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Examples of a Surprisingly Realistic Outcome in Live-Action TV series and Puppet Shows.


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    Soap Operas 
  • All My Children's Dixie Martin gets pregnant despite multiple warnings not to because of her health issues. She is advised by her father-in-law and brother-in-law (both doctors) to have an abortion, but refuses. A typical soap storyline would have her miraculously carrying the pregnancy to term, but indeed, she miscarries.
  • The Bold and the Beautiful: Liam and Sally Spectra get caught in a building explosion and trapped under debris. Though they are miraculously rescued from the rubble and they're not trapped for long, both of them are on the verge of death from smoke inhalation and Liam has to use a cane to walk for several weeks after the incident.
  • General Hospital:
    • Jason Quartermaine sustains severe brain damage in a car accident. When he awakens, he has no memory of anyone from his past life. Unlike typical Hollywood Healing of some cliched storyline of him regaining his memory, he never does. He's also seen walking with a cane and going to physical therapy to regain his strength.
    • Speaking of Lois, she later punches Ned's other wife Katherine after the woman accosts her. Despite the fact that Katherine provoked her, Lois is still arrested for assault and it's only thanks to having an excellent lawyer that the charges are dropped. Even then, she's still sternly reprimanded by the judge for resorting to physical violence to solve a conflict.
  • The Young and the Restless:
    • Dru returns from a trip to find her husband Neil carrying on with another woman. So she breaks into the woman's apartment and trashes the place... and gets arrested for breaking and entering, destruction of property, and slapped with a restraining order. Later, in another confrontation with the woman, she puts her in a headlock and gets hit with new charges of physical assault and violation of the restraining order. It turns out being the cuckolded spouse does not give you carte blanche to commit crimes.
    • On a lighter note, when a married couple moved into their new home, they had to live among boxes and off of takeout food for several weeks, like real people. (Soaps are notorious for having a new home furnished and set up the very day after a person buys it).

    Puppet Shows 
  • Bear in the Big Blue House: In "Raiders of the Lost Cheese", Tutter finds a map from his great grandfather, Tutterly T. Tutter, who collected cheese from all over the world. Specifically, he found a pile of cheese too big for him to eat, so he put in a chest and put the chest in a hollow tree not that far from the Big Blue House. When the show's cast finds the chest and opens it, they find the cheese has become too moldy for anyone to eat due to being stored in the chest for decades.

    A to G 
  • All Rise: Emily advocating for a fair trial for her cases would usually be seen in a good light in other Law Procedurals. Problem is, she only adds more to the backlog of cases that could easily be done away with a signature, thus causing even more trouble at the DA's office and eventually at the Public Defender's office as well.
  • American Vandal: The series follows a high school student, Peter, making a documentary series to expose the truth on whether or not school troublemaker Dylan has vandalized the teachers' cars. On the documentary, he comes clean about several secrets surrounding the school, including the history teacher's creepy comments about a student and other teachers, the existence of a female student's (Sara Pearson) hook up list, various cases of infidelity among student couples, etc. Although this just seems like incidentally juicy gossip to put in the documentary, when it goes public, it actually has serious repercussions in the lives of those featured: the couples break up, the history teacher is fired, many who had their secrets brought up are mad at the documentarist who was briefly suspended due to making the documentary, and for bringing the school's dirty laundry into the light. When Sara gives Peter a "The Reason You Suck" Speech about how her father watched the documentary and now knows about her list, with how she and her personal life had little to do with the vandalism case in the first place, he insists in keeping the speech in the documentary because he feels that he deserves it.
  • Angel:
    • In "The Thin Dead Line", Wesley is shot in the gut and lands in a wheelchair. In the episode "Reprise", when Angel, going through a Knight Templar phase and having fired his staff, goes to their office to get some research material, Cordelia refuses to let him have it, even when it becomes clear that he will use force to take it if he has to. Eventually, Wesley rises from his wheelchair and tells Cordelia to just give Angel a book so they can get him out of their office... and immediately after, he collapses back into the chair and has to be taken back to the hospital because he tore open his stitched-up wound.
    • In "Not Fade Away", Lindsey has a big showdown planned with the eponymous hero, only to be outraged when he's shot and killed by sidekick Lorne. Turns out that tropes like Arch-Enemy and The Only One Allowed to Defeat You make great fiction but life seldom turns out that way. "Goodnight, folks."
  • Arrested Development: During the second season, a subplot has Tobias separated from his family so he attempts to remain in touch by dressing up as a nanny a la Mrs. Doubtfire. All of the Bluths immediately recognize that it's him in disguise, and the only reason he's able to get away with it is because they decide to humor him, especially since he's at least doing housework this way. In his nanny disguise, he also attempts to emulate Mary Poppins and float down a floor of stairs with an umbrella in front of his daughter Maebe. He ends up crashing into furniture and nearly breaking his hip.
  • Arrowverse: Much like the comic books it is based on, the Arrowverse generally runs on Rule of Cool and Acceptable Breaks from Reality, but also likes to examine the realistic consequences of fantastic events.
    • Arrow:
      • At the end of the first season, Detective Lance reveals to his superiors that he has been working with the title vigilante and assures them the hero can be trusted. He's promptly suspended and relieved of his badge and gun. In season 2, he is demoted to patrol officer and when he reveals to a superior that he is still in contact with the vigilante, he is promptly arrested.
      • The season 2 episode "Birds of Prey" does this to The Worf Effect/Took a Level in Badass. In their first fight, Helena beats the Black Canary and throws her out of a window. In their second fight where Black Canary decides not to hold back... Helena gets her ass kicked and is in a choke hold in about 10 seconds flat. Remember, kids, fighting skill means little against a trained assassin who let you win!
      • In the third season, in response to Sara being murdered, Laurel makes use of her self-defense lessons and attempts to become a vigilante. In her first mission, she attacks a known domestic abuser, and promptly gets overpowered, beaten up and hospitalized for her trouble.
      • The Season 3 finale shows that, no matter how trained the members of the League of Assassins are with their bows and swords, in a world where superpowered beings are real, they are hopelessly outclassed, as demonstrated in Barry's Big Damn Heroes moment, when he storms Nanda Parbat and disarms and incapacitates all the assassins in the fortress before they can figure out what's happening.
      • Throughout season 4, Damien Darhk uses his position as leader of HIVE to indulge in threats, embrace the use of magic and randomly kill any underling or even fellow HIVE "board member" who makes him the least bit upset while using their resources in his attempt to take over Star City. When Damien is arrested and jailed, he assumes HIVE will bust him out, only to be informed that the organization has decided a magic addicted lunatic who kills his own people without good cause isn't the best person to have in charge and they can manage quite nicely without him. Likewise, despite being a powerful mystic, he can still be caught off-guard by an attack from behind.
      • Also from Season 4, despite Starling City being renamed to the comic-accurate name "Star City", the rebranding doesn't solve the problem caused by the deaths of the last three mayors (at the start of Season 2, again at the end of that same season, and at the end of Season 3) and the events of the finales of the first three seasons (an earthquake machine used to level part of the city, Deathstroke laying siege with an army of Super Soldiers, and Ra's al Ghul unleashing the Alpha/Omega virus), which are causing people to leave the city in droves.
      • Yet another season 4 example. After Lyla confirms in "AWOL" that Amanda Waller is cold-blooded enough to let every agent under her command die instead of negotiating with the men holding them hostage, the hostage-takers simply kill Waller and start bargaining with Lyla instead.
      • After his disappearance, Ray leaves Palmer Technologies in the hands of Felicity Smoak, his VP and ex-girlfriend who is a fellow tech genius and widely considered the best hacker on the planet. However, Ray's disappearance means the company is on the verge of bankruptcy and Felicity struggles to adjust to being CEO of a tech conglomerate, which requires her to actually be present at the company to address the Board of Directors' concerns with her leadership and conflicts with her duties to Team Arrow. As a result, she's eventually forced out of the position in disgrace.
      • In season 5, when District Attorney Adrian Chase is revealed to be the murderous Prometheus, Oliver faces a nightmare scenario: When it gets out that the Star City D.A. is a psychopathic killer, every criminal Chase put in jail has their convictions overturned and put back out on the street.
    • The Flash (2014):
      • All throughout the first season, Barry and his friends have been imprisoning superpowered criminals in their secret prison inside S.T.A.R. Labs, since ordinary jails are not capable of handling them. Late in the season, they realize that S.T.A.R. Labs is no longer secure and they have to transfer the supervillains to another prison. When Detective Joe West reaches out to his friend, District Attorney Cecile Horton, to get help with the transfer, she gets very upset, informs him that holding these people without any kind of hearing is a crime, and that he should stop talking to her about it, since she may have to prosecute him for it. It's a nice touch of reality for a superhero show, especially considering this has got to be the most Willing Suspension of Disbelief show in the entire Arrowverse. From Season 2 onwards, to avoid such a dilemma again, the captured supervillains are handed over to the law to prosecute and the team has helped build prisons to properly contain them.
      • When the guys try to hide from Caitlin/Killer Frost behind a blast door at the lab, she just opens it with the hand scanner. Being taken over by her Superpowered Evil Side didn't magically revoke her security privileges, which she points out.
      • The Thinker's satellite is punched apart at the end of Season 4 by the Flash and XS. The falling pieces cause collateral damage and severely injure the man who becomes one version of Cicada and his niece.
    • Supergirl (2015):
      • In one episode, Cat Grant is very reluctant on publishing a story by Siobhan Smythe over Supergirl going rogue. Siobhan goes behind Cat's back and heads for the Daily Planet trying to sell the story to Perry White. Perry, however, is not J. Jonah Jameson and he calls up Cat to let her know what Siobhan did. This results in Cat tearing Siobhan a new one and firing her.
      • When Kara starts dating one of her coworkers (and he gleefully announces it to everyone), she is immediately informed that they have to go down to HR, fill out the proper forms in triplicate, and attend a mandatory sexual harassment seminar.
    • Legends of Tomorrow:
      • Before the final confrontation between the Legion and the Legends, Thawne gives Merlyn and Darhk futuristic laser guns. They both quickly realize that the guns are cool but useless in the hands of two people who don't know how to use them, and they quickly switch back to the weapons they actually know how to use.
      • Rip Hunter, while a badass in his own right, is no match for someone like Sara. So, when he gets brainwashed and meets up with her, what does he do? He just shoots her at point-blank range.
      • When the Legends temporarily disband and return to normal life, Sara and Ray are working quite humiliating and menial jobs. Sara's only employments as an adult were an assassin and then captain of a time-traveling band of misfits—neither of which give you a sterling resume. Ray is at least working in tech, but as a low-level software engineer, despite having been CEO of an extremely innovative tech giant. Turns out, disappearing and leaving your company to your ex-girlfriend, who was soon fired and left it in ruins, tends to leave your reputation in tatters.
      • The Legends reform and offer to help the Time Bureau. However, their erratic approach to fixing problems with time, along with their recklessness being responsible for the time crash that necessitated the creation of the Time Bureau, means that they're seen as a joke at best and dangerous liabilities at worst, and not allowed within a square mile of any time travel work.
  • Atlanta:
    • Episode 6 has Van going to increasingly desperate lengths to pass a work-mandated drug test after smoking a joint the night before. In the end, she confesses to her boss, who reveals that the test isn't real, since it's understood that most young adults these days have at least tried recreational drugs at some point in their lives. She then fires Van anyway, since even if it's an open secret, you still can't officially tell your employer that you're taking illegal drugs.
    • Episode 8 has Paper Boi going to a nightclub run by a sleazy promoter, who then tries to weasel his way out of paying the guys the full amount of money he promised. The guys storm into the club's back office while music plays, with Paper Boi smacking around the promoter until he gives up the money. It's initially treated like a big achievement, but then the episode ends with a news report saying that Paper Boi is now wanted for questioning in an armed robbery case.
    • In season 2, both Alfred and Earn are often concerned after whatever wacky/odd situation that someone might call the police, which would cause further problems for them since they're on probation for the aforementioned case.
  • Babylon 5: In an attempt to avoid the dreaded Reset Button, the show has seasons-long story arcs that require past actions and decisions have long-lasting consequences.
    • In season 2, Ivanova's new promotion came with a challenge to help mediate a violent dispute between two factions of the Drazi. Turns out getting a promotion doesn't make you automatically good at the new role and her mediation attempts fail miserably. Worse, she ends up getting injured in the ensuing chaos.
    • In connection with the injury she incurred, the show doesn't hit the Reset Button and make Ivanova all healed-up by the next episode. She instead takes weeks to properly heal and also needs to change her diet.
  • Babylon Berlin: The climax of the end of the second season has two characters engaged in a Traintop Battle with pistols, at the end of which neither have been seriously injured despite both firing several times. Fictional action scenes often greatly exaggerate the accuracy of handguns — shooting at a moving target with a pistol while yourself running on top of a moving train will score a hit only by blind luck.
  • Bates Motel (1987) has Norman Bates leave the titular motel to Alex West, a fellow inmate whom he befriended after being sent to a mental institution. However, Alex has spent somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of his life in said institution, and thus proves hopelessly naive, nearly getting scammed out of the motel by a Morally Bankrupt Banker until his two new friends intervene.
  • Battlestar Galactica made this its raison d'etre — a show that purposely avoided using the Reset Button and portrayed the consequences of momentous decisions in a very grounded manner, despite existing in a world that includes robots who can download into other bodies:
    • It turns out that sustaining constant damage from enemy and external forces will eventually compromise the hull integrity of a ship, even if it's a heavily-armored cruiser like Galactica. The atmospheric jump in "Exodus, Part II" is cited as the key breaking point, as the ship voluntarily puts itself into a freefall approximately one minute and sustains significant damage to its core systems, which are pointed to after the fact for causing significant external "bruises" to the ship.note  Tyrol learns this damage the hard way when, after having to skulk around during the Mutiny arc in Season 4, he sees that the ship's structural integrity has been compromised — the very foundations of the ship have cracked and run all the way through the engine room and beyond. And the much-touted "Cylon technology" that will ostensibly fix the ship up only lasts a few weeks at most, barely long enough to hold out until the ship gets to Earth — and even then, it's not enough, as the damage is still severe enough that the command crew has to evacuate most of the colonists and personnel still onboard to other ships.
  • Baywatch:
    • A lifeguard trainee is asked what to do if he and a victim are being swept toward rocks or a pier. When he confidentially says he would take the impact himself, he's chewed out as that's the worst thing to do because if anything happens to him, then both will need rescue. As brutal as it sounds, the standard procedure is to put the victim in between them to take the impact so the lifeguard can complete the job.
    • This gets a callback in a later episode where Mitch tells Stephanie he found himself in that very situation. As Mitch states, reading something in a training manual and actually doing it in real life are much different; he couldn't bring himself to risk the woman and so positioned himself to hit a pier. Sure enough, he was knocked out and the woman drowned (even though the coroner determined she was likely already dead by the time Mitch got to her).
  • Beforeigners: In spite of being a Buddy Cop Show with Time Travel as its central premise, Beforeigners takes great care to show why police procedures exist. Improperly filed reports vanish, meaning that crucial information can't be found later. Cases are solved not by beating up snitches, car chases and gunfights, but by sifting through and collating data from thousands of completely unrelated sources. Cowboy Cop antics are not tolerated and even after Lars and Alfhildr learn to throw their bosses off with Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, they still get taken to task more than once by Da Chief.
  • Better Call Saul:
    • "Cobbler": Jimmy is proud of himself getting the two detectives to believe his ridiculous story about the Squat Cobbler, and he seems not to understand how reckless he actually was. His actions could get him disbarred and sent to jail. He then brags to Kim about what he did, seemingly ignoring the fact that lawyers are ethically, morally, and legally obligated to report what he did. By keeping quiet she becomes complicit in his actions. We're starting to see Jimmy transform into Saul, but at this point, he does not yet fully have a grasp of how the Amoral Attorney thing is supposed to work.
    • "Amarillo": As Jimmy finds out, no matter how successful and legitimate your tactics are, (advertising is perfectly legal) going behind your boss's back to do something he might not approve of is not going to be good for your job prospects.
    • In the Season 3 finale, Chuck - who's been doing good with his condition since it being revealed at the hearing - relapses hard after being pushed out of his firm and having pushed away Jimmy. Even with the epiphany that the condition was all in his head, it can be hard to dump behaviors and habits that have been with you for years.
    • In season 4, Gus Fring wants to excavate underneath an industrial laundry to build a meth superlab in absolute secrecy. The project ends up being a huge logistical hassle, takes close to a year to even get halfway done, keeps going over deadline, and has to be abandoned temporarily when information about it gets leaked to one of Gus's rivals so that the rival doesn't figure out the truth, etc. And that's just to make what basically amounted a really big basement.
  • Blackadder Goes Forth has a snarky comedy protagonist and his idiot sidekicks getting up to some zany antics in the trench of World War One. In the final episode, they are finally forced to go over the top and charge machine gun nests. Rather than being saved by a hilarious cop-out Deus ex machina or a surprising show of skill, the characters are all killed in seconds.
    • Same series: Blackadder is court-martialed for killing a homing pigeon (he was guilty, shooting it and intending to claim it was killed by predators, and that he therefore never received any orders to go over the top). However, the pigeon's (distraught) owner, General Melchett, becomes the judge for the proceedings, and his aide and Blackadder's Sitcom Arch-Nemesis Captain Darling is the prosecutor. Blackadder is, due to Baldrick misplacing a letter, denied his choice of defense attorney, and instead assigned blatantly incompetent Upper-Class Twit Lt. George. Does this sound like a blatant example of Kangaroo Court to you? Well, it certainly did to the Minister of War, who declared the trial a sham, pardoned Blackadder and harshly reprimanded both Melchett and Darling.
  • Blake's 7 gives us a single ship — admittedly the most advanced in the galaxy — crewed by approximately seven people — admittedly very talented — trying to bring down a gigantic evil bureaucracy (the Federation). They manage to survive for four years, then reality catches up.
  • Black Mirror:
  • Blindspot shows that a mysterious package is dropped off in a public place, it will be treated with suspicion. Even if it is a beautiful woman with no memory of anything. As such, Jane is followed around with a detail and lives in a safe house.
  • In the Blue Bloods pilot, Danny Reagan uses the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique on a child predator. While he gets useful information, the perp's lawyer correctly points out that information obtained by torture is inadmissible in court, forcing them to find other evidence to get him convicted. This, unfortunately, is approximately the only time in the series that Danny's '90s Anti-Hero antics actually have significant consequences: the show otherwise often displays a rather flippant attitude towards civil rights protections.
  • Blue Heelers was regarded by those on the force as as real as it gets and that included the consequences of certain actions. A murder occurs? Mass door knock of the area where the police are sidelined by witnesses reticent to reveal anything. A car chase goes too fast? The police have to terminate, with serious consequences being shown several times when they don't comply (one officer becomes a paraplegic and a youth is killed for example). Any discharge of a firearm? Ethical Standards Department, grief counseling and a mountain of paperwork, and likely media and public reaction as well.
  • Blue Mountain State is a comedy series built firmly upon the Rule of Funny. The acts committed by the team shown in the show would get a real NCAA team in serious trouble with the NCAA but hey, it's a comedy, so that kind of talk is brushed aside. Then comes the end of season 3. It turns out that the NCAA has been investigating BMS and the Goats are in serious trouble. They end up with a lot of their players suspended, and proceed to lose the big game badly.
    • Also during season 3, the team's new offensive coordinator bragged that his system was so efficient, it could be successful with an orangutan at quarterback. Then when the team plays in the championship without star quarterback Alex Moran and most of the usual starters, the offense fails to score a single touchdown.
  • Boardwalk Empire:
    • No matter how rich and well-connected he is, Chalky White is still a black criminal in 1920s America. So when he kills a white man, it causes a commotion in town and he gets arrested and charged with murder — despite the fact that the "victim" was a Klansman that had just tried to kill Chalky, and the dead man and his pals had killed four of Chalky's men in an attempt to get at him.
    • The 77-year-old Commodore feels rejuvenated after surviving an illness and misses no opportunity to show off his newfound strength. Not so much later, he suffers a stroke.
    • In the second season, Jimmy tries to rob Nucky of his position of power and then tries to murder him. Jimmy realizes that this was bad and offers to make things right in the finale. In a very divisive subversion of Plot Armor, Nucky murders him in retaliation rather than pardoning him, just like he would have done with any other character.
    • Nucky is not an expert shooter, so just shooting Jimmy in the head with a small caliber gun fails to kill him. This forces Nucky to Mercy Kill him.
    • Bullet wounds are not shrugged off: Nucky's hand still hurts a year and a half after having been shot through it, and despite the fact that it looks completely healed. Likewise, Clifford Lathrop has to walk with a cane permanently after having been shot in one foot. Eddie also uses a cane a year after surviving a shot to the gut in extremis and it is clear that it is still very painful. A punch to the gut by other character makes him vomit his entire stomach contents at once.
    • A bomb explodes just far enough for Nucky to survive it. Nevertheless, days later he still suffers from the resultant tinnitus and concussion, and the effects only worsen when he refuses to take medication to treat it.
    • Despite common fan belief, Richard Harrow does not make one kill per bullet fired when he takes on Rosetti's gang in "Margate Sands". Being a determined war veteran and expert marksman, he is ridiculously good compared to the drunk, demoralized, and untrained thugs he takes by surprise, but he's not superhuman. There are several cases where he only manages to injure a target and the same guy comes back to fight him later.
  • The pilot episode of Bones has one where Brennan confronts the killer, who is dousing a room with evidence in gasoline. When Brennan says she can't let him destroy evidence, he pulls out a lighter and does the whole "try and stop me and we both burn" thing. Brennan immediately whips out her revolver and shoots him in the leg. And in even more ensuing reality, she is promptly arrested for it. By Booth. And later fails to get a gun-carrying permit, because of this incident.
  • Breaking Bad has so many, to the point that it could be considered a Deconstruction of the escapist Anti-Hero/Villain Protagonist character. This is particularly true in "Ozymandias" and the episodes that follow, where the consequences of every single one of Walter White's decisions and sins over the five seasons of the show come home all at once.
    • "To'hajiilee", the previous episode, ends with a shoot-out between Hank, Gomez, and Jack Welker's neo-Nazi gang. Hank and Gomez have a handgun and a shotgun. Jack's gang has automatic weapons and superior numbers. When the next episode begins, Gomez is dead and Hank follows not long after.
    • In "Granite State", Walt is forced to face the reality of what his family would have to endure when he goes on the lam: beforehand, Walt called his house while the police listened in and played himself up as an intimidating druglord who coerced his wife Skyler into helping him, rather than her being a willing accomplice, so that she wouldn't be blamed for his crimes. Unfortunately, when Walt goes on the run, he essentially leaves Skyler holding the bag; without any information on Walt's whereabouts or anything else of import, she would remain the target of prosecution.
    • In the Season 2 premier, Hank survives a violent shootout and guns down a suspect without any physical harm to himself; the experience is still traumatic enough to give him Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and when he never discusses it with anyone or seeks counselling, it causes both his work and personal life to become strained. Additionally, immediately following the shootout Hank is questioned as part of an investigation to determine if the shooting was justified and the exact circumstances.
    • Hank's shootout with the Cousins is a masterwork of this trope: rather than charging straight ahead and trying to murder Hank, Marco and Leonel recognize that he's more of a threat than their usual targets and come prepared with bulletproof vests, also using numbers to their advantage. In turn, Hank may be unarmed but he's still a trained law enforcement officer, and a three-minute warning is enough to give him the upper hand, especially when coupled with his attention to detail (he quickly grabs Leonel's gun and Marco's bullet when they're dropped near him and uses them to his advantage). Still, training can only go so far against equally prepared opponents, and though his quick reflexes ultimately save him, Hank suffers major injuries that sideline him for months. The aftermath of this shoot-out further avoids Only a Flesh Wound not just in the realistic length of Hank's recovery, but even after he learns how to walk again, he still has a limp and is no longer able to storm buildings chasing bad guys.
  • Bridgerton plays with a lot of the tropes of Jane Austen-style period pieces. While some people get their Happily Ever After, a lot of others do not.
    • The show takes place in an Alternate History where Queen Charlotte (a black woman) convinced George III to raise non-white people to the peerage (allowing actors of colour to play roles other than servants). While everyone seems okay with this, racial equality hasn't come close to being achieved overall, and the new minority nobility is only two generations old and very precarious, with Duke Hastings, who is black, stating that the next king could easily take it all away from them.
    • Duke Hastings had a severe stutter as a child that took him years to overcome. Speech impediments are incredibly debilitating now, in a time before professional speech therapists existed they were basically crippling. Also, his abusive father kept him isolated from the world for most of his life out of shame for his handicap, which stunted his social development. He can behave like a formal gentleman in polite company or a roguish rake around other high society bachelors, but he initially has trouble making a real connection to anyone except children and his surrogate mother figure Lady Danbury.
    • The Queen tasks Eloise with finding out the true identity of Lady Whistledown. Although Eloise is very smart she has no idea how to run an investigation and makes slow progress. The Queen eventually gets tired of her efforts and hires private detectives to do it.
    • George III's madness is usually depicted as comedic in pop culture, focusing on funny moments like the famous talking to a tree incident. In this series, the King is a far more tragic figure, showing his confusion and distress at the world around him, as well as realistically showing the impact it has on those around him. In one particularly heartbreaking scene, Queen Charlotte has dinner with him during an unusual period of lucidity and has a brief moment of hope that he may be getting better, but then he asks her how Princess Amelia, who has been dead for years, is doing. When Charlotte tries to explain to him that she is dead, he has a meltdown, starts accusing her of murdering their daughter and has to be physically restrained.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • In the premiere of season 2, "When She Was Bad," Buffy returns from summer vacation with her father having Took a Level in Jerkass. Willow initially believes that Buffy may have been a victim of Demonic Possession, thus explaining her current behavior, but Giles quickly deduces (correctly) that Buffy's actions are a result of her having been traumatized by her Disney Death at the Master's hands during the first season finale.
    • "Anne":
      • With Buffy gone, the Scoobies manage to slay some vampires, but in the most awkward, realistic way possible. When one runs away, Oz hurls a stake at it... and it bounces off a gravestone and lands pathetically on the ground a few feet away.
      • The Monster of the Week knocks The Heart down and does a speech about how his realm is inescapable. Then the girl gets up and pushes him off the edge.
    • Season 3 episode "Homecoming": Buffy repeatedly uses the Dramatic Gun Cock for emphasis. This comes back to bite her when she runs out of ammo quickly.
    • Season 3: After the events of Angel's Face–Heel Turn in the previous season, his relations with the Scoobies are now heavily strained. It doesn't matter that all his actions during that phase were from the Hyde part of his Jekyll & Hyde personality and he now has his soul back; after all the torment Angel's evil personality put them through they've lost any and all trust they previously had for him. Even after he proves he's one of the good guys again by saving Willow's life, that doesn't automatically dispel all the distrust; Giles for example now keeps a crossbow nearby whenever Angel shows up just in case anything goes wrong.
    • "Bad Girls": Before Wesley was assigned to be Buffy and Faith's Watcher, his only encounters with vampires were brief and, in his own words, "under controlled circumstances," arrogantly declaring himself to be capable in the field. Needless to say, when he gets in a real fight later on, he turns out to be completely useless and Giles has to save him.
    • Season 4 episode "Wild at Heart:" Spike attempts to make a big speech vowing to get revenge on Buffy, only to get zapped unconscious and abducted by some Initiative soldiers in the middle of it. What, did you think Talking Is a Free Action? Guess again!
    • Season 4 episode "A New Man": Meddlesome chaos sorcerer Ethan Rayne is once again thwarted, but gloats that he'll just walk away as usual, since, as a human, he's out of the Slayer's jurisdiction. Then Buffy's new boyfriend from a (para-)military organization calls some MPs and has him arrested.
    • Season 4 episode "This Year's Girl" revisits the Season 3 finale. Despite the heroic final stand and defeat of the Mayor, it was still considered a slaughter by the community. The freight train-sized Mayor!snake and two dozen vampires versus the Scoobies and the students armed with stakes and spears. The Mayor eats a couple of the unarmed adults, Harmony becomes a vampire, and several students are violently beaten. And that's just what appears on screen.
    • In season four The Yoko Factor, through a series of events, Angel and Riley end up in a fistfight. Riley is a regular person (who was drugged with supplicants to be peak human) with soldier training, some fighting experience, and weapons. Angel is much older, has much more fighting experience, is the better fighter, and is much, much stronger. While Riley is able to use a few of his weapons to his advantage, he is in no way, shape or form prepared to fight Angel and the moment Angel starts taking the fight seriously, Riley is utterly decimated.
    • When Joyce gets ill in season 5, Buffy seeks to prove that there is some supernatural cause behind it. There isn't and it gets worse.
    • The season 5 episode "The Body" brings a definite reality check to the Scooby Gang, when Joyce dies. Sure, you may spend years fighting mystical demons and monsters, but when you are forced to face a reality that will eventually affect you, you can feel utterly helpless when a loved one dies, and there is nothing you can do about it. The episode's creepy atmosphere, punctuated by a distinct lack of incidental music, makes the experience even more realistic.
    • Season 5 finale "The Gift": Buffy approaches The Dragon atop a tower. He gears up for a fight, and she just knocks him off the tower.
      • From the same episode, when the Big Bad stops to gloat during the final fight, on a construction site, Xander manages to send her through a wall with a wrecking ball.
      • Same episode again, after beating the Big Bad, Giles finds them still alive but in their mortal human alter ego. Rather than allow Glory the chance to regroup and try again, he simply strangles Ben to death, killing her in the process.
    • Season 6 episode "Seeing Red": The villain's plot is thwarted, the heroes have their denouement with the talking about their feelings, and Tara is shot dead by a stray bullet when Warren comes back with a gun and just fires as much as he possibly can.
  • On Bull, Bull wants to give an employee a big raise. His manager, Marissa, tells him they can't afford it. Bull is amazed as they seem to be doing great with their business of "managing" juries. Marissa points out how they own a huge space in downtown New York with massive high-tech equipment and an entire full-scale courtroom. That's not to mention the costs of having to hire people for mock juries and travelling across country for trials. Bull living a lush lifestyle with designer suits and expensive cars and apartment doesn't help either so rather than being flush with cash, the firm is barely breaking even.
  • Burn Notice does this all the time. Gas tanks don't explode when shot (unless one specifically sets them up to), police can't just be ignored, and being a spy leaves you with a lot of very angry enemies.
    • Especially being a spy without the protection of some sort of agency. As soon as Michael says Screw This, I'm Outta Here to Management, Management shows him what the world is like for a burned spy without the Organization keeping bad people away.
  • In Castle:
    • At the end of Season 2, Beckett finally realizes that she has feelings for Castle. She breaks up with her then-boyfriend and tries to tell Castle... only to find out that Castle has moved on to be with his ex-wife/publisher. Just because they had plenty of Belligerent Sexual Tension doesn't mean that Castle would necessarily wait forever for Beckett to make up her mind.
    • Beckett's job in Washington D.C. doesn't last long because a cop as headstrong, independent and relying on her gut just isn't a good fit for the more rules-bound and serious world of the FBI. That's proven when Beckett realizes her superiors are going to let a killer go because of the "bigger picture" of a case. Unable to handle that, Beckett drops a tip to the press that helps the NYPD solve the case. When her supervisor stops by the apartment, Beckett expects a warning or reprimand. Instead, she's told the Attorney General's office can't support someone who so blatantly violated her supervisor's orders and fires Beckett on the spot.
  • Catastrophe: Rob and Sharon have lots of casual, spontaneous and unprotected sex. Sharon quickly gets pregnant.
  • Chappelle's Show:
    • "When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong" skits are all about this.
    • The segments featuring what it would be like if movies took place in real life, as seen in a version of Pretty Woman where Richard Gere's character throws out Julia Roberts' character after having sex with her and doesn't listen to a word she says when she tells him about how she became a prostitute.
  • Cheers:
    • At the end of series 3, Diane and Frasier are planning to marry in Italy, and Sam hurriedly boards a plane to try and get there to stop them. The beginning of series 4 has him return weeks later to reveal he got arrested for trying to enter the wedding's premises without permission (not that it mattered, since Diane had a Freak Out and abandoned Frasier at the altar), which leads to...
    • Diane's dumping Frasier leaves some serious mental scars which, despite Frasier's claims otherwise, he clearly doesn't just "get over", something that gets pointed out in his own TV series a decade later - Diane didn't just dump him, she did so in the most humiliating way possible.
  • Dr Crockett Marcelle spends Season 7 of Chicago Med training to become a transplant surgeon. In the Season Finale he makes a bad call during a brain surgery on his mentor/girlfriend that affects her hand-eye coordination and may end her surgical career entirely. In the first episode of the next season he tries to resign from the transplant program, but Ms Goodwin flat out refuses. With his mentor out of action, potentially forever, he is the hospital's only trained transplant surgeon. It would take months to replace him, during which no transplants would be performed at Med, and a top-notch candidate would command a salary of potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. The hospital literally can't afford to let him quit.
  • The third season of Cobra Kai ends with a violent fight at Daniel LaRusso's between Cobra Kai and Miyagi-Do which trashes the place and ends with a challenge to fight at the All Valley Tournament where the loser leaves and the winner stays. Standard The Karate Kid stuff. Season 4 begins showing that Daniel's wife and family are now living in fear of a home invasion with a brand-new alarm system installed, and react to a tripped alarm by rushing to the door with baseball bats — a pretty real reaction to having just had a group of armed thugs break into your home and try to beat the hell out of your children.
  • Cold Case: "Yo, Adrian": In the movie Rocky, on which the episode is based, the titular character survives a hundred blows and is praised for his stamina and determination. His injuries heal nicely and he continues boxing for many more movies. In here, Jerry gets pummeled in a match gone on too long, only he succumbs to his injuries and dies.
  • Community:
    • In the Season 4 Series Fauxnale, Jeff finally graduates and is able to resume his career as a lawyer. However, he states that his time at Greendale has changed him for the better, and that now he'll help those who are truly in need, instead of representing scumbags like he used to. The Season 5 premiere then opens with Jeff's law practice being shut down because his newfound scruples led him to financial ruin. There's a reason successful attorneys aren't known for being kind or morally upstanding people.
    • This is how Abed runs his Dungeons & Dragons games in both "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" and "Advanced Advanced Dungeons & Dragons."
      Hickey: You can't just say he's gone! You owe us an ending!
      Abed: I owe you nothing. I'm a Dungeon Master. I create a boundless world and I bind it by rules. Too heavy for a bridge? It breaks. Get hit? Take damage. Spend an hour outside someone's front door fighting over who gets to kill him? He leaves through the back. He's out there somewhere. You might find him — if you get your crap together.
    • Throughout the show, Pierces's accidents typically have no real lasting consequences, but after landing in a dumpster after bouncing too high off a trampoline in "Aerodynamics Of Gender", he breaks both of his legs, and has to wear a cast for the next several episodes, and following that, ends up dealing with a painkiller addiction.
  • Control Z:
    • As Sofía pointed out earlier, Gerry's student record got progressively tainted due to his low grades and large amount of absences. After he viciously knocked Luis out during the fight arranged by the hacker, Gerry was therefore immediately expelled from the school, not only for the deed itself, but also because of the former situation.
    • Raúl wanted to give Sofía "a world without secrets" and did so by becoming the hacker and blackmailing others out of personal gain and leaking their most intimate secrets, although the plan didn't meet its expected results as his actions mostly caused the students to turn on each other, get into massive fights and the death of one of them. In the second season, Sofía reminds Raúl about this while criticizing him for all of the damage he left in his wake, even though he never even imagined that all this would push everyone to their limit.
    • Quintanilla was removed as principal of National School by decision of the school council as he hadn't properly done his job to investigate and put an end to the schemes of both the hacker and the avenger, most of the time implementing questionable measures and rejecting Sofía's assistance. The repercussions of both the previous events and Quintanilla's poor handling with trying to deal with the avenger clearly prove this point. Susana, who was far more experienced, was the perfect candidate to succeed Quintanilla, this time with even more controversial measures.
  • Criminal Minds does this to Intoxication Ensues. Reid is kidnapped by a man with three personalities. After the first two torture him, the third drugs him to help with the pain... but said drug is heroin-based, and Reid becomes addicted. He has to struggle to get clean and later episodes mention that he still goes to support meetings. Also, he is several times shown emphatically refusing painkillers despite being in great pain, which many recovered narcotics addicts do to avoid a relapse.
    • In another episode, the UnSub suffers from a delusion that he is infested by insects, and believes there is a government conspiracy to silence him. He finds a girlfriend who also suffers from psychosomatic itching and she quickly accepts his delusions as fact. When he's caught, JJ tries to explain to her that the guy was crazy and killed several people, but the girlfriend refuses to listen. In Real Life, delusional people don't just "snap out of it" when they're told the truth.
    • In a more humorous example, an episode begins with a sexual harassment seminar based entirely on Morgan and Garcia's banter. If you have co-workers calling each other "babygirl" for years on end, sooner or later HR takes notice.
    • One UnSub, as a result of a brain injury as a teenager, Feels No Pain. When the BAU corners him, he rushes towards them and gets shot, stands back up, laughs about how it didn't hurt and gets shot again, this time fatally. Being immune to pain does not equal invincible.note 
    • Reid's gunshot wound to the leg is not Only a Flesh Wound, but leaves him in crutches and out of the field for almost the entire season. Near the end of the season he lies to Hotch that he was cleared for active duty when in fact he was not. Rather than rubber stamping him so he can return to duty as soon as possible like the authority figure in a typical Police Procedural, Hotch refuses to let him leave Quantico.
    • When the BAU are hunting an UnSub in Vegas, they realise that he will be at a high-stakes poker tournament which requires a significant buy-in. Hotch contacts the Department of Justice and asks them to advance him the money and gets turned down flat, since the federal government isn't in the business of handing over hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money so FBI agents can gamble.
    • The first UnSub to get away scot-free in the show is likely the most disgusting of all, a pedophilic serial killer appearing in "Into the Woods". He isn't particularly bright or strong (in fact, he has a worsening limp) but he has no relations and knows how to live off the land, so all he needs to evade capture is to shave and avoid law enforcement until he's back in the wilderness. And since he has been identified already, the BAU's work is done, and they depart without catching him. We never learn if he ever gets arrested.
  • CSI: Miami:
    • "Guerrillas in the Mist". The bad guy has a weapon that's a Metal Storm with the Serial Numbers Filed Off. In The Teaser, it vaporizes three men. Horatio tracks the baddies down at the airport and comes riding in in his Hummer, which the bad guy destroys. Caine gets out of the burning car and takes aim at just outside of point-blank range. A staredown ensues.
    • A gang member prepares to attack someone outside of a courthouse with a rocket launcher. He takes up position inside of a cement truck, which has a small enclosed interior. It's a good concealed position to shoot from... if you did not have to worry about the back-blast. When the CSI team finds him, he's still at his firing position and is now a smoldering corpse.
    • A member of a Western Terrorist organization tries to pull off a We Are Everywhere speech to Caine, thinking he's got the upper hand and his organization will continue on... only for Caine to point out that the events of the episode have turned everybody that the terrorist is connected to into a person of interest, as is normal for an investigation into a major potential threat to national security. The closing montage of the episode is a barrage of arrests that makes the terrorist eat his words.
    • A suspect tries to bait Horatio into asking for a Motive Rant when he is arrested so they can gloat, but Horatio will have none of that nonsense.
      Suspect: Don't you want to know why?
      Horatio: You just killed four innocent people, you're evil, you enjoy death; I hope you enjoy your own.
    • Tim Speedle, a member of Horatio's team, has been shown neglecting the maintenance of his gun. During the Season 3 pilot, when he ends up in a firefight, his gun fails to fire and he is killed as a result.
  • The pilot of the short-lived drama The DA ends with a young prosecutor getting evidence that a veteran judge was involved in a conspiracy to kill four people and it's not the first time. He's thrown when his boss arranges for the judge to plead guilty to wire fraud in exchange for hushing up the murder charges. The D.A. responds by showing a room packed with dozens of boxes containing just a few of the hundreds of cases the judge has overseen in 21 years on the bench. As soon as it gets out the man is guilty of murder and conspiracy, every one of these cases (and hundreds more) will be instantly subject to appeal, since the judge's involvement in a conspiracy means that any of his previous judgements could have been impacted by similar crimes. As several go back decades, it will be impossible to regather all the evidence and witnesses, and thus several guilty killers will be back on the streets. And even if they could do it, the cost of retrying all these cases will cost the city roughly three billion dollars and hopelessly tie up the entire court system for years while going through the backlog. Thus, letting the judge skate on lesser charges may not be morally right but it's not worth the massive can of worms trying him would be.
  • Danger Force: In "A Danger Among Us", Captain Man's Arch-Enemy Drex is released from his prison and battles Danger Force. Despite sharing his old foe's indestructibility (and possessing even greater combat skills), Drax is quickly overwhelmed by the young heroes, due to spending months locked in a small cell with no way to stay in top condition or even properly exercise.
  • Dash & Lily: Langston and Benny spend a couple nights on a New York City roof enjoying the beautiful winter skyline. Langston then spends an entire episode down with a cold, and he berates himself for thinking of romanticism over reality.
  • Drake & Josh:
    • In the pilot, a bully challenges Josh to a fight after catching him with his girlfriend (it was actually Drake who was dating her) and Josh spends the two days before the fight learning karate to defend himself. However, it takes many months, if not years of training to become a good fighter, not a couple of days. When it's time for the actual fight, the bully flattens Josh with one hit. Then there is The Stinger (which is either a Deleted Scene or a What If? scenario) where, the bully asks the girlfriend why she even went out with Josh in the first place. She corrects him and shows who she went out with: Drake Parker. Instead of getting away scott free like he usually does, Drake gets also clobbered by the bully for dating his girlfriend.
    • "Driver's License" deals with, well, Drake and Josh taking their Driving Test. Josh takes his preparation seriously while Drake slacks off. When they take the tests, Josh's instructor is a grumpy old lady who hates him on sight while Drake's instructor is an attractive fun loving young woman. Based on how the gag is set up, it looks like Drake will pass simply because he's Drake and Josh will fail simply because he's Josh. Instead, Josh's crabby instructor passes him for doing well, while Drake's fun instructor has to fail him for being reckless.
  • In the final season of Drop Dead Diva assistant Teri helps a friend out of a jam by pretending to be a lawyer to intimidate a credit card company. When bosses Grayson and Kim find out, they have no choice but to report Teri to the cops and she's arrested and spends a few months in jail for practicing without a legal license and impersonation.
    • When Teri is released, Jane is ready to welcome her back only to be informed that there's no way a legal firm can employ an ex-con, let alone one convicted of impersonating a lawyer.
  • El Chapulín Colorado features an episode involving Don Severiano Mirón, described as the most famous spy in the world. That means everyone recognizes him at first sight, and thus cannot work as a spy anymore.
  • Elementary: Towards the end of the fifth season, Sherlock is attacked in the street and severely beaten by an antagonist who wanted to intimidate him into dropping an investigation. For the next several episodes, on into the first few episodes of the sixth season, Sherlock suffers from post-concussion syndrome that causes him to suffer hallucinations, headaches, dizziness, and memory lapses, and fears that he may have permanent cognitive damage. In real life, people don't always shake off head injuries as effortlessly as the average fictional action hero.
  • Everybody Hates Chris:
    • Chris doesn't attempt to fight back every time he gets bullied and physically assaulted by Caruso. Chris has lampshaded that he would either get framed by Caruso or beaten. Given the time period of the series (when racism was rampant) and the useless school rules regarding bullying, it is safe to say that his suspicions are legitimate.
    • Also in one episode the P.E. teacher thinks Chris will be a star athlete on the school basketball team simply due to him being black, Chris himself starts to believe it only to end up failing miserably during the game and not scoring a single point.
  • Farscape:
    • Throughout the first two seasons, the main characters are escaped convicts and wanted criminals with no readily-accessible source of income to fall back on, and the logical consequences of Perpetual Poverty crop up throughout the series: food supplies run low, at one point forcing the crew to virtually beg for provisions lest Zhaan starve to death; the non-Leviathan technology is either stolen or scavenged, and tends to break down at inopportune moments; trading is almost impossible given that the crew barely have anything other than essentials to bargain with; and looking for work usually results in the crew getting either screwed over or mugged. Worst of all, medical attention is limited and heavily improvised - leading Crichton on an insanely risky mission to retrieve compatible donor tissue from a maximum security base when Aeryn begins to suffer organ failure in the wake of a near-fatal stabbing.
    • In "Throne For A Loss", after a young Tavlek pirate by the name of Kyr ends up getting captured by the crew, Zhaan takes pity on him and tries to help the pirate give up the gauntlet stimulant that he and the other Tavleks are addicted to. It's a long, uphill journey that requires Zhaan to protect herself from physical assault, tolerate a lot of verbal abuse, provide medical assistance when the withdrawal symptoms hit hard, counsel the addict when he resents being off the stimulant, and stop him from getting high on improvised substitute drugs. And at the end of the episode, Kyr is allowed to leave Moya: he's grateful for the help, even speaking up on Zhaan's behalf in the climax... but he still goes right back to the gauntlet. Addiction can't be shaken in the space of a single day, especially when you're part of a culture dependent on it.
    • "Thank God Its Friday Again" brings up the logical problems of both the Planet of Hats and the Single-Biome Planet: basically, Sykar was forcibly converted into an Agri World by the Peacekeepers so they could harvest vast quantities of Tannot root, a component of pulse weapon ammunition. However, the population is not happy with being made into an entirely homogeneous culture of farmers, and must be kept docile and happy with mind-control additives in the food. Worse still, the conversion of Sykar into a farm world is ruining the ecology of the planet, a combination of introduced plantlife and overharvesting actively damaging the soil: there's only one fertile region left on the entire world, and once that's depleted, the Peacekeepers will dump Sykar like a bad habit and replace it.
    • Exactly one episode after being hospitalized with a massive stab-wound to the abdomen, Aeryn leaves her sick-bed and returns to intensive exercise, insisting that she's okay - only to end up puking blood all over her punching bag. Far from being instantly hitting a Reset Button on her wounds following the end of the previous episode, Aeryn is actually suffering organ failure and fully expects to die.
    • In "The Hidden Memory," technician Gilina Renaez decides to pull a Big Damn Heroes moment when Crichton ends up getting grabbed by Scorpius during the climactic firefight; she even gets a very dramatic slow-motion shot as she levels the rifle in Scorpy's direction... but unfortunately, Gilina is not a trained soldier and has never fired a gun in her entire life. Worse still, Scorpius is inadvertently using Crichton as a human shield. As such, she hesitates at the last minute - allowing Scorpius to shoot her in the chest, fatally wounding her in the process.
    • Early in season four, Chiana admits that she used her unique vision abilities to win big at a casino seven times in a row. Trouble is, casinos get suspicious about prolonged winning streaks, even if there's no obvious method of cheating, and the whole thing ended with Chiana getting arrested and having her winnings confiscated, then being tortured for good measure.
    • In further medical shenanigans, in "Terra Firma", Noranti has to sedate Crichton's younger self as part of an improvised attempt to Set Right What Once Went Wrong. As she's had no problem sedating characters instaneously beforehand, this at first seems to go off without a hitch. Unfortunately, the sedative chosen was originally meant for someone much heavier: instead of a straightforward One Dose Fits All, the serum is so powerful that Young!Crichton would have wound up dead if Noranti hadn't been able to resuscitate him in time.
  • Firefly:
    • In "The Message", Wash tries to lose a pursuing ship by flying into a canyon:
      Wash: They're not behind us anymore!
      (Looks up and sees that the other ship simply flew over)
      Wash: I didn't think of that...
  • An episode of Frasier deconstructs one of the famous scenes from parent show Cheers, when Frasier and a female co-worker have a blazing row similar to that between Sam and Diane. Except in this case when Frasier says "Are you as turned on as I am?" he gets a horrified "NO!" and his boss demands everyone take a sexual harassment class because of this incident.
    • In "An Affair to Forget", Niles challenges Maris' fencing instructor to a duel, as he has fallen in love with her. He quickly realizes that despite his training in school, he is incredibly outmatched.
      • A second one happens during their duel. After losing his sword, Niles attempts to swing on a chandelier nearby. It quickly falls from the ceiling under his weight and leaves him prone on the floor.
    • In "Bristle While You Work", Niles goes to a doctor because he's been having unbelievable coincidences that day. When he lightly asks his doctor if he has a heart problem, the doctor says, "Yes". When Niles lightly says he can clear his schedule for the next day for an appointment. The doctor says "No" and says he has to be admitted immediately.
    • Roz's pregnancy in the fifth season was done because the executives wanted her to face realistic consequences for her promiscuous behavior. No matter how safe the sex is, no protection is absolute and the more sex you have, the more likely you are to have accidents. Lampshaded by Roz herself.
      Roz: Even the best birth control is only effective ninety-nine out of a hundred times. I can't beat those odds.
  • Friday Night Lights: When Matt is replaced as QB1 by J.D., he asks to be allowed to play running back instead. Taylor agrees to let him try if he can catch ten passes. Taylor runs through the drill with Matt, throwing as hard and as far as he can to test Matt's limits. By the end Coach Taylor, a middle aged man who hasn't played football in years, has completely wrecked his shoulder.
  • Full House:
    • Jesse and Rebecca's wedding is held up when Jesse gets himself arrested that morning and Rebecca is forced to drive to the outskirts of San Francisco to retrieve him. After many more mishaps, the wedding is finally held... and the reception ends up being held at the house, because that's what happens when you miss the time frame that you chose for your reception venue.
      Danny: (serving champagne and hors d'oeuvres to guests) "Groom was late, we lost the hall."
  • In the second episode of Galavant, the titular character undergoes a brutal Training Montage to get back in shape and get ready for a joust the next day. While Isabella's training does allow him to go from being unable to even touch her in a sword fight to easily winning while drinking, it also leaves him so incredibly sore that he flat out can't move the next day from overworking himself.
  • Glee:
    • When Holly Holiday reveals that she does relationship counseling as a side gig, Carl and Emma go to see her about their sexless marriage. They expect Holly to give some sort of wacky unorthodox advice, but instead, she asks Emma straight-up, "Are you still in love with Will Schuester?" When Emma is too stunned to answer, Carl takes that as the answer he needs and promptly annuls the marriage.
  • The Goldbergs has Barry often attempting to recreate the plots of movies of the 1980's only to find out how such antics play in real life.
    • In "Barry Goldberg's Day Off," Barry tries to emulate Ferris Bueller's Day Off by playing hooky from school and having fun. He and his friends are hassled by security at an art museum, pelted with food by fans at a baseball game, his grandfather's car is stolen and never brought back and his mother easily finds out about what he's been doing and grounds him.
  • Grey's Anatomy:
    • April claims her first time was on a beach, which everyone immediately points out is a bad idea because (among other things) sand will get where it shouldn't. Two seasons later, Miranda has sex on the beach on her honeymoon and gets an infection from the sand.

    H to M 
  • Happens with an attempted Race for Your Love on Happy Endings — in "Boys II Menorah" Dave and Jane rush to the airport because Alex is there due to buying into a false airport ticket which was actually an invitation to a set-up Grand Romantic Gesture dinner. When they get there, they're parked illegally, as often happens with this trope. Security tells them to move Dave's truck, and Dave, in classic romantic lead coolness tosses him the keys, saying 'Keep it.' The guard quickly tosses him back the keys despite Dave saying it's for love. He and Jane try to rush past security anyway and get tackled and tazed, respectively.
  • Henry Danger:
    • During the Crossover with The Thundermans, a battle takes place on top of a moving train. Phoebe Thunderman tries to use her ice breath on the bad guys, only for the train's inertia to send the ice right back into her face.
    • After Invisible Brad is finally made visible again, he looks terrible, with crazy hair, terrible teeth, and is just generally unkempt, a result of being invisible for so many years and thus unable to properly groom himself.
    • After 4 seasons of subversions where Henry manages to sneak out of his house without his family suspecting anything, its finally played straight in the "New Evil" saga where the family finally reveal they were talking behind his back and wondering why Henry sneaks away everyday, and forced him to stay in the house for once. (but for some reason, they still failed to realize he was Kid Danger.)
    • Henry hadn't been seen in school for the second half of season 5. "Beginning of the End" reveals he's not graduating on time for not being in school.
  • Homicide: Life on the Street:
    • One early episode had Howard, currently under pressure to find a murder weapon from Danvers so he can get an easier conviction on a murderer, dream that the victim's ghost told her where the weapon was. Howard believes this is a genuine supernatural occurrence and looks where the ghost had told her the weapon was, and finds nothing. As it turns out, it really was just a dream.
    • In "Night of the Dead Living", a perp escapes custody and tries to hide out in the homicide squadroom's ceiling until the police leave. The ceiling winds up collapsing under his weight, and he lands right smack dab in the middle of a police precinct.
    • In "Bop Gun", Robert Ellison's wife defiantly refuses to give up her pendant during a mugging. Anywhere else, this would be depicted as a sign of badassery, but here, she just gets shot by an irate mugger and killed.
  • House:
    • House always gets the diagnosis in the end, but it doesn't always mean a happy ending. Sometimes it's simply too late, and other times the patient is found to have a condition that's incurable.
    • Kutner's suicide. While some viewers found it an abrupt way to hurriedly write a character off the series, therapists and psychiatrists with experience in suicidal patients found it shockingly realistic: in many cases, suicidees leave no letter or note and no clue as to why they took their own life, especially when depression plays a part, and their families and friends would never know for sure why they committed suicide, merely some best guesses.
    • Foreman's House-like antics are tolerated at the Princeton-Plainsboro, but in another hospital, they get him fired on the spot despite saving a patient's life, and when a word about his actions spreads, Foreman finds himself practically unemployable by any hospital. One interviewer expresses genuine admiration for Foreman, says, "Man, I wish I had your stones..." then, after Foreman noticeably relaxes and starts pitching himself, explains that he's saying he really wishes he had Foreman's guts, because he knows he absolutely can't sell Foreman to the hospital board. To add insult to injury, Cuddy retracts the perks she had previously offered to Foreman specifically because he can't get himself hired anywhere else. This is the same thing that happened to House, amusingly enough, as Cuddy had previously mentioned that House couldn't get hired anywhere and so she got a brilliant doctor at bargain basement prices.
    • At the start of season 6, House commits himself to a psychiatric hospital to help him through Vicodin withdrawal, and his attempts to play One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are either easily stymied by the hospital staff or end terribly. This culminates when a delusional young man named Stevie who is convinced he is a superhero who can fly is brought to the hospital, House is furious that the hospital keeps him heavily sedated and breaks the kid out to take him to a wind tunnel where he can experience flight. Stevie then hurls himself off a parking structure and almost kills himself, because he is not just a quirky personality who society doesn’t understand, but a severely mentally ill person who poses a danger to himself, and House has not only played into, but reinforced his delusions.
    • In one episode, House encounters a man who had a near death experience in a car wreck and believes he visited Heaven. He electrocutes himself in front of House because he wants to experience it again. House similarly electrocutes himself and when he wakes up he wants to talk to the guy, but Wilson tell him that he died a hour ago, as it’s not a good idea to give yourself cardiac arrest a week after suffering massive internal injuries.
  • House of Cards (US):
    • Lucas Goodwin believes he's a crusading journalist who will find the evidence to prove Frank Underwood is crooked and bring him down. He takes part in a plan to hack a server farm only to be arrested. He agrees to a plea deal, convinced his fellow reporters will carry on his work to take Frank down. Instead, the two realize there's no way they can fight the Vice-President of the United States who clearly will do anything to keep in power, they have no evidence to use against him and back away, both leaving town and poor Lucas realizes he's stuck where he is.
    • Master manipulator though he may be, when Frank starts to maneuver to become the Vice President, both Linda Vasquez and Raymond Tusk see through his attempts to play them, and by the time he visits Tusk, he's already being played in return.
    • Season 3 is basically a reality check for the series. Frank learns that cheating his way into the White House was one thing but actually being President is another. For one thing, doing whatever you feel like doesn't always go over well with the public, your attitude will annoy the opposing party enough to work against you every step of the way and it's quite likely your own party will feel it's better you not run for re-election as you risk dragging them down. Finally, by the end of the season, Frank learns that treating everyone around you like shit doesn't inspire loyalty.
    • In Season 3, Frank proves rather ineffectual in his dealings with Viktor Petrov, president of Russia. That's because unlike Frank, Petrov is a genuine dictator. An unrepentant veteran of a secret police agency, Petrov doesn't care about leaving behind a legacy or getting adored by his people, and nor is he constrained by things like the rule of law or balance of power that American presidents usually are. Even if Frank will never admit it, the fact is Petrov is way more ruthless and more manipulative than he is.
    • When Lucas is released from jail, he immediately seeks out Heather Dunbar, Frank's likely Presidential election opponent and shares all his information on Frank, assuming she'll use it to take him down with the media. Dubar instead throws Lucas by pointing out that even if she believed him (which she doesn't), accusing the President of the United States of cold-blooded murder without a shred of actual evidence is political suicide.
    • Appointing an ineffectual, indecisive, and easily manipulated person like Donald Blythe to the vice presidency is a good way to sideline someone and have impeachment insurance. It's not assassination insurance, though, as shown when Frank gets shot by Lucas Goodwin, and Blythe is so lost that he only is able to run things by being Claire's puppet.
    • In Season 4, Frank is shot by Lucas Goodwin in an assassination attempt, and requires a liver transplant. Rather than a fast recovery, Frank is shown needing the span of months to get back into shape. Even then, he still finds himself out of breath with his doctors telling him that, re-election or not, he can't keep flying all over the country in his condition.
    • In season 4, Tom Hammerschmidt proves that even a smart politician like Frank who's good at covering his tracks will make tiny mistakes that will get their schemes blown wide open.
    • On Election Day, Frank discovers all the "expert polling" in the world doesn't make up for actual votes. He's jarred when instead of an easy re-election, Will Conway is beating Frank in numerous areas. If not for Frank faking a terrorist attack to throw off the Ohio vote, Conway would have won.
    • In the final season, Claire has to wrestle with the fact that no matter what she does, she will always be judged by Frank's actions and never escape his shadow.
  • How I Met Your Mother:
    • In one episode, Barney decides to take an injured Marshall's place in the New York City marathon despite the others' skepticism. Much to their surprise, Barney manages to complete all 26.2 miles without looking worse for the wear. However, a few hours later, Barney calls them and explains he's stuck on the subway because his body has completely given out. While Barney is in decent shape (he mentioned running a 10 kilometer race a few episodes prior), he's not in marathon runner shape and it took literally all of his stamina and endurance to complete the endeavor.
    • In one episode of the wedding arc in the final season, Ted and Robin discover that if Barney gets drunk enough he becomes incapable of lying, so they spend all night asking him questions and plying him with drinks to keep him in his truthful state. The next day he is so hung over that he's essentially catatonic.
  • It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia uses this trope often:
    • In one episode Mac and Charlie attempt to fake their deaths by blowing up a car. Their attempts to do it by invoking various action movie tropes result mostly in the duo injuring themselves. Later it turns out that their attempt to fake their demises failed miserably and that no one but Frank thought they were dead.
    • In "Dennis And Dee Go On Welfare", Dennis and Dee try to pose as being a drug user and mentally handicap to be eligible for disability. When they go to the government office to apply, the receptionist says that they need documents and doctors letters to confirm that they are on drugs and handicap and they are forced to fill out a number of forms before they can even get any money. Just because someone says they are on drugs doesn't mean that people are going to take their word for it.
    • In "Mac Day" Mac's Crazy is Cool badass cousin, "Country Mac", is established throughout the episode to be a seriously tough guy. Which makes it quite a surprise when he gets anticlimactically killed by crashing his motorcycle. It turns out that even if you are really tough, it's still a bad idea to drive a motor vehicle unsafely while not wearing any sort of protection.
  • iCarly: Throughout the series, Spencer's various artworks often put Carly and himself in danger, usually by power outages or fires. This is almost always Played for Laughs until Spencer creates a "Fan of Hammers" that nearly kills Carly after one of the hammers detaches and is flung towards her head. Afterwards, their grandfather makes a surprise visit, only to reveal that he came over because he saw the incident live on the Internet and now he wants to take Carly away from Spencer because he believes that he's an unfit guardian.
  • Plenty in Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond to contrast with the fantasy world of James Bond. In one episode Ian Fleming decides to gamble with German intelligence officers in Spain in the hope of making them lose their working capital. Given that this is gambling, Ian loses his own capital instead.
  • Jessie: In "Zuri's New Old Friend", Zuri's new friend Nana Banana encourages the Ross kids to give their vegetables to Ravi's pet Asian Water Monitor Lizard Mr. Kipling. Shortly after eating the vegetables, Mr. Kipling vomits them back up, since, as a carnivore, his stomach is unable to digest them.
  • In the pilot episode of John Doe, the protagonist is able to quickly amass a fortune by betting progressively larger sums on horse races, since, with his perfect knowledge of statistics he can accurately predict the winner of each race. Then he loses all but $2 when a horse he bets on turns its ankle and falls, since not even the most accurate statistical models can foresee random accidents.
  • Five Came Back details John Ford, George Stevens, William Wyler, Frank Capra and John Huston's propaganda efforts during World War II. However, it isn't until Part 3 where the horrors of the war sink in for everyone except Capra. Ford starts Drowning His Sorrows after experiencing D-Day, Stevens is emotionally unprepared for shooting the liberation of Dachau, Wyler temporarily goes deaf and fears his career is over, while Huston's documentary, Let There Be Light about Shell-Shocked Veterans is suppressed by the US government until the 1980s.
  • Justified:
    • Raylan was cautioned about killing people after the first episode because he had earned a reputation for it, which doesn't make the police look good, and besides, every time he kills someone it involves more paperwork for him and his boss. As a result there are many situations where he could kill somebody but can't because of his position, so has to find more intelligent ways around it.
    • Early in season 1, Raylan brings down the Dirty Cop who arrested Bo Crowder and took over his operation running drugs for Raylan's old enemies in Miami. The very next episode, Bo is released from prison and explains that all the crooked cop's old cases are being reopened, and since he had less than six months on his sentence, the US Attorney decided to just let him go rather than waste time and money retrying him
    • In season 3 Raylan has gotten used to bullying the local criminals for information because none of them want the trouble he can bring on them and it would be utter stupidity to kill a US Marshal. However, he does this one too many times with Limehouse who points out that Raylan is alone in a remote mountain community where everyone is utterly loyal to Limehouse. Raylan could shoot Limehouse but then he will be shot down himself by the dozen armed men surrounding them. They can then make his body disappear without a trace and with all the enemies Raylan has, they probably will not be even the main suspects in his disappearance.
    • Raylan is usually portrayed as Made of Iron but it takes him weeks to recover from a gunshot wound and when he returns to duty the act of drawing and firing his gun causes him a lot of pain and completely throws his aim off.
    • This is also invoked in fist-fights. In an early episode, he's drinking at a bar and picks a fight with a couple of local jerks. He refused to back down, despite being drunk and outnumbered, and proceeds to get beaten to a pulp until the bartender comes out and breaks it up. He later admits he was asking for a beating.
  • Kevin Can F**k Himself deconstructs your usual Dom Com by applying realistic consequences to a wacky sitcom husband's antics:
    • Kevin is very reckless with money, resulting in him blowing all of his and Allison's savings on sports memorabilia and various Get Rich Quick Schemes, which has a detrimental effect on his and Allison's finances.
    • Why doesn't Allison just divorce this deadbeat idiot and move on? Because getting a divorce and starting a new life all cost money, which she doesn't have and Kevin controls what little they do have. Moreover, Allison has a very Limited Social Circle due to Kevin's antics taking up all her time and energy, leaving her isolated, and thus, she doesn't have anyone to turn to for help. And that's not even getting to the simple fact that Kevin won't just let her leave him so easily.
    • Allison's attempts at engaging in criminal actions, from buying and selling drugs to plotting to kill her husband, always backfire because a person with zero criminal experience is going to make some stupid mistakes that nearly get her caught.
  • Kevin from Kevin (Probably) Saves the World once tried to help out a woman who's been performing good deeds throughout town only to find out she was wanted for some really serious crimes. During her trial, someone points out that her situation is similar to his own in that he used to be a bad person but learned to be good through helping people. So, he gathers a group of townsfolk that the woman had helped and got them to interrupt the trial with evidence of her having changed her ways. The move ends up landing them in jail for interrupting a legal proceeding. However, it does net the woman a sentence of community service, so simultaneously played straight and subverted.
  • One of the Key & Peele Halloween specials has a sketch where a detective pursues a crazed serial killer into a Hall of Mirrors. Despite the use of the usual Hollywood cliches, the detective is able to find and shoot the real killer rather easily. The humor comes from the killer trying to keep up the charade by pretending the detective only shot a reflection, despite the fact that he is now seriously injured and visibly in pain.
  • The Kicks:
    • The Season 1 Finale, "No Pain, No Gain" introduces a classic Down to the Last Play scenario: After having been forced to sit out the last game with an ankle injury, Devin convinces Coach Rivas to put her in for one final penalty kick to win the game for The Kicks. She scores the goal, The Kicks win the game, and as they celebrate, she aggravates the ankle injury. The season ends with Devin writhing in pain and her teammates calling for help.
  • Law & Order:
    • Defense attorney Danielle Melnick ends up being shot by a client's associate in a season 13 episode. She ultimately survives and returns a season and a half later, but now walks with a cane and is still visibly weaker than before. Unlike other shows, including fellow police procedurals, they manage to display that being shot is not anything that can be miraculously healed with an episode or two (and oftentimes has its effects be lifelong).
    • In general, the series, especially in the early seasons, would show cases on a fairly regular basis where the protagonists did everything right and the verdict still went against them, or something else went wrong. This is very much Truth in Television as far as how law enforcement and the legal system work. (Later episodes that play out this way tend to have something else happen in the end so the bad guy doesn't totally get away scot-free, but some earlier episodes play it completely straight.)
  • Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
    • When Alex Cabot breaks the law to help the detectives get the evidence they need to nail a criminal in "Guilt", she's immediately in hot water. The only reason she's not fired is because of the judge, who still hits her with a serious suspension.
    • The villains of one episode are a group of gamers who kidnap, torture, rape and try to kill a female game developer. They have improbable tactical and technical skill that allows them to outmaneuver the protagonists for most of the episode, but at the end when they're cornered and forced into a physical fight, the trained police officers effortlessly overpower the weak Basement Dwellers. One of them actually drops his gun after firing it for, presumably, the first time ever.
    • The team realize a man who has been in jail for 20 years is innocent of the rape and murder he was accused of. The real killer is caught but ends up killing himself before he makes a confession. Thus, despite the circumstantial evidence they have and knowing the truth, the cops and D.A. don't have enough to overturn the conviction and the innocent man must remain in jail.
    • In one episode, Elliot goes undercover as a crooked CBP agent to infiltrate a ring of rare animal smugglers. The smugglers are shown to be incredibly paranoid, and when they "recruit" Stabler they make him wear a watch with a tracking device and live in a housing unit they own so they can monitor him, because they're obviously not going to immediately trust this guy they just met. Olivia sneaks in to speak with him and when the crooks show up without warning she pretends to be a prostitute to throw them off the scent. They seemingly get away with it, but Elliot's handlers then take him on a drive and shoot him in the chest, because he's proven himself a security risk by having a girl over when he was explicitly told not to contact anyone. He only survives because he has a bulletproof vest on under his clothes.
    • Stabler is forced to shoot a teenage girl after she opens fire inside the police station and kills several people, including a cop and innocent bystander, and she ends up dying from the wound. Despite it being completely justified with plenty of witnesses in the room, the shot is still called into question due to Stabler's history of abusing suspects and just due to standard procedure.
    • Nichols discusses this in the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode "Rock Star" with a suspect in the episode's two different murders, an aspiring lead guitarist. He states about how in spite of hundreds of thousands of musicians come to New York every year in pursuit of fame, on average only about 10 people actually make it, regardless of any distinguishing talent they may have.
  • Leverage: In order to get past a security camera in "The Homecoming Job", Hardison tries to do his thing, but Eliot just hucks a rock at it and breaks it. But the broken camera ends up alerting security faster than altered footage would have.
  • Limitless shows the sheer boring prep that goes into FBI investigations and often Brian imagines the adventures being much cooler.
    • When he confronts a crook on his own, Brian is confident his perfect recall of kung fu movies gives him the advantage. He ends up knocked down in five seconds and realizes it doesn't matter how perfectly you know martial arts moves if you've never had any fight training. When he goes in for some, his trainer lets him know that fighting involves a lot more grounded attacks than flashy kung fu moves.
    • In a subversion of Hollywood Hacking, Brian notes the reason TV and movies do hacking as montages is because "in real life, hacking is boring."
  • On Macgyver 2016, Jack and Mac are in a top floor of a huge skyscraper in the Middle East. Realizing they need to get rid a bomb, Jack grabs a chair, intending to smash a window and drop the bomb out. The chair bounces off as Mac dryly states that unlike the action movies Jack loves, real skyscrapers have windows with glass specially treated to not shatter easily under the slightest pressure.
  • In Mad Men, Michael Ginsberg is practically a deconstruction of the Bunny-Ears Lawyer trope. In another series, his erratic and quirky personality might have been a sign that he's really a Genius Ditz, but in this series, it adds up to him being an unreliable pain in the ass, and towards the end of the series, it becomes clear that he is genuinely mentally ill.
  • For the first two seasons of Malcolm in the Middle, Commandant Spangler's over the top abusive treatment of cadets was Played for Laughs. When he reappears for a single episode in season 3, it's revealed that Marlin Academy got even worse after Francis left, and eventually, a group of parents sued, the school was shut down and he lost everything.
  • In Martial Law, in the first episode when Sammo came to LA, he was robbed by a Russian taxi scam. When he later arrived at the police station, he was asked why he, a senior officer in hand to hand combat and the top cop of Shanghai, didn't do anything. His reply was that they had three guns aimed at him. Even someone as trained as him would get shot before he could do anything. Instead, he reported them to the police and by the end of the episode, they were arrested and Sammo's things returned to him.
  • M*A*S*H:
    • In "Yessir, That's Our Baby", a half-white, half-Korean baby is abandoned in the camp, and the unit has to try to figure out what to do with her given that mixed-race children are ostracized or worse in Korean society, but they're also not given a path to emigrate to the United States. They spend most of the episode trying to figure out a loophole or hidden path to get the child out of Korea, but ultimately that avenue simply doesn't exist, and they're forced to take the least bad option of leaving the child at a monastery where she'll be safe but isolated.
    • Klinger spends much of his time trying to come up with ever-more-elaborate schemes to get discharged. On a few occasions, however, something bad really does happen to Klinger (in one episode he's deafened by an explosion, and in another he develops anemia from an anti-malaria medication), at which point he has trouble convincing anyone to believe him.
    • Many of Klinger's antics usually have little to no repercussions beside him ending up with egg on his face, but then there's the time he tried to eat a jeep part by part. While it did get him some attention (even Col. Potter admitted that was actually a good one), the only thing to come out of it was that he got sick.
    • In general, any episode where they go to extreme lengths to save a patient who ends up dying anyway counts as this trope. The doctors can do everything humanly possible and sometimes it still won't be enough. Hawkeye references this in-universe in the first season episode "Yankee Doodle Doctor"note .
      Hawkeye: Three hours ago this man was in a battle. Two hours ago we operated on him. He's got a 50-50 chance. We win some, we lose some. That's what it's all about. No promises. No guaranteed survival. No saints in surgical garb. Our willingness, our experience, our technique are not enough. Guns and bombs and antipersonnel mines have more power to take life than we have to preserve it. Not a very happy ending for a movie. But then, no war is a movie.
  • Men Behaving Badly: In "Playing Away", Tony tries to get rid of a bad tooth himself via the old "tie one end of a string to the tooth, another to a doorknob, then slam the door" trick. After a few false starts, he succeeds in pulling out the tooth... but seconds after his moment of triumph, blood starts gushing out of his mouth, thanks to the tooth-sized wound left behind.
  • The Mentalist does this to Mushroom Samba. Jane accidentally ingests some hallucinogenic tea... that is also incredibly poisonous and leaves him in convulsions on the floor, and would have been fatal had he not been immediately rushed to the hospital to get his stomach pumped. He doesn't have "fun" hallucinations either — most of the hallucination is just him hallucinating that he's working the case, and the one thing that isn't is an aged-up version of his dead daughter, which is at best a mixed blessing. And while the hallucination does end up containing a hint at the answer, it's pointing out something he had already noticed and was on the verge of identifying when he began hallucinating. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have broken the case within about a minute; instead, he had to go to the hospital, get his stomach pumped, and then spend several hours chasing down the pieces of the hallucination to put it all together.
  • In the Miami Vice episode "Glades", The Dragon is holding a shotgun to a little girl's head as Sonny Crockett approaches with this pistol drawn and aimed. The Dragon begins threatening to shoot the girl if he's not let go, saying "If I so much as twitch, she's go—" BLAM Sonny shoots him right between the eyes, with the Post-Mortem One-Liner, "Maybe you won't twitch."
    • The whole series pretty much flipped this concept from earlier Police Procedural shows where the heroes Always Got Their Man, very few people got hurt, and the protagonist cops seemed to be super-weapons against crime. Except for a (relatively) small number of episodes, every victory was Pyrrhic at best, many times they didn't get the bad guy, and sometimes the Big Bad of the episode managed to pull a Karma Houdini act by cutting a deal with higher-ups in law enforcement. Overall the message was that, in the War On Drugs, there was no "Decapitated Army" to speak of—the drug runners and criminal capos arrested, no matter how nasty they were, in the great scheme of things were just cogs in the machine; the same as the cops that fought them.
  • Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries: In "Death at the Grand", Inspector Robinson knocks out a gunman with an apparent Tap on the Head. Instead, the gunman is left in a life-threatening coma.
  • This occasionally happens in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe segments of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood to teach a valuable lesson, or otherwise be educational. For example:
    • During the superhero week, Ana Platypus tries to use her "super skirt" to fly like a superhero and ends up falling instead, having to be caught by Lady Aberlin before she hits the ground.
    • During the pets week, much to King Friday's frustration, a parrot who's just come into the neighborhood has learned to say several things, and "Correct as usual, King Friday" was not among them. Parrots take a long time, possibly months, to learn to speak, and so he really shouldn't have expected it to learn to say "Correct as usual, King Friday" in such a short span of time.
  • In the fourth season of Modern Family, Haley gets arrested for (accidentally) injuring a cop and resisting arrest while fleeing a party following a police raid. She has to appear before a college disciplinary board—and is expelled six weeks into her freshman year, with the proviso that she can reapply next year (conveniently allowing the show to bring her back into the Dunphy house and resume her Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry with Alex).
  • Monk:
    • After helping put away several killers, in "Mr. Monk Goes to the Carnival," Monk applies to rejoin the force — only for his request to be shot down by Stottlemeyer's testimony to the board. As much as Monk wants to be reinstated, the nature of his OCD would make him incapable of performing the duties required of a police officer.
    • In "Mr. Monk and the Badge," Monk finally does get reinstated. However, instead of being put on the case of a five-man serial killer, he finds himself riding the desk. When he's finally allowed to run investigations, Monk finds that the burden of proof is different, as shown when a police officer is killed and Monk suspects that he may have been on the take and been double-crossed. Rather than take his claims as fact as would have happened if Monk was a private consultant, he's instead told to keep his mouth shut unless he's 105% sure on his theories. He also finds himself ostracized by his colleagues for refusing to drop his suspicions about the officer.
    • In the novel Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu, the Mayor deputizes Monk and Natalie to run the SFPD Homicide Division for the duration of a police strike. Monk is thus made acting captain, and is given a squad of former detectives discharged from the force for various reasons.
      • When murders come up, Monk wants to work each and every one of them. Natalie has to remind him that he can't work each case because too much multitasking could lead to him making mistakes. Thus, Monk has to pick one homicide for himself and Natalie to work, while delegating the other homicides to his other detectives. Additionally, Monk and Natalie find themselves having to roll on every homicide call, not just the unusual ones they normally get called in on.
    • In the novel Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse, Monk and Natalie suspect that real estate developer Lucas Breen, a member of the San Francisco Police Commission, is responsible for killing an elderly woman, burning down her house, and killing a dog at a nearby firehouse while trying to retrieve evidence linking him to the first crime. While Stottlemeyer is convinced of Breen's guilt as well, Monk's investigative tactics lead Breen to accuse them of harassment, making their efforts to build a case against him that much harder. Questioning Breen again, this time accusing him of killing a homeless man, causes Stottlemeyer to get officially reprimanded by the chief, with the notice to appear at an IAB hearing and explain himself, thus risking a demotion.
  • The entire premise of the Monty Python's Flying Circus's Ron Obvious sketch. Ron attempts stunts such as jumping the English Channel, eating Chichester Cathedral, tunnelling from England to Java, splitting a railway carriage with his nose, and running to Mercury. All go as would actually be expected.
    • One sketch features a boxing match between professional boxer Ken Clean-Air-Systems (played by John Cleese) and a school girl (played by Connie Booth). Given the surreal nature of the programme, you might expect some hilarious role reversal? No..the fight goes exactly as you'd expect between a professional boxer and a school girl.
  • The Muppets (2015):
    • Miss Piggy tries to play a prank on a woman by getting Scooter to shove her head into a cake and filming it. Not only does Ms. Applegate notice Miss Piggy very obviously sitting completely dressed in black in her suspicious black car, but Miss Piggy gets arrested for filming her.
  • Murder, She Wrote had a series of episodes where Jessica Fletcher didn't solve the case but instead had other characters investigating the murders that took place. One episode was about a showrunner on a TV show who investigated when a coworker was murdered. She found the clue that breaks the case right open, runs into the murderer... and immediately runs screaming for help since no-one else knows about the clue and she's alone in a room with a murderer.
  • The Middle has an episode called "The Trip", which has the family's meek daughter Sue be left out of a field trip despite selling the required amount of fundraiser food because (as we find out at the end), Frankie forgot to actually mail the money to get her on the list. Sue, following her mother's coaching to be more assertive, forces her way onto the field trip anyway. It ends up being a miserable experience for her because the trip wasn't prepared for an extra person, leaving her without a bed in the hotel, unable to enter the state capital building, and a large amount of other unpleasant experiences.

    N to S 
  • Fran Fine in The Nanny is... well, a nanny, who wears expensive and fashionable outfits. As such she also has crippling credit card debt, and it's revealed that she makes payments via an elaborate ponzi scheme of paying off older credit cards with new ones.
  • Never Have I Ever: Devi is super attracted to Mr. Fanservice Paxton and behaves like the standard Hormone-Addled Teenager. However, she gets cold feet the first time they actually attempt sex together, due to her lack of experience and her age.
  • In the third season of Nikita, Division is absorbed to turn it from a sinister rogue agency to an actual part of the U.S. military. When a terrorist holds Division up for $5 million dollars for information, Nikita and Michael figure they can just pay him as they're used to that being chump change for the company. However, government liaison Ryan has to break it to them that the reason Division was flush with cash before was all the illegal dealings Percy was running. Now, they're on a government budget which means "we barely have enough to keep the lights on."
  • No Good Nick has young Nick posing as an orphaned foster child as part of a scheme to take down the family responsible (or so she thinks) for her dad being in prison. While Nick is very smart, many of her schemes fail due to various factors she hasn't considered.
    • Nick steals a bunch of expensive wine from Liz’s restaurant by swapping the labels with cheap wine. When she tries to sell it off, however, she realizes that the original labels have the actual price so she can’t prove these are anything but blank wine bottles with no commercial value.
    • Nick manages to break the password of a bank manager and thus figures she can easily move money around. However, even a bank president can’t just move funds around without authorization or it being noticed by a system created specifically to prevent such actions so she can never be able to withdraw from random accounts without being discovered.
    • Her “Go Fund Me” scam was great pulling in money. Too bad as a minor, she can’t open a bank account without an adult co-signer so she can’t actually access any of that cash.
    • The entire scam required Nick to rip off and ruin a family who, thinking she was a long-lost relative, showered her with nothing but love and affection. The girl simply isn’t callous enough to keep doing that as she finds herself actually realizing how good these people are so her con turns into a Becoming the Mask experience.
  • In the NCIS episode "Bete Noire", Ducky's assistant Gerald gets shot in the shoulder. Fiction often treats this as Only a Flesh Wound that someone can shrug off and continue functioning, but not this time; Ducky and Caitlin have to immediately bandage Gerald's shoulder before he bleeds out. He then has to go through months of rehab and even a year and a half later when he reappears, his arm still hasn't fully healed.
    • On a similar note, there's the time that Gibbs has to shoot McGee in the leg in order to save his life. (It Makes Sense in Context.) Again, this is not Only a Flesh Wound, as McGee loses a considerable amount of blood and is out of action for the next episode. It's then revealed that the bullet almost hit an artery, which would have been fatal.
  • NCIS: Los Angeles:
    • In the episode "Venganza", Callen and Sam are chasing a suspect on a roof, and said suspect tries to parkour his way to the next roof. He fails.
      Callen: Gravity is a bitch.
    • One episode had Sam go undercover as a former soldier, and he was given a perfect backstory, as well as having the records altered. But the mark got suspicious and called some friends who had been in the same unit, who naturally told him that they'd never heard of Sam's cover. In the end, cover stories can only go so far.
    • Shay Mosley sends the team to Mexico on an off-book mission to rescue her son from his drug-running father. They succeed, but things rapidly go south and they're all nearly killed (and to make it worse, Harley Hidoko, who went in ahead of them, is burned to death). As a result, the higher-ups launch a thorough investigation with the potential to end the team. Shay, in particular, is in very hot water for massive abuses of her authority for personal reasons — and ends up in the cartel's crosshairs, requiring her and her son to go into hiding, ending her career.
  • In the NCIS: New Orleans episode "Escape Plan," Sebastian is kidnapped by foreign villains to help them orchestrate a prison break. They then demonstrate how serious they are by shooting a prison guard whom they had already taken. Sebastian's reaction is a panicked "Oh my God, you shot him!" which is probably how most people would react in that situation. Especially without the benefit of the Training from Hell that soldiers and LEOs can be expected to get.
    • Sebastian invokes this when the villains reveal they picked him because they need him to break into a prison and saw Sebastian had scored highly in a "prison break" video game. Sebastian points out there is a world of difference between doing this in a video game (no matter how detailed it was) and pulling it off in real life.
    • In the season 2 finale, Brody discovers her lover is secretly a member of a terrorist group using her for information for an attack. The team expect Brody to take time off but are thrown to learn she won't be coming back as she blames herself for not seeing through the man. More importantly, even if she wanted to, the entire thing has caused her security clearance to be revoked and thus forced to retire.
    • Pride is shot in the season four finale and while he recovers, he's haunted by the experience. Also, his superiors decide Pride isn't cleared for field work and he's thus moved to a supervisor position.
  • NUMB3RS:
    • In the pilot episode, no less: Charlie uses his mathematical skills to determine the general area where a serial killer lives based on the locations of his murders, but the FBI fails to find a single viable suspect in the target area. When the FBI finally catches the guy, it turns out that he used to live in the target area, but had moved away prior to the beginning of the episode. No matter how good your math is, there will always be some variables that you can't account for.
    • In a later episode, Charlie gets the idea to stop a new drug from hitting the streets by interrupting the supply chain. In the end, his plan succeeds and that particular drug is contained, but other drugs just surge to take its place. Don tries to reassure him that he still made a difference, but Charlie is less than convinced.
  • Odd Squad:
    • In "Running on Empty", Opal is shown being far more deprived of energy than her partner Orla as the two walk across the Sahara Desert, with Orla going faster at one point while Opal struggles to catch up and catch her breath. Not only is Opal the one who is carrying the backpack full of quart-size containers that's almost as big as her, but she also used to work in an Arctic precinct prior to joining the Odd Squad Mobile Unit, and thus is not used to the climate of the Sahara Desert. In addition, she's also not used to walking long distances like most agents since she never had a real reason to step outside of Headquarters to solve cases. Orla, on the other hand, is more physically fit, being an ancient 500-year-old warrior who used to live in the Amazon rainforest, which has a very humid climate, and serving as the guardian of the 44-leaf clover. However, as she is still a human being like Opal, she still manages to get tired after a long while of trekking across the desert.
    • In Season 3's mid-season premiere, "Odd Off The Press", Denver Mr. O is chosen to be the new Big O in place of Oprah, who is heading into space on a mission. However, he ends up failing for two reasons.
      • The five prerequisites Orpita, Oprah's assistant, comes up with for the candidates for the Big O position include reciting the long-standing Director Catchphrase, how strong they are, how much juice box knowledge they have, their math knowledge, and how good they can play tennis against a platypus. Denver Mr. O checks every single box except for the last one. Being very strong and being good at math are two skills that the Big O should have, but the other three hold very little merit when it comes to being in a CEO-like position. Had more reasonable prerequisites been offered to the candidates (such as having lots of knowledge about Odd Squad or how respectful and kind they are to their agents as Directors), a more reasonable replacement might have been picked.
      • Denver Mr. O finds that running all the Odd Squad precincts in the world is much harder than running one sole precinct of a select group of agents and ends up cracking under pressure, leaving when his anxiety ramps up and he causes chaos to ensue in his new office. Just because an employee is good in a managerial position doesn't mean they'll be good in a CEO position.
    • In "O for a Day", Orla and Omar, who are serving as temporary co-Directors in place of Seattle Mr. O, initially think that being a Director is easygoing and that they've got all the time in the world to relax, which is quickly proven wrong when they are dragged into conflict between numerous departments, their heads of whom attempt to quit over office supplies and the precinct's budget being allocated towards what ones to buy. Neither Orla nor Omar have any sort of experience being in the Management department — the latter volunteered them both on the basis that he worked in the Arctic Headquarters while she worked in the Amazon rainforest Headquarters, nothing more, but none of them were Odd Squad Directors during their times working there. Not only that, but they both end up disagreeing on what kind of paper to buy for the Seattle precinct and get into a nasty argument with each other in spite of the fact that they're partners, because even if two Investigation agents are good partners and good friends, it can very much be a different story if they're co-Directors of a precinct no matter how strong their bond is.
    • In "In Your Dreams", Orpita is shown being terrified of the nightmares that the Dream Weaver gives her, and whenever she experiences one, she attempts to wake herself up. Although Orpita is, by technicality, the highest-ranking agent in Odd Squad (with Oprah, still serving as the Big O, being gone from the show permanently), she is still a little kid who, like most other kids her age, are terrified by nightmares. Luckily, she has the much older and much more mature Orla and Osmerelda to remind her that the things she sees in her nightmares aren't real and that she can take back control of her dreams.
  • In The Office (US), Michael made everyone participate in a 5k run, which several people weren't ready for, leading to some disastrous results: Kevin didn't have any running clothes, so his regular clothes got soaked with sweat, Andy's nipples began to get irritated and eventually started bleeding from chafing against his shirt, and Michael himself ended up in the hospital due to severe dehydration from loading up on carbs and not drinking any water prior to running. A few others just decided to ditch the run altogether and go out for drinks.
    • Kevin is an incompetent idiot who is employed as an accountant despite being incapable of basic math, and it's revealed that he originally applied for a warehouse position but Michael hired him an accountant basically on a whim. As Michael refuses to fire anyone for incompetence, Kevin kept his job for years, but in the last episode Dwight, the new General Manager, (who is no longer a ruthless Jerkass but is capable of separating his personal feelings from business) fires Kevin almost immediately. It's also revealed that all Kevin's accounts were essentially fraudulent so he was lucky he didn't go to prison.
  • Once Upon a Time:
  • Orphan Black
    • Sarah impersonates her clone Beth, including doing her job as a Toronto police detective. She initially manages to fake her way through it thanks to everyone believing Beth is traumatized by a recent civilian shooting, but the deeper she gets, the more the facade starts to crack, to the point where she has to have 'Beth' quit her job.
    • Sarah's daughter Kira isn't fooled by her clone Alison's impersonation of Sarah for even a moment. Alison has to tell her the truth.
  • The Orville:
    • When part of a spaceship is damaged/destroyed, debris does become a problem for other ships nearby.
    • Fast-tracking Xelayans through the ranks because their species rarely join the military sounds good on paper but it can also result in very young officers being thrust into positions of responsibility that they're not adequately prepared for, in extreme circumstances, as seen when Alara is forced to command the Orville and suffers extreme anxiety and self-doubt because the Captain and XO were missing and the 3rd in command is physically incapable of command at that point in time.
    • It actually takes a few moments for a communications officer to "open a channel"; you can't just start talking immediately upon giving the order. This one is Played for Laughs.
    • Xelaya's gravity is much higher than most planets, so Xelayans like Alara have Super-Strength in normal Earth gravity. In "Home", Alara begins losing her strength and suffering bone and muscle wastage since she's essentially been living in microgravity for over a year. Also, when she first returns to Xelaya to recover, she stumbles and falls after stepping out of the shuttle and is confined to a wheelchair because she's gotten used to low gravity and is too weak to move normally. These are problems that Real Life astronauts face, and one of the main reasons long-haul space missions aren't possible yet.
    • Realpolitik comes into play with the Planetary Union — just because the member worlds are allied doesn't mean they actually like each other. Xelayans, for example, tend to be disdainful of service in the fleet, and Moclans seem to rub everybody the wrong way with their rigid values. That said, they need each other when facing enemies like the Krill, so they force themselves to tolerate each other as much as possible. Even so, the Union clearly isn't stable enough for comfort, as Mercer points out more than once.
    • "A Tale of Two Topas": In Real Life, scientists who study sex and gender have known for a while that gender identity is biologically fixed very early in a child's development, and trying to make the child be something else doesn't work: it just makes them miserable. In this episode, it turns out that despite their Bizarre Alien Biology, Moclans are no different from humans in this regard: their He-Man Woman Hater establishment may think they can flawlessly turn all females into males, but they really can't.
  • In one episode of Parks and Recreation, Tom, having just run his start-up company Entertainment 720 into the ground through mismanagement and over-ambition returns to the Parks & Rec department. When Chris assigns him to redesign the department's logo (essentially choosing a new font), Tom tries to use the project as a springboard to launch new ventures such as an Apprentice-esque reality show about the city's park rangers. He is shut down by Jerry of all people, who tells him point blank that Chris would never approve any of his ideas, most of which involve copyright infringement as well as being totally unworkable, and that he is a government worker who should swallow his pride and just do the menial assignment given to him by his superior.
    • In a later episode Ron, who has recently gotten married, decides to go completely off the grid when he starts receiving junk mail at his wife's address. He spends the episode erasing every trace of himself, only for his wife to furiously track him down and tear into him for destroying his cellphone and making himself unreachable when she had a flat tyre and was stranded for hours at the side of the road. She tells him that he can't just vanish every time he gets paranoid, especially since Ron is now her daughter's stepfather and they have a baby on the way.
      • Also, when she catches up to him, he is trying to purchase an RV with gold coins and without filling out any paperwork, which the salesman won't allow him to do, and earlier in the episode a postal worker refuses to dump any mail for Ron in the woods.
    • Throughout the show, Eagleton's status as an utopia of wealth is a long running joke. Giving away smartphones in goodie baskets, holding cells that are more like high-end hotel rooms, using a several-thousand-dollar crystal piece as a simple basketball trophy, etc. are just some of their more amusing traits. However, "The Pawnee-Eagleton Tip Off Classic" reveals that because of their ridiculous and frivolous spending, Eagleton's financial state is atrocious, and the only solution to fixing their monumental debts is to dissolve the town entirely and merge it with Pawnee.
    • In one episode where a cult claims the world is about to end, April and Andy decide to take the opportunity to complete items on Andy's bucket list. They go to the bank so he can check "hold a thousand dollars cash in my hand" off the list. However, instead of getting a giant stack of bills like he expected, the teller initially gives him ten $100 bills.
    • In the episode "Road Trip", a fourth grade girl comes to City Hall looking for help on a school report entitled "Why Government Matters". She meets Ron who lectures her on libertarianism, demonstrates taxation by stealing part of her lunch and gifts her with the landmine from his desk at the end. Inconsequential B Plot right? Well, at the end of the episode the girls' mother shows up to yell at him, as her daughter's two word essay "It doesn't" got her in trouble at school.
      Ron: I'm very sorry, I was only...
      Mrs Brukiss: And you ate her lunch? And you gave her a landmine, really!?
      Ron: Well... it seemed appropriate at the time.
      Mrs Burkiss: HOW!?
    • Throughout the series as a whole, it’s shown (her best friend Ann point blank says it) Leslie is depicted as a “steamroller” someone who only hears what she wants to hear, and ignores any criticism. At one point, she is NARROWLY elected to the City Council. She IMMEDIATELY goes about fighting for what she believes in (very loudly), pushing legislation she believes in, and ignores criticism from the townspeople, claiming she “knows better”. She constantly fought her fellow council members and ignored voters. In any other show, her legislation would be a success and the people would thank her? Nope. What happens? She gets recalled. The fact is, in politics, you have to make allies and get along with your constituents, and, shockingly, LISTEN TO VOTERS! Ron even reveals to Leslie that he tried to have her fired four times because she either ignored his orders or went behind his back to do whatever she wanted. Although Leslie is highly competent in her field, Ron was still her boss and Leslie's actions were textbook insubordination.
  • Peep Show:
    • In the episode "Holiday," Jeremy has to dispose of his Girl of the Week's dog after he accidentally runs it over. He and Mark attempt to cremate the corpse in the forest, but quickly discover that it's not working, which Mark chalks up to all the water in the dog's body. It's incredibly difficult to completely incinerate living organisms in real life for that exact reason, which is why crematoriums exist in the first place.
    • The entire series could be seen as a Deconstruction of sorts for the concept of Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonists. Mark and Jeremy are total assholes, but rather than making them seem edgy or endearing to others, it consistently alienates everyone around them and ruins any chance the leads have at happiness.
  • Power Rangers:
    • Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers:
      • When Rita plans to give the Dragonzord to her then Evil Green Ranger, Squat has doubts that the Dragonzord still works because it hasn't been used in 10,000 years.
      • When the Shogunzords are discovered by the villains in Season 3, their next step is to steal a Ninjazord and kidnap Ninjor because the Zords are utterly outdated and, being primarily magic in nature, the villains have neither the knowledge to upgrade them or the resources to power them on their own.
    • Power Rangers Lost Galaxy Grand Finale's "Journeys End Part" hits this a case of Darker and Edgier.
      • In Part 1, the Big Bad Trakeena decides to quit sending a Monster of the Week and simply attack Terra Venture with her own ship, blowing up its last functioning engine, and there is nothing the Power Rangers can do to stop her.
      • At the end of Part 1, Trakeena attached bombs to all of her Stingwingers with the intent of sending them to blow themselves up along with the Rangers and Terra Venture. In Part 2, two of the Rangers' Megazords go to hold off the Stingwingers, but being built to fight against giant enemies they proof ill suited to stop the swarm of smaller foes and are destroyed.
      • On the flipside, right as Trakeena thinks she has won she orders her army sent into the heart of Terra Venture. Villimax informs her that she doesn't have an army left. Power Rangers typically have a seemlingly endless supply of Mooks but when Trakeena sent them all in a Suicide Attack, especially given the number she sacrificed to destroy the Megazords, she depleted her ranks in a single episode.
    • In the Megaforce episode "A Lion's Alliance", the Rangers arrive at Animarium to ask the Red Lion for help. Some villains find this out and try to attack the Red Lion, who to note, is nearly thirty-feet tall forty-feet long Zord who is very much self-aware and intelligent, and has all lion-like features like claws and teeth, and the villains attack the Zord while at human size themselves. It ends as well as you'd expect.
    • In Mystic Force, most of the Ranger team works at the same store so when they have to go fight a monster it's left for the owner/manager to run by himself. To cover their constant disappearances, he ends up hiring one of the Ranger's former enemies to pick up the slack which leads to tension in the workplace.
    • In Beast Morphers Commander Shaw discovers that one of her employees has blackmailed one of the Rangers into a position where she could sabotage another Ranger in an attempt to take his job as head of the science division. She immediately fires the employee and has her removed from the premises.
  • The Practice:
    • In "Brother's Keepers", luckless attorney Harland Bassett pulls a TV courtroom ploy by having another woman impersonate the defendant, his niece. The judge cites him for contempt, since this is a fraud on the court. Even so, she gets acquitted because the witness continues identifying the wrong person.
    • The final arc of the series ("The People Versus Alan Shore") is made of this trope. Alan Shore is ostensibly fired from Berluti, Frutt and Young (the main character team of the series), despite the fact that he brought in a lopsided share of the firm's business, and was fired under extremely-tenuous pretenses — i.e. skirting the bounds of morality in a legal sphere where lawyers are expected to represent some of the worst clients humanity has to offer. When the firm sues him for reckless action and illegal entry to their offices, the judge (and the ensuing jury) both realize that the firm has functionally become Alan's due to the fact that he brought in most of the business, and that their claims that he is a loose cannon ring extremely hollow when they've compromised their morals time and time again. Not only does the jury agree, but they award Alan more than his original claim, which functionally destroys the reputation of the main characters and forces them to take alternate jobs in an attempt to salvage their reputations.
  • Surprisingly, several episodes of Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon deconstruct the Transformation Is a Free Action trope the original anime made famous in the first place. On a few occasions, the villains manage to take out one of the girls by attacking them before they can finish their transformation phrase.
  • Pretty Little Liars:
    • When Aria's family finally found out about her and Ezra, no one was happy due to the fact that he was older and her teacher. Her father is still against their relationship. It's also something of an aversion, because reality ensuing would be him being arrested the moment the relationship became public. He even wrote a book about it.
    • In a later season, Alison asked the girls that they feel safe so that Charlotte can be released. While Emily, Mona, Hanna and Spencer all eventually do this, Aria has flashbacks to all of the things that Charlotte has put them through as "A", and confesses that she will feel safe because of her.
  • Prodigal Son: When J.T. is put in charge of the unit, he does his best but it's clear he's having issues handling leadership after so long as just a regular detective. He's also horrible dealing with the press.
  • Proven Innocent:
    • While Madeline gets a job with a legal innocence team, Levi has a hard time finding work due to his reputation.
    • "The Struggle For Stonewall" details how, in the 1980s, gay rights groups would ignore transgender people, feeling that they were "too much" for straight society to take and would hinder gay people's progress. One LGBT worker openly regrets how he ended up being as prejudiced as people against him.
    • Madeline approaches Bellows with a proposal to let that client out of jail in exchange for taking down a corrupt cop whose false testimony put others in jail. At first, Bellows states that he can't do it because releasing a known racist in an election year is political suicide. However, when he learns his main opponent in the election turned a blind eye to the cop's actions, he realizes the political gains of that will overcome letting a man out of jail. That he can spin how prison "redeemed" this former racist is the icing on the cake.
    • The team defend a woman accused of murdering her mother. A professor helps them gather evidence indicating a known serial killer was the one who did it and the girl is freed. During a private talk, the team hear a recording of the girl and the professor which reveals she did kill her mother and she and the professor (her lover) set up all that evidence. Violet wants to turn them in but the others say they can't as this talk could fall under violating lawyer/client confidentiality. More importantly, nothing would ruin the reputation of an "innocence project" more than revealing they got a guilty person out of jail and so, for the good of their future work, they have to keep this quiet.
    • In "Seal Team Deep Six," Madeline finds herself over her head defending a Navy officer as military courts are far different than civilian courts in their handling of matters and court conduct (Navy judges don't take kindly to a lawyer "demanding" things). There's also how the burden of proof rests solely on the defense and the military tending to classify key evidence top secret.
  • Psych:
    • In the episode "Extradition: British Columbia", Detective Carlton Lassiter has been trying to catch the art thief Pierre Despereaux for over six years. When Pierre is finally caught thanks to Shawn, Lassiter gloats that he has finally won, only to be shocked when Pierre has no idea who he is. What did he expect? This was the first time they ever met face to face after all.
      • There's also the fact Despereaux is an internationally wanted thief chased by a dozen different global agencies. Why would he even know (or care) about a minor detective from a small California town amid the hundreds of other cops around the world after him?
    • In Season 7, Juliet finds out about Shawn being a Phony Psychic, she is furious and they break up. Juliet hates liars, due to her Disappeared Dad being a lying con man, and finding out her stepfather was also involved in illegal activities; and finding out the truth about what Shawn is doing (most of which is illegal) put her in a very tough position as an officer of the law. When Trout is brought in by the mayor to save money and improve the police department after a very badly handled high-profile case, he fires the Psych team, suspends the chief (and takes her job), and demotes head detective Lassiter.
    • In Season 8, he's fired for endangering the public due to his gung-ho attitude.
  • In the penultimate episode of Pushing Daisies, Ned and Chuck hide in the trunk of a car and have a conversation at normal volume as the driver drives along a quiet road with the stereo off. They seem to be getting away with it until the driver pulls over, opens the trunk and tells them it wasn't a good idea.
  • Quantico: Simon attacked Ryan during a big argument. As such, he was kicked out of the academy once it was revealed.
  • Kids' fantasy game show Raven has one example in Series 8 when one warrior, Milex, fails to complete the challenge The Drop due to her fear of heights despite having completed Leap of Faith earlier in the week, showing that just because someone faces their fear once does not mean said fear will automatically go away.
  • The Republic of Sarah:
    • Since planning to remove the federal government's control of an area is illegal, Sarah ends up arrested by the FBI after winning the independence vote. Fortunately, Greylock's unique situation provides enough of a legal loophole for her to get acquitted (it helps that her mother, who defended her, is a skilled attorney).
    • As Greylock is now a foreign territory, and on poor terms with its newfound national neighbors, soon armed checkpoints are established at the border to stop people from crossing until proper diplomatic ties can be established.
    • Another side effect of Greylock now being its own country is that anyone with banking and credit card accounts based in the US has to pay foreign transfer fees for virtually any transaction.
    • Alexis and AJ having sex in the latter's office nearly gets them caught by a delivery man.
    • Corinne's blow-up at Liz Fernsby during the election debates comes back to bite her in the ass when Adam walks out on her and cites the incident as an example of her impulse-control issues; combined with her affair with Danny, she ends up looking like an unfit mother.
  • Rome, Antony struts the battlefield telling young Octavian to "breath deep" the smells of victory. He says it rhetorically, but Octavian barely restrains his disgust and sums up classical-era victory in war smells like "Smoke, shit, and rotting flesh."
    • Antony decides to spar with Vorenus to prepare for a duel and acts like he's still in his prime; however, he is drunk, stoned, and out of practice in hand to hand combat. Vorenus is none of those and does his best to not embarrass his boss in front of the court.
  • Rutherford Falls: Shaken by certain revelations about his family, Nate dramatically tries to invoke Toppled Statue by looping a chain around the statue of Big Larry, attaching it to his car, and driving off. Because of the weight, however, the effort instead tears the rear bumper off of his car.
  • Being a show that parodies popular culture, Saturday Night Live has a quite a few moments of this:
    • One sketch features a send-up of High School Musical as Troy (Zac Efron) has to break it to a new class of the high school that if you try breaking out into song in college, not only will no one join in but people will treat you like a lunatic.
    • Likewise, some skits would have Norm Macdonald placed in Evita or West Side Story (1961) and baffled at people suddenly breaking into song. "What the hell was that?"
    • In a sketch parodying Peanuts, Lucy attempted the old Running Gag of pulling the football away when Charlie Brown (Brendan Fraser) tried to kick it, but when Charlie Brown landed, he cracked his skull open, and everyone was now angry with Lucy for causing him to be severely injured, and desperately trying to keep him to hang on until the paramedics arrived.
    • In one sketch, a military executive brings president George Washington (played by Russell Brand) into the present day using a secret military time machine in hopes that he could bring an end to the arguments over the founding fathers. While a tad exaggerated, considering he starts beating up everybody around him, Washington's reaction over being transported into another time period with no warning was fairly realistic as he questions where he is and who the people around him are out of fear.
    • Another skit parodies the famous scene from "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" where Grandpa Joe gets out of bed and starts singing when Charlie (played by Kristen Stewart) reveals he won the 5th Golden Ticket. Before Grandpa Joe can really get into the song, however, Charlie becomes absolutely befuddled that his grandfather could walk the entire time and had been essentially forcing Charlie to drop out of school to earn a living for the household while he had essentially been lounging around in bed all day. When Grandpa Joe tries to brush off Charlie's indignant and justified anger, Charlie makes it clear that he is not taking him to the Chocolate Factory and storms out of the room when his other grandpa and one of his grandmas revealed that they could walk also.
    • Another "Willy Wonka" themed skit introduces Willy's accountant brother Glen (played by former Vice President Al Gore) who is yelling about how the factory "is hemorrhaging money" due to Willy's insistence on such things as a chocolate river, spending a billion dollars on a machine to simply change giant chocolate bars into smaller ones and the countless health code violations of having a pack of mysterious foreign helpers around as the staff (without green cards). When he hears Willy is about to hand control of the factory to an eight-year old boy, Glen hits the roof. Charlie meanwhile, decides he's going to go in for the profits and instructs Glen to start seeing about getting some cheap Mexican-made chocolate they can pass off as expensive.
    • The "Hero Song" sketch features Andy Samberg as a businessman singing about how he's distressed by crime in the city and donning a superhero cape and mask to clean up the streets. Until he finds a Damsel in Distress played by Amy Adams being menaced by a mook played by Jason Sudeikis. In mid-line, the singing hero takes a punch to the face, at which point the mook proceeds to beat the hero. Brutally. For over a minute.
    • In one of its commercial parodies, Undercover Office Potty, a man is provided with a lamp that doubles as a portable toilet so that he can use the bathroom in the office and continue working. A typical SNL bit would have his co-workers being blissfully unaware and his boss complimenting his increased work production, but instead, everyone immediately notices the stench and orders him to get rid of the lamps. When he tries the same thing with oversized office equipment, he gets the same result, culminating in his fed-up, horrified, and disgusted boss firing him.
    • As overkill as it ended up being for the sake of comedy, the famous sketch where Chris Farley plays a man that gets mad at finding out he was in a Product Switcheroo Ad do showcases the fact that people sometimes don't like being swindled like that. There's a reason why these kind of ads have been struggling recently, not the least of which is the fact that people who get pissed off can make it public as fast as they can place it on the Internet, like this example here can attest.
    • Two "Black Jeopardy" sketches note  have the characters played by the hosts perform poorly because, even though they have dark skin, they are natives of other countries and, thus, are completely unfamiliar with African-American culture (therefore, they struggle to answer any of the questions correctly).
    • The early-90's recurring skit "The Denise Show" featured a teenage boy moping over his ex-girlfriend and doing whatever he could think of to get her back. Despite the comedy setting, it's made abundantly clear that Stalking is Love is not true—his father blasts him for his behavior, Denise herself repeatedly tells him to leave her alone, his new girlfriend dumps him because he won't get over her, and the final skit has him mentioning that a restraining order has been filed against him.
    • A Stranger Things skit has Mike, Lucas, and Dustin about to venture into the Upside Down only to be stopped by Lucas' parents, who noticed that their son has been missing for days. The adults chide the kids for being out late while kidnappers are roaming around, do not believe them about the Demigorgon and the Upside Down, and are not any more reassured by them getting supervised by Joyce (who went crazy from the disappearance of her son) and Chief Hopper (who they do not know and are uncomfortable with him calling the kids some of his closest friends). The skit ends with Lucas being taken home by his parents while they comment on the weirdness of the situation.
    • A parody of an enhancement drug ad starts out with a man, played by Dwayne Johnson, talking about the miracle of "xentrax", a drug recommended to him by his colleague that cures erectile dysfunction. However, when Johnson's character tries getting a prescription for xentrax, his bewildered doctor points out the dangers of the drug, calls out Johnson for taking sketchy medical advice and responsibly refuses to write a prescription that could lose him his medical license and get a patient killed. Unfortunately Johnson keeps aggressively persisting and beats the poor doctor up for all his troubles at the end of the skit.
    • A 2019 Christmastime Macy's commercial parody makes the point that children often find the cute Christmas outfits their parents buy and make them wear to family gatherings to be uncomfortable for a variety of reasons, and sometimes can't get out of them in time to go to the bathroom. In addition, those clothes can cause adults problems, like a marital couple's squabble over the father's inability to get a pair of boots on their daughter expanding into the father's reluctance to visit his in-laws because the inevitable family drama, and "onesies with so many buttons you'll keep them in a fully loaded diaper rather than have to take it off and put it on again".
    • A social distancing Santa's Workshop skit where Santa and Mrs. Claus talk to the kids through giant hamster balls ends in disaster when the two actors playing the respective characters keep falling over and hurting themselves in the unsecured balls and destroying the set, with Santa even sustaining a nose bleed. The family who came in at the beginning of the skit understandably refuse to let their daughter near those unsafe conditions.
    • The "Dick in a Box" video. While the two men's girlfriends are impressed and happy to receive the gifts, by the end of the video, both of them are arrested due to displaying their boxes in public, i.e. indecent exposure.
    • One skit shows the realistic consequences of Statler and Waldorf heckling the Muppet Show; as they start to get warmed up, venue security comes out. They get Kermit's name and species wrong, with Kenan Thompson saying he doesn't like the recording outright, but make a legitimate point: the duo's tickets, and everyone's tickets, state that no talking or heckling is allowed during the show. The two are given two verbal warnings before the bouncers try to physically eject them. Eventually, however the bouncers change their minds and join in on the heckling.
    • In "Brunch", a group of women go for brunch and start chatting about their celebrity crushes. One of them, Claire, starts talking about Chris Hemsworth and how he's the biggest hunk in Hollywood. Naturally, Claire is Chris Hemsworth (the episode's host) Disguised in Drag, and "she" won't stop raving about Chris's looks and body. When Claire leaves, though, the other women immediately see through the ruse ("Crazy question—is our friend Claire actually Chris Hemsworth?"), especially when they remember that they've never met Claire before in their lives. For a final bit of realism, when Chris reveals that he just wanted to see if fans still like him, Aidy's character Megan bluntly tells him "This was bad and you're WEIRD now." In short, if you're a famous movie star, wearing an incredibly flimsy disguise and talking about yourself won't conceal your identity or endear you to anyone.
  • Several things through Scream Queens (2015) show precisely the kind of results certain antics on the show would have on the characters in real life. You could easily argue that this is one of the show's biggest sources of comedy.
    • At the beginning of the first season, a Kappa Kappa Tau pledge successfully gives birth in a bathtub...but since the sorority sisters prioritize having fun at the party downstairs over calling an ambulance or getting her any medical help whatsoever, she quickly bleeds out and dies. Likely due to her having had twins.
    • Kappa Kappa Tau has blatant racism in how they traditionally choose the pledges to accept into the sorority as well as several wild parties including one where a guy was fucked by a drunken goat. Had Chanel not been forced to accept Munsch's ultimatum to accept all pledges that year, Kappa would've been shut down.
    • Throwing Off the Disability simply doesn't work. Hester still has to wear her neckbrace for her scoliosis even after her makeover. Subverted as she never needed it.
    • Grace is so busy investigating the Red Devil killings and the mystery of the bathtub baby she nearly flunks out of college.
    • Chanel is eventually charged over Ms. Bean's death in the first episode. She doesn't stay in jail for long, though.
    • The school is eventually shut down because of how many murders have been committed. Munsch was reluctant to do so... until Jennifer is killed and since Munsch brought her to Kappa in the first place...
    • The entire homicide division is fired due to their incompetence and replaced by Denise, since she did more for the investigation of several murders than 20-something officers did with little-to-no training.
    • The Chanels are so unlikable that Hester had no trouble framing them for murder.
    • The entirety of the Chanels' situation in Season 2 is a result of this - yes, they've been exonerated for murders that they didn't commit but they proved how unlikable they are that no-one in their right mind wants anything to do with them. Also, they were disowned by their families so they're forced to live in a rundown apartment.
      • Related to the above, Hester's Karma Houdini Warranty is entirely realistic - trying to argue Double Jeopardy for their crimes won't work as Denise explains. Since the Chanels were the ones to be tried by the court and not Hester then Hester can be tried without Double Jeopardy being invoked.
  • The Second Coming is a two-part drama about one man discovering that he's the second coming of Jesus Christ, this series shows what would happen if there really was a second coming.
    • After Saxon reveals himself to the world, he has to be isolated and given sanctuary for his own safety. People believe he's responsible for promoting religious extremism, people are trying to figure out which faith he belongs to and people believe that he's evil for not solving crises' like famine and disease.
    • As Saxon points out, he can't take requests to perform miracles as it'll cause a snowball effect that could lead to all sorts of trouble, as he might preform a miracle that people disagree with and indirectly cause a dictatorship. Nobody can or should shoulder that amount of responsibilities, as it leads to Saxon screaming at Judith by saying he can't do everything or control all of his followers.
    • Asking the public to write their own testament is monumentally difficult, there are billions of letters that have to be read by someone and organized.
    • When the public is told about an oncoming apocalypse, they inevitably panic and start rioting. Forcing the government to impose martial law to prevent it from escalating.
  • Seinfeld:
    • The finale episode is one long invocation of this trope. In it, every single rude, cruel, and illegal thing the cast did through the entire show comes back to bite them in the ass. First they get arrested on charges of criminal indifference after mocking a guy who was being robbed rather than helping him. At their trial they get convicted after a massive landslide of people they've wronged testify against them as well as starting several confrontations in the courtroom. Turns out that being an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist doesn't typically lead to good things in real life.
    • Elaine's trademark expression of astonishment or excitement—"Get Out!" complete with shove gets so out of control as the series progresses that she eventually pushes people with enough force to knock them down. Reality ensues in "The Bizzaro Jerry" when she does this to her new friend Kevin and he's annoyed and angry like most people would be (the fact that he appears to be genuinely injured doesn't help either).
    • In several episodes, Kramer dons disguises and uses false identities to sneak into various locations, such as a hospital (he claims to be "Dr. Van Nostrum from the clinic") or an office building, for a Zany Scheme or two. The episodes inevitably end with him being found out and forced to leave—since he has no training or experience in the fields he's claiming to know, the genuine professionals who work there always realize that he's not the real thing.
  • Sex and the City:
    • Charlotte quits her job in anticipation of becoming pregnant right away. When her marriage falls apart sans pregnancy, she not only can't get it back, she's overqualified for anything else she applied for and is bored out of her mind sitting around all day doing nothing. Also, the very reason that marriage fell apart was because it was a Fourth-Date Marriage.
    • Similar to the Richard/Samantha example listed above is the Aidan/Carrie storyline. As a character, Aidan is reliable, supportive, loving, and essentially the exact opposite of Big. When Carrie cheats on him with Big, he is naturally devastated. Reality ensues several times over. When Carrie realizes what she did was wrong and goes running back to him, he does not immediately take her back. That’s not someone even a nice person will get over immediately. When he does try to give their relationship another go, it naturally falls apart for obvious reasons. He simply does not and cannot trust her anymore.
  • Sex/Life: Billie and Cooper try to have sex while she's lactating. This causes Billie to squirt breast milk in his face accidentally.
  • The Sex Lives of College Girls: Leighton has a ton of casual sex with other women in Season 2. This results in her contracting chlamydia, a rare outcome in a show that's largely comedy.
  • Shades of Blue follows the exploits of a Dirty Cop who's caught by the FBI and forced to inform on the other corrupt officers in her department. She manages to walk the tightrope for three seasons but eventually ends up in prison.
  • Sherlock:
    • The second season finale, "The Reichenbach Fall" is practically a reality check for the series. First, Sherlock assumes Moriarty is going away for good after being arrested but overlooks how a criminal genius would have no trouble intimidating the jury to let him be found not guilty.
    • When Moriarty makes it appear as if Sherlock has been setting up all these crimes so he can "solve" them and look like a genius, Sherlock's past jerk behavior eventually ends up helping Moriarty's scheme out. A reporter Sherlock once ran down as a joke gets revenge by printing the story as fact, and Sherlock discovers that when you insult police on a constant basis as being complete idiots, you're not going to get much support from them when you need it. Indeed, many of the cops are more than ready to believe Sherlock did this rather than being that smart, solely because of how insufferably he acted towards them.
    • The Chief Superintendent was under the impression Sherlock only helped on a few minor cases. When Lestrade confesses that Sherlock aided in nearly thirty and was given total access to sensitive data, his boss is outraged and orders Sherlock arrested.
    • Sherlock faces off against Moriarty on how the man came up with a super-hacking code to rob banks and intends to use it in order to prove his innocence. Moriarty just laughs that there is no code, he just bribed people to open up the bank vaults at the right moment and is disappointed Sherlock didn't see that.
    • A major fan complaint over Moriarty's plot is how he's claiming to have been an actor in numerous movies and TV shows yet somehow no one recognized or knew him. The season three premiere reveals that it didn't take Scotland Yard long to see through the story specifically for those reasons and thus concluded the whole thing was a frame job on Sherlock.
    • When Sherlock returns from his apparent death in season three, it takes him a while to understand that John is not annoyed but truly furious his friend put him through the pain of his best friend's "death" and is not ready to forgive Sherlock.
    • Watson is fond of using his Army ID badge to get in and out of buildings... but in "The Sign of Three", a guard notes that Watson was discharged from the Army years ago and the badge is no longer valid.
    • In "His Last Vow", Sherlock realizes that there's no way Magnussen has a computer database of his blackmail info — he just keeps it in his head — and kills him. He doesn't get off scot-free for it as MI-6 decides to send him on a suicide mission as punishment. At least, until Moriarty shows up.
    • In "The Six Thatchers", Sherlock gives the villain of the piece a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, only to have her pull a gun on him and shoot. Mary saves him, dying in the process. It's never a good idea to insult the bad guy when they still have the ability to shut you up.
    • The Lying Detective has John seeing a therapist to deal with Mary's death and having his daughter taken care of by family friends, since the trauma of the incident has him feeling he failed Rosie and is starting to hallucinate Mary's ghost in front of him. He is also avoiding Sherlock like the plague, blaming him for what happened to to his wife Mary, and it takes him to learn that Mary left a video in the event that she dies that would help Sherlock and John reconcile for him to come to Sherlock's aide just in time before he is strangled by the episode's killer. Sherlock mentions later that the recorder he hid to prove who the killer was will most likely be thrown out of court on grounds of entrapment, but the killer keeps on confessing to his crimes, so it doesn't really matter.
    • In the fourth series finale, "The Final Problem", Sherlock's parents are pissed at Mycroft for lying to them about their daughter being alive, and not dead like he told them. It doesn't matter that she was responsible for many unfortunate events prior to the episode, they had a right to know if their daughter was dead or alive and the fact that Mycroft didn't bother telling them this most likely damages his relationship with them.
  • The Shield has Cowboy Cop Vic Mackey chiefly flouting authority because of Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!. Except it turns out the sort of authority willing to cover up for Vic's transgressions is just as corrupt as Mackey and eventually ends up on the run to avoid corruption charges. Leaving Vic have to deal with quite a few pissed off authority figures who basically put an end to his career. Most of the last series is Vic trying to deal with his enforced retirement from the Barn and get a day job with ICE. Except that it wasn't the one he wanted and he made clear he wouldn't accept (until he was told the consequences of refusing it).
  • In the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World episode "The Knife", Veronica eventually faces Sir William Gull and Robert Anderson, the two men who were collectively Jack the Ripper, in a Knife Fight. It soon becomes clear that although they were vicious killers, they don't actually know how to fight, and she kicks their asses.
  • The series 16 And Pregnant deals heavily with this, as the young mothers-to-be face the reality of their decisions. Turns out that babies do NOT, in fact, make everything better.
  • In the U.S. version of Skins Tina, the teacher of the main cast, spends several episodes engaging in an affair with Chris, one of her students. In one episode he uses her house to throw a party, and when she comes back, he kicks out the revelers, and talks her into having sex again. While they're in the middle of it, another teacher sneaks into her house to surprise her and catches them in the act. The next day, she tries to act like the previous night's embarrassment didn't happen, but she's arrested at the beginning of the school day and charged with statutory rape. After her students testified in her favor, including Chris who tells the police he initiated the affair, she's spared any jail time, but she's immediately fired from the school, her teaching credential is revoked, and she's legally obligated to inform anyone she greets that she's a registered sex offender.
  • Smallville: In season 1, Whitney starts off as a jerk jock to Clark Kent. However, he isn’t hostile for no reason. Clark is BLATANTLY and openly in love with Whitney’s girlfriend, Lana Lang, and the show HEAVILY implies that she returned his feelings as early as the pilot (it’s telling that when it looks like Clark is about to get into a relationship with Chloe, she’s ready to have “the talk”, IE break up with him). It’s only natural that you’ll be hostile to someone openly drooling over your girlfriend.
  • The Sopranos was basically Mafia Movie: Reality Ensues. It strips away all of the glamour, fashion and charm of movies like The Godfather and Goodfellas and shows what gangsters are really like. And guess what? They're mostly brutish, greedy idiots who are willing to hurt everyone around them if it makes them a little bit of money. They're not dapper, they're not charming and The Mafia doesn't have a code of honor.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine did this a lot, being a significantly grittier take on Star Trek than its predecessors:
    • "Emissary":
      • As it turns out, forcefully giving in your resignation to Captain Picard while making it clear that you dislike him for something that wasn't even his fault means that you can't just rescind it if you change your mind. Sisko had to apologise and confirm that he was ready before Picard dropped it.
      • Conversely, Picard learns that just because something isn't your fault doesn't mean that people personally effected by something you were involved in will just handwave away feelings of resentment towards you.
      • Deep Space 9 isn't a warship and was stripped of most anything valuable when the Cardassians left. It is no match for the Cardassian warships, and firing their only torpedoes as a warning shot and using technobabble to fake additional armaments only buys a little time.
    • "Dax": The Klaestrons defend kidnapping Jadzia by citing a treaty with the Federation that permits them to unilaterally "extradite" anybody they like from Federation space (in keeping with the TNG-era Federation's bad habit of signing treaties that are hilariously unfair to it). However, as established back in "Emissary", Deep Space 9 is legally Bajoran soil—Starfleet just runs it on their behalf—and the Bajorans are not yet members of the Federation, meaning the Klaestron "extradition" instead gets classified as an attempted kidnapping and causes a major diplomatic incident that Kira and Sisko exploit to stymie it.
    • "Valiant": Jake Sisko and Nog are rescued by the titular Defiant-class ship, which is piloted by Red Squad, a team of elite training students from Starfleet. They were out on a training cruise when they were attacked and the main crew was killed. They decided the best thing to do was to field promote themselves, even promoting Nog as he has expertise in getting the Defiant-class running smoother. They have information on a new Jem'Hadar battleship and attempt a risky attack on what they think is a major weakness on it. They pull off the attack... and the ship is barely even scuffed. The Jem'Hadar proceed to wipe the floor with them and even indulge in Sink the Lifeboats with Jake, Nog and one member of Red Squad being the only ones to escape.
  • Stranger Things: After three seasons of unexplained murders and disappearances in their small, ordinary town that a group of Dungeons & Dragons-playing kids always seem to be near, all against the backdrop of The '80s, the fourth season sees the Satanic Panic arrive in Hawkins in full force as the townsfolk decide that all the terrible things that happened are the result of malevolent supernatural forces. While on this show, vicious monsters and demon-like entities from a realm that resembles Hell are all real, the main reference point that the people of Hawkins have for such things is Satanism, so that's what they go with — with tragic consequences for both the targets of their bigotry (particularly Eddie Munson, suspected of killing his girlfriend Chrissy simply because he's a metalhead and a D&D fan) and, in the end, themselves when they're confronted by what's actually going on.
  • Suits seems to skirt reality with the plotline as Mike is hired as a junior lawyer at a major firm despite having never attended law school (he makes up for it with his genius at the law). However, the series plays with this by showing the massive consequences that come from the firm engaging in a fraud.
    • It's pretty easy for someone who tries to figure out Mike isn't a lawyer. Jessica figured it out fast as Mike doesn't have a Bachelor's degree from anywhere.
    • While Mike does his best to fake it, he often fails to recognize things any Harvard grad should know from the popular songs to the locations of the best pizza place. Eventually, Louis finally figures it out when Mike fails to know about the "key" Louis (and any other real cum laude, Order of the Coif Harvard grad) would have.
    • Rachel kisses her ex-boyfriend, and then struggles whether to tell Mike. Donna tells her not to. She eventually tells him, and he walks out on her. After an episode or two, they do get back together, but he admits he's still not over it.
    • Mike, whose parents were killed by a drunk driver, represents a kid who killed a man in a hit and run. As there are extenuating circumstances he's able to get his client a plea deal for a reuced charge and community service, but as soon as the guy signs the deal he reveals that he was high when he hit the guy. Mike secrelty tells this to the prosecutor, hoping she'll throw out the deal and send his client to prison, but she refuses and enters the plea deal. When Mike confronts her she tells him that by telling her his client was high he broke privilege and she couldn't act on that information even if she wanted to.
    • Without Harvey to shield him, Mike's idealism is even less suited for the world of high-stakes corporate finance than it is for high-stakes corporate law.
    • Louis' antics trying to cover his misbehavior, though funny, end up tipping Mike and Harvey off that he's up to something. They figure it out within minutes, and he quits seconds before Harvey would've questioned and fired him.
      • Then it turns out that departing from a major law firm under a cloud doesn't do well for your career prospects, especially since he can't have any of his old clients and he refuses to leave New York. Jessica refuses to rehire him because, in her opinion, he constantly screws up.
      • His secretary is fired for trying to cover his rear.
    • Earlier, Louis' Training from Hell reduces talented associate Harold to a quivering mess. The fact that everyone treated him like dirt didn't help.
    • When he finds out the truth about Mike, Louis succeeds in blackmailing himself to be named as "door partner" and immediately gets ready to fire Mike and Harvey by threatening to reveal the truth. However, Jessica points out what Louis has overlooked: By taking part in the knowledge about Mike to get himself rehired, Louis became part of the fraud and will go down with the rest of them if he exposes it.
    • In season 5, Mike is finally exposed and immediately arrested for fraud. The entire firm faces massive litigation and possible disbarment for taking part in all this. Despite all their hard work, Mike ends up agreeing to a plea deal to get only a few years in jail. Meanwhile, Jessica and Harvey assume their staff will stay out of loyalty. Instead, as soon as the firm's non-compete clause is nullified, every lawyer, paralegal and assistant who isn't a main character walks rather than be associated with a firm engulfed in fraud.
    • Trying to rebuild after Mike's arrest, Jessica decides to expand the firm's hiring pool from 20 other schools rather than just Harvard. Louis has to break it to her that not one candidate is interested in working for a firm that knowingly hired a fake lawyer and facing possibly being shut down.
    • Season 6 adds a new wrinkle and Jessica and Harvey learn that they are being sued for every case Mike ever worked on.
    • In Season 7, an opposing lawyer uses Mike's past as a fraud and convict to prejudice the judge against him. Then later, when Mike tries to hand the case over to Rachel, Harvey forces him to roll with it and keep the case, telling him that if he gives up, every opponent he faces will use his past against him.
    • After Harvey becomes managing partner, he allows Donna to become a senior partner and plans to bring in an old friend as named partner to get a big corporate client. Katrina tells him that he is devaluing the firm by just handing out partnerships, and Harvey is forced to rescind the offer to his friend and give Donna the sinecure of COO rather than partner.
  • Supernatural: In season 15, the brothers get on the bad side of Chuck aka God who has been "writing" their adventures. In anger, Chuck strips the pair of their Plot Armor as they suddenly are hit by new issues:
    • Sam has a hard time not being distracted while in the kitchen and burns his hands grabbing a hot pot without potholders, spilling boiling water and pasta all over the place.
    • Dean suddenly has multiple cavities from his tendency to eat junk food. On top of that, Dean has his usual meal of multiple burgers and beer and is soon throwing up.
    • Their hacked credit card no longer works because no credit card gives unlimited funds.
    • They discover that lockpicking is a long and tedious process, not something that can be done in seconds.
    • The Impala breaks down as it's a 50-year old car that's been driven all over the country, and essentially totaled several times and reconstructed. Maybe Dean's gift for car repair and maintenance really was a god-given gift.
    • In the season 6 episode, "My Heart Will Go On," the brothers find themselves living in an alternate reality where the Titanic never sank. Except that it takes them a while to figure it out, because in a world where the Titanic didn't sink on her maiden voyage and cause the deaths of 1,500 people, there's nothing particularly significant about it. They've never heard of the ship before.
  • Superstore:
    • At the beginning of Season 2, Matteo learns that he is an undocumented immigrant who was brought to the USA illegally as a child. This realistically wrecks his personal and professional life as he is forced to keep a low profile to avoid being deported to a country he doesn't remember and has no links to: he has to turn down a promotion at work because a background check will reveal his status; and has to break up with his boyfriend when he invites Matteo to go on vacation with his family because he doesn't have a legitimate passport (he can't tell his boyfriend the truth because he's a Cloud 9 corporate employee). When ICE eventually find out about him and come to Cloud 9 to detain him, the employees try to help him escape, but they're cornered in an aisle, Amy and Cheyenne suggest some wacky ideas to get away, but he simply says "it's over" and lets them arrest him. As he's being driven away Jonah says the employees need to save him from deportation and then admits he has no idea how. Even when Matteo is released from prison in Season 5, he still has to wear a tracking anklet so he doesn't leave the city and is only rehired at Cloud 9 on a strict position.
    • In the middle of Season 2, Amy separates from her husband Adam after realizing how unhappy she is with their marriage and the fact they only stayed together because of a teen pregnancy at high school. After the tornado hit the store in the season finale, the two were happy to see each other safe and sound so that means they reconcile right? Nope. At the beginning of the following season, Amy tells Jonah she and Adam are getting a divorce because one moment of relief to see someone safe does not negate years of problems.
    • Near the end of Season 5 and the beginning of Season 6, Amy gets a big promotion at corporate level, but it means moving to California. She does not tell Jonah this until Dina blabs it out. This causes a bit of resentment, but Jonah tries to make do with it and offers to come to California with Amy, planning on marrying her. However, Amy does not want to get married, so Jonah has enough and ends things with Amy. If one member of a couple is leaving town but hasn't bothered to ask the other to come with them, the one being left behind will not react well and it is a fast track to a break up.
  • Surgical Spirit: A new doctor is hired at the hospital—a new female surgeon, working with a team where there is only one other woman who isn't a nurse or a receptionist. Problem is, she was hired partially because having a black female surgeon looks good and partially because she was qualified...and unfortunately, she isn't quite up to working with the team. As nice as she is and as helpful as she is, a surgeon who can't do the work could kill a patient, so she leaves at the end of the episode.
  • Survivors: A second-season episode deals with the heroes' realization that as (mostly) a bunch of former suburbanites, they really have no clue how to run a functioning farm. Plus an episode where they also realize that just because they survived The Death, that doesn't make them immune to other diseases.
  • S.W.A.T. (2017):
    • Upon her being approached about being the third in Ty and Kira’s relationship, they reassure Chris that she’d be an equal part of the relationship; with Chris ultimately deciding to go along with it due to her attraction to Kira. Subsequently, Chris becomes closer to Kira than Ty over the course of the relationship, and despite Kira claiming that she feels the same way, it becomes clear that the relationship isn’t as equal as Ty and Kira like to claim as they will always choose each other over the third. Deacon had warned her this would likely happen.
    • In "Gut Punch", Victor's suspended from the LAPD after news got around that he was involved in a brawl in a bar while drunk. Even though it's his first time, the department has him suspended for a couple of weeks without pay to send a message that officers who start things and violate the law will not be tolerated (the guys he beat up didn't press charges). His teammates and immediate superiors are all surprised he got this.

    T to Z 
  • Ted Lasso: Richmond were relegated the season before by Manchester City. In the next they go on a deep FA Cup run, including defeating Tottenham in the quarter final. They get drawn in the semi-final against Manchester City and a revenge plot is built up. Richmond get annihilated 5-0. An underdog team is the underdog for a reason and being highly motivated to win doesn't mean you can't lose.
  • Teen Wolf: Stiles always gets up to some serious shenanigans like stealing police property and kidnapping one of his fellow students... which then causes his dad, the town Sheriff, to lose his job.
  • 30 Rock:
    • In the season 2 finale, Pete shoots the head page in the leg with an arrow to help out Kenneth, whom the page was attempting to restrain to keep him from submitting an important paper. In the first episode of season 3, the incident is brought up and it's revealed that Pete actually got into a lot of trouble for basically assaulting the guy and had to go through two months of anger management and community service to keep his job.
    • Kenneth's feud with head page Donny began when Jenna destroyed Kenneth's jacket, and in order to get a new one, Kenneth had to beat him in a "page off". Every page gathered in a basement to watch them, but just before the contest could start, Pete walked in to shut it down and simply ordered the head page to replace Kenneth's jacket.
      Pete: What, are you kidding me? This is a billion dollar company! Demerits? Donny, give Kenneth the damn jacket!
  • The Thundermans: Max and Phoebe get into a fight with a trio of delinquent girls. One of the girls snaps a broom over her knee to make an Improvised Weapon for herself and her friend. Max tries to do the same, and only succeeds in hurting his knee, doing no damage to the broom.
  • Wednesday: The series's opening scene features the title character siccing a school of piranhas on her brother's bullies, injuring at least one of them, in a scene that is 100% Black Comedy. The very next scene reveals that the boy was maimed as a result, forcing Gomez and Morticia to pull their daughter from school, as his parents had threatened to press attempted murder charges.
  • Yellowjackets: The group finds an abandoned plane. In "Flight of the Bumblebee" Laura Lee decides she will fly it out and find help. Her only "experience" is reading the flight manual and watching someone else fly. Everyone cheers as she takes off... only to explode into a fireball while her horrified teammates watch.
  • Yellowstone: Hendon arrests a pair of horse thieves and plans to drive them back into town. He decides to shake them up by putting them in the back of a trailer with their hands bound. Hendon then drives at high speeds with sudden braking and swinging the trailer around to send the guys slamming about (based on a real-life police punishment called a "rough ride"). Parking back at the local horse ranch, Hendon jokes to his fellow cops on "the two have learned their lesson." He opens the trailer doors... only to find the duo's bloodied bodies, one with a broken neck and the other from internal injuries. Too late, Hendon realizes that unlike a cartoon, being tossed around an enclosed metal container at high speeds can seriously damage a body.
  • Young Sheldon:
    • George teaches Missy how to throw a baseball and she eventually gets good enough that she earns a spot her school's baseball team. She's not the star player that the story sets her up to be because even though she's a great pitcher, she's terrible at batting because George never taught her to bat.
    • In "A High Pitched Buzz and Training Wheels", the refrigerator starts making a noise which only Sheldon’s hypersensitive hearing can pick up. His father refuses to get it serviced because it’s otherwise working perfectly, so Sheldon decides to repair it himself, something the average TV Child Prodigy could do easily, but Sheldon simply dismantles the fridge to find the faulty part and is unable to rebuild it.

Alternative Title(s): Live Action TV

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