Protagonist Centered Morality / Live-Action TV

Protagonist-Centered Morality in live-action TV.

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• Jim from According to Jim. Yes, he is an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist, and he often justifies his behavior with his Freudian Excuse (his dad walked out on him as a kid and the rest of his family weren't much better) and he does have some Pet the Dog moments, but sometimes, no matter how much of an ass he is, the show bends over backwards to treat him as being right. Some notable examples:
  • "The Ego Boost" Jim goes to a restaurant he finds run by his old college girlfriend, and he gets the titular ego boost by thinking she was hitting on him. However, after Andy tells him said woman was interested in him instead, Jim scoffs at the idea that a woman who dated him could like Andy, and then tries to hit on her to prove otherwise. After he's proven wrong and has a talk with Cheryl about accepting ego boosts, but not to actively go looking for them, he apologizes to Andy, but it turns out he broke up with the woman because she called out Jim's name during sex.
  • "The Garage Door" when Cheryl gets mad at Jim for not remembering something she said, he tells her that men & women's brains are wired to only remember certain gender specific things and block out anything else, with Cheryl rightfully dismissing it as BS. But, later she isn't able to open their automatic garage door, and the end of the episode has her basically admitting she was wrong.
  • "Take my Wife, Please"- Jim lets Cheryl go to opera with an older neighbor, since he doesn't want to go, then later thinks he's a Dirty Old Man. Despite him never showing any signs of this before, yup, he is.
• In the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode "T.A.H.I.T.I.", the team needs to recover a miracle drug to save Skye from a bullet wound. The drug is being guarded by unidentified agents who won't let the unauthorized team take it. The team kills them both and no one questions the morality of this - though to the team's credit, the facility guards open fire on the team first, and Coulson tells them that if the team is just there for medical assistance and will defend themselves if the agents continue to fire on them, which they do. We later find out that of the four people who went into the facility, two of them were HYDRA, and they were the ones who did the actual killing (as well as the ones who assured Coulson that raiding the facility in the first place was necessary, although Coulson was the one who ordered the attacks). The whole thing was a setup by the Clairvoyant to try and discover what this facility was and how it brought Coulson back from the dead.
• Alias often falls into this, especially during the initial seasons. One might think that Sydney Bristow, after discovering that she'd unknowingly worked for an international crime syndicate for seven years, would have an appreciation for the shades of gray inherent in spy work, but one would be wrong. Who is considered moral at any given time is often determined just by how pissed off at them Sydney is.
• Ally McBeal cheats on her boyfriend Gregg then decides to win him back by hiring a male model to be her pretend date to make said boyfriend jealous. When her boyfriend ends things with the woman he was dating to get back with her, Ally then decides she prefers the hired model and doesn't want Gregg. Neither the show nor any of Ally's friends show any negative judgment about her behavior. Ally is also the kind of person who purposefully smashed her car into a stranger's car and justified her actions because he had smiled at her and she wanted to meet him.
• Oz from Auf Wiedersehen, Pet series 1 and 2 was a xenophobe who abandoned his wife and child yet, while his behavior was shown as wrong, he was still someone the characters sided with. However when characters like Herr Grunwald or Arthur Pringle were rude or nasty to the main characters they were hate-figures deserving of ridicule and embarrassment.
• Blue Bloods: Cowboy Cop Danny Reagan has repeatedly tortured and threatened to kill suspects to get them to cooperate, but every single time he's formally accused of misconduct it turns out the witnesses or accusers were either mistaken, or lying to stir up trouble between the community and the NYPD.
• In Bones, Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan has been flanderized into this. Where in early episodes the characters call her out when her Jerkass tendencies crossed the line, in later ones they make excuses for her, then as the series reaches goes on they begin to tell people they should be honored to be insulted by her. It has reached the point where you can tell the villain or at the very least antagonist of the episode by who she insults.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel contain many examples over the course of both shows:
  • Anya is considered to have become good once she's depowered and teams up with the good guys, even though she shows no remorse for going around killing people for a millennium and temporarily turning Sunnydale into a vampire paradise (unintentionally, but she was happy with the result). It helps that once she became human she stopped killing people and started romancing one of the Scoobies, but she still cheerfully reminisces about her vengeance demon deeds. Contrast Buffy's former love, the vampire Angel, who when he regained his soul also stopped killing people and who was also arguably an entirely separate person when he committed his crimes ^note depending on how much you consider soulless Angelus to still be "him"; the show is a little inconsistent on the subject (whereas Anya still had her soul as a vengeance demon), but he still frequently gets called out on and is haunted by said crimes. Xander is the worst about this, since unlike Buffy or Willow he loathed Angel, but now he's dating Anya.
  • In one of the last season's episodes, Anya has returned to being a vengeance demon and killed over a dozen people and Buffy decides she'll have to kill her. Xander tries to dissuade her, saying that Anya's her friend, and Buffy gives him an epic chewing out on how she doesn't get to play favorites, and reminding him of how gung-ho he was to kill Angel when he'd lost his soul.
  • There's a version of this in the episode "Doppelgangland". Willow is uncomfortable with the idea of destroying her own vampire double at the end of the episode and apparently the other Scoobies think it's perfectly fine to send the vampire back to her own universe instead of staking her, based on the fact that she was willing to go home and only kill people there, where they can't see it (she gets staked there by Alternate Oz as soon as she returns, but the Scoobies didn't know that and still aren't aware it happened). All of this despite the fact that Vampire Willow had also fed on a girl named Sandy in the regular universe and turned her into a vampire (who resurfaces in Season 5).
  • When Angel loses his soul, the characters go to great lengths to restore it — but they never try to do the same for anyone else who gets turned into a vampire. It's only because they already know Angel that they make an exception for him. Of course, the only means of restoring Angel's soul is a complicated ritual that it took a long computer program to translate so that it could be re-used; it may be that they don't know enough about the spell to know how they can adapt it to be used on anyone else. Also, it required an orb that dissolved during the ritual and may not be easy to find in large quantities.
  • A perfect example occurs in the Angel episode "Sanctuary". As Angel is The Hero of this show, he's shown as in the right for wanting to rehabilitate Faith, while Buffy is a Hero Antagonist depicted as in the wrong for wanting Faith to suffer for her crimes. If Buffy were the point-of-view character, Angel would be the one in the wrong for harboring a criminal who swapped bodies with Buffy and used it to have sex with Buffy's boyfriend without consent, just because he identifies with Faith and wants her to be redeemed like he wished he could be.
  • Ben is horrified by the idea of killing Dawn by his own hand even if it will stop his evil sister Glory (with whom he shares a body) from destroying the world, however he saw no issue in summoning an uncontrollable Queller demon to kill the people whom Glory drove to madness, just to cover up any possible connection to himself. The Queller demon kills at least six people, and Ben shows no remorse for this, then it never comes up again.
  • In "Gone", a social worker sent to check in on Buffy's younger sister Dawn sees legitimately suspicious activity and plans to recommend Buffy lose her guardianship. Buffy, who has turned invisible, sets things up to make it look like the social worker is insane in a way that could easily get her fired or sent to a mental institution, just so that someone else will be assigned to the case and give Buffy more time to prepare. This is portrayed as a comedy routine and we are apparently supposed to feel sympathy with Buffy harassing a regular person merely because she's frustrating a main character. Admittedly, one of the things the social worker seemed to disapprove of was Buffy cohabitating with a lesbian (Willow), which makes Doris a bit of a jerkass victim, but the other things she witnessed (druglike substances in the house, Buffy having no sense of what day it was, a man dressed like a punk rocker - Spike - seemingly sleeping over with Buffy and mentioning Dawn had spent time at his crypt), were real concerns.
  • Soulless vampires Spike and Harmony are quite sympathetic in the later seasons, mainly because they are both so ineffective as to be laughable, and because Spike is such a martyr for love (first for Drusilla, later for Buffy). Meanwhile, Harmony is still killing people to feed at night while Spike, who no longer can because of a chip in his head, is completely unrepentant and cares so little for other's welfare that he helped a Big Bad bring on the end of the world at least once, and was selling weapons (demon eggs) — the sort which could kill entire cities — to the highest bidder.
  • Willow's Roaring Rampage of Revenge after Warren murders her girlfriend Tara is forgiven fairly easily, even though (in-universe) it was really just luck and timing which prevented her from bringing about the apocalypse. She also flayed Warren to death (granted, he was someone who richly deserved it). Given a notice in the final-season episode "The Killer In Me", where it's pointed out by a bad guy who put a hex on her, not for almost destroying the world but just because they're jealous.
    "She almost destroyed the world! And yet everyone keeps on loving her?"
  • The Calling. When the First Slayer is Called, it is presented as being exploitation of a young woman by old men, and conscription of a minor to fight and die. The scene has strong overtones of sexual assault, and in spite of the world needing a Slayer, it is presented as an evil act. However, when the Scoobies Call all the Potential Slayers, effectively doing the exact same thing to hundreds of people, this is presented not as a necessary evil but an objective good, and as a liberating and empowering action.
  • Season Seven eventually started lampshading this:
  The First Evil: Really? Why? So you can earn a spot on her little pep squad? You think she'll ever let you in? You're a murderer.
  Andrew: Confidentially, a lot of her people are murderers. Uh, Anya and Willow and Spike....
  The First Evil: Interesting. And, you're the only one she makes seek redemption.
• In Bull, the titular character has a plethora of idiosyncratic hobbies and characteristics (and he is naturally excellent at all of them), with the most over-the-top example being that his apartment is a minimalist design with barely any furniture but does contain a rock climbing course. All of this is framed in a positive light: we are all clearly supposed to be awed by Bull, and how awesome he is at everything, Compare to poor honest Benny, who lacks the "oh my god isn't he cool, don't you just want to worship him" halo the writers seem so keen to attach to Bull. When Benny takes to riding a motorcycle and insists that he is "back in the game" Bull coldly says "it looks like a mid-life crisis to me", and later "I don't think you are back in the game, we'll call you when we have to represent a biker gang".
• Generally, whenever there's an argument between Alan and Denny on Boston Legal, Alan is clearly supposed to be right, and Denny clearly wrong, generally just by virtue of Alan holding the same viewpoint as the creator. Alan, unlike Denny, is never asked to defend his viewpoint or challenged on some less-than-strictly-true statements he makes, while Denny gives good points to defend his opinions, but they aren't explored by the series. One example is when the two debate presidential candidates: Alan tells Denny to name even one good reason to choose the Republican candidate, but Alan is not asked to name a reason to vote for the Democratic candidate.
• The later seasons of Charmed just smack of this. The sisters can steal souls, wipe out free will with the Avatars, and even encourage killing higher ups of Good simply because it suits them. In one episode, Phoebe and Paige trick a mortal man who's threatening them with a gun into getting himself killed (in a way that gets a target off the back of their nephew), when they could have easily just orbed the gun out of his hands. Phoebe in particular mixes this with heavy doses of hypocrisy to boot.
• Cheers: In "Home is the Sailor", Sam and Carla conspire to get new bartender Wayne fired. Wayne's only crime is being a humorless stiff and better at his job than Woody. But Woody's a main character, so we're supposed to hate Wayne and celebrate when Sam and the barflies manipulate him into storming off in a huff, so that Sam and Woody can keep their jobs.
• When a character in Cold Feet cheated on their spouse, the person they cheated with was always depicted as a villain; yet when Karen, one of protagonists, starts an affair with a married man, there is nothing negative shown about her behavior, nor that of her friend Rachel, who encouraged her to pursue the affair.
• Discussed in-universe in Crossing Jordan: our Cowboy Cop protagonist can be a real pain in the ass, but since she's motivated by such a strong quest for justice, it's usually forgivable to her coworkers and the audience. Until it's personal in the later seasons, at which point her coworkers help her to the detriment of their lab's reputation, risking having all the cases they've worked on called into question, just because it's Jordan - even though at that point she seems self-defeatingly fatalistc and frankly pretty careless.
• Day Break (2006): Subverted. Initially Hopper is overly focused on only protecting himself and his girlfriend Rita and simply ignores the greater good. Not only does the day keep resetting anyway, during one loop Hopper comes across as so paranoid and deranged that he drives Rita right back into her ex-husband's arms. Eventually he accepts that he cannot prioritize his relationship with her above other people and truly sets out to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
• Desperate Housewives did this a lot:
  • For example, we're supposed to feel sympathy for Lynette when she steals the children from her husband and goes cross-country without telling him because she believed he was cheating (he actually wasn't).
  • A particularly glaring incident happens in Season 7, when Paul Young returns to Wisteria Lane after spending ten years in prison when he was framed for murder. All of the housewives and neighbors who knew him in Season 1 are very wary of him because they suspect (correctly) that he killed Martha Huber. However, they always seem to forget that he killed Martha because she was blackmailing Mary Alice into committing suicide. Plus, it's a bit rich of the housewives to declare Paul as dangerous and untrustworthy for suspected murder when Mary Alice not only killed Deirdre to stop her from taking her son, she also chopped her up into little pieces and hid her in a toy chest, but the housewives (particularly Lynette) constantly remember Mary Alice as a saint, even if her reasons were a whole lot more selfish than Paul's.
• Doctor Who:
  • Throughout many eras of the show, characters who like the Doctor and are susceptible to his charms are good, while those who dislike him turn out to be evil. Occasionally you'll get a character who is suspicious of him, but if they're good he'll have won them over by the end. The 1970s were probably the worst for this, as both the Third and Fourth Doctors were exceptionally charismatic on-screen figures, and impossible charm was considered to be one of his characterisation points in this decade — this also allowed the Doctor to mistreat his companions and get out of it by being cute, in a few moments that seem quite painful today.
  • In "Genesis of the Daleks", we're supposed to be horrified when Davros tortures the Doctor for information. The next story, we're supposed to be satisfied when the Doctor tortures a Cyberman collaborator for information while smirking about it cold-bloodedly the whole time.
  • "Meglos" takes place on a planet where everyone lives in a safe underground city undisturbed by the planet-wide jungle teeming with venomous and carnivorous plants. Their power source, a mysterious artifact, is stolen by the intergalactic criminal Meglos to use in a planet-killing superweapon. The Doctor reprograms the weapon to change the target from the jungle planet to Meglos' base. His decision to kill Meglos and the band of thieves he was working with (who didn't even know they were involved in a genocidal scheme up until the end) is never explained or even questioned. More alarmingly, the underground city leaders thank the Doctor for saving their planet from destruction and stopping the criminal who stole their power source, but never question whether it was really necessary to destroy the power source. They now have to evacuate untold cubic miles of powerless underground dwellings, set up new homes in a horrible writhing jungle, and somehow find the power to make it all work. Assuming this is even possible, it will be a long and difficult process in which many lives will no doubt be lost. The Doctor may have had no alternative to destroying the artefact, but we wouldn't know because the subject is never discussed at all.
  • Rose Tyler treats her boyfriend Mickey Smith horribly, not showing much concern for him when her disappearing for a year meant he got questioned by the police and her mother thought he'd murdered her (albeit from her perspective she'd been gone for a few days, and Mickey was never very attentive). She's horrible to any other woman who interacts with the Doctor, in "The Parting of the Ways" even shooting dirty looks at Lynda for acting perfectly nicely to the Doctor and going out of her way to be catty to Sarah Jane just for saying she used to travel with the Doctor. In "Doomsday", when she is trapped in a Parallel world and the Doctor says them meeting would destroy both worlds her reaction is "So?" In "Journey's End", she clearly says she was working on trying to get back to her world before the barriers collapsed, despite what the Doctor said. Yet the writers and the Doctor portray her as the perfect companion, and these points are never brought up.
  • River Song benefits from this in "The Wedding of River Song". In her selfishness, she threatens the safety of the universe, claiming that she'll suffer more than everyone else combined if she has to kill the Doctor. Normally, this act would be rightfully shown as one of horrendous selfishness, especially given that a.) her parents are included in the whole "everyone suffers horribly before dying in agony" thing and b.) this also includes every single companion the Doctor has ever had (along with, again, every single person in existence). Aside from an all-too-brief calling out, River never sees any consequences of her actions, and in fact, arguably gets away with everything she wants - and what she's done is never brought up again.
  • The show's treatment of the Twelfth Doctor tends to go out of its way to avoid this trope — it's rare to see him do anything morally grey and/or make the better of two bad choices without getting chewed out by other characters, and such actions can come back to bite him where it hurts later. Probably the closest he comes to this trope is his behavior in "The Lie of the Land", in which he tricks Bill into thinking he genuinely joined the Monks and has given up all he stood for, all in an attempt to prove she's not brainwashed — upsetting her enough to try and kill him. When the true nature of his actions are revealed, it's largely laughed off in a case of Mood Whiplash rather than a What the Hell, Hero? speech.
  • "The Pandorica Opens" is all about this. The titular object is a Tailor-Made Prison that's designed to seal away something known only as "The Beast". Every species has legends about that creature, which is spoken of as a horrifying, malevolent, capricious god that descends from the sky at random and begins killing, altering life, and basically completely changing everything about a planet's long-held history in a matter of hours. The episode builds up The Reveal of the Pandorica finally being unlocked... and it's empty. It turns out that the villains who had temporarily allied themselves weren't gathering to free what was inside the box — they were gathering to imprison The Beast to prevent it from doing any more damage to the universe. And the name of that horrible, indestructible, life-destroying monster? The Doctor. Yes, from our perspective, he's a hero, but imagine that you're an innocent life-form on one of the hundreds of planets he's visited in his lifetime. How would you think of him?
  • A particularly infamous example happens in "Arachnids In The UK". The Doctor and her friends are trying to contain giant, carnivorous spiders and prevent them from spreading out into Sheffield. Jack Robertson, the latest in a long line of corrupt businessmen characters in Doctor Who (who's also partially the reason why they're in this mess in the first place), repeatedly demands that they use the opportunity to gun the spiders down and kill them. The Doctor, true to her character, refuses to solve her problems that way and is determined to come up with a more humane solution. Except, the Doctor's plan amounts to luring them all inside a giant cage, and then leaving. The Doctor and her friends fly away at the end of the episode, and there's never any indication given that she transported the spiders off-world with the TARDIS, or contacted any of her human allies to have them moved somewhere else. As far as the audience can tell, the spiders are doomed to either starve to death, crush each other to death (since they were previously established to grow rapidly), or cannibalize each other. The only way the Doctor's plan seems to be more humane than Robertson's is the fact that the Doctor won't be around to watch them expire.
• Downton Abbey: When penniless Lord Hepworth pursues Lady Rosamund for her money, the Dowager Countess warns her that he's a conniving fortune-hunter; the narrative also paints him as a jerk who is also carrying on with Rosamund's maid. Meanwhile, Lord Grantham married Cora for her money in the series' backstory, presumably with the Countess' encouragement. Every so one character or another will gently rib him about this; otherwise no one seems to judge.
• The main four girls and Mrs. Garrett in The Facts of Life do whatever they want and they're still considered examples of good people. Tootie snoops and snitches on other girls, spreading half-truths and rumors. Jo and Blair steal a van, buy beer illegally, drink wine, and do other things that would land a lot of people in jail. Mrs. Garrett doesn't respect the wishes of others and manipulates them to get what she wants, including setting the girls up for failure so they will have to room together for another year as punishment.
• Family Matters did this in its last season, when Steve and Laura suddenly hooked up with each other: One problem is that they were both dating other people, who suddenly became their Romantic Runner-Ups, whose feelings are treated as unimportant.
• Fear the Walking Dead: The season one finale. Daniel Salazar comes up with a plan to release a massive herd of zombies and lure them to a military-controlled hospital where his wife, Travis' ex, and Madison's son are being held. None of the other protagonists object to this, not even Travis (the show's moral center) despite the fact that it's sure to cause dozens, if not hundreds of other deaths just to rescue three people the "heroes" care about. While they attempt to justify their decision by saying the soldiers have lost their minds and deserved to die, previous episodes had shown them as, at worst, a bunch of Punch Clock Villains Just Following Orders who, aside from a specific few, weren't actively malevolent and were genuinely trying to help people. And even putting the soldiers aside, what about all the patients and civilians who got caught in the crossfire? The military was even planning to evacuate everyone (including the protagonist's loved ones) from the hospital before the attack made them deem it too risky.
• Friends:
  • Joey and Ross can have multiple girlfriends and this is fine. Phoebe can date two men at once and the other characters don't criticize her (though one of the men dumped her when he found out) but when Phoebe's boyfriend is overheard having sex with someone else the men rush upstairs to violently attack him with the women's full support. Ross at least was dating two women non-exclusively (very common, especially in big cities), and when one woman dated both Ross and Joey non-exclusively she wasn't portrayed as immoral or wrong in any way-exactly like Ross was. So at least they played that the same.
  • Ross cheating on Rachel was portrayed sympathetically for both sides, one feeling hurt and betrayed and the other feeling ashamed and trying to fix his mistake. Joey slept with an actress who had a long term boyfriend and it was played entirely for laughs because he wasn't a main character and kind of a dick.
  • Ross ridiculing Paolo right to his face, insulting him in English, knowing full well the guy can't understand him. Had the roles been reversed, Paolo would have been seen as a jerk. When Ross does it, it's played for laughs. Also, Ross intending to swoop in and seduce Rachel following her break-up with Paolo, not only knowing full well that she's in a bad state, but looking to do this BECAUSE she is. Even he argues that this is actually a pretty sleazy thing to do before going ahead with it anyway.
  • Rachel's nasty attitude towards Ross' girlfriend Julie (and most of Ross' girlfriends) and her manipulative attempts to interfere in this and other relationships of his (trying to prevent Ross and Julie from sleeping together, getting Bonnie to shave her head, etc.) She displays similar behavior towards Joey's girlfriends when she takes an interest in him, all played for sympathy and amusement because she's a main character, whereas she would have been reviled had she not been. And she just laughingly accepts that other women tend to dislike her?
• Game of Thrones: In the series finale "The Iron Throne", Jon Snow bizarrely defends Daenerys's actions at the battle for King's Landing when Tyrion begs him to stop her and only agrees to when Tyrion points out Arya and Sansa will never bend the knee to Dany. It's not Dany burning hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children alive, nor is Dany promising to take over the world and do the same to anyone who doesn't bend the knee; it's that Dany will probably kill his sisters that gets Jon to turn on Dany. All this because:
  Jon Snow: She is my queen.
  • Sansa finally finds it in herself to forgive Theon after learning that he didn't murder her two younger brothers—instead, he murdered two other innocent children and made people think they were the Stark boys (and only because he was unable to catch the latter).
• In Glee, most scenes feature Protagonist Centered Morality. If the scene is from Rachel's POV, then it will show stalking and harassing an auditor and cheating to get around fair audition procedures as a perfectly valid way to get into your chosen university. If it's from Finn's perspective, it will show yelling at and hitting a girl with a spinal injury and trying to tip her out of her wheelchair in the middle of a crowded dance floor as justified due to her not informing him the instant she started to regain some ability to walk (although the girl in question, Quinn Fabray, was milking her disability to get sympathy votes for prom queen). If it's from Sam's perspective, it will show ignoring a girl's boundaries and direct 'no' and pursuing her regardless as perfectly reasonable. If it's from Santana's, it will show vicious verbal abuse of a guy she hates because she slept with him while trying to avoid acknowledging her love for Brittany and then got slut-shamed by both him and his girlfriend in front of the glee club as perfectly reasonable and indeed enjoyable. If it's from Will's perspective, he can plant drugs in a student's locker, threaten him with expulsion and the ruination of his life, all in an effort to get him to join the freaking glee club, and he will be seen as the one in the right just because it's so clear that the student will be a great addition to the club. The worst for this is arguably Kurt; he can be as terrible as he wants to anyone (such as telling a student he smells homeless), but anyone who bullies or insults him is presented as a villain.
• In The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Bucky suggests he and Sam should physically assault the new Captain America, John Walker, and forcibly take the Shield from him because they can't handle the fact that John is not Steve Rogers. At this point, the only thing Walker has done is literally save Bucky and Sam's lives from the Flag Smashers and asked for their help in his mission to take the aforementioned terrorists down, which they threw in his face.
  • Later on, the Dora Milaje outright physically assault and literally try to murder Walker and Lemar (both duly appointed representatives and counter-terrorist operatives for the United States of America). Bucky had to physically interfere to prevent one of the Doras from murdering them, and even then the Doras just continued their assault. All for the great crime of John putting his hand on one of their shoulders while extending an olive branch to them. And we're supposed to be rooting for the Doras.
• While The Golden Girls largely averted this trope, some of Sophia's actions occasionally run toward this. Now, Sophia is definitely a Cool Old Lady, but every once in a while, her antics move from "feisty senior" to "straight-up jerk" or even criminal. A few examples:
  • In the two-parter "Sick and Tired," the girls go to a fancy restaurant to celebrate Dorothy finally getting a name for her mysterious illness. When the waiter arrives, Dorothy requests the best bottle of champagne the place has, despite Rose protesting the expense. After they drink the champagne and praise it, Rose informs them that it's four-hundred and thirty dollars a bottle. Dorothy starts complaining about the price, ignoring that Rose tried to stop her, but Sophia announces that she has a plan. She covertly pours salt into her champagne glass, then has the waiter taste it and tells him that it's ruined their palate. The flustered waiter offers to comp the girls' meals in exchange, which Sophia accepts. The audience cheers for the trick, despite the fact that Sophia essentially just robbed the place (and probably got a few staff members in serious trouble) because of Dorothy's stubbornness and refusal to listen to Rose's warnings (it's not as if the waiter tried to cheat the girls or was treating them badly).
  • One episode has Dorothy's old high school sweetheart John Neretti, a tough-talking greaser who has since cleaned up his act, coming to Florida and reconnecting. Dorothy has always been angry about the fact that John jilted her on prom night—but when they go out to dinner, John reveals that he did show up that evening, only for Sophia to scold him for wearing improper clothes; when John mouthed off to her, she sent him away. That in and of itself is understandable—Sophia was trying to protect her daughter—but the problem is that she not only didn't tell Dorothy the truth, she kept up the lie for over forty years. Dorothy bitterly explains that John's apparent standing her up destroyed her self-confidence, which in turn led to her to accept a date with Stan Zbornak, who knocked her up and put her into a marriage that took a serious toll on her. She tells Sophia that she can never forgive her for the decades of lying—but the episode's ending has John telling Dorothy that Sophia's harsh words actually inspired him to stop being a jerk and become a successful businessman, which convinces Dorothy that her mother was right all along (although to her credit, Sophia does apologize for what she did, but it still feels hollow after keeping the secret for all of those years).
  • In "From Here to the Pharmacy," Sophia asks Rose to help her prepare her will. Dorothy makes fun until Rose accidentally lets it slip that Sophia has a secret savings account of $35,000 from checks that Dorothy's sister and brother Gloria and Phil have been sending her over the years. Dorothy furiously points out that she's made many sacrifices over the years to cover Sophia's expenses and announces that from now on, she'll have to pay her own way...only to come around again and say that she likes taking care of her mother, so her anger is all forgotten.
• Played straight to the point of absurdity on Gossip Girl:
  • Everyone dislikes the eponymous blogger for stalking them, violating their privacy, ruining parts of their lives and occasionally even being part of putting some of their lives in danger. The moment they find out that Gossip Girl is one of the main characters they all forgive and forget instantly and decide that the blog was actually a positive in their lives. Heck, she even gets to marry Serena, the person who's been stalked and criticized the most on the blog, and we're supposed to think it's a happy ending.
  • The show lives this trope for the entirety of its run. The main characters commit numerous crimes and ruin numerous lives (Blair framing a decent teacher for an affair with a student simply because she gave her a bad grade being a stand-out example) and while they occasionally get karmic punishments, they still ultimately end up on top. Anyone messes with them and being driven out of town is the least they can expect.
• Played straight in season 3 of How I Met Your Mother but then eventually subverted. Barney's Casanova ways were viewed with disgust by the rest of the group. But they never had a problem when Ted got in on it after his break-up with Robin. Eventually, though, Ted realizes just how sleazy he's been acting — and acknowledges it was more out of desperation.
• The iCarly trio have done things just as bad as the "villains" of various episodes have done. In one specific episode, the villain is a bully, who does the exact same thing that Sam has done and continues to do so long after the bully is defeated, with the only difference being that the villain picked on Carly. The bully insulted the trio and pushed Carly away, so she's apparently a big jerk who needs to be put in her place. Sam beats Freddie with a racket, throws him out of a tree house, and then slams onto him because he has a different opinion to everyone, and a season or two later, the two are dating.
• The titular character of I Dream of Jeannie She often would punish Tony for going out with other women, even though they weren't officially in a romantic relationship, ^note  At least, not until the final season. turned people into things, caused all sorts of mischief that got Tony in trouble (usually unwittingly, but still) or made Dr. Bellows look crazy, but it was considered acceptable, cause she was the main character. Yes, her sister was more evil cause she basically wanted to keep Tony as a Sex Slave, but Jeannie herself wasn't much better. ^note  Sometimes, this could be justified by her naivete in human matters, but other times, she knew exactly what she was doing and was rarely (if at all) punished or called out on it.
• Lucy on I Love Lucy is sometimes called out for her mischief, but other times, she isn't, including one time she ruined a nightclub owner's revenues for an entire night. This was because the owner tried to do Ricky a favor and let him out of his contract to go make more money when Lucy was trying to squeeze him for higher pay. So, to repay a kindness, Lucy screws him over.
• This trope could well be renamed to "Inhumans morality," due to the writers attempting to create an Anti-Villain-and-Anti-Hero dynamic but forgetting to make the good guys do anything good or the bad guys anything bad. Similar to Black Panther (2018), the villain, Maximus, has the motive of ending a corrupt power structure that the protagonists, the Inhuman Royal Family, take part in (namely, a Fantastic Caste System where anyone who loses the Superpower Lottery is sentenced to a life of backbreaking labor). However, whereas T'Challa realizes that Killmonger is right about Wakanda's isolationism and ends the policy shortly after defeating Killmonger, not to mention the fact Killmonger has taken far too many cues from the racist European empires that Africa suffered under, the Royal Family has no interest in ending said caste system and are basically all terrible people to varying degrees, while Maximus's goals harm almost no one outside of the Royal Family being exiled and a handful of judges being killed. Basically, the primary goal of the series is for the Royal Family to resume their seat of power... because they're the protagonists, more or less, as it doesn't seem like them being reinstalled would help much of anyone.
• The later episodes of Kamen Rider Geats show Ace taking issue with the higher-ups in the DGP treating the Riders like pawns who can be easily manipulated, yet as Keiwa can attest in #2 and #7, he himself isn't above using lies and trickery to get further in the game. This is especially jarring as some of the more antagonistic Riders like Michinaga, Kanato, Morio, and Daichi have all been treated with distain for their actions, yet Ace is never called out for being a Manipulative Bastard. While one could argue that Ace has more noble traits overall, it doesn't completely invalidate the argument that he's not that much better than the "bad" Riders, given how a fair portion of the antagonists can be just as manipulative as he is.
• Kirby Buckets has, over the course of his show, constantly lied to get what he wants, inadvertently hurt his family and friends in the process, and caused a lot of mayhem. Yet, by the end of every episode, he finds his way back into everyone's good graces. No such luxury is afforded his sister Dawn, who is always supposed to be seen as the bad guy even when she's pointing out the fact that she is always given the short end of the stick.
• This happens a lot in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit when it comes to the police detectives' actions, especially Olivia Benson in the later seasons who goes from being a cop, passionate about women victims, but reasonable in her judgement most of the time, into a Straw Feminist who always sees men as the predators and women as the victims, even when there are women doing amoral or criminal acts that got them in trouble in the first place. One example is how Benson becomes determined to have a college coach arrested and convicted of being a rapist because he promised mothers he'll get their child into college if they have sex with him. Even though the sex was consensual and the mothers were the ones actually committing a crime by illegally making a deal to get their children into college, Benson guilt-trips D.A Barba into charging the man. The judge of the case makes it clear that no crime was committed, and if the jury does convict, he will set aside the verdict and Barba's reputation would be ruined. When Barba eventually drops the charges, Benson is outraged.
• Little House on the Prairie:
  • Kezia refuses to pay her taxes and has her home sold at auction. When Harriet buys the house, she's portrayed as the antagonist and everyone in town agrees with Kezia's side of the story. No one ever mentions that Kezia should have read her own mail. After all, she works at the post office where she reads everyone else's mail. This is particularly interesting because there is another episode where Harriet is seen as the bad guy for listening in on phone conversations. Kezia does the same thing with mail, but is the good guy.
  • Mrs. Oleson is generally accepted as an antagonist and everything she does is wrong, so the Ingalls can do whatever they want and the audience will side with them. When Mrs. Oleson makes up a lie and spreads it, she's a horrible person. When an Ingalls makes up a lie, there's nothing wrong with it. In one episode, Charles takes in a black boy who wants to go to school. When he takes him to the school, Mrs. Oleson objects, saying the school is for the children of the people of Walnut Grove. Charles tells her the boy is his son from a previous marriage. In another episode, when Caroline's father is trying to sell copies of the book he wrote, Laura tells Mrs. Oleson the book has all kinds of gossip in it, including a story about how Caroline ran out of the house naked one time.
• In Lost the main characters are often placed in situations where they are forced to lie, or even kill, in order to survive. The main characters seem to have accepted this and don't really condemn anyone on 'their' side for killing someone because they see the killing as justified. But when one of the 'Others' has to do the same thing against them, for the exact same reasons, they are quick to condemn them and attack them and even kill them, failing to see that they are guilty of the exact same thing. But when 'they' do it it is justified, when the Others do it it isn't.
• In the second season of Lucifer, Lucifer's mother, the goddess of creation, escapes from Hell and winds up in the body of an attorney named Charlotte Richards. She then has an on-again, off-again relationship with Dan as the season progresses, before Lucifer sends her to another reality to keep her from exploding. This has the side-effect of Charlotte not remembering everything that happened during the season, including her relationship with Dan. Everyone consoles Dan for his loss while ignoring the fact that Charlotte Richards was married and had two children, who in fact are not mentioned after two episodes. Later subverted, since the real Charlotte does turn back up in the third season, and we get to see the fallout her possession had on her life, including the fact that her husband has divorced her and isn't letting her see their children. Also, since Charlotte was in fact dead (and her soul in Hell) when the goddess took over her and as a side-effect of the possession she's now alive again, she arguably came out ahead.
• Helena Peabody in the 2nd season of The L Word had a strong social conscience. She cared a lot about the plight of poverty stricken families and donated a lot of money, both money from the company she inherited and her own money, to good causes. However she manipulated Tina and Bette and so was a villain. Similarly when she mentioned to her — admittedly also very charitable — mother Peggy Peabody that she had been a neglectful mother and Peggy responded by mocking her, we are encouraged to support Peggy, who was always nice to Bette. We are also encouraged to dislike Helena for dating other women while with Tina, even though she only did this after Tina cheated on her with Bette.
• M*A*S*H:
  • All the times that Hawkeye and the others give Frank a hard time over patients dying or not recuperating is seen as harmless joking. Whenever Frank takes a shot at Hawkeye when the tables are turned, everyone treats this as an unpardonable sin.
  • The nadir of this trope arguably occurs in the third season episode "House Arrest." It begins with Frank making an ass of himself, and when Hawkeye snarks at him, Frank gets back at him by giving Hawkeye a "rattail" ^note a common locker-room prank of winding up a wet towel into an improvised whip and moderately smacking someone else on the buttocks. Admittedly, this is juvenile and unbecoming of an officer in the United States Army, a surgeon or even an adult (or whatever facsimile thereof Frank is), but Hawkeye's reaction is an order of magnitude worse: he punches Frank full in the face, causing a black eye. For one of the few times in the show's run, Frank Burns has Hawkeye Pierce dead-to-rights on a court-martial offense, that of striking a superior officer. And in front of witnesses. One of whom who is only too happy to perjure himself to save Hawkeye. Hawk is put under the titular house arrest, where the entire camp treats him like a conquering hero — he gets water buffalo steak delivered, the movie showings are arranged so they're screened in The Swamp, and in general it's treated as Hawkeye being rewarded with a free vacation for committing assault and battery. To top it off, how the writers got Hawkeye out of the fix was to essentially make the universe conspire to work in his favor — Burns is sexually harassed by a visiting colonel, and when Margaret accidentally walks in mid-attempted-seduction, the harasser, to save her face, falsely accuses Frank of trying to rape her. This causes Margaret, in a fit of pique, to change her eyewitness testimony to match Trapper's perjury, getting Hawkeye off the hook, while Frank is put under a much less pleasant house arrest to await trial. (For what it's worth, the writers of the episode did later express regret for the false rape accusations being treated as the punchline for the episode's plot.)
• NCIS: Gibbs has done things like assassinate targets on foreign soil (in revenge for his wife and daughter's deaths), and arranged for the deaths of criminals he isn't able to prosecute, such as a gang leader with insufficient evidence for trial, where he instead dropped hints with the rest of the gang that the leader was duping them and a news story at the end announces the finding of the leader's body. Note that this is not true of other characters: Gibbs finds Jenny's assassination of the Frog troubling, despite the similar circumstances to his own revenge (though it is implied she may have the incorrect target); Ziva is pulled up more than once by the accusation of going too far with suspects, including one she roughed up whose death may or may not have been a result of that action.
• Subverted in one episode of The Office (US). Michael makes a spy movie, with himself as the starring role. At one point his character strangles an innocent hockey player just because he was in the way of the mission. Michael expected the audience to side with the spy, but everyone who attended the screening was creeped out.
• In Reckless (a Masterpiece Mini Series), a woman enters into an affair with a younger man after discovering her husband's affair with a younger woman. Whereas he's demonized despite his sincere remorse and attempts to make amends, her affair is the central love story and is glamorized to the point that at the end of the sequel, they get married. And how did this affair start? With (a) him continuing to pursue her even though she repeatedly rebuffs him (so Stalking is Love as long as you're a main character) and (b) him covertly telling her about her husband's affair and then conveniently being available when she comes running to him for comfort. In short, he causes her emotional pain and then takes advantage of it. Apparently not being Above the Influence is also okay as long you're a main character.
• Lampshaded in the Psych episode "High Noonish", after Lassie shoots the Killer of the Week in the tourist trap town. After some tourists boo him, he indignantly tells them "I'm the good guy, you toothless hillbillies", before acknowledging that "[He] did just shoot [the killer]"
• Played with on Rome — several characters denounce acts done by their enemies but view them as fully justified when they do the same things themselves. The show seems to play this up as an intentional part of the Deliberate Values Dissonance. Contemporary attitudes about Might Makes Right and Right Makes Might are incredibly entangled, and the Romans have no problem invoking either to justify their actions.
• This trope played itself out in Robin Hood to a mind-boggling degree. No matter how much of a jerkass Robin could be at times, anyone who loved Robin was good, and anyone who hated Robin was evil. The end.
• On Saved by the Bell, Zack and most of the other main characters aren't much nicer to their classmates than any of the various bullies who appear on the show in its run. They insult them frequently and look down on them as people (including Screech, who's supposedly Zack's best friend), but because they're the main characters, this is treated as totally normal and acceptable. One particular example comes in the Date Auction episode, wherein Lisa's Guy of the Week is a handsome brainy kid (not a "nerd") who isn't interested in her until she puts on an intellectual façade. Later in the episode, he's made out to be a pompous jerk because he expresses less-than-complimentary feelings about Lisa's friends, as well as Lisa herself before putting on the façade, and Lisa is made out to be correct in telling him off. Of course, it's never pointed out that Lisa expresses similarly condescending views, if not outright hostile ones, of people she feels are beneath her (nerds, especially Screech) to some extent in almost every other episode and the only ever called on it once. It comes off like the only thing the smart guy did wrong was insult main characters.
• Inverted on Scrubs. No matter how badly JD's friends act, he's always in the wrong so he can learn something.
• Averted in Sex and the City, when Charlotte learns that Carrie is cheating on her boyfriend with Mr. Big, who himself is married, she tells Carrie that it's the worst thing she has ever done and she should feel terrible for doing it. Also lampshaded when she points out that if another woman slept with Charlotte's fiancé, Carrie would be furious.
  • Played straight in The Movie, though. Mr. Big panics and gets cold feet, jilting Carrie at the altar; he later comes back to apologize and restart the wedding, but Carrie screams at him and hits him with her bouquet before fleeing to Mexico. The girls fall over themselves to comfort Carrie, to the point where Samantha spoon-feeds her. But when Miranda is cheated on by Steve, who she's not only been with much longer then Carrie has with Big, but he is the father of her child. Needless to say, Miranda kicks him out, but the other girls barely give Miranda any sympathy about this, with Samantha teasing Miranda about not shaving, Carrie asking how Steve is dealing with the break-up and then culminates with Carrie telling her during a fight (after Miranda admits that she told Big in a moment of frustration when Steve unexpectedly showed up outside the rehearsal dinner that he was crazy to get married) that she thinks Miranda's "an idiot for letting go of Steve", but Miranda soldiers on like normal while Carrie had a full-blown Heroic BSoD over getting jilted, even comparing it to being dead and all the other girls can do is grimace sympathetically.
  • The girls also complain a lot in the early seasons they hate how married couples tend to act like they're going to throw themselves at their husbands because they are single and therefore must be desperate and jealous, but as times goes on and they all settle down with boyfriends, they start to obsess over single women "stealing" their men, like Samantha's continuous jealousy over girls she thinks Richard has slept with or Charlotte spending the entirety of the second movie obsessing over the possibility of Harry cheating on her with the nanny thanks to some offhand comments from Carrie and Samantha and because Erin doesn't wear a bra. (This is especially rich of Charlotte considering that she cheated on her first husband Trey with the gardener.)
• The Shield is a massive deconstruction of this trope as it occurs in police dramas. The show constantly points out that the Cowboy Cop antics and "necessary evils" that Vic Mackey engages in are functionally identical to the actions of the criminals he fights, with his only real justification for them being that the people he goes after are even worse. And then he loses that justification as the series drags on, increasingly harming civilians, fellow cops, and his own family and friends with his behavior, culminating in the final season with driving one of his own men into killing his family and then himself before selling out another to secure an immunity deal with Internal Affairs, becoming not just a Villain Protagonist but pretty much the Big Bad of the show. By the final episode, it's been thoroughly spelled out that any person who actually engages in Protagnist-Centered Morality is at best a hypocritical asshole, at worst a narcissistic monster with no moral code beyond whatever benefits them the most at the current moment.
• Six Feet Under: A widow sues Fisher & Sons for emotional distress because Nate acquiesced to her repeated requests to see her husband's mutilated body. Both Fisher brothers are aware that the widow was a victim of domestic abuse and that the lawsuit was actually instigated by their business rival. When David goes to speak with the widow and can't convince her to drop the suit, he proceeds to needle her by calling her pathetic and weak for "tolerating" her husband's abuse until she rips up the paperwork. There is absolutely no reason this scene couldn't have had David offer her compassion while reminding her that suing the Fishers would not heal her trauma; instead he inflicts actual emotional distress and is never called out for it. Everyone else is just pleased that she's dropping the suit.
• Subverted in Stargate SG-1: At first it looks like Teal'c is going to be this, someone whose evil dog-kicking past will be swept away once he joins SG-1, but it's soon shown that the trope will be averted. Relatives of a few people whom Teal'c had butchered under orders from Apophis have him put on trial, and Teal'c insists he should be judged for his actions, despite the rest of SG-1 willing to do just about anything possible to bail Teal'c out. Teal'c also repeatedly shows concern and regrets over the things he did as First Prime of Apophis. One of the final episodes has that episode's villain, who murdered numerous innocents with a bomb, call out Teal'c saying that Teal'c was every bit as bad when he worked for the Goa'ulds. Finally, one of the most touching scenes of Stargate: The Ark of Truth has Teal'c advising a former enemy soldier, who, like him, did horrible things in the name of his religion. Teal'c tells him that others may forgive him, but he'll never forgive himself, and that they should devote their lives to helping others for other people's sake, not for a vague hope of redemption.
  Teal'c: One day others may try to convince you they have forgiven you. That is more about them than you. For them, imparting forgiveness is a blessing.
  Tomin: How do you go on?
  Teal'c: It is simple. You will never forgive yourself. Accept it. You hurt others - many others. That cannot be undone. You will never find personal retribution. But your life does not have to end. That which is right, just, and true can still prevail. If you do not fight for what you believe in, all may be lost for everyone else. But do not fight for yourself. Fight for others - others that may be saved through your effort. That is the least you can do.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had moral ambiguity as a theme, but sometimes the bad things the heroes did were barely acknowledged as bad, if at all.
    • In "For the Uniform", the Starfleet officer-turned-Maquis Rebel Leader Michael Eddington starts launching chemical weapons^note They're described as "biogenic weapons", but the description is of a chemical agent. at Cardassian colonies in the disputed territory. Benjamin Sisko, the protagonist, responds by doing the exact same thing to Maquis-friendly worlds to force Eddington to surrender. While the episode gives token disapproval of Sisko letting the pursuit of Eddington get personal, it ends with Eddington being carted off to the brig to face trial for rebellion and war crimes, and Sisko facing no consequences at all.
    • Gul Dukat is treated as a monster for being the prefect of Bajor during the final years of the occupation, and accused of being directly responsible for all the atrocities committed during that time, despite his insistence that he tried to save as many Bajorans as possible (it's ambiguous how genuine he is in this regard, since we see he, at the very least, abused his position to coerce sex from Bajoran women). But Odo willingly became the security chief of Terok Nor during the occupation, claiming that he was more just than any Cardiassian would have been in the position (even though Odo could have easily joined the resistance with his powers and contacts), and is treated as a hero by Bajorans and gets to keep his position after the occupation.
    • When The Dominion first showed up, the Federation had every reason to be cautious and skeptical of their claim to own the entire Gamma Quadrant because they'd been exploring it for a year before meeting anyone who'd even heard of the Dominion, and their first act was to kidnap Sisko (and possibly destroy some civilian ships). But the Federation's actual response was rather violent and imperialistic; instead of negotiating, they sent a heavily armed ship into Dominion territory to rescue four people and seemingly fired on the first Dominion ships they saw. Apparently, the Dominion acting aggressively is a sign of how evil they are, but the Federation doing the same is a justified showing of force.
    • During the Dominion War, Julian Bashir is the only one to raise a token objection to the Federation's play to destroy all Ketracel-white in the Alpha Quadrant, which is needed to keep the millions of fully sentient and capable of rebellion Jem'Hadar in the quadrant from going violently insane and dying. Again, the Dominion is monstrous for creating the Jem'Hadar this way and fighting a war without regard for collateral damage, but the Federation won't hesitate to exploit any enemy weakness, even if it means effective genocide and countless innocents dying to win a war.
    • Sisko and the crew treat bringing the Romulans into the war as an unequivocal good because both the Romulans and Dominion are the bad guys, with only their methods of doing so being questionable. The Federation gets to sit out any war it wants for ideological or pragmatic reasons, but apparently the Romulans are obligated to put their millions of civilians on the Dominion's chopping block to defend the good guys.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise:
    • Captain Jonathan Archer. Since the series is a Prequel and Archer was essentially added to the franchise's history via Retcon, he is a borderline Designated Hero in that it is the future results of his present-time actions (which lead to the formation of the Federation) that are commonly trotted out to rationalize the fact that he is a hypocrite who frequently violates his own stated principles when it is to his benefit or Earth's. The show often goes out of its way to emphasize that he will be one of the greatest heroes in history as seen by future generations, and therefore anything he does in the present is morally justifiable.
      
      Probably the most blatant example is his opinion on helping out less-advanced species. In "Dear Doctor", he uses the not-yet-existent Prime Directive as an excuse to not give a cure to a species on the brink of extinction. He already has the cure and the recipe for it at this point; all he has to do is hand it over to the Valakians, and he'd save their lives and likely become a hero to their planet for generations. However, thanks to the Prime Directive mentality (and also an absolutely terrible understanding of evolution) he doesn't do so. Three seasons later, in "Observer Effect", two of his crew contract a deadly disease. When he realizes that some Organians were watching the whole thing, he gets pissed off that they won't help him. He even references the events of "Dear Doctor" and stands by them. Furthermore, the Valakians contracted their disease through no fault of their own, whereas the crew members were literally digging through garbage without so much as wearing rubber gloves. (The episode later confirms that a hazmat suit would have protected them.) In other words, Archer is against saving the lives of an entire planet who are doomed simply due to bad circumstances, but he's in favor of someone saving two members of his crew when the only reason they're about to die is because of their own incompetence.
    • To a lesser extent than the above, Humans and Vulcans are both apprehensive about each other and tend to suffer from Moral Myopia. In most cases, the narrative seems to side with the Humans and put the fault on the Vulcans for being a bunch of stuck up jerks.
  • In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Unforgettable", we meet a woman seeking sanctuary on Voyager who explains that she's been on the ship before, but no one remembers her. She comes from a very secretive culture which forbids anyone to leave and wipes the memory of anyone who discovers them. She had been searching for one of her people who had stowed away on Voyager and Chakotay helped her find him. Now she's seeking to escape her fellow tracers because she and Chakotay fell in love. The crew do their best to protect her from them. No one on the ship questions why the "right" thing to do depends on which side of the argument Chakotay's Girl of the Week is on at the time, or even seems to notice the discrepancy.
• In Season 1 of Stranger Things, Eleven breaking Troy's arm for bullying Mike is treated as cathartic, with Mike and Dustin cheering her on. In Season 4, when she strikes Angela with a skate for bullying her, it's treated as a shocking assault that Mike considers out of character, apparently because he wasn't the one being bullied this time.
• Supernatural:
  • In "Sacrifice", Sam and Dean have a chance to close the gates of Hell, banishing every demon off of the face of the Earth forever, at the cost of Sam's life. They ultimately decide not to go through with it and the show tries to play it as a moment that shows just how much Sam and Dean care about each other, not mentioning how they consider his life more important than every human who will ever be killed by a demon from that point onward. Also ironic, as the Winchesters have accepted imminent death for far lesser payoffs in the past. Is it better to die fighting a single demon, or wiping them all off the face of the Earth?
  • The season 10 finale featured a scenario that reversed Sam and Dean's roles but was otherwise quite similar. Sam is so determined to save Dean from the Mark of Cain that, even after learning the Mark is the only thing keeping an ancient primordial darkness from consuming the earth, he still doesn't call up Cas and tell him to abort the ritual he's planning to remove the mark. In the same episode, Dean kills Death himself to stop him from killing Sam, the consequences of which are not yet known, but given that he's the Dark Is Not Evil counterpart to freaking God, to say they could be disastrous on a cosmic level is probably an understatement.
  • Sam's behavior at the start of the eighth season — giving up hunting, shacking up with some random woman, and not even trying to find Dean or rescue Kevin from Crowley. It might have worked if the show had at least acknowledged he'd screwed up, but instead the narrative and Word of God tried to push that Sam's decision was 'mature' and Dean was wrong for being upset over it. Eventually the show did have Bobby call Sam out on this, but this was 19 episodes into the season and was likely only done to appease the fans once it became clear that nobody liked the decision. While Sam does succesfully retire in the show's final episode, doing so when your brother is trapped in a monster dimension and one of your friends is held hostage by a demon is probably the worst possible moment for Sam to hang his hat up.
  • If one compares the early seasons to the later seasons you can easily see that this trope has become rampant in this show. Where once the boys angsted over the rights and wrongs of killing a demon — which always means killing the innocent person they are possessing too — nowadays they cut them down by the dozen without a shred of hesitation or remorse, and in season 8 at one point Sam actually stops a demon from leaving a victim and then kills it. (This is particularly jarring since during seasons 3 and 4, much of Sam's initial motivation for drinking demon blood and being involved with Ruby was explicitly to have the power to exorcise demons without killing their hosts.) The only times they don't do this are, of course, with people they personally know and like. In earlier seasons, they were opposed to hunters who treated every single monster out there as fair game and slaughtered with impunity; nowadays, they do exactly that themselves, making only occasional exceptions for, once again, monsters they know (and admittedly, once or twice, for "new" monsters who haven't killed anyone... yet).
• True Blood:
  • Eric and Bill have both killed and tortured countless people during their lifetimes. Eric feels no remorse and continues to do so-he even has his own Torture Cellar. Bill is a self-loathing wreck about his past but hasn't tried to atone for his actions and quite readily kills if it is convenient for him to do so. His main objection in draining a seventeen-year-old girl (Jessica) and converting her to vampirism (knowing full well that she will probably die since most newborn vamps don't make it through the first year, and that she will certainly kill innocent people), is that he'll get in trouble with Sookie if she were to find out. There's also Bill being neglectful and even abusive towards Jessica at multiple points in the series, and never really getting held accountable for it. We also find out that Bill not only spent years raping, torturing, draining, and killing humans with both Lorena and the vampires in Malcolm's nest, but that he also worked as a procurer to the Queen for 35 years (something he got paid to do) and brought her humans to feed on, rape, parade around as her pets, and then callously dispose of. And yet, in spite of these crimes, Bill faces no repercussions for them. Both Bill and Eric would be considered violent sociopaths in real life, but we're meant to see them as The Hero at best and antiheroes at worst because they both genuinely love Sookie.
  • Sookie does some very bad things herself, and she's never called out on it. For one, she must have known exactly what would happen when she told Bill about her uncle or that young man who had been trying to infect the clan of vampires with his blood-borne illness. Or when she outed the telepathic bellhop to Eric. And that's just the first season. It's easy to feel sympathy over her actions involving her uncle (he probably got what he deserved) but the other two didn't. The young man with the blood-borne illness was just seeking revenge for the brutal murder of his lover, and the vampires he targeted were unreformed and bloodthirsty killers. The plan didn't even involve murdering them, just putting them out of action for a few months. Sookie's words sentenced him to death (and most likely, particularly brutal torture) at their hands. This incident has no repercussions and is never mentioned again, by anyone.
• The Vampire Diaries:
  • Elena and co. are okay with proceeding with Klaus's ritual in which Elena, a vampire, and a werewolf have to be sacrificed, once they figure out how to keep her alive. It's only once Klaus decides to use their friends as those vampire and werewolf that the main characters become worried. Presumably, if he used someone they never knew, they would've been perfectly fine with it.
  • In the third season the string of innocent corpses Stefan leaves behind appear to be of interest purely in terms of judging his mental state.
  • When it is realized that killing an original vampire also wipes out their entire bloodline, they naturally want to avoid killing the original responsible for the bloodline of Stefan, Damon and Caroline, because they're Elena's friends. Apparently however, no one is even slightly concerned about the possible hundreds of other vampires that will die if they kill any of the other originals. As far as is obvious, they aren't of concern.
  • In season 4 they really outdo themselves by murdering Chris — a hybrid who was risking his life to help them in the first place — in cold blood because Jeremy needed to kill a vampire in order to stop Elena's hallucinations. And then they have trouble understanding why Tyler, who was Chris's friend, is upset about it.
  • A Hunter looking to kill Elena just because she's a vampire? A horrible act of bigotry. Elena getting her brother to kill Kol, which would wipe out his entire bloodline, effectively committing mass murder on tens of thousands of vampires? Just something that needs to be done.
• In Wizards of Waverly Place it is really driven home in the Alex vs. Alex special. Alex gets drilled, again, for being irresponsible and selfish by her family. Being depressed over this, Alex pulls a stunt that endangers the world, again. She gets stripped of her powers, again, for her actions. At the end of the special, she gives a speech about how only Harper appreciates Alex for being herself and not trying to change her. This It's All About Me speech actually manages to deem her worthy of having her powers again.
• This trope shows up in the rejected Wonder Woman pilot. In this version, Diana is a vigilante who brutalizes, tortures, and even kills mooks in pursuit of her idea of justice — not to mention holding a press conference so she can tell everyone that Veronica Cale's company is evil, admitting that she doesn't have any proof but she just knows that she's right. After rampaging her way through Cale's company, the episode ends with her getting a standing ovation from her employees and the federal investigator (who just so happens to be her ex-boyfriend) lies to his superiors and tells them that there's no reason to go after Wonder Woman where just earlier a congressman who upholds the law and states all the horrible things WW has done is portrayed as evil. At no point is this presented with the slightest bit of irony, and this trope was so blatant and extreme in this case that it is widely seen as the reason the pilot was never picked up.
• The X-Files:
  • Whenever Mulder and Scully are reassigned or the X-Files division is closed, the audience is supposed to feel as outrageously indignant about it as Mulder does. The only problem is that the actions of the partners before the closing/reassignment are actions that should have gotten them fired, if not arrested, including breaking into government agencies using fake identification, stealing evidence, going on unauthorized cases, ignoring direct orders from superiors, etc. The partners always assume that the closing of the X-Files division is part of the conspiracy (and they're not totally wrong), but one has to remember that not only are these agents making the agency look bad, the only reason the X-Files is even open is because Mulder has sway in the government. It's a non-essential division and really shouldn't exist to begin with.
  • In season 8 Kersh becomes the new AD and assigns Doggett to not only head the manhunt for Mulder, but also replace him on the X-Files. Kersh is supposed to be seen as an evil dictator of sorts, very different from Skinner, who started out as a boss and ended up a friend. He constantly says he's keeping on eye on the X-Files, which the audience assumes means he's looking for any reason to shut it down. In reality, having a division with essentially rogue agents and a vague case-closure percentage means he should be looking at it closely. Not to mention Mulder had just disappeared and it was seemingly connected to the work. When he says that he'll fire Scully or Skinner if they mention the word "aliens" to his own superiors, one forgets that his job is not only to police the agents under him but to make the FBI itself look good. He also makes several good points when Mulder returns and is refused reinstatement to the FBI — Mulder has a personnel file thick enough to rival War and Peace and Doggett does not, and the case closure rate for the X-Files had gone from a very low amount to the highest in the bureau during Doggett's tenure in the office. In the end, he does agree to reinstate Mulder, but rightly fires him in "Vienen" when he — surprise, surprise — ignores direct orders and almost causes an international incident. And whom are we supposed to identify with? Mulder and Scully.
  • Mulder and Scully also regularly do disrespectful things like stand in on a sacred Native American ritual or have lengthy discussions about the details of a case in the room while a funeral is going on, and we're not supposed to question this.

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