Never Say Die / Live-Action TV

• Played with in Arrested Development, when a doctor appears to be doing this by saying "we lost him," but it turns out that George Sr. just climbed out the window to avoid going back to prison.
• The A-Team. As a de facto children's show, in it, the A-Team amass a arsenal of machine guns and other weaponry, faces off against a similarly armed force, exchange thousands of retorts of gunfire —— and no one dies. Man, their aim sucked. Parodied in Family Guy when Peter and company, dressed as the A-Team, try to stop a construction crew from demolishing a park using guns and ramming into things with their vans. They are surprised when the construction crew assume that they are trying to kill them.
• Despite being overwhelmingly the most-requested subject for Beakman's World to tackle, the show waited until the very last segment of the very last episode to tackle flatulence. (And they got away with saying "anal sphincter").
• In The Big Comfy Couch episode "Full of Life", Loonette finds a live caterpillar in Granny Garbanzo's yard. She sets it down in her garden, only to find it dead a short time later. She picks it up and assumes it is sleeping. Granny tells her that the caterpillar is "gone", which Loonette takes literally and disputes, "It's not gone. It's right here." Granny elaborates that by "gone", she means that it's "not alive" and sings a sad song about the situation, all while avoiding the D word.
• Played with in-universe on the Bones episode "The Body In The Bounty", when the host of a kids' science program wants Brennen to guest-star on his show. People dying on Bones is nothing new, but one of the characters expresses doubt as to whether Brennen can avoid talking about autopsies or grisly modes of death long enough to appear on a kiddie Show Within a Show.
• From Buffy:
  Buffy: If there were just a few good descriptions of what took out the other Slayers, maybe it would help me to understand my mistake, to keep it from happening again.
  Giles: Yes, well, the problem is, after a final battle, it's difficult to get any... well, the Slayer's not... she's rather...
  Buffy: It's okay to use the D word, Giles.
  Giles: Dead. And hence not very forthcoming.
• Charmed is very fond of the word "vanquished". Only for demons though. The words "death," "die", and "kill" are still used for humans, except for sarcastic expressions like "Somebody vanquish me!"
  • Happens in-universe when the Avatars remake the world into a Utopia in season seven. Whenever someone dies people can only say "they went away" or "they've gone to a better place". Leo, who wasn't affected, uses this to point out to Phoebe how the "Utopia" isn't what they were promised it would be.
• Daredevil (2015). At the start of Season 3, Karen Page cites a story of a masked vigilante in Hell's Kitchen as proof that Matt Murdock is still alive. When Foggy Nelson continues to insist that Matt is gone, she points out that his using "gone" instead of "dead" means he doesn't believe Matt's dead either. Foggy makes a point of using the word dead in his next sentence, causing her to storm out on him.
• Interestingly, The Dick Van Dyke Show never used the word with regard to Laura's pregnancy (which was visited repeatedly in flashbacks), but could use it freely regarding animals, as in the 1962 episode "Never Name a Duck."
• Alistair Griffin's song "Just Drive" includes the line "I'll take you to the edge where I have died a thousand times". When Sky Sports made it the theme tune for their Formula One coverage, they changed the line to "I'll take you to the edge where I have lived a thousand lives". While Formula 1 is much safer now than it was 50 years ago, it's still dangerous, so while mentions of death are unavoidable from time to time, mentioning death right in the introduction doesn't exactly set the right tone. Not to mention that, in the intro itself, the line happened to coincide with the iconic shot of Nigel Mansell collapsing (non-fatally) after the 1984 Dallas Grand Prix.
• Happy Days:
  • In "The Fonz is Allergic to Girls", Fonzie is Mistaken for Suicidal by Richie. However, Richie doesn't use the terms "die", "suicide", or "kill"; he just says, "You're not... y'know?". Fonzie says, "No, worse!", to which Richie says, "Worse than you know?! What could be worse than you know?!".
  • In one episode, Fonzie nearly dies, but he doesn't mention it directly; he just says that it might've been "curtains" for him.
  • Averted, however, in Very Special Episodes, perhaps to hammer in the seriousness of the situations — one episode is actually called "Richie Almost Dies", and in "A Star is Bored", Fonzie uses the phrase "killing himself" when explaining what "to be or not to be" means.
• iCarly toys with this a few times:
  • In "iHatch Chicks", the kids have to find a bunch of newly-hatched chicks in four hours or "bad things happen". When prompted on what exactly that means, Carly responds with a much more blunt "Six cute little chicken funerals!"
  • In the episode "iPie", this is the basis of a cruel Hope Spot: the pie shop is put in jeopardy after its owner, the 97-year-old Mr. Galini, is admitted to the hospital. They later get word secondhand that he "checked out", giving hope that he's okay... until they actually meet the workers in person and they reveal he "checked out forever", one of them explicitly stating that he passed away.
• Kamen Rider Dragon Knight uses being "vented" to explain that the defeated riders are sent to the "Advent Void," the nexus point between the mirror world and the real one, and will not be able to ever return. This seems to be one more case of replacing death with a Fate Worse than Death.
  • One episode is actually entitled "Vent Or Be Vented".
    • The series actually runs with this idea, later revealing that the Advent Void wasn't meant to be a Fate Worse than Death, since the Riders' leader had the ability to retrieve them from the Void and thus it was more of a temporary break than a permanent banishment. Of course, at the start of the series he's not around, so it is a prison for a while.
• When The Killers earned their "Sesame Street" Cred on Yo Gabba Gabba!, the show avoided mentioning their band name, instead introducing them as "Brandon, Ronnie, Mark and Dave".
• The exceptionally hard-to-win childrens' Game Show Knightmare freely uses "death" where it's appropriate.
• Lab Rats is particularly egregious about this trope, using "take out" in many situations where "kill" would flow much better with what's being said.
• Leverage: Happens in-universe when Sophie is asked if she's familiar with a certain person. Nate tells her on her earpiece to reply that the man is dead, which she is vague about it with lines like "I'm so sorry. It was a beautiful ceremony".
• Discussed in Lie to Me when an alleged rape victim said "he sexually assaulted me". Foster deduced that she was lying because actual rape victims don't shy away from saying "rape".
• Monty Python's Flying Circus:
  • The famous "dead parrot sketch" provides an excellent parody of this, with the shop owner trying to explain the dead parrot is "pining for the fjords" or anything else but dead, as the customer insists; leading said customer to launch into a Hurricane of Deadly Euphemisms:
    Customer: 'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile! This ... is an ex-parrot!
  • Also subverted in the railway timetables sketch. After seeing the corpse:
    Has he been... ?
    Yes, after breakfast. That doesn't matter now, he's dead!
• The forgotten The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo never lets anyone die, which, for a grown-up, is jarring in a detective series. The closest the show ever got to show a character dying (or even saying the d-word, for that matter) was when a victim was attacked... and fell into a coma.
  Angie: He was my mentor.. and now he... he is—
  Detective Delancy: No! No, he isn't... yet.
• In-Universe example in the NCIS episode "Grace Period", where Ziva continually states that they will kill a terrorist they are hunting. It becomes a Running Gag in the episode.
  Abby: But we only caught one of them. What if somebody else tries to stop it?
  Ziva: We kill them, Abby.
  Tony: We catch them. That's the preferred term.
  Cassidy: I like hers better.
• Neighbours has been guilty of the same thing as Home and Away since at least the mid-2000s, leaving out the word "rape" during such storylines as Izzy lying to Karl that her baby with Gus was the result of rape, Rebecca admitting to Paul that Oliver and Declan's father raped her (conceiving Declan in the process) and Bridget accidentally killing a guy who was trying to rape her. Especially strange when you consider that back in 1993 they had no problem with the scene where Julie reveals to Philip that her conception was the result of rape. Or Scott sarcastically calling himself a rapist during the first week of the show back in 1985).
• Some of the more racier game shows on US TV in the 1970s substituted the word "whoopie" for sex. Notable examples include The Newlywed Game and Match Game.
• In the Nickelodeon version of Robot Wars, Sir Killalot was re-named Sir K.
• Played straight for the most part on Odd Squad, with words like "destroy", as well as various allusions to death, used as substitutes. However, the episode "Dance Like Nobody's Watching" is a special case — the trope is played straight when Oscar tells Olive and Otto that his booby traps can "destroy" people, then it's averted later on as Otto, Ms. O and Olive get upset at Oscar and yell at him for forgetting the pattern to deactivate the first trap, with the former saying that all of them can die in Headquarters as a result.
• Our Miss Brooks: In the episode "Mr. Casey's Will", virtually every euphemism for dying is used, i.e. "shuffle off this mortal coil". Mr. Casey was Angela Devon's beloved pet cat. Oddly averted in other episodes of the series (i.e. Postage Due), which even includes an occasional suicide joke.
• Power Rangers goes overboard with this, sometimes to (unintentionally) comic effect, speaking of people (or humanoid beings) as having been "destroyed". Similarly, to avert an Inferred Holocaust, there are often excuses given for why there aren't any people harmed during Zord battles; there was a reference in Mighty Morphin Alien Rangers to battles taking place in the "Abandoned Warehouse district", which just smacks of poor urban planning. In one particularly comedic example from Lost Galaxy, a proverb becomes, "Those who live by the sword shall come to their end by the sword." Which made it all the more surprising when the Pink Ranger in Time Force screams that she would "not let [her fiance's] death be in vain" (though at other times, she says that he was "destroyed"). Of course, it turns out that he's Not Quite Destroyed.
  • Speaking of Lost Galaxy, even when Pink Ranger Kendrix had to be Killed Off for Real because her actress was gravely ill with leukemia, they still didn't use the term "dead" outright. This was a Justified Trope since they weren't sure of Valerie Vernon's survival at the time; fortunately, she pulled through and Kendrix came Back from the Dead at the end of the Grand Finale. They did, however, use the term in a Wham Line during the Grand Finale, when (after Trakeena lays waste to Terra Venture) Commander Stanton declares "This ship is dying. I don't want us to die with it!"
  • In Wild Force, the impostor Master Org gloats about how he killed Cole's parents using the most contrived death-word-aversions, never using the same one twice and really breaking the flow of a scene that would have been far more intense with one death word (and would have suffered less without it if they'd only stuck with the usual "destroy.") You forgive it because, after all, they have this unbreakable rule that decrees they must absolutely, positively never utter any die-related word come Shadow Realm or high water... and then in the very next scene, the new villain says that "the real Master Org died three thousand years ago and is never coming back!" before announcing himself the new Big Bad and tossing "Master Org" to his Not Quite Death, er, destruction. If they can use death words a few times, why not make one of them during the scene that needed it most?
    • That can be chalked up to a promise the showrunners made to the Fox censors — that Cole's parents weren't really dead; the original plan was to reveal them as a brainwashed Jindrax and Toxica. When they switched over to ABC and ABC Family mid-season, their censors hadn't been informed about any such promise, and thus Cole's parents stayed dead. Presumably the awkward wording was in case they needed to go through with their original plan.
  • The most noticeable one: "I will destroy you or be destroyed trying!"
  • In an episode of Power Rangers S.P.D., a monster goes so far as to announce "I hate empty buildings!" before smashing one to pieces, assuring the audience that no one was inside to be hurt. Also, in another episode, a former SPD cadet and close friend of the Blue SPD ranger was hired by Broodwing to assassinate Commander Crueger. This assassin is confronted by Broodwing later and accused him of failing. The assassin defends himself by claiming that he "cancelled" the commander.
  • No less than a season later in Power Rangers Mystic Force, we're told by the team's mentor that Plucky Comic Relief Clare's mother "depleted her life force" sealing the gate keeping the villains in the Underworld. Oddly, a later episode includes a Monster of the Week stealing people's life force, which seems to make them unconscious/zombified but quite alive, returning to normal once the monster was defeated and the life force was returned. You really have to wonder if Clare's mother is locked up somewhere in the base until she can get a life force infusion. A later episode averts this, with Daggeron declaring he would "rather die with honor than live without it."
  • This actually becomes quite an impressive accomplishment in Power Rangers RPM, where they manage to kill off 99% of humanity without using the "d" word. Ranger Blue uses "die" twice, though... a record for actual life-threatening circumstances. When Ziggy becomes a target of several mob cartels, he fears being "ghosted", a Future Slang term used the selfsame mob and other criminals. (We did get repeated death words way back in Space, when Zhane was Mistaken for Dying). And two of the Ranger characters had backstories involving the deaths of people close to them, both of which were shown on-camera in flashbacks. (If you count a plane blowing up with its pilot not shown to be "on-camera.") And yet nobody actually says they're dead or were killed.
  • Several series have references to ending someone's "existence" or will avoid saying "alive" with terms like "still with us." Apparently you can't even say "alive" because the opposite of alive is dead!
  • It also extends to some forms of weaponry. Power Rangers villains almost never use "bombs." Rita and Zedd have used "implosion devices" that sure seemed to explode, Divatox used "detonators," and good guys and bad guys alike in RPM use "charges" when something needs to go kaboom.
  • So it was quite surprising when, in the episode with Robogoat, Goldar said Tommy was going to die.
  • Averted in "The Green Candle" two-parter. When Zack goes into Goldar's dimension to retrieve Jason, Jason argues that Tommy will lose his powers, and Zack had to tell Jason that if he doesn't leave to help Tommy, Tommy would lose his life. Fortunately, this is enough to get Jason to leave.
  • The infamous "laser pellets" of Power Rangers S.P.D. that were just plain bullets in Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger.
  • You know how trailers sometimes have "clean" alternate takes of dirty dialogue? Well, in the trailer for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie, Billy says that Zordon is "aging at an accelerated rate". In the actual movie he says, "He's dying."
  • Power Rangers Ninja Steel has a character who is afraid of driving; when he falls off a bike, he says the crash "almost killed [him]" quite freely when discussing what might happen. However, in the same series, and even the same episode, "destroy" remains what Galvanax wants to do to the Rangers. Later in the same season, the this trope appears in an unintentionally comical manner: After defeating a cat-themed villain, the Rangers say that "curiosity destroyed the cat."
  • When Zayto explains what happened to his fellow Knights of Rafkon in the first episode of Power Rangers Dino Fury, he says that they were "lost". Though this one could at least be chalked up to grief, since for him it only happened recently.
    • A later episode plays around with this one. Zayto mentions two of the zords his team used were lost, and since they're shown to be sort-of alive in this show, it looks like this trope is in full effect... but then it turns out Zayto really means they were physically lost after all.
• British children's Game Show Raven The Island used a lot of euphemisms for the contestants "dying". "Perished" was the closest they got. In the original show's first series, this is averted as Raven himself states at one point "It is better to live in peace than to die in combat".
• In-universe, this was attempted but ultimately subverted to hell and back in an episode of Roseanne when Jackie tries to break some bad news to a relative that is hard of hearing.
• The Sarah Jane Adventures, normally a show with a low body-count, has Sarah Jane encounter Oddbob, source of the Pied Piper myth. Naturally, when he disappears children, they don't "die", but are sent to another dimension. Since his powers have No Ontological Inertia, his defeat frees them. But as it would be a storytelling inconvenience to deal with the reappearance of the hundreds of children he's abducted over 700 years with only three minutes of show left. So this possibility is ruled out with the explanation that the abducted children do not die but "fade away" over time. Frankly, the idea of the abducted children "fading away" seems a bit more nightmarish than to just explain Oddbob as a prolific alien serial killer. Especially since it wasn't afraid of using the word die in Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? when Maria tells Andrea she was meant to die and Andrea repeats the line back to her in disgust.
• Scrubs: "We never say die! Except when a patient actually dies. Then, we're kind of forced to by law."
  • There's a flashback at one point to when Elliot tried being the doctor-who-never-says-terminal. She had a very hard time explaining to a patient that his mother was in fact... terminal...
    Man: Is it terminal?
    Elliot: I wouldn't say that.
    Man: So she still has a chance?
    Elliot: No.
  • J.D. has rattled off a quick list of variations on the word "die" that can be used while trying to teach intern Keith how to break news to a terminal patient including such gems as "deadsies" and "Deadwood" (did you know Cowboys used to curse?)
• Seinfeld:
  • The famous episode "The Contest", about the characters competing to see who can hold off from masturbating the longest, probably only made it to air because none of them actually say the M-word. Although it's really pretty well done, as the dialogue never seems forced to avoid the term.
  • Also, the episode where Elaine tells Jerry her date "took it out" while they were in the car. The term it is repeated several times, not once explaining what exactly it means. It is the guy's penis. What really makes the moment is when Kramer enters halfway through the conversation and immediately knows exactly what they're talking about.
• Sesame Street: Averted famously in the "Goodbye, Mr. Hooper" episode that opened the 16th season. Will Lee, who played longtime "Grandpa" figure and curmudgeonly storekeeper Harold Hooper, had died in December 1982, while filming for the 1982-1983 season was still ongoing. The remainder of his episodes were aired in early 1983, after which his character is absent^note (in newly produced episodes; at the time, the show occasionally repeated the live-action stories from the past few seasons, and several featuring Hooper were included) and no mention is made of either that or why he is missing... the subject not dealt with until that fall. Several options on how to explain why Mr. Hooper was missing were debated, including him having retire and leave Sesame Street or hiring a replacement actor, before the definitive episode on explaining death to a child became the final product. The producers decided to make it part of the show that Mr. Hooper died and, on the advice of child psychologists, they pulled no punches. Big Bird is told that Mr. Hooper died (not "passed away," not "moved on") and will not be coming back. Big Bird is confused and angry, and the adults (with actors not attempting in the least to hide their tears - many holding hands throughout) tell Big Bird that it's okay to be sad and to miss him. See it yourself.
• The '90s children's show Shining Time Station, in one of the later episodes where Billy's nephew Kit comes to visit. Billy asks Stacy if she'd heard about Kit's father, and she responds, mournfully, "Yes, I'm sorry."
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: Zigzagged — usually, the show has no problem saying death-related words (e.g., one episode has Troi mention, "You cried when Father died" and also mentions the word "suicide" several times, and one episode involves Wesley nearly being executed and clearly uses the terms "execute" and "kill"), however, it still falls into the trap of having Dr. Crusher say, "I'm sorry" or "I did all I could" when patients die instead of outright saying they're dead, and Picard tends to use the term "lost" instead of "killed" when his underlings die.
• On That '70s Show, they rarely said exactly what it was they were smoking, calling it "the stash" instead. In some cases it wasn't too awkward, such as when they were around adults.
  • The smoking itself was only implied. The only time characters are actually seen smoking anything in the circle is an episode where they're smoking cigars, causing one character to comment, "This is way worse than what we normally do in the circle. THIS should be illegal."
• That Mitchell and Webb Look lampshades the trope in one of its "evil genius" skits.
  Alan: Oh, what are you talking about, Keith? This is going to be "Let's hope professor Ritson meets with a little accident" all over again. We spent nine months hoping that professor Ritson would meet with an accident before Leslie made it clear it was an accident we were supposed to make happen!
• In one episode of That's So Raven, Eddie is asked to perform for a group of "seniors" (which he soon finds out are senior citizens, not high school seniors), because the original act, according to Cory, "cancelled last night... peacefully in his sleep."
• Webster: In early first-season episodes, the title character (played by pint-sized Emmanuel Lewis) was told that his parents were "away" (they had actually been killed in a car accident) and that he was merely staying with George and Katherine. George decides he can no longer put off telling Webster the truth ... and does in a truly heartbreaking scene.
• The West Wing has an in-universe example that's a cross between this and Unusual Euphemism. No one is allowed to say the word "recession". In one episode, they take to using the word "bagel" instead. In another, Leo insists that the meeting scheduled to discuss it be called "The Robust Economy Meeting".
• Young Hercules: Ares says several times that he will 'destroy' Hercules, but never actually mentions killing him. In fact, throughout the whole run of the series, only two characters were actually shown being killed onscreen. The other two references of death occurred either between episodes or in the pilot movie.