Examples of Ripped from the Headlines in Live-Action television series. A staple of most Police Procedural dramas, some works have their own pages.
Works with their own pages
- 9-1-1
- Cold Case
- Criminal Minds
- Law & Order
Other Works
- Accused: The incident which sparks the plot is clearly based on the vehicular murder
where Neo-Nazi James Alex Fields, Jr. used his car to ram protesters against the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which injured protester Heather Hayer fatally. Here, the victim is a black man (who survives) however, with the incident occurring in New York City. - All Rise
- Season 3 episode 2 "The Game" is clearly based on the real life case of Trevor Bauer.
- All of this makes watching True Crime shows like American Justice or Cold Case Files an interesting experience, especially when you recognize a case you didn't know had been ripped from the headlines.
- Just about every Police Procedural show (Bones, NUMB3RS and Without a Trace ... remarkably none of the Law & Orders participating) got to show off their Friendly Local Chinatown for an episode based on the ancient Chinese custom of "ghost brides": the family of a young man who died before getting married arranges for a deceased girl to marry him in the afterlife; the episode typically dealt with someone who forgot the "deceased" part when selecting a bride.
- The second half of the first series of Babylon was based on the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan and the resulting riots.
- Babylon 5: The dockworkers' strike in "By Any Means Necessary" riffs on the 1981 strike by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers' Organization, which ended in failure and the firing and replacement of over eleven thousand workers by the Reagan Administration under a 1955 law that prohibits strikes by employees of the US government. The dockworkers in the episode are noted to be employees of EarthGov by way of the station administration, and a similar "no strikes" law was passed in the Earth-Minbari War and then never repealed because of the power it gave employers.
- Battlestar Galactica (2003) often took sci fi twists on whatever was going on during The War on Terror.
- The first episode of the final season of Strong Medicine had a storyline that referenced the 2005 Glendale train derailment (where a guy left a truck on the track). They made the suspect in the episode female...and bipolar.
- Bones:
- One episode takes the pregnancy pact reportedly taken by a group of Massachusetts girls and incorporates it into the storyline. Bones herself thought it was a good idea for the girls to band together; meanwhile, in Real Life, the "pact" turned out to be a huge coincidence fanned by rumors and probably more than a little snarking.
- Another episode was inspired by the Hello Kitty Murder.
- One of the criticisms of Boston Public was how every school-related controversy during the late 90's/early 2000's seemed to happen at that one high school.
- Castle:
- The episode "The Late Shaft" pretty much based its entire story around the Jay Leno-Conan O'Brien debacle over at NBC, with a dash of David Letterman's affair/blackmail story thrown in for good measure. Nathan Fillion was a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that night...
- The episode "47 Seconds" also dealt with bombings at an expy of the Occupy movement. (When the repeat aired on TNT just after the Boston Marathon attack, they issued an apology.)
- The episode "Habeas Corpse" features a car company that was fictional and totally not General Motors, that had decided it would be cheaper to cover up several deaths due to a fault in their car (the airbag, instead of the ignition switch) rather than issue a recall.note
- CASUAL+Y:
- Occurred in July 2012, Casualty did a two part episode, featuring a riot in its fictional setting of Holby, this was similar to the riots in English cities a year ago.
- A storyline from the 1990s in which an ambulance ended up going off the road and laying across a railway line was very obviously based on the Great Heck rail accident. The next-of-kin of those killed in the crash were less than impressed.
- On a lighter note, in a 1997 episode of Coach, the title character's football team is sabotaged during an away game in Buffalo when a local restauranteur serves them poisoned wings. This is based on an incident that happened to New Zealand's team during the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa.
- Columbo did this at least twice following the series's Revival, with the sociopathic duo of college students in Columbo Goes To College based on Leopold and Loeb, and Columbo Goes To The Guillotine starring Expies of Uri Geller and James Randi. Though it's worth noting that both episodes changed the underpinnings of their stories more than usual for the trope: the evil college students killed a professor who would have exposed them for cheating and not a child, with the "We did it because we knew how" explanation being made up after they were caught, while the Uri Geller stand in actually passes his psychic powers test... because the Randi stand in helped him cheat as a favor to an ex-friend, only for not-Geller to kill him the next day as Revenge for the reason behind that "ex".
- Crownies has a few examples, with one case being based quite clearly on the murder of Carl Williams.
- Both CSI: Miami and Law & Order have plots based on a census taker who found in the woods, strung up with the word "FED" pinned to his shirt. While both stories are undoubtedly murders, Real Life revealed it was actually a staged suicide — he was attempting to pin his death on local rednecks so his family would get the insurance money.
- CSI: Miami went for quadruple plot points by adding slave labor, a repossessed house, and a meth lab. Another one was based on a real life murder suspect who photographed his victims. One was the sister of one of the actors.
- Original flavour CSI Vegas:
- It did an episode revolving around guns produced in 3D printers within barely a month of news breaking about Defense Distributed's Liberator.
- "Anatomy of a Lye" ripped the case of Chante Jawan Mallard, who struck a homeless man with her car, drove home with him clinging to the roof, and left him to bleed out in her garage rather than taking him to a hospital.
- "Unfriendly Skies", a first season episode, ripped the murder of Las Vegas resident Jonathan Burton aboard a plane, which took place a mere two months before the airing of the episode.
- "Felonius Monk" was based on the massacre of several monks at a Buddhist temple in Arizona during a robbery in 1991.
- "Overload", based on the death of a child during a "rebirthing" session intended to bound her to her adopted mother, in 2000.
- "I like to watch", featuring a woman raped in her apartment by a man pretending to be a fireman, was ripped from an identical case that took place in New York the year before.
- “Pledging Mr. Johnson” was based loosely on the death of a fraternity pledge in the sixties due to a swallowing raw liver initiation.
- The Season 2 premiere "Burked" was based heavily on the murder of Ted Binion, right down to the cause of death and the victim being the son of a casino magnate.
- "Leaping Lizards," involving the murder of a woman involved in a UFO group that believed in the existence of reptilian aliens, is loosely inspired by the murder of Girly Chew Hossencofft, whose con artist ex-husband convinced a UFO believer that she was a reptilian who needed to die.
- Every season of Damages features this:
- Season 1 was based on Enron's pension scheme shenanigans.
- Season 2 was partly based on fracking pollution scandals and partly on Enron's manipulation of the energy market.
- Season 3 revolved around the family of a stockbroker who had been caught and convicted of running the largest Ponzi scheme in history but definitely wasn't Bernie Madoff, honest.
- Season 4 dealt with a Brand X of Blackwater and secret CIA torture in Afghanistan.
- Finally, Season 5 was based on WikiLeaks and the sex crime accusations against Julian Assange.
- The first three seasons of the Canadian crime series Da Vinci's Inquest dealt with the main characters attempting to find out who was behind the disappearances of prostitutes in and around the Vancouver area. The show was inspired by the real-life kidnappings of prostitutes by B.C. pig farmer Robert Pickton (he hadn't been caught at the time the show began), and numerous episodes contained characters speaking at length on the failure of the Vancouver police department to find the killer. When Pickton was caught, the creators dropped the plotline altogether.
- Degrassi:
- Degrassi Junior High
- Shane jumps off a bridge while on acid, much like Benji Hayward, a 14 year-old boy who did the same thing after a Pink Floyd show in Toronto. However, while Shane survived (albeit with significant brain injuries), Benji died.
- Degrassi: The Next Generation
- Season 3, In one of the series' many Gay Aesop stories, Marco's shoes get stolen when he's the victim of a hate crime, much like Matt Sheppard, only not as lethal.
- Season 13, In a plot that seems to be blatantly following this trope, basketball player Miles and his best friend are shown taking photos of and carrying Zoë (who is inebriated and unconscious) into the pool house where she is later recorded being raped by unknown assailants, resembling the Steubenville rape case. The rapists turn out to be members of the hockey team, again similar to the Steubenville case (in which they were football players).
- Degrassi Junior High
- Doctor Who used to encourage its writers to do this from time to time:
- "Planet of Giants" is rooted in the then-recent release of the book Silent Spring, which highlighted the damage DDT was allegedly doing to bird populations. The story concerns an ecologically-devastating pesticide.
- "The War Machines" featured the newly-built and cutting-edge technology of the Post Office Tower, as well as theoretical new concepts like computers all over the world linked together via telephone lines (which of course is presented as the computer ringing people up to talk to them with words).
- "The Tenth Planet". Writer Kit Pedler was asked to write about something in the science world that concerned him. Early robotic prosthetic limbs and implantable artificial pacemakers were emerging at the time and so he chose to create a race of Cyborgs that had replaced most of their human bodies with machinery - the Cybermen.
- "Inferno" concerns a plot to drill through the Earth's crust, inspired by the Kola Superdeep Borehole, a project to do the same thing that began in 1970.
- "The Curse of Peladon" dealt with political intrigue on a monarchal planet around the time its various power players have thoughts on whether or not the planet should join the Galactic Federation - right around the time Britain was deciding whether or not to join the European Economic Community.
- "The Mutants" was inspired by the controversy regarding the British colony of Rhodesia during the 1960s and 1970s. During a period when the British Empire was divesting itself of its colonies and, in Africa, handing them over to black African governments, the white residents of Rhodesia unilaterally declared independence and introduced a South African-style Apartheid system. The story has a declining human empire deciding to withdraw from a colonised planet, at which point the Evil Colonialists in charge decide to stay and attempt to commit genocide on the native sentient culture.
- "The Green Death" concerns a mushroom that can be used to replace meat - at the time there was a fear of protein rich foods becoming scarce within the next twenty years and so scientists were researching alternative protein sources derived from mushrooms and yeast, including the research that went on to create Quorn.
- "The Robots of Death" has a plot about robots that instinctively creep people out - basically, the Uncanny Valley effect, which had been newly described at the time.
- Dragnet was based on actual events and was made with as much realism as possible.
- Shortly after a posthumous investigation found media personality Jimmy Savile guilty of many historical sex crimes, EastEnders announced a similar plotline where Kat Slater (who was already established to have been raped by her uncle when she was 13) is asked to come forward in relation to allegations made against him by other victims after his death.
- Elementary:
- "Lesser Evils" is inspired by the Kristen Gilbert murders, a nurse who killed four patients (and was suspected of killing eighty others) with epinephrine at the Veteran's Administration hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts in the early 1990s. There's even a drug-addict coworker as a Red Herring.
- "Step Nine" has a killer commit murder with a plastic gun made from a 3D printer and then destroy the gun to hide the evidence. The technology to make such a gun was less than a year old at the time of airing.
- "We Are Everyone" was obviously inspired by the Edward Snowden scandal. The Snowden Expy is helped by a Julian Assange-type character (sans the rape allegations). It should be noted that the Snowden expy is portrayed totally unsympathetically, being willing to kill and endanger lives rather than face the legal repercussions of his leaking national security secrets (And it is implied that he did it just to get attention).
- "The Five Orange Pipz" episode involves toy beads that that contain substance that metabolises into potentially lethal GHB when swallowed due to the manufacturer substituting the substance for the more expensive non-poisonous substance. This is a nod to a similar problem with Bindeez toys.
- "One Watson, One Holmes" involves a schism in Everyone, which is transparently based on Anonymous. A few months earlier, shortly before the start of the season, there was a schism on 4chan, with many users migrating to 8chan.
- Part of "The Games Underfoot" episode is people searching for a cache of videogames that the manufacturer buried during The '80s because of the negative reception, which is a reference to thousands of copies of the infamously bad E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial licensed game that Atari buried in a trash dump during the The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 and its rediscovery that was chronicled by the Atari Game Over documentary.
- "Crowned Clown, Downtown Brown" featured creepy clown sightings similar to the ones prevalent in September/October 2016.
- The solution of "The Art of Sleights and Deception" turns out to revolve around an anatomy textbook that was written and illustrated by a Third Reich-era German doctor who dissected the bodies of Holocaust victims to create it. This is inspired by the real-world controversy relating to the ''Topographische Anatomie des Menschen'' by Eduard Pernkopf.
- "Breathe" has a pharmacuetical executive who jacks up the price on medications to the disgust of virtually everyone, based on Martin Shkreli.
- The "ghost of Brooklyn" debacle in the episode "On the Scent", in which a number of unrelated murders are mistakenly believed to be by a serial killer due to accidental contamination of forensic kits with the DNA of a worker at the manufacturing plant, is inspired by the real-world German case of the "Phantom of Heilbronn".
- "Lesser Evils" is inspired by the Kristen Gilbert
- Subverted by Fargo. Like the film that inspired it, it is not based on actual events as it claims to be.
- The Flashpoint series finale features an antagonist whose backstory is very similar to that of Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, specifically in the sense that the fictional character was a younger-than-usual college student who was psychologically tormented by a professor as part of a supposed behavioral experiment.
- Forever: "Hitler on the Half-Shell" bears a strong resemblance to the 2013 reports of a vast trove of art stolen by the Nazis being confiscated from the son of Nazi art thief Hildebrand Gurlitt, who had inherited the works. The son, Cornelius Gurlitt, left all of the art in his will to a museum in Switzerland.
- Frasier:
- When driving home from work, Frasier notices a statuesque woman standing on a street corner. Being the gentleman he is, he offers her a lift. The moment she gets in his car, police lights flash, and he's arrested for soliciting a prostitute. In jail, he asserts that he was just giving her a ride, but the cops don't believe him. When Niles & Martin come to bail him out (disgusted that he would be so immoral) the prostitute is led out of the other interrogation room, no longer wearing "her" wig, and apologizes (in a now more masculine voice) for getting Frasier in trouble. The look on all three of their faces is priceless.
Martin: (to Frasier) You're my son and I love you.
- This comes from an incident when Eddie Murphy was caught picking up a transgender hooker, and insisted that he was just giving her a ride home.
- Another episode features Frasier endorsing a politician who confides in him that he believes he's been abducted by aliens. When Bulldog tells Frasier the next day that a scandal involving aliens has hit the press, Frasier tries to defend the candidate on the radio, only to find out the scandal was about him allegedly employing illegal aliens (although it turned out he was just providing housing for foreign exchange students). This is inspired by both the "Nannygate" scandal, in which not one but two of Bill Clinton's Attorney General nominees were found to be employing illegal immigrants as part of a tax evasion scheme and Jimmy Carter's claimed UFO encounter.
- Niles's ex-wife, the wealthy heiress Maris, becomes involved with an Argentine polo player who she claims is abusive and ends up killing, supposedly in self defense. This is obviously inspired by the near-identical real life case of Susan Cummings.
- Ghost Whisperer and Law & Order: Criminal Intent did episodes based on the Tri-State Crematory scandal, where corpses were never cremated and "piled like cord wood" in the undergrowth. Ghost Whisperers caretaker was just old and senile while CIs caretaker was both bad at business and using the undergrowth to hide bodies for his assassin brother. Said brother was also trying to give him business advice, to no avail.
- The Good Wife:
- In the episode "Whack-a-Mole", after a bombing in Milwaukee an Internet witch-hunt starts up on a website that is totally not Reddit. The witch is an Arab-American anthropology professor who kinda looks like a blurry photograph not-Reddit thinks is the bomber. This was clearly lifted from what happened on the real Reddit after the Boston Marathon bombings, except the real Reddit didn't end up getting sued for defamation.
- Another episode had a trial in an airport after a member of the National Security Agency was retained there for "inadvertently" leaving the country in possession of a USB with data from his job. In the real life Edward Snowden case, there was never a trial, since he reached Hong Kong and leaked the data before the NSA knew anything about it, let alone could stop him. note
- Like in its predecessor series, The Good Fight has its share of these... but perhaps the most pointed was an episode about a crime series burying its "ripped from the headlines" episode based on the Trump Administration, which was seen as a pointed Take That! to SVU for burying its own "ripped from the headlines" episode based on Trump's "grab them by the pussy" comments that came out during his campaign.
- One episode of Grounded for Life was promo-ed as "ripped from the headlines", when a character's interference causes the Yankees to lose a game. Except that the real game was between the Marlins and Cubs, and the episode was a rerun.
- The Hawaii Five-0 episode "Kupale" is based partly on the real-life drama of the Hawaii Superferry.
- Holby City has managed to time storylines so they appear onscreen at the same time a story is just becoming big news thanks to industry insiders - the producers received a heads up on a story about dodgy breast implants in France several months before it actually broke, and the story was only becoming a major scandal at the same time the resulting related plot appeared on screen. As well as this, there is a series of episodes involving John Gaskell and a "Miracle Cure" for someone to walk, which is based on the David Noakes scandal.
- House did an episode based upon the case of Whitney Cerak and Laura VanRyn. Two young women similar in appearance and build were misidentified after sustaining horrific injuries in an accident. In the House episode, as in real life, one of the women did not survive and the other woman's care was supervised by the deceased woman's family. So did CSI: NY, with the twist (of course) being the "dead" girl's mother accidentally killed her own daughter, who she (and everyone else) thought was the party-girl "survivor". Later in the series, the episode "Hide Sight" drew from the cases of the Stayner brothers, Steven (I Know My First Name Is Steven) and Cary, and the episode "Misconceptions" was based on the disappearance of Etan Patz.
- How to Get Away with Murder:
- The first season's storyline behind Lila Stangard's murder was eerily similar to the real-life death of Elisa Lam, a Canadian tourist whose body was discovered in the water tank of a Los Angeles hotel. As a whole, the series often tackled serious modern issues such as racial disparities in the criminal system, Generational Trauma, bi erasure, and recidivism, among others.
- Season two's "Skanks Get Shanked" seems to have been inspired by the murder of Skylar Neese, a teenage girl who was murdered in cold blood by her two best friends in 2012.
- Hustle was notorious for doing this when choosing marks to be conned by the con artists. Over 8 seasons, marks included bailed out bankers on massive pensions, expense-fiddling MPs, and lying journalists. Cons included selling the Ashes trophy that England had just regained after 18 years, selling London landmarks to reduce the UK deficit, and selling bogus 2012 London Olympic torch runs.
- Interview with the Vampire (2022): Just like in Real Life when Season 1 first aired, the COVID-19 Pandemic is still ongoing in the June 2022 scenes.
- JAG: Female combat pilots in the Navy? The War on Terror? Issues with various aircraft? Homeless veterans? Racial bigotry? Gays in the service? You pick 'em, this show has 'em in spades.
- The Joan of Arcadia episode "No Bad Guy" contains a plot involving an elderly man who loses control while driving and causes numerous deaths by crashing into a farmer's market. As the episode's title suggests, the moral is that sometimes bad things just happen with no one to blame. However the case of George Russell Weller, on which the episode was based, was not so co cut and dried. There was evidence that the incident was a premeditated spree-killing.
- The Journalist centers around a scandal where a school connected to the Prime Minister's wife is sold public land at a suspiciously low price. The local finance bureau then altered their records in order to cover it up, and the employee charged with falsifying the records later committed suicide out of guilt. This was all based on a real-life scandal in Japan, even including the suicide of the local finance bureau employee.
- Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital not only incorporated King's own roadside near-demise, but also did an episode based on the series-losing error by, and subsequent pariah status of, Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner.
- L.A. Law:
- It once had an episode based on the case of Angela Carder, a pregnant woman terminally ill with cancer forced to undergo premature cesarean section by court order. In Real Life, both died. On TV, the baby survived.
- This was common for whatever the 'light' sub-plot was for L.A. Law. Lawsuits and criminal charges based around toad-lickers and bull semen were often fictionalized news bites.
- Leverage often has this, with episodes based on the Upper Big Branch mine disaster and Pfizer's rather bad week of quality control, among others. John Rogers often says on his blog that most of his stuff is just as pulled from the headlines as the other crime dramas, only with less sodomy with a violin bow. The Leverage team also took down a Madoff expy and Hank-Med was hired to treat another one.
- One episode of Lie to Me was based on the Bernie Madoff blowup and the pilot had a similar plotline to the Elliot Spitzer scandal. Secret Santa lampshades this by referring to the event that inspired the episode.
- Madam Secretary:
- The second episode is literally called 'Another Benghazi', and deals with a dangerous situation outside the US Embassy in Yemen which Secretary Elizabeth McCord fears may escalate to the same level. They do, but the Genre Savvy Liz had private security in place who get the ambassador to safety this time.
- Several season one episodes involve a fictionalized version of the talks on Iran's nuclear program that were being conducted by the Obama administration in real life at the time. It turns out in the end that Secretary Marsh's assassination was carried out by CIA Renegade Splinter Faction that wanted to solve the problem with regime change instead of peace talks.
- "Spartan Figures" deals with the Greek debt crisis.
- The second episode is literally called 'Another Benghazi
- In Monty Python's Flying Circus, the story of the Piranha brothers and their pursuit by Superintendent Harry "Snapper" Organs is based on that of the Real Life Kray twins, who had recently been brought to justice by Insp. Leonard "Nipper" Read.
- USA series Necessary Roughness, about a professional American Football team's therapist, has a major Season 2 story arc blatantly based off the then-contemporary New Orleans Saints bounty scandal.
- The Newsroom is set one to two years in the past, and follows journalists at a fictional cable news station as they cover real-life news stories from that time, such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the first episode. Also, the News Night team's coverage of the fictional military operation, Operation Genoa, in the second season was based directly on CNN's coverage of Operation Tailwind in the late 1990s.
- NUMB3RS does this - many episodes (including the pilot) are based on real-life cases, but not recent ones. For instance, the Season Five finale had a cult figure based off of Charles Manson, played by Gaius Baltar.
- The main plot of the NYPD Blue episode "Roll Out The Barrel" is based on the murder of Reyna Angelica Marroquin, a crime discovered a few months before the episode aired.
- In Oz, Ryan O'Reilly's mother was a member of a far left group that was based on The Weather Underground.
- A TV movie called Pregnancy Pact, "based on a true story" according to the ads. Just like with the example mentioned for Bones above, the true story is that there was no pact and the story was nothing but rumor and bad journalism.
- Queen Sugar: The show tends to incorporate recent political and social issues, especially ones affecting the African-American community. In particular, the show focuses heavily on police brutality and corporate greed destroying small towns and rural communities. It also touched on the deportation of undocumented migrants from Latin America following the Trump administration's controversial measures to separate migrant children from their parents/guardians at the American-Mexican border. Season 5 makes the COVID-19 Pandemic and George Floyd Protests integral to the story.
- The plot of Scrubs episode "My Lunch" was ripped from a real case
- The Secret Life of the American Teenager was made when the "teen pregnancy epidemic" scare was at its height. Pretty much the whole series was/is marketed on how it "realistically" portrays the lives of teen mothers.
- Seinfeld: In "The Chicken Roaster", a branch of Kenny Rogers Roasters opens outside the characters' apartment building, with a large neon sign that shines straight into Kramer's apartment, making him unable to sleep. This was inspired by a real-life confrontation between a New York City branch of Kenny Rogers Roasters and a neighboring law office.
- Sherlock: The attempt on Major Sholto's life is almost precisely how Empress Elisabeth of Austria was assassinated: stabbed with a thin weapon (a sharpened industrial file, in her case) and held together by fabric (her very tightly laced corset). She was killed for being royalty (and therefore responsible for the people's suffering, as Sholto was responsible for the death of his team) in the wrong place at the wrong time note - just as Pvt. Bainbridge was nearly killed.
- The Shield: The ultimate fate of the Vendrell family was not in the first draft of the finale. Shawn Ryan added it after reading about wrestler Chris Benoit murdering his wife and son before killing himself. The show itself is largely based on the LAPD Ramparts and CRASH scandal.
- Shots Fired follows an investigation into the shootings of two unarmed teenagers, one white and one black. While the former isn't based on any particular incident, the latter is inspired by the 2015 death of Eric Harris, an unarmed black man who was accidentally shot by an unqualified "reserve" deputy after confusing his handgun for a taser.
- Squid Game: Gi-hun's backstory of being a former automobile factory worker who is afflicted with PTSD after a worker's strike he organized was brutally quashed by authorities is most likely inspired by the SsangYong Motor Company strike of 2009, which similarly ended in police violence. Further evidence to this is that Gi-hun mentions that he missed his own daughter's birth because he had to help a dying friend during the strike; Gi-hun's daughter is 10-11 years old, and the show is set in mid-2020. Also, the company Gi-hun used to work with is called Dragon Motors; "SsangYong" means "Double Dragon" in Korean.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
- In the two-part episode "Past Tense", Sisko, Bashir, and Dax find themselves in the year 2024, where the United States has set up "sanctuary districts" for the homeless and long-term unemployed that have essentially become internment camps where the poor are sent to be forgotten by the rest of society. At the time (1994-95), Los Angeles' mayor proposed something very like Sanctuary Districts while they were filming the episode.
- A variation occurred in the middle of a space battle between the Defiant and some Klingon warships, where a civilian transport decloaked and was promptly blown away by Worf, thinking it was an attacker. The episode, "Rules of Engagement", focused on Worf being on trial over the incident. A similar incident, involving a US AEGIS cruiser and an Iranian civilian airliner flying through the middle of a battle and getting shot down took place, and the captain ended up on trial for it... back in 1988, almost a decade before this episode aired.
- Both Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard received some backlash due to their unsubtle use of current events (Donald Trump's presidency and Brexit in particular), as well as making clear the writers' view on the matters. note
- Street Legal's two-hour series finale, "Last Rights", is loosely based on the case of Sue Rodriguez, an assisted suicide advocate who died one week before the final regular episode aired.
- The Lifetime series Strong Medicine featured an episode with a B-plot based on the 2005 Glendale train crash, where a suicidal man left his car on the tracks after having second thoughts, and a commuter train hit it and derailed into two other trains, causing 11 deaths. In the show, the perp was a female bipolar patient of Lu's clinic, who went to the clinic immediately after her episode, oblivious in her manic state to the carnage she had just committed (the hospital Lu's clinic was a part of had been treating victims of the crash for most of the morning.)
- The Suite Life of Zack & Cody: The main plot of "Big Hair & Baseball", in which Mr. Moseby becomes a pariah after catching a baseball and causing the Boston Red Sox to lose, is an obvious rip on the Steve Bartman fiasco.
- Supernatural:
- Season 1, episode 15 (The Benders) features a family named after The Bloody Benders, a serial killer family from the late 1800s (though their MO is closer to 20th century serial killer Robert Hansen).
- Another episode, aired not even one year after Josef Fritzl was arrested, had Sam and Dean come across the incestuous descendants of a man that imprisoned his daughter in the cellar and raped her. Dean even comments that "this sounds like something out of the Austrian newspapers".
- Tehran: Mossad's operation to disable Iranian anti-aircraft defenses for a potential Israeli air strike is (likely) inspired by the Israeli Air Force's air strike operation when they bombed the incomplete Iraqi Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981.
- Regularly inverted in The Thick of It, which has become infamous for predicting real life political policies and gaffes. However, played straight in Series 4 with the Goolding Inquiry, which is largely based off of the 2011-12 Leveson Inquiry which came as a result of the News of the World phone hacking scandal.
- The Twilight Zone (1959):
- "King Nine Will Not Return" was inspired by the story of the Lady Be Good, a World War II bomber which crashed in the Libyan desert on April 4, 1943, but was rediscovered in 1958, only two years before this episode aired. The missing crew likewise refers to the missing crew of the Lady Be Good, who were later discovered to have perished trekking across the desert under the mistaken belief they were near the Mediterranean Sea, instead of over 400 miles inland. Finally, the date on Sgt. William F. Kline's grave is April 5, 1943, the day after that the Lady Be Good vanished.
- Rod Serling wrote "The Shelter" in direct response to the social discourse and anxieties during the ongoing Berlin Crisis.
- "Deaths-Head Revisited" was inspired by the capture and ongoing trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the main architects of The Holocaust.
- "The Parallel" was inspired by John Glenn becoming the first American to orbit Earth aboard the Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962.
- "The Bewitchin' Pool" was inspired by Earl Hamner, Jr. reading about the increasing divorce rate for married couples and its effects on children in the San Fernando Valley of California.
- Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is about the titular Kimmy Schmidt, who was taken at the age of 13 by an Apocalypse Cult leader and forced to live in his basement for 15 years. It mostly references the Ariel Castro case (in which 3 women were kept in Castro's basement for 11 years) as well as a little bit of the FLDS church with the outfits they were forced to wear.
- The CBS show Unforgettable, about a detective that can remember everything that ever happened to her, has this in the episode "Check Out Time". The episode was about a Dominican hotel maid who was accused of murdering someone, but claimed he was attempting to rape her. The plot revolves around the detectives solving the questionable story. The story was pretty obviously based on the then-recent case involving Dominique Strauss-Kahn's alleged rape of an African hotel maid with a questionable story.
- Happened accidentally on The Unit, in an episode where the members of the unit infiltrate Syria to rescue Jonas' daughter, despite being strictly told not to do so because it constitutes as an act of war against a sovereign nation. Just two weeks before the episode was aired, there were actual news reports of an American attack in Syria, involving an infiltration team and helicopters. While the episode itself was (probably) written and filmed long before these events, the fact that it aired two weeks after it actually happened makes this a curious accidental case. (In point of fact, such a coincidence would usually lead to such an episode being pulled by the network and rescheduled for later, on account of it being too soon.)
- Van Kooten En De Bie: Many of their sketches were based on events that were in the media during the week of broadcast.
- Walker, Texas Ranger can name a number of these such as Al Capone ("Blue Movies"), The Vietnam War ("Codename: Dragonfly", "The General's Return"), World War II ("The Soul of Winter"), the assassination of John F. Kennedy ("The Deadliest Man Alive"), Bonnie and Clyde ("Collision Course", "Desperate Measures") and the Oklahoma City Bombing ("The Day of Cleansing").
- Walking with Dinosaurs: Several of its episodes were clearly inspired by recent paleontological discoveries that had only been described a few years prior. Unfortunately, the franchise's tendency to jump the gun has made it an extreme example of Science Marches On, since later more detailed research has frequently refuted what was known back then.
- The episode "Giant of the Skies" reeks of this. The title character is a gigantic Ornithocheirus, which was based on a pterosaur fossil that had not yet been fully described and had an upper size estimate of a twelve metre wingspan (later studies showed it as a Tropeognathus specimen and was less than nine metres). The episode also featured the giant dromaeosaur Utahraptor (living in Europe of all places), which had only been described in 1993, and the giant Tapejara species (now considered a Tupandactylus species), that was only described in 1997 (the series began production in 1998 and aired in 1999).
- The episode "Spirits of the Ice Forest" is set in the highly obscure and little-known locale of Mid-Cretaceous Australia. This was due to numerous fossils found in "Dinosaur Cove" in Victoria showing dinosaurs which lived in cold, polar regions, and challenged the common notion that the Mesozoic was only endless tropical jungles and swamps. Of particular note was a giant salamander-like amphibian Koolasuchus, which had only been described in 1997.
- The 2002-2003 spin-off episodes of Chased by Dinosaurs also came about from this. One focused on the bizarre Therizinosaurus, that had only very recently been confirmed to be a gigantic herbivorous theropod (a novelty at a time when all non-avian theropods were believed to be carnivorous), while the other episode focused on the giant carnosaur Giganotosaurus and the giant sauropod Argentinosaurus, the former described in 1995, and the latter in 1993, and having made headlines as the largest land carnivore and herbivore respectively (this is especially notable because none of the other animals shown lived at the right time, as study on the South American fossil formations was so new, most of the species now known from the region at the time period set had not yet been described).
- The West Wing did this at least once, with the Lowell Lydell arc in the first based on the death of Matthew Shepard.
- Many of the scenarios featured on What Would You Do? reflect real world incidents.
- When Dinosaurs Roamed America has one segment set in the Moreno Hill Formation, which had revealed North American dinosaur species of the Mid-Cretaceous, previously a very unknown period in dinosaur history. This includes featuring the early horned ceratopsian Zuniceratops (described in 1998) and the therizinosaur Nothronychus (described in 2001, the same year the series premiered, and one of the very first depictions of therizinosaurs in popular media). Notably, the main characters of the segment are a pack of dromaeosaurs which were based on fossils that were unnamed and in description at the time. This attempt to be cutting edge ended up biting them when closer analysis during mid-production revealed the fossils were not of dromaeosaurs, but of a much more basal coelurosaur species. This was partly addressed with a hastily added small coelurosaur, but it in effect turned the main characters into fictitious creations (it later turned out the fossils were of juvenile tyrannosaurs, eventually named Suskityrannus in 2019).
- The Wire is based largely on the experiences of David Simon working as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, and Ed Burns as a police officer and teacher in the city, and the show also hired real, reformed Baltimore underworld figures to both consult and play bit roles. Starting in season 3, a number of high-up drug dealers start the New Day Co-op, a co-operative to share the costs and profits from the drug trade and to sort out differences without violence. There was a real, albeit smaller scale, drug dealing operation that ran out of a grocery co-operative known as The New Day Co-op in Baltimore.
- Without a Trace premiered in the fall of 2002, after a summer full of infamous kidnapping cases note , including that of Elizabeth Smart, whose story was profiled at the end of the ninth episode "In Extremis" (Every episode concluded with a blurb on a Real Life missing persons case). In particular, the episode "Maple Street" is based on the 2002 disappearance and murder of Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis. With a slightly happier ending—in Real Life, both girls were found dead months later, whereas on the show, one was found alive.
- WKRP in Cincinnati: The 1980 episode "In Concert," in the wake of a tragic incident at a December 1979 The Who concert in (where else) Cincinnati, where 11 people were trampled to death in a stampede prior to the concert. The real-life events are set within the context of the show's fictional universe, with station personnel engaged in their usual banter and fun and games in promoting the concert in the first act, and then coming to grips with the events of the concert in the second act and vowing to call for action. The episode went on to earn critical acclaim from many who saw the episode, calling to attention a dangerous phenomenon that had fortunately never happened anywhere else.
