the truth. On occasion he reports on other breaking news and scandals that deserve coverage
• Both Maddie and Carla on Jonathan Creek qualify, falling somewhere between the good and bad versions of the trope. Maddie isn't averse to a little breaking and entering or using the Bavarian Fire Drill to get a story, and Carla is a sensationalist television journalist.
• Little House on the Prairie:
  • How Mrs. Oleson plays herself up in episodes that involve newspapers and journalism. In reality, she is doing nothing more than spreading malicious gossip and — to the chagrin of her husband, Nels — playing herself and her family up as moral, upstanding citizens and the faces of the community (again, to Nels' chagrin) spreading rumors and lies, characterizing it as investigative journalism and human interest.
  • John Sanderson Jr., Mr. Edwards' adopted son, who had accepted a job at a newspaper in Chicago. John Jr. was investigating a corrupt businessman and politician, and kills him (in a "streetcar accident") before the story can go to press. This has triggered Mr. Edwards' relapse into alcoholism, but before that, Charles and Edwards work with the newspaper publisher and editor to uncover the truth.
• Lois Lane and Clark Kent in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman are this. More so than in other Superman incarnations, much of the focus is on Lane and Kent developing their stories.
  • They didn't do so shabby in The Adventures of Superman either. Alone among the Superman series, nearly all of the antagonists are corrupt officials, mobsters, etc. that Clark, Lois, and/or Jimmy encountered while following a news lead.
• Midnight Caller: Jack's friend Deacon Bridges, a reporter played by Mykelti Williamson, sometimes helps him with his investigations.
• Midsomer Murders: In "The Scarecrow Murders", DS Winter's New Old Flame Caitlyn is one of these. Her help and a past set of stories helps Winters and Barnaby solve the case.
• Part of Me: Downplayed with Selma, who does a lot of risky stuff in her investigations against dangerous killers, but it's more for Mónica's sake than for professional ambition or a desire for exposing the truth.
• The Poirot adaptation of The Big Four adds a new character called Lawrence Tysoe, a journalist who was one of the first people to know about the titular Big Four and stirs up quite a lot of hysteria and panic by publishing the information against his superiors' wishes. He was later recruited by Poirot to the investigation, partly to protect the guy from the organisation he's trying to report on.
• Power Rangers Dino Fury has Amelia, who works at BuzzBlast doing segments on things like glow-in-the-dark lip gloss but would prefer to report on paranormal phenomena.
• Betty Cooper and Jughead Jones, reporters for the Riverdale High School Paper, the Blue & Gold. Despite the fact that it's only a school paper, Riverdale being a Stepford Suburbia means that their articles often involve uncovering the truth about local murders, criminal gangs, drug dealers, organised crime and government corruption.
• Scandal (2012):
  • Gideon. God help you if you get in the way of his scoop.
  • James picks up the mantle in Season Two. As with Gideon, he's not sure where the story is taking him.
• Yana in Servant of the People who always jumps on an occasion to discredit the new president.
• The Shadow Line has Ross McGovern, a journalist that wants to write a story exposing police corruption and one of the show's few genuinely heroic characters.
• Stargate SG-1:
  • Julia Donovan in "Prometheus". In her case, it turns out that she was actually put up to it by a government black-ops group that was going to hijack the Prometheus and use it as blackmail to get one of their leaders free. However, she was entirely unaware of their ulterior motives (or the fact that her camera crew were smuggling weapons in with their gear.) As far as she was concerned, she really was just an honest Intrepid Reporter, it just turns out that the people who were feeding her the initial information were something different.
  • Earlier in "Secrets", there was Armin Selig, who had a concrete scoop about the Stargate Program. He got hit by a car after confronting Jack with his suspicions. Never explicitly said, but Jack was left half-believing it was arranged.
  • Emmet Bregman, the documentary-maker who visits the base in the two-part episode Heroes, tries to be something of this when he repeatedly forces himself in the middle of every ongoing situation, but each time is sent away by the colonel in charge of supervising him. (It's stated that some of this is due to not wanting to take risks after the Julia Donovan incident, but additionally the members of Stargate Command just find his presence annoying and disruptive.) He never ends up in the middle of the action like he wanted, but he ends up witnessing a good deal more of it than he really bargained for.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Jake Sisko becomes this, although his original ambition was to be a novelist, risking his life to cover the front lines of the Dominion War and to report from the occupied station.
  • He nearly got killed early in his writing career in "Nor The Battle To The Strong", when he and Bashir were diverted to assist a Federation field hospital under siege by the Klingons. Jake expected a lot of derring-do for his story, only to find that when people were actually shooting at him he wasn't anywhere near as brave as he thought he'd be.
• Harry Kim on Star Trek: Voyager claimed to have edited the newspaper of Starfleet Academy as a student, breaking the story of the Maquis rebellion and getting the faculty and the student body polarized and taking sides. He reveals this information to Neelix, spurring him to investigate the ongoing espionage and sabotage situation aboard Voyager. Neelix, the ship's cook, is then inspired to use his television program A Briefing With Neelix to do some Real Journalism, and Neelix, and ultimately plays an important role in the unmasking of spy Michael Jonas. Ah, the power of the media.
• Cal McCaffrey and his fellow reporters in State of Play all fit the type, although they all avoid the stereotype of the lone crusader and rogue - by design, according to Paul Abbott. They might drink, have affairs, and employ less-than-ethical tactics, but they're not stupid about it.
• Stranger Things deconstructs this trope with Nancy in season 3. Nancy's relentless pursuit of a big scoop ends up getting the paper she works for into legal trouble, which leads to her and Jonathan (whom she dragged along) getting fired. This is made even worse because, unlike most other examples of this trope, she wasn't even an official reporter, she was an intern.
• Taken: In "Acid Tests", Sam Crawford, a journalism student at UC Berkeley who writes for the college newspaper, travels to Hyder, Alaska to investigate the strange writing found in the burial chamber. He realizes that there is something more going on when Sheriff Kerby tells Dr. Powell and his archaeology students Sarah, Buzz, and Daryl to leave town after it is discovered that the mummy is no more than six years old.
• The satirical title character of This Is David Lander/Harper, as played by Stephen Fry and later Tony Slattery, is a recklessly determined investigative journalist in a trench coat. He frequently puts himself in dangerous or ethically dubious situations in his attempts to expose corruption.
• Titans (2018). Donna Troy has stopped being Wondergirl and sticks to her civilian identity as a reporter, because she realised she could do more good that way than as a superhero.
• The Twilight Zone:
  • In "Valley of the Shadow", a journalist named Philip Redfield discovers a small town named Peaceful Valley while driving through New Mexico. He notices strange occurrences around town and realizes that there's something unusual going on, leading him to investigate. Once he discovers that the town's citizens have access to various extremely advanced forms of Applied Phlebotinum, he is determined to reveal the truth to the world, even risking death to do so.
  • In "Queen of the Nile", Jordan Herrick arrives at Pamela Morris' house in Hollywood to write a fluff piece about her and is immediately smitten with her. However, his curiosity is piqued when Viola Draper, ostensibly Pamela's elderly mother, tells him that she is her daughter. With the help of Mrs. Draper and his editor Krueger in Chicago, Jordan determines that Pamela is immortal and has used many identities, including the Silent Movie star Constance Taylor and the stage actress Gladys Gregory, over the years.
• V (1983) has Kristine Walsh, who lost her objectivity so completely that she pretty much became the Minister of Propaganda for the Visitors. She changed her tune, however, about five seconds before she was fatally shot. In the A. C. Crispin novelization, she had a reputation for sensationalism and many people said, "(Paraphrasing)<Walter Cronkite?> wants the story and Kristine Walsh wants the GLORY."
• The West Wing:
  • Being the White House correspondent, Danny Concannon is supposed to be intrepid or people will accuse him of letting a second Watergate go by, which puts him in a bit of a tricky spot since he's good friends with the President, literally wrote the book on the First Lady and has a crush on the Press Secretary.
  • We also meet other intrepid reporters on that show, such as C.J.'s friend Will Sawyer who ends up getting killed in the Congo. And there's a subversion where Toby gets a press pass for a Russian journalist so she can cover a summit between their two governments, having assumed that the reason the Russians didn't want to let her in was that she was some kind of idealistic Voice of the Resistance. Turns out she was just a glorified gossip writer who had printed a lot of unchecked, fabricated or gratuitously nasty stories about them in a crappy tabloid. "They should give up your spot and put another naked woman in there!"
• The Victim of the Week in the Without a Trace episode "The Source". Paired with a Bittersweet Ending — she's murdered, but thanks to her work, an innocent man will be freed from prison.
  • Also in the episode "Exposure", a legitimate photojournalist turned Paparazzi trying to turn back to legitimate. It was feared that he'd met with foul play due to either of these ventures, but it turned out that'd he'd gotten into an accident on his own.
• Women's Murder Club: Cindy is constantly forcing her way into Lindsay's investigations and trying to find the story, refusing to simply stand by while the others say it's too dangerous. This type of reporting is constantly shown to get Cindy in trouble, such as getting her repeatedly arrested or even shot at one point.

Made-for-TV Movies:

• In the Made-for-TV movie Special Bulletin, a reporter is told to get out of the way in case a terrorist home-made bomb turns out to actually be a nuclear weapon, but stays on the scene because he believes that they have more than an hour before it will detonate, not realizing that when the government assault team captures it, they make a mistake and set it off.

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