Sacrificed Basic Skill For Awesome Training / Live-Action TV

• Tom in Being Human is incredibly naive and socially awkward, due to having been raised in near-isolation from a young age by his adopted father. His lack of social graces are because all of his training was focused on managing his Lycanthropy and in hunting down and killing Vampires. Considering that Vampires have superior strength to humans, while Werewolves are regular individuals for most of the month, it's a testament to this training that Tom is able to go toe-to-toe with numerous Vampires and is said to have an incredible body count to his name.
• The Big Bang Theory: Sheldon has, as he puts it, "a working knowledge of the important things in the universe"... which apparently does not include driving a car. Justified in-universe in that cars do not seem to be a frequent transportation method in most of our solar system or of our universe. Sheldon also Does Not Understand Sarcasm or even symbolism, adheres rigidly to familiar habits and schedules and knows little to nothing of non-nerdy popular culture (a trait shared somewhat with his roommate Leonard). Sheldon's social skills are also lacking, but that's more by choice; he's relentlessly logical, brutally honest, and refuses to feign interest in people or situations he finds boring. He's also incapable of keeping secrets. The main reason he doesn't lie or keep secrets is that he's paranoid that someone will Pull the Thread. The one time we see him try to lie, he constructs an elaborate back story (which he insists Leonard learn and help him construct alibis and documentation for) and provides unsolicited details about it at awkward moments. With the effort he puts into lying, it's just easier to accept the consequences of honesty.
• Dr. Temperance Brennan from Bones is a genius forensic anthropologist, but has zero social skills, no knowledge of pop culture, and Does Not Understand Sarcasm.
  • Every time Brennan says "I don't know what that means", take a shot. You won't make it to the first act break.
    • While she still lacks social skills and can often be overly Literal-Minded, her understanding of society has greatly improved in later seasons.
  • Oddly enough this only extends to her own culture. She has shown a working knowledge of several other cultures, including their pop culture, over the course of the show.
    • Making it even odder, she shows an understanding of many things in her own pop culture, making it a bit off-putting that she misunderstands common metaphors but views Jersey Shore of all things as a documentary, and apparently thought that Selena Gomez was an anthropologist.
  • Zach Addy, Brennan's assistant until he goes batshit crazy and becomes the apprentice of a cannibal, is the same way, leading to widespread speculation that he has Asperger's.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: When she showed up in Sunnydale, Kendra the Vampire Slayer demonstrated the primary weakness of the Watcher's Council usual treatment of potential slayers (that is, they trained them to be living weapons above and beyond all other things). Kendra might have been a kick-ass fighter, for sure, but when it came to anything other than just hitting things, she was naïve, nervous about interacting with boys, had no dress sense, hesitant, and when push came to shove easily beaten by an enemy that did anything other than stand there and offer her a straight fight.
• In Burn Notice, Michael mentions that spying is a great way to learn things like how to survive in the back mountains of Afghanistan, or how to disassemble a .50 caliber machinegun, but it doesn't teach you how to do more basic skills of normal life, like keeping track of sports teams or how to hold a baby. He's also fluent in many world languages... but can't say two words in Spanish (note: he was born and raised in Miami, a very Spanish-fluent area).
• Mostly averted with Sherlock in Elementary, who is just as smart but is able to navigate the social circles fairly well (for one, he has no trouble finding sexual partners, even engaging in a Twin Threesome Fantasy at one point). However, his main flaw is expecting everyone else to see things from a logical and not emotional standpoint, and he admits he can be a dick a lot of the time. After betraying Captain Gregson's trust, he thinks that Gregson is being immature when the captain no longer trusts him. Also, his idea of proving to his brother that Mycroft's fiancee is only interested in the family money is to repeatedly sleep with her. He does, however, spend a lot of time training and practicing, ignoring unnecessary little things like sleep.
  • Part of the reason Sherlock can cope on this level is that he's learned he doesn't have to specialise; where Sherlock seemed to basically keep track of everything he'd need to know for investigations on his own, in Elementary Sherlock has a group of experts — referred to as his 'Irregulars' — he can consult if a case requires specialised knowledge of particular subjects he wouldn't expect to deal with on a more regular basis (Mathematics, meteorology, computer hacking, etc.)
  • As of Season 3, Watson has been trained to or close to his level of skill. It's worth noting that everyone in the show who's in his league (Holmes, Watson, Kitty) are all profoundly hurt in some way, though Watson is otherwise fairly normal and Holmes was just as skilled before his major trauma. The one exception is Moriarty, who's just a sociopath.
• Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother is highly skilled at the performing arts, speaks multiple languages, is a master manipulator and seducer, can write loophole-proof documents that a trained lawyer cannot work around, and his home is full of complex gadgets which he apparently designed himself. However, he is also shown to lack a basic understanding of world or even US geography^note He thinks Spain is Italy, Sweden is France and Iowa is in the Deep South, simple life skills like driving and using tools, and, despite being very socially adept in other areas, is unable to navigate a genuine romantic relationship or a serious dispute with his best friend without help.
• Very harshly Deconstructed in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit when an abusive Education Papa puts his Teen Genius daughters through academic Training from Hell. After he cuts one daughter loose for not reaching the ultra-super-genius levels that he demanded, she got a job as a waitress because he never taught her how to do anything practical with her life.
• Legion (2017): Kerry Loudermilk is an odd example. Kerry and Cary are actually a single mutant who have the ability to split into two people. Kerry (the girl) spends most of her time merged with Cary, where she doesn't age and can ignore the outside world completely. Since she's a Blood Knight, she only comes out for training and fighting, leaving the "boring" stuff like eating, sleeping, school, and talking to Cary. The end result is that Cary's over forty years older than Kerry, and Kerry doesn't even know the most basic things about the world, like what people do in bathrooms. Cary is very worried about how she'll survive when he eventually dies.
• Parker from Leverage. An incredibly talented thief who plans complicated robberies the same way normal people do crosswords, she nonetheless has serious problems interacting with people on an everyday basis. Because of an abusive childhood (during which she may or may not have blown up her foster parents) and later being raised/trained by a master thief, she comes across in non-heist situations as awkward, disturbing, or somewhere in between. Word of God says that she's high-functioning autistic.
• Played for Laughs in Married... with Children. In one episode Al trains Kelly to learn a bunch of sports trivia for a quiz show, and during the Training Montage we see basic life skills (like "Dinner first, then sex") literally exiting her brain.
• Lauren and Jayden in Power Rangers Samurai were basically raised as weapons. Jayden has very little idea how to interact with people since he's only seen two since he was five and one of those left when he was seven. Lauren, bizarrely, is easy enough with the team but awkward around Jayden.
• The title character in Sherlock is a polymath forensic genius who has honed his memory and reasoning skills into precision weapons and spends his spare time researching things like what harpoon wounds look like. His knowledge of human interaction is limited to criminology and he's absolutely hopeless at navigating social situations. His older brother Mycroft is even more brilliant and even worse at emotional reasoning. As distinct from Doyle's "attic" metaphor, Sherlock speaks of it in terms of deleting unnecessary items from his hard drive.
  Sherlock Holmes: Look, it doesn't matter to me who's Prime Minister, or who's sleeping with whom—
  John Watson: [somewhat bitterly] Or that the earth goes around the sun.
  Sherlock Holmes: Oh God, that again?! It's not important!
  John Watson: Not important? It's primary school stuff! How can you not know that?
• Stargate SG-1 has a version of this with a one-off race of aliens. The "awesome training" is instant learning from nanobots, which are imprinted with the information by specially selected children who basically act as information harvesters. The children are filled with these nanobots, then tasked with learning everything there is to know about a specific topic. Once the child reaches a certain age, the nanobots are harvested and spread to every member of the society — leaving the child essentially mindless. Learning is painless and thorough, but because the kids their information comes from are treated as pure data-gathering units, they never learn things like play, with the result that no one else on the planet learns it either; the concept of drawing something that isn't an exact diagram is utterly foreign to them.
  • Later upped by the Ancient Repository of Knowledge. It writes everything there is to know about the universe into one's brain... but the human brain is not meant to store that much information, gradually overwriting things and eventually killing the subject when it starts mucking up low-level things. O'Neill was the only one who actually used it on-screen; it gave him insane scientific prowess, to the point that he invented a revolutionary new method of distance calculations between Stargates using base 8 math, and tweaked the battery of a handheld energy weapon into a one-use energy source of astronomical power... at the expense of losing his ability to speak, read or even understand English. Later comments by the Asgard imply that very few humans could have survived even that. Most would've just burned out in minutes or seconds.
    • Another Repository was used by Daniel Jackson, but according to all evidence this one had been specifically programmed to only give Daniel the knowledge of a specific Ancient, the man known to mythology as Merlin, and was also programmed to automatically depart Daniel after a certain amount of time.
  • Dr. McKay encounters another Ancient device in Stargate Atlantis, which enhances his brain activity in preparation for ascension. However, as he starts developing advanced powers such as telepathy and telekinesis, his brain starts losing the ability to regulate the more basic functions needed to keep his body alive, until it becomes a choice of "ascend or die".
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In the episode "Mute" we have a young girl, orphaned in a house fire, who apparently cannot speak a word. She turns out to be completely telepathic. Unfortunately, a strictly conformist teacher forces the girl to be Brought Down to Normal by forcing the girl to speak (which causes her to lose her gift).
• The Swedish comedian group Varan TV made a sketch about a family who didn't let their son go to school because that would take time from their busy schedule of teaching him ninjutsu so he could participate in junior leagues of UFC. "Why learn math when there are so many other important things to know in life? Like how to escape when attacked by three people at the same time."