No Good Deed Goes Unpunished / Live-Action TV

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• 4400: After seeing Steve injured at the park, Doc feels duty-bound to heal him with his power. This results in Steve being misperceived as having the power himself, which gets him doxxed due to the paranoia about the 4400 and he's quite angry with Doc for helping him as a result.
• 24: In every season, Jack Bauer winds up doing everything he can in his power to stop the threat of the day and ultimately his efforts wind up costing him so much more personally. By the final season where we actually see him in a very rare spot of being content, he's realized that helping to stop the current terrorist attack is going to naturally all but lead to this happening to him again and does his best to initially avoid being caught up in it. Ultimately he does wind up doing so, and true to form, by the final episodes this trope bites him back.
• Andor: Clem was executed by the Empire as a direct result of trying to stop a group of idiot teenagers from getting themselves killed by provoking a Clone trooper squad, which is implied to feed into Cassian's cynical views on rebellions at the start of the show.
• Angel: Angel has this happen as well, particularly in the 4th and 5th seasons.
• Arrow: Most of the people who want to kill the Arrow have been saved by him.
• In Auction Kings, Paul almost always fails to meet reserves. He does occasionally take them, but is very hesitant.
• The A-Team, "Deadly Manuevers":
  • Murdock hears a dog whining in the bushes and leaves the car to pick it up, thinking that a driver hit it and then drove away. It's a trap on the part of the bad guys, who meet him with guns as he comes out of the bushes.
  • The whole episode is a large example of this trope, given that the trouble the team has could have been avoided had they not ruined the bad guys' businesses (presumably in the process of rescuing some of the past victims of the week.)
• Bates Motel: Norma has gone through absolute hell trying to protect Norman and help him conquer his Sanity Slippage, but ends up murdered by his hand in the end.
• Better Call Saul: Mike robs one of Hector's drug-running trucks, but does it in a way that leaves the driver unharmed (and hogtied) and unable to identify him. However, he later learns from Nacho that a Good Samaritan came across the hogtied driver and released him before the police could arrive, and then Hector killed the Good Samaritan to Leave No Witnesses. Hector tortured and executed the driver later on for his failure to boot, making Mike's pacifist approach All for Nothing at best.
• The Big Bang Theory: Sheldon helped Penny go to the hospital by driving her. He runs a red light by following her instructions and gets a ticket. To fight the ticket, he has to miss a Stan Lee autographing session at the comic book store. The ticket was sent to Penny originally since it was her car and license plate. However, she couldn't afford any more points on her license, so she threw Sheldon under the bus and told them he was driving.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Played with in an episode where Peralta shows up to a party which his girlfriend is attending, despite her telling him not to, in an effort to ingratiate himself with her boss. He succeeds, until he catches her boss snorting cocaine in a bathroom, and is forced to arrest him. Despite Peralta setting up a deal with the local DA to sweep the case under the rug, his girlfriend nonetheless accuses him of betraying her and dumps him, and while both Captain Holt and Terry reassure Peralta that if he hadn't carried out the arrest it would have made him a Corrupt Cop, Peralta responds that at least he would have been a Corrupt Cop who still had a girlfriend. It then gets worse a few episodes later when her boss, driven insane by the subsequent loss of his job, marriage and home, takes Peralta hostage, forces him to falsely confess to framing him and prepares to stage his suicide until Santiago and Diaz show up to save him, none of which would have happened if Peralta had just had the guy jailed for his crime.
• In Season 3 of The Boys (2019), Frenchie helps his former lover escape the country to avoid the wrath of his other ex-lover and The Mafiya boss Nina, which results in him being terrorized by Nina and her mooks for the rest of the season. And she got caught anyway, making him suffer All for Nothing.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Buffy's life runs on this trope. No matter what she does, the PTB find new ways to fuck with her.
  • Spike gets hit with a fair amount of this in Season Five. After realizing that he loves Buffy, he tries to be good to get her to take notice of him, but since he doesn't have a soul, he doesn't really understand what good is anymore. Most of his attempts at being good are rejected by Buffy because they don't fit human norms of what is good and because she is suspicious of him and his motives (with good reason). When he eventually starts to get better at his good deeds, he starts paying for them physically (gets savaged by a demon while helping Dawn, is nearly tortured to death by Glory for refusing to reveal that Dawn is the Key, gets his hands sliced open saving Buffy from a Knight of Byzantium), though Buffy begins to take him more seriously and his deeds finally pay off as he is more or less accepted by her and her friends.
• In one episode of Castle, a secondary character named Simon Doyle saves Beckett and Castle's life, at which point Beckett puts Doyle under arrest for no discernible reason.
• The Colbert Report: Stephen invokes this trope.
• About half the victims in Cold Case were killed for trying to do the right thing, but their killers had other plans.
  • The male victim in Blood on the Tracks was a Guilt-Ridden Accomplice of a murder of one of his college friends and he and the female victim wanted to finally tell the cops. But his wife and two friends blew them up before they could.
  • The victim in Lonely Hearts was also one to a serial killer. After helping him murder four other women, she planned to kill him herself, but her killer still loved him.
• The Confessions of Frannie Langton: Frannie's mother tried to spare a little black albino boy from being experimented on by Langton and get him away. She was hanged for this.
• Crusade: Lampshaded nicely:
  Gideon: Refresh me, Lieutenant. How did we get in the middle of this again?
  Matheson: I believe it was an act of mercy, sir.
  Gideon: Remind me never to do that again.
  Matheson: Aye, sir. No good deed goes unpunished.
  Gideon: I'll have that embroidered on a sampler when we have time.
• Not as bad as other examples, but in the Danger Force episode "Mika in the Middle", the gang is having a contest regarding snitching on others. Mika, who had one more before being punished, found out that Schwoz's mother was not ill and was taking advantage of the others in Danger Force, including having them spending their own money on things for her. In the end, she has to tell and is punished, albeit only by having to wear the "shoes of shame".
• Dexter: Dexter Morgan saves a man's life midway through season 4. That man kills Rita in the season finale, as well as several other people earlier. Subverted Trope, because Dexter saved his life so he could have the pleasure of killing him. However, in a more straight example, Dexter later stops Trinity from killing a young boy which is what drives him to kill Rita for revenge.
• Doctor Who:
  • This show is stuffed with this trope. Even if the Doctor's help doesn't screw him at the time, it sometimes has ramifications in the timeline that he doesn't discover till later.
  • The Doctor, period. The guy goes around saving planets and has probably saved billions of lives at this point, but he himself has died 13 times, lost countless friends, and experienced more heartbreak and seen more horrific sights than any person ever should. It's a miracle he's as sane as he is.
  • A particularly sharp example is the Fourth Doctor story "The Face of Evil", although it's not immediately obvious what's going on. It turns out the whole mess the Doctor finds himself in was in fact caused by him, when he helped some colonists debug their computer. It wasn't a bug, it was a nascent AI, and he drove it insane by trying to fix it. On the meta hand, that good deed being punished led to Leela becoming his companion, and the dads of Britain rejoiced.
  • "The Doctor's Daughter": The Doctor insists to Jenny that she doesn't have to kill General Cobb to protect their group, and after some thought she listens and opts to spare the general when she has a clear shot. This lets General Cobb later shoot and seemingly kill Jenny in front of the Doctor, putting an end to their travels together before they could begin and burdening the Doctor with the thought that another child of his is dead.
  • Series 9 is particularly bad about this. If the Twelfth Doctor hadn't saved — rather than destroyed — his home world of Gallifrey in the 50th anniversary show and saved Ashildr's life in a way that made her immortal earlier in this season, the plot against him that leaves him in a bespoke torture chamber would never have been hatched. And because Clara, inspired by the Doctor's example, will do anything — however reckless and risky — to protect the innocent Rigsy in "Face the Raven", she is Killed Off for Real. It's not surprising that the Doctor undergoes a severe Sanity Slippage in the following two episodes and temporarily becomes a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.
• The very title of an ER episode in which Carter writes a generous check to a doctor running a poor inner-city clinic. Only to find the place completely abandoned when he drops by and to realize that he's been scammed.
  • In the episode "Ambush", a gangbanger and a well-meaning bystander are brought it. The gangbanger recovers from his injuries while his would-be savior is left paralyzed from the neck down.
• Frasier: One episode has the title character question whether it's good to be a Good Samaritan on the basis of how frequently his attempts to do good have backfired on him (note that the parable itself is not an example — we don't know what happens to the Samaritan afterwards).
• Game of Thrones:
  • Being merciful likely results in becoming a head shorter, as shown by Ned Stark who warned Cersei to save her children and refused to take Joffrey hostage which got him arrested and executed.
  • Daenerys stops the Dothraki from engaging in rape as the spoils of war. This leads to Drogo being injured in a challenge. The village wise woman, Mirri Maz Duur, seizes the chance to take revenge on Drogo and Dany along with their unborn son. Daenerys believes this of Mirri Maz Duur's betrayal until Mirri points out that Daenerys' beloved husband was the cause of all her woes in the first place.
  • Any time Jaime Lannister tries to do something good, it only causes him trouble:
    • He intercedes to prevent Brienne from getting raped, in spite of dueling with her just hours before. This compounds his captors' enmity, leading them to chop off his hand.
    • His murder of The Mad King when he was about to burn King's Landing and all its people in his backstory got him a reputation for Chronic Backstabbing Disorder that haunts him to this day.
    • Buying a whore to give his little brother some experience ended with her being gang raped on his father's orders to psychologically torture Tyrion.
    • It turns out this led to the fight between Brienne and Sandor Clegane, if Jaime hadn't given her that Oathkeeper sword that screams "Valyrian steel", the Hound wouldn't have freaked out and picked a fight with Brienne to protect Arya.
    • Freeing his little brother who was falsely accused of a crime he didn't commit. The problem is that Tyrion has become so embittered by betrayal from his friends and family that after being released, he takes a detour and kills his father, making Jaime an unwitting accomplice.
    • Jaime's insistence on leading an army to kill the High Sparrow for retribution of Cersei's torture at his hands. Because Tommen ended up pledging his allegiance to him, Jaime ends up getting his title stripped and exiled from King's Landing.
    • Prior to the attack on Highgarden in Season Seven, Cersei apparently had several ideas about torturing and murdering Olenna Tyrell; Jaime talks her out of it and instead suggests poison. When he actually gives it to Olenna, she confirms that the poison will be painless, downs it in one long drink, and then calmly tells him that she was the one who murdered Joffrey, and to make sure that Cersei knows the truth.
  • The tragic Stark tradition continues with Jon Snow. Choosing to save the wildlings from the White Walkers gets him betrayed and murdered by his own brethren. He hangs a Lampshade on this to Ser Davos on his resurrection, noting that tried to do the right thing and failed. All Davos tells him is that he must be prepared to fail again to do what's right. Likewise, Jon Snow consistently upheld his duty over his desires. He stays with the Watch rather than riding south to fight alongside Robb to avenge their father's death, when he wants to be at Robb's side. He loyally serves as a Double Agent for the Night's Watch against the wildlings, though he feels sympathy for the wildlings and loves Ygritte. As Lord Commander, he puts aside his feelings for revenge and upheld his duty by calling for men and supplies from all Northern lords, including Roose Bolton, despite his hatred for the Boltons due to them having a hand in the betrayal of his brother, Robb. After constant rejection and lack of results, Jon takes matters and legally settles the Wildlings on land belonging to the Watch and this leads the Umbers, who never once responded to his summons, to side with the Boltons citing their grudge over earlier Wildling invasions.
  • Yes, Meryn Trant was an absolute scumbag of a person who completely deserved to die, but Arya has to find out the hard way that no one steals a Face from the Faceless Men and gets off scott-free, even if it is for a noble cause.
  • Every time Varys does something unapologetically good, it seems to come back to bite him in the ass. His attempts at helping Sansa probably set the wheels in motion for the Tyrell-Littlefinger alliance and his ally Tyrion's downfall and when he helps Tyrion escape King's Landing, this causes Tywin's death, and thus forces him to flee Westeros so he won't be a prime suspect.
  • Stannis is the only king to rise above the petty ongoing dynastic struggles, pay heed to the Night's Watch's calls and send an army to help. However, this greatest act of heroism is also what led his forces to ultimately be Snowed-In and trapped without supplies in the far north, leading to his infamous Sadistic Choice and his consequent Napoleonic defeat. In a case of Stannis inflicting this, there is the aforementioned fingore-ing and later, he is fully prepared to execute Davos for the "crime" of releasing Gendry from an almost-certain fate as Human Sacrifice. Only Melisandre stays his hand.
• Hardcastle and McCormick: In the pilot episode, Mark McCormick steals a prototype car from the bad guy (who had killed the designer and forged legal documents in order to get his hands on it). In the ensuing Car Chase, a police car crashes and Mark comes to the rescue of the trapped cop...who gets a good look at Mark's face and (regretfully) has him arrested for the theft.
• Heroes: Someone is helping Matt Parkman fix a tire; unfortunately, Sylar is possessing him at the time and kills the helpful man with a tire iron.
• Homicide: Life on the Street:
  • The third season's first story arc centers around a Serial Killer who murders women assisting in community activism, particularly those who helped with domestic abuse shelters. When the killer is captured, she's revealed to be a Female Misogynist who believes women should Stay in the Kitchen, and that a woman being active in the community violated God's will.
  • In Season 5, Bayliss ends his partnership with his verbally abusive partner Pembleton after reaching his Rage Breaking Point. Ironically, it comes when Pembleton tries to be supportive by comforting Bayliss when he reveals he was molested as a child. Bayliss, who is filled with self-loathing over his abuse, is outraged at being pitied and ends their partnership because of it.
• House: In the sixth season finale, House convinces a woman whose leg is trapped under a pile of rubble and whose life is endangered if they take too long to free her that she shouldn't let her leg be amputated. He sees parallels to the incident that ruined his own leg, where he made the same decision. However, after being called out by Cuddy, when she points out that his choice to refuse amputation has left him crippled, in pain, bitter, and alone, he convinces the woman to change her mind and performs the procedure himself. Everything seems fine... until, on the ride to the hospital, the woman succumbs to an embolism caused by the amputation, and House is powerless to do anything except watch her die. Later, Foreman tells him that he did the right thing, only for House to furiously assert that it doesn't matter because "she died anyway".
• iCarly:
  • Every time Freddie did a good deed, it bit him on the ass later. In iSam's Mom, he catches an elusive criminal on video when no one else could. He's rewarded with nothing but a coupon (buy a dozen smoothies, get 10% off on your 13th), which expired the very next day. Then on national television, T-Bo and a female schoolmate reveal his full name and address while the crook is still on the loose.
  • Freddie and Carly pushing Sam to admit she's in love with Brad backfires hard in iOMG. Sam is actually in love with Freddie, and ends up doing a Forceful Kiss on him when he's trying to prod her into telling Brad. Considering Freddie has canonically loved Carly since he was about 10 years old, and Carly was fighting her own feelings for Freddie, this could've easily been very bad.
• The Invisible Man: Darien Fawkes is a thief who has been in and out of prison for most of his life. While trying to rob yet another place, he comes upon an elderly guard, who faints. Believing the old man is suffering a heart attack, Darien has a choice: run with the loot, or try to save the guy. He starts trying to perform CPR on the guy, only to be caught red-handed by the other guards. The old guy later testifies in court that Darien tried to rape him. Cue life in prison without parole.
• Kamen Rider Outsiders: Desast manages to free Horobi from the Ark's control after transforming into his namesake Rider form, only to find himself having a target painted on his back by Zein's accomplices, despite having recently redeemed himself.
  Nico: Desast! Zein views you as a villain. If you care about him [Ren], you should stay away from him!
• Kingdom Adventure:
  • Defied when the Prince shows up to stop Zordock from punishing Vibes for refusing to work for Zordock.
  • Played with for Magistrate Kendrick: he also refused to work for Zordock and was turned into a beast for his trouble, but he never stopped believing in the Prince or the Emperor despite this, and was able to make good use his beastly form.
• One episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent saw Goren working to clear the name of his old mentor, Declan Gage, who was being framed for murder by his own daughter and protege. This comes back to bite Bobby in the ass in "Frame" when Declan goes on a murder spree that results in the deaths of Goren's brother Frank and his nemesis Nicole Wallace.
• One episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has a man working at a pizzeria check up on a girl crying in the bathroom and try to return her purse, only for her to falsely accuse him of raping her. They assume he's guilty due to him having a past record, but after he's let go due to a lack of evidence he's accidentally tortured to death by the girl's father (who was trying to beat a confession out of him rather than kill him).
• Lost:
  • Season 5, Sayid (in the past) is locked in a cell awaiting execution. A young and at this point innocent Ben Linus who is sympathetic to Sayid steals a key and rescues him from his cell. After Sayid escapes, he repays Ben by knocking out a guard (Jin), stealing his gun, shooting Ben, and leaving him for dead. Sayid hates the adult Ben, but the child Ben was innocent and had just saved his life.
  • It's implied that this is what turns Ben into the man Sayid hates, making this also an example of Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.
  • Also Ben (while some the deeds not necessarily being good) did everything Jacob told him to do without question and waited years to see him himself, and his reward for those years of loyalty? Watching Locke skipping the waiting list and seeing Jacob first time he asks.
    What about me?
    What about you?
• MacGyver (1985): Before becoming a secret agent, MacGyver first encounters his future nemesis Murdoc like this. Murdoc is dressed as a woman and on the run from Pete Thornton. Mac sees this and interferes by saving the apparent damsel; he soon learns who Murdoc really is and tracks him down alongside Pete. When Murdoc catches them and puts them in a Death Trap, Mac tries to appeal to his gratitude:
  MacGyver: Murdoc, remember, I did try to help you.
  Murdoc: Yes, you did. It's a little unfair that an innocent bystander has to become a simple pawn in this game. [...] But we live in difficult times, and Good Samaritans die young!
• The backstory of M.A.N.T.I.S. involves its hero, Miles Hawkins, trying to save a girl during The LA Riots and getting shot by a police sniper, though in the original TV movie, it's implied that there's more to the shooting than a mere accident and in the series proper, it's mid-way through that Miles learns that the shooting was really a botched assassination attempt ordered by an old business partner, Solomon Box.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In the fourth season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the team becomes trapped in a virtual world called the Framework, which presents an alternate timeline based on their biggest regrets being averted. In this universe, Agent May saved that little girl in Beirut instead of being forced to kill her, but as a consequence, the little girl caused an even bigger disaster in Cambridge, which led to the Inhumans becoming even more hated and feared than they are in the regular universe, which was the perfect opening for Hydra to take over the world.
  • She-Hulk: Attorney at Law: At the end of the first episode, Jen transforms into She-Hulk to save the jury from a supervillain that just burst into the courtroom. While she gets praised by the public for her actions, she gets what was supposed to be an airtight case ruled as a mistrial, since the jury would be biased in Jen's favour. It also gets Jen fired, and her outing herself as a superhuman makes her pretty much unhirable to any other law firm. After weeks of fruitless job searching, she even admits to her dad that she almost wishes she had just let the jury get smooshed so her life wouldn't be in shambles now. Fortunately for her, a law firm creating a Superhuman Law Division decides to hire her, but it comes with it’s own issues.
• Merlin: This seems to happen whenever the Druids help someone.
  • In series 2, Morgana seeks out the Druids because she suspects she has magic. When she is attacked by giant scorpions in the woods Mordred feels her distress and the Druid leader Aglain saves her and brings her back to his camp. Shortly afterwards Arthur and the knights show up believing Morgana has been kidnapped and with orders to "take no prisoners". Aglain is killed and the rest of the Druids flee (it is unknown how many survive). Mordred is apparently left wandering the woods on his own.
  • In series three, a different group of Druids saves Sir Leon using the Cup of Life. Uther's response to them saving his knight's life is to send Arthur to forcibly retrieve the Cup of Life so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands, which Arthur does by holding a young Druid boy hostage. And to top it off, Arthur's taking the cup is the REASON the bad guys get ahold of it.
  • In the series three episode "Love in the Time of Dragons" Uther is seeking to arrest a sorcerer. Their crime? Using magic to heal people.
• Midsomer Murders'': A positive example in "The Point of Balance"; Con Man Jake Hannity's one moment of genuine altruism, calming down a PTSD victim from a panic attack, is what outs him and prevents him from completing his latest scheme.
• On Mom, Tammy needs to get a job as a condition of her parole and gets one working the drive-through at a fast food restaurant. Unfortunately, she gets fired a few days into the job. Why? For giving a homeless person a free meal.
• Monk:
  • In the episode "Mr. Monk and the Three Julies", a graduate student named Julie Teeger (who is not to be confused with Natalie's daughter) ends up getting a package meant to be delivered to a housewife of the same name by mistake, and generously delivers it to the rightful receiver. Unfortunately, that package contained evidence that the housewife's husband was unfaithful, so both Julies end up dead.
  • In "Mr. Monk on Wheels," Natalie basically spends an entire episode as the living embodiment of Nice Job Breaking It, Hero, culminating in Monk getting shot in the leg.
• This is how the Netflix revival of Mystery Science Theater 3000 started off - Jonah Heston, receiving a distress call, rushes off to save the day, dropping off his payload — the biggest ever — in the process. For his heroism, he's kidnapped by Kinga Forrester and trapped on the rebuilt Satellite of Love.
• Never Have I Ever: When Devi accidentally spills Fabiola's drink all over her suit, Devi was genuinely stopping her from drinking out of concern (Ben just told her that Trent put his balls in the punch, and Devi saw Trent himself laughing at people who tried to drink from the punch bowl), yet Fabiola dismisses this as Devi making another weak excuse for acting crazy.
• October Faction: Alice was identified by Presidio when she saved a woman using telekinesis because she almost stepped in front of a truck. This led to her being captured and sent off to a dire fate (although she freed herself, their agents still found her people's refuge, killing them).
• Odd Squad:
  • Oren and Olaf may have caught the most blob pieces in "Blob on the Job" like what Oprah instructed them to do, but they're sent to Blobsylvania for a month anyway, where they have to count blobs. This is because Oren and Olaf stole Olive and Otto's blob pieces out from under their noses and spun the truth to make it seem like they caught all the blob rather than Olive and Otto.
  • In "The Curious Case of Pirate-itis", Olive helps a pirate cross the street for seemingly no reason other than just to be nice and contracts Pirate-itis as a result, which causes her to slowly and gradually turn into a pirate.
  • At the end of "Teach a Man to Ice Fish", Arctic Mr. O refuses to have any of his agents help get the Mobile Unit van free from being encased in ice despite the fact that they helped him and his agents learn how to solve cases on their own. And why does he refuse? Because he believes that the Mobile Unit will come to be over-reliant on him and his agents, rather than the other way around, which was the case for the entire episode. And yes, this includes Opal and Omar — two of Arctic Mr. O's now-former agents who were the best in the precinct. Instead, Arctic Mr. O gives them, and Orla and Oswald, a space heater to use as a makeshift shovel.
  • In "End of the Road", the final part of the mid-season finale of Season 3, Oprah (as the Big O) punishes Opal for failing to contact her for backup and going after The Shadow directly as she was told to do in the previous episode, "Follow the Leader". Not only that, but she also punishes Omar, Orla and Oswald as well, sending all of them back to the Odd Squad Academy to attend Orchid's School for Listeners. The reason that Opal went directly for The Shadow to begin with was because she believed that it would take Oprah too long to get to Minnesota (where the villain hotel, and The Shadow, is located) from the Big Office where she's located, which is a perfectly justified reason given that it's unknown where the nearest tube entrance is in proximity to the hotel.
• Lampshaded by Regina in Once Upon a Time. After she watches Johanna get killed, she then tells Snow, "See where being good gets you?" And considering what Johanna's killer had put her through, she knows from experience.
  • She and Rumplestiltskin suffer from this in particular. Regina becomes a much better person, and what is her reward? Her True Love is killed in front of her eyes, again, and in such a way that he can never go to the afterlife. Rumplestiltskin sacrifices his own life to save his family and indirectly the town in season 3, and his reward? He is revived but then spends a year enslaved by Zelena with his son's mind trapped inside his own head, driving him insane. To top it all off, his beloved son, for whom he spent 300 years devising a curse just to get him back, dies in his arms. Whereas Zelena gets away with it. No wonder the two of them are so jaded.
• In Orange Is the New Black the inmates gaslighting Pennsatucky gets her sent to the psych ward. Piper feels bad for her, so she goes to the administration and takes full responsibility for the prank. Pennsatucky, who is released, ends up trying to kill Piper and exhibiting behavior of someone who probably should have stayed in psychiatric care.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "Small Friends", a prisoner who has secretly invented nanomachines uses them to aid a fellow prisoner in repairing a CD player he broke, which is owned by a hostile convict who will kill him if it isn't fixed. As a result of this act of kindness, the inventor has his secret exposed to the hostile con, is forced to aid that con's escape, and ultimately loses his life while defending his family from him. At least the nanomachines paid the con back for that one.
• The Outpost: Zed saves an infant from a monster. The baby's father brings Prime Order soldiers against him for his reward, due to bigotry against Zed's race.
• Outlander: Stephen Bonnet, a thief, pays back Jamie and Claire for their help in his escape by coming back to rob them.
• A recurring theme in Oz.
  • Every time Beecher tries to help anyone, it blows up in his face. His efforts to save Keane result in Schillinger forcing him to eat a law book, his attempts to bury the hatchet with Schillinger gets his son killed, and his attempts to help Guenzel end with him being humiliated in front of the entire prison.
  • Saïd campaigns tirelessly to improve conditions in the prison and even tries to help fellow inmates. As thanks, he usually has his good nature rewarded by the prisoners pissing away whatever opportunity he's brought them when they're not just flat-out manipulating him.
  • McManus's efforts to reform the prison from the inside results in him taking shit from his callous superiors and being manipulated by the prisoners he's trying to help, who take advantage of his gullibility to manipulate him. It comes to a head when some prisoners ruin his reputation by framing him for molesting an inmate after a wrongful sexual harassment suit had left him in hot water.
• Pushing Daisies:
  • Ned attempts to undo the revenge taken by Chuck and Olive on Balsam's Bittersweets and gets arrested for murder as a result.
  • And once, when he was still a kid, he climbed up a tree for a kindergarten class to show them baby birds...but they were all dead. So he revived them, and showed the birds to the class...Then they decided to show him the three baby woodpeckers that they were going to release that day...
• Revolution:
  • In episode 2, Charlie Matheson convinces Miles Matheson to not kill off the bounty hunter Jacob. While it is a good deed to not murder someone while he's helpless, it comes back to bite them in the rear when Jacob sells out their location to the Monroe militia.
  • In episode 4, Tom Neville gets trapped under rubble in a storm cellar. Danny Matheson could have easily just left Neville to die, because he's the bad guy who arrested him in the first place. However, he decides to do the right thing and save the guy's life...only to get arrested again.
  • In episode 11, Jason Neville warns Charlie about the air strike coming in 12 hours, and this is when he lost everything. Charlie thanks him for the information, but refuses to take him in, because he's part of the militia.
  • In episode 16, Charlie, Jason and Nora Clayton decide to free the scientist Ethan Camp and his family. That is a good deed, but then they find themselves facing the wrath of Tom Neville.
  • In the first season finale, Team Matheson finally gets the power back on for everyone worldwide. This is a good deed, but then Randall Flynn uses the opportunity to launch Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles to destroy Philadelphia and Atlanta. Not only that, but the American government that has been hiding out in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is now going to come in and retake what's theirs.
• RFDS (2021): Pete spends most of season 2 dealing with the fallout from a rescue in the premiere. The on-call doctor was AWOL at the same time Leonie went in for a medical procedure, and the locum that Leonie frantically called in inserted an airway too far. Pete realized on the flight home that the patient wasn't breathing properly, then the plane hit turbulence and he accidentally yanked the entire rig out. After failing to reinsert because the patient's throat swelled shut and a critical piece of equipment was left behind at the scene, he performed an emergency tracheostomy, but accidentally severed a nerve that had grown in the wrong place; the patient recovered but was rendered mute. The rescue is targeted for a critical incident review, and even though both Wayne and Eliza agree after the fact that Pete did the best he possibly could have done, he ultimately has his nursing license suspended for six months after he loses his temper at a friend of the patient.
• The Rookie (2018): Lucy lets a 16-year old drug dealer go with a citation, and is told off by the prosecutor for it. Next thing she knows he's robbed a convenience store, which gives the elderly owner a heart attack. Naturally the prosecutor blames her, and says the kid will be charged with Felony Murder assuming the owner dies. It was all to give him a second chance so he wouldn't fall into the prison system, which will now happen anyway. Fortunately, the shop owner survives, and the attorney agrees to push for a minimal sentence of a few months in juvenile detention.
• In Sleeper Cell Darwyn Al-Sayeed almost single-handedly averts several mass-casualty terror attacks. His reward? His girlfriend is murdered by the terrorists and Darwin winds up alone in hostile territory and critically wounded.
• Smallville: As revealed in the season 9 episode "Metallo," Clark (a.k.a. The Blur) saved a bus full of prisoners from crashing. One of the prisoners on the bus later escaped and murdered a woman named Becca, the sister of John Corben/Metallo, who developed a homicidal grudge against Clark as a result.
• St. Elsewhere: Dr. Westphall decides to have the residents do community outreach around St. Eligius hospital through a community service program. Dr. Ehrlich goes to work with inner city youths and gets mugged. Dr Chandler goes to work at a women's health clinic, which is bombed by protesters. The next day, a second bomb goes off at St. Eligius, injuring only him. Dr. Morrison goes to work at a prison clinic, and is raped by an inmate.
• Stargate SG-1:
  • This is touched upon, where bad results sometimes come from good deeds, often as a result of completely unpredictable, Butterfly Effect-esque cause-and-effect actions. One character remarks that the universe is so complex, and so random, that instead of having complete control over the actual consequences of one's deeds the only thing one can control is "whether we are good or evil."
  • Orlin got a particularly raw deal when he descended to a mortal form in order to provide valuable intel on the Ori and helped to develop a cure for the Prior plague. For his troubles, he not only became trapped in his mortal form, but also suffered permanent brain damage, consigning him to spend the rest of his life (which is considerable, as he came back as a 12-year-old boy) in a sanitarium, and even worse, his memory is so far gone that when Sam goes to visit him, he doesn't even remember her.
  • The two-parter episode "Evolutions" has at least two examples: One was with a CIA agent named Burke who was Kicked Upstairs to an assignment in the worst possible location: Honduras. The reason he was exiled involved betrayal, but not as you might think: He actually killed a fellow CIA agent named Woods, in self-defense after he caught Woods in the act of betraying them. He kept silent about what he'd discovered for the sake of Woods' wife (had Woods been exposed as a traitor, his widowed wife would not receive his pension). They couldn't prove Burke had murdered Woods deliberately (as opposed to accidental Friendly Fire), so he got a shit assignment instead of prison or a dishonorable discharge. This was only mentioned and not explicitly shown. After Burke reveals this, Jack promises to arrange a better posting for him. The second is a member of the anti-Honduran extremist faction. He tried to side with Daniel Jackson about shutting off the Ancient healing device, as he's being creeped out by the device (and Jackson also explained that it should never be activated regardless of intentions). The leader responds by initially making it seem as though he is going to turn it off, but then unexpectedly shoots him and kills him. It gets worse in that he ends up being revived thanks to it being turned on, but his mind was permanently gone and thus was no different than a Zombie.
• Star Trek:
  • Starfleet Academy's famous Kobayashi Maru test is a no-win scenario where answering a distress call gets you blown up for your trouble. Only Kirk ever passed, and he cheated.
  • Kirk rescued a shipful of superhumans in stasis when their life-support was on the verge of failure. The thanks he got for that was getting a new enemy (Khan) who tried to kill him and his crew. Afterwards, he decided to let Khan have a chance to start over on a new planet. Khan wound up coming back and killing several people, including (temporarily) Spock.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation Next Generation:
    • In "Datalore", the crew discovers Data's twin brother, Lore, and reassembles him. He turns out to be a psychotic murderer.
    • "Heart of Glory" reintroduces the Klingons to the franchise as the Enterprise rescues two of them from a damaged ship. They try to hijack the Enterprise.
    • "The Schizoid Man" sees the crew trying to help out an ailing scientist, who sees a chance to cheat death by uploading his memory and personality into Data, where he causes a lot of trouble.
    • In "A Matter of Honor", an organism is discovered eating away at the Enterprise's hull, and they realize the organism is also present on the hull of a Klingon ship they met with earlier. They try to find the Klingon vessel, but they've already found it, and the captain believes that it was a deliberate act of sabotage and tries to destroy them.
    • There's an episode called "Samaritan Snare." Geordi beams over to a Pakled ship, only to be held hostage in exchange for advanced technology. This appears to be the Pakleds' hat, as they are quite dimwitted and have a lot of stolen technology that they don't understand.
    • "Up the Long Ladder": They try to help out a planet where people reproduce via cloning, but their genetic patterns have broken down over the generations. Riker and Pulaski are assaulted and cloned by force.
    • "Who Watches the Watchers" has a non-betrayal example. Crusher saves the life of a native from a near-Bronze Age planet, who wakes while she's treating him and comes to the conclusion that Picard is a god. The rest of the episode is spent dealing with the repercussions.
    • Geordi quotes this trope in "The Enemy," declaring it the motto of Galorndon Core. As the planet is perpetually covered by electrical stormclouds, allowing only intermittent transporter windows, with the rocky surface constantly faced by rain + storms, and pulling the injured Romulan to safety before he promptly makes him his prisoner 'again' despite this, it's completely fair. Subverted as the Romulan does eventually drop his hostility and they work together to get off the planet.
    • In "The Defector", the Romulan Admiral Jarok was only trying to help the Federation avoid a disastrous conflict. Instead, he discovers the information he was providing was all fake, and his Romulan superiors were actually testing his loyalty. Despondent that his defection was all in vain, Jarok kills himself.
    • In "Galaxy's Child", the crew do an impromptu Caesarean section on a space-dwelling creature whose death they were inadvertently responsible for, managing to help birth its offspring. The baby then latches onto the Enterprise and starts draining its power for sustenance.
    • In the dramatic climax of "Redemption," Worf spares the life of his enemy's son Toral, even though Klingon honor all but demands he kill the boy. Years later, Toral makes a surprise return on Deep Space Nine; instead of making something of his life, he's become as bad as his old man. He nearly succeeds in killing Worf and stealing the Sword of Kahless.
    • In "The Next Phase", the Enterprise comes to the aid of a Romulan ship. The Romulans' idea of thanks is to attempt to destroy them.
  • "No good deed ever goes unpunished" is the 285th and last Ferengi Rule of Acquisition.
  • Trip quotes the saying in Enterprise's "The Andorian Incident." The good deed in this case is paying a visit to a remote Vulcan monastery... which happens to have been taken over by Andorians, and the away team's arrival makes the situation even worse.
• The villain of the first episode of Supernatural was a female ghost who posed as a hitchhiker who was walking home in the middle of the night and only appeared before men in a relationship, then kill them if they accepted her advances and proved to be unfaithful. If they refused her advances, she would rape and murder them, considering her forcing herself upon the unfortunate victim to "prove" them to be unfaithful and thus deserving of death.
• Swarm: Her fellow strippers save Dre from Reggie, assuming that they're walking in on an Attempted Rape situation, and shoot him before he can strangle her to death. She rewards them by fleeing with the gun and leaving them stranded at his house with his dead body. It's later revealed they were arrested for supposedly murdering him during a robbery gone wrong.
• In an episode on Tales from the Darkside we follow a young boy who has just lost his grandmother and fulfills her dying wish to save the family's souls from an ancient demon named the Cutty Black Sow. The boy does exactly as he is told by performing a ritual to keep it away, but then the demon shows up and takes his soul as compensation. The last shot of the episode has the demon cornering the little boy, going in to take his soul.
• Too Old to Die Young: Martin forces a psychopath to take him to the location of a woman he's left to die in the desert. After she's freed, the traumatized woman grabs a nearby switchblade, stabs Martin and runs away, leaving him seriously injured in the middle of the desert.
• Played for Laughs in Two and a Half Men where Alan suggests that Chelsea receives breast-reduction surgery to help her back pain. While she is grateful for his insight, Charlie, on the other hand, does not appreciate what his brother is doing and slams the laptop on his fingers.
  Charlie: What are you doing sticking your nose in my fiancée's breasts?
  Alan: (pained) I was just trying to help.
  Charlie: Let's make one thing clear: the only acceptable boob reduction in this house is you moving out.
• In Season 6 of The Walking Dead, Daryl sparing Dwight's life resulted not only in his bike and crossbow being stolen, but also indirectly led to Denise's death at the hands of the Saviors. Now, Alexandria has lost their only doctor and trained medic of any type, which is something they've been trying to avoid all season.
• Wallenberg: A Hero's Story: Save 100,000 lives, disappear into the Gulag.
• The Wire:
  • A constant theme, particularly with regard to the Baltimore Police Department. Any police character who sticks his neck out to try to do some good will be Reassigned to Antarctica, if not fired outright, for the sin of pissing off the bosses and/or the politicians.
  • At the end of the first season McNulty is demoted for having brought several high-ranking members of the Barksdale Organization to justice (the reason being that the investigation stirred all kinds of trouble with the corrupt politicians).
  • Prior to the events of the show, the highly competent Freamon had served 13 years (and 4 months) in the pawn shop unit for being good police.
  • Upon finding out about Hamsterdam, Mayor Royce initially lets it continue because it significantly decreases violent crime (although even this is self-serving). This reaction is the main reason he loses the office to Carcetti.
  • Senator Clay Davis quotes this exact phrase from Prometheus Bound when he is entering court to face charges for fraud and embezzlement, claiming to have used the money for his poor constituents' behalf. Subverted by the fact that Davis truly deserves to be convicted, as calling him corrupt is like calling Antarctica chilly.
• Without a Trace. A lot of the missing turned out to have been (a) trying to be The Atoner for a wrong that they committed in the past, (b) trying to extricate themselves from a present day situation, or (c) trying to help someone. Sadly, these were often those who ended up dead. An especially cruel example in the episode "Our Sons And Daughters", where the Victim of the Week was murdered by the father of the girl he was trying to help, who'd mistaken him for one of those who'd assaulted her.
• Yellowjackets: In "It Chooses" Young Javi tries to save the "winner" of a Lottery of Doom from being killed by the survivors and eaten, but in the process falls through thin ice and drowns while the others deliberately stand back and let it happen.
• Young Sheldon: Averted in "A Tornado, a 10-Hour Flight and a Darn Fine Ring". Pastor Jeff decides not to say anything about Connie's illegal gambling den after she shelters her laundromat customers inside.
• You're Only Young Twice (1971): The residents of Twilight Lodge try to organise a holiday for Matron and the staff in "Collapse of Stout Party" as thanks for all their hard work. In true comic fashion, however, all their best-laid plans go astray.

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