Take Our Word For It / Live-Action TV

Characters insisting you take their word for it in live-action tv shows.

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• The many, many reality shows dealing with haunted locations never show any video evidence — real or fake — of ghosts, specters or apparitions. What they do instead is offer a lot of hazy green close-up shots of people screaming in terror at things the viewer never gets to see. While they're no doubt going for the Nothing Is Scarier effect, it also seems suspiciously like the producers are trying to hide the fact that the night-vision camera ate up most of their budget.
• Kerry's painting in 8 Simple Rules that didn't get to the exposition because it was deemed "too controversial", and Paul turns away in shock when the picture is shown to him.
  • A few episodes later, Kerry shows the video she took where Paul breaks Bridget's nose while playing tennis. We never get to see this moment, but the whole family turns away in disgust when they see it.
• Lampshaded on 30 Rock, where Liz and Jenna put on a sketch to prove to Tracy that women can be funny. We see them performing, and the entire audience laughing, but all we hear is a musical number assuring the audience that the sketch is hilarious.
• Two occurrences of "Footage not found" in Arrested Development. Especially the one after Lindsay said she and Tobias used to be happy once.
• In the pilot of Babylon 5, Dr. Kyle is the first known person to have a look inside a Vorlon's encounter suit. Prior to this, there was only a legend that the only human to do so turned to stone. The only thing shown on screen is rays of light coming out of the suit, and later, he warns another character that "it is for the best" she not look for herself. In the end, unable and/or unwilling (due to medical confidentiality and the diplomatically delicate nature of the situation) to describe what it was he saw, he instead waxes hauntingly poetic with a bit of a Thousand-Yard Stare:
  There are moments in your life when everything crystallizes and the whole world reshapes itself right down to its component molecules. And everything changes. I have looked upon the face of a Vorlon, Laurel. And nothing is the same anymore.
  • Also, the Technomages know "the true secrets, the important things. Fourteen words to make someone fall in love with you forever. Seven words to make them go without pain. How to say good-bye to a friend who is dying." We never find out what they are, though.
• Batman (1966) did this with certain effects as part of its humour. For example, in one episode Mr. Freeze freezes the Batmobile, but while we get to see the beam hitting the vehicle, the actual "car getting frozen" shot is instead one of Batman and Robin's shocked expressions at the amazing thing occurring before their very eyes. Of course, the shot immediately after is the Batmobile now encased in ice.
• In Being Human, after several unsuccessful attempts to haunt and torment her ex-fiancé/killer Owen, Annie whispers a secret to him that "only the dead know." We never hear what it was that she whispered to him.... only that it was so frightening that it led Owen to turn himself in for his crime and go completely insane.
• There are several of these on Better Off Ted, all related to past Veridian experiments, but the most notable is the octochicken. Assorted references to it indicate that it has eight legs, spins a web, and lives in a tank. Veronica's threat to throw a group of misbehaving employees into its tank is met with looks of pants-wetting terror.
• The Big Bang Theory:
  • The series played this with Howard Wolowitz's mother, where we only started getting brief glimpses of parts of her (but never her face) after Season 5. Though we hear her a lot.
  • In "The Killer Robot Instability," Barry Kripke has a video showing his robot destroy an entire car. The audience hears part of the video, but doesn't see it, only Leonard, Sheldon, and Raj's reactions to it.
• Blackadder: With the low budget for the series Blackadder II, sometimes what the characters see is left to the imagination of the audience.
  • In "Potato":
    Baldrick: This doesn't look like Southampton to me. All those palm trees, and natives standing round a large pot.
  • In "Money", the audience does not see the paintings which Blackadder shows to the bishop. However, they do see Percy in his outlandish outfit.
• Bones: In the fifth season episode "Bones on the Blue Line", page 187 of Brennan's latest crime novel describes a too-steamy-to-say-out-loud (on network TV at least) sex act, inspired by Hodgins, as dictated to Brennan by Angela. The episode has reaction shots of various characters reading the page and several extremely vague bits of dialogue between characters about the maneuver, but the details are left entirely up to the viewer's imagination.
• During Buffy the Vampire Slayer's seventh season, Buffy takes the Potentials to Willy's bar, where they meet Clem, a kitten-eating demon who is otherwise really quite friendly and, apart from an excess of skin, looks fairly normal. When she sees that the Potentials aren't getting the right message, she asks Clem to show them what he really looks like. We see from behind that his face opens up and something comes out, but not any details. It does, however, set a group of girls training to save the world from horrific evil to screaming.
  • In "The Zeppo" (season three), Xander is deliberately excluded from a struggle to save the world; the most intense parts of the battle are shown in the reactions of Xander and his undead opponents as they happen to pass by.
  • The monster that everyone but Xander is fighting in this episode is barely seen (aside from a few tentacles), but is ostensibly the same demon that tried to escape the Hellmouth two seasons earlier in Prophecy Girl, where again all we saw was tentacles. The demon itself is apparently terrifying though — Willow's reaction: "Every nightmare I had that doesn't revolve around academic failure or public nudity is about that thing. In fact, once I dreamt that it attacked me while I was late for a test, and naked."
• In Castle, there are many mentions to the books the main character writes, particularly a series protagonized by character Derrick Storm, which are good enough to become best-sellers but, according to Castle, "aren't Shakespeare".
• In season 5 of Charmed, Phoebe becomes a successful advice columnist, has her own billboard ads, gives radio interviews and is generally said to be really funny. Of course the audience never hears more than a single sentence from her columns. She also ends up sleeping with the boss. We got a little insight when Phoebe first got the job. The person wrote in saying she was still living with her parents and was afraid of living alone. Phoebe's response, which seemed like something of an Ass Pull, was that she should get a dog for a companion. The previous columnist praised this for being proactive (it actually got her out of the house) and for being non-judgemental. Both her (and Piper's) response was simply "Get a therapist, and get a life." The columnist said hers was better and handed the job over, so she must have done something right.
• Cheers.
  • We never see Norm's infamous wife Vera.
  • In the first season episode "Truce or Consequences", Carla convinces Diane that Sam is the father of her youngest son Gino. When Sam finds out about the lie, he bursts into laughter. Diane is offended until Carla shows her a picture of Gino, which the audience doesn't see, and she, too, bursts into laughter. Then Carla shows Diane a picture of Gino's actual father, and she, Diane and Sam are on the floor (Carla's ex does eventually appear on-screen).
  • Cliff asks Frasier if a person's signature really reveals anything about their personality. Frasier tells him that it's nonsense, then looks at Cliff's signature and says "Mother of God!".
• Inspector Columbo's wife is often mentioned, but never shown. In one episode we see a picture we are told is of Mrs. Columbo, but at the end it is revealed to be her sister. That woman named Columbo who solves crimes? No relation.
• Community - In "Early 21st Century Romanticism" Britta enters the study room nonchalantly bragging about having a lesbian friend. Everyone stares pointedly at Pierce, anticipating a comment - instead he pulls out a prepared statement in a thick bunch of paper, takes a deep breath...and the opening titles roll. At the return, everyone is staring in alarm...
  Pierce: ...and, in summation, good luck, and bon appétit.
  Jeff: Many, many paragraphs of that were oddly supportive!
  Pierce: Wait 'till you hear the one I have for you!
• Although Criminal Minds isn't too averse to showing the gruesome results of a crime (or even the act), many times, if the crime is especially heinous, we'll just hear the characters talk about it instead of actually seeing it occur. Some notable examples:
  • "The Caller" has the team come across a murdered child. Perhaps afraid of the audience reaction if it was shown, the episode does not actually present us with the dead body, leaving the father's grieving cries upon discovering the body and the team's description of how the body was left behind as the only indicators that a child has been killed.
  • "The Apprenticeship" has one of its suspects be revealed to be someone who is cruel to animals. When the team finds him but before they arrest him, we hear the screams of a dog and see the man from his back, appearing to lord over the animal. The abuse to the dog is never shown, with the team's description and the poor animal's wails being the only indicator that the suspect is abusing the dog.
• CSI: NY: Child pornography is found on a victim's laptop in "Rush to Judgement." The only image shown to the audience is of a shirtless young boy clad in a pair of shorts. When Sheldon shows the rest to Mac, the two men are facing the camera with the back of the laptop toward the viewer. Mac is so disgusted he looks away, telling Sheldon, "That's enough," apparently before they're through scrolling through the file.
• Curb Your Enthusiasm:
  • In "The Weatherman", a close-up photo of Larry's teeth horrifies everyone who sees it. It's not shown to the audience.
  • In the episode "The Benadryl Brownie", Richard Lewis's girlfriend eats peanuts to which she's allergic. As a result, her face becomes hideous, and, of course, it's never shown.
  • The episode "The Nanny from Hell" features a little kid with an impressively large penis. For obvious reasons it's not shown.
• Captain Mainwaring's wife, Elizabeth, in the British sitcom Dad's Army is another character who is never seen or heard on screen but who is frequently mentioned so much can be inferred about her.
• On Desperate Housewives, Julie is so moved by a letter that her ex-boyfriend Austin wrote that she considers taking him back. Considering that Austin was good looking but a moron and a bit of a jerk who cheated on her with one of her friends, getting that friend pregnant, that's got to be a romantic message rivaling Shakespeare. Shame we never get any hint of what it is.
• The Dick Van Dyke Show got into it with the episode "October Eve", though it's possible that the abstract painting of a nude Laura may have been seen at the very end of the episode. They also tried hiding Alan Brady's face for a while, but then gave up and showed it. (Both Brady and the painter were played by series creator Carl Reiner.)
• In Dirty Jobs, Mike repeatedly laments that there is no way for the audience to smell whatever horrible stench he is smelling on his latest job. In one of his milestone specials, he talks about how much work the show puts into trying to convey an experience covering all five senses to the audience using only visuals and audio (their solution, he explains, relies a lot on extreme closeups and Camera Abuse).
• Doctor Who:
  • The Daleks, up until "The Power of the Daleks", were never shown outside of their travel machines. Previous to that, they were merely described as horrifically mutated monsters. (Most people forget the appearances of the organic Daleks prior to "Genesis of the Daleks", when they first appeared in colour.)
  • "Remembrance of the Daleks": The Time Lord superweapon called the Hand of Omega was never shown on screen, but only displayed abstractly in terms of the golden glow it cast on characters' faces.
  • "The last, great Time War" took place at some point between the old series and the new series. We never, ever get any details or specifics. All we know is that Something Really Bad happened and now the Doctor is the Last of His Kind (except when he isn't) as is that remnant of the Daleks that got un-sealed for this encounter only (and the same will go for the next batch, and the next...) The general idea seems to be that the Time War was so apocalyptically HUGE that the biggest Hollywood budget movie wouldn't even begin to approach how big it was. A glimpse of the Time War is finally seen in "The Day of the Doctor"... and it resembles every other generic sci-fi battle since Star Wars. There's a reason this trope exists, after all.
  • "The God Complex": Everyone is said to have a room somewhere in the labyrinthine hotel in which the episode is set. One is said never to know what greatest fear of theirs they will find therein, only to realize, upon seeing it, that it could never have been anything else. When the Doctor finds his room (conveniently numbered 11) the audience is not shown what is inside. We see only a rueful look on his face and the sound of the TARDIS' cloister alarm ringing.
    The Doctor: Of course... Who else?
    • "The Time of the Doctor" reveals the Doctor's room to have contained one of the cracks in time.
  • "The Day of the Doctor" has its own example with the Moment, a superweapon so powerful even the Time Lords wouldn't use it, which ended the Time War in an instant by annihilating both sides. It isn't used on screen.
  • "Orphan 55": Benni is never seen after he's captured by the Dregs, and requests a Mercy Kill when he's able to communicate with the rescue party. When Kane reveals that she killed him, she says that the Dregs had some "fun" with him, suggesting that he was not in a pretty shape.
• Farscape has the "place I once saw" that Stark shows to calm or comfort people. Obviously, only they get a glimpse, via psychic link, leaving the audience out. Stark states that he saw this place as a boy, and having grown up on Katratzi he is almost certainly showing them the Strelitzia garden (the only remotely beautiful place on a Scarran military base), which means the audience only gets to see it three seasons after it is first mentioned.
• Father Ted often features characters talking about a mutual acquaintance, Father Bigley, who has a number of repulsive physical features including enormous fish lips and a deathly-pallid complexion, as well as a number of unlikely life stories (including performing OJ Simpson's wedding). Writers Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews have indicated that Maris (below) was their inspiration for this perennially unseen character.
• Frasier
  • The show never shows us Maris, making a full character based entirely on this trope. (Reputedly, they did plan to introduce her some time, but built up such a bizarre legend that no human could ever actually play her.)
  • The episode where Roz meets her unborn baby's grandparents: we don't get to see the photo of the father pre-nose-job or Roz's childhood photo which shows her with sticking-out ears.
• In Friday Night Lights, Matt's father is killed by an IED in Iraq. The explosion mangles his body, so a closed casket funeral is planned. Matt has trouble accepting that his father is really dead and demands to see the remains against the funeral home director's advice. The audience doesn't get to see what Matt sees inside of the casket, but from his nauseated reaction, we're led to believe that it's truly gruesome.
• Friends has a few:
  • One of the most well-known examples could well be the Ugly Naked Guy, whom the various characters frequently watch, but we never see. In one episode, we see a part of him, and he's apparently hairy.
  • And the writers eventually yielded to the temptation to let us see Monica in the days when she was fat... which precipitated a certain amount of Flanderization.
  • There were two straighter examples of this trope: in "The One with Ross's Sandwich", a note to prevent sandwich stealing (Ross's coworkers became afraid of him, and he was called by his boss, prompting to a reveal on the previous sandwich stealing), and in "The One with Phoebe's Uterus", an unseen numbered diagram of "sensitive female points" to explain how to completely satisfy a woman (from which we learn that Monica enjoys a lot of whatever "seven" is - heavily implied to be the vagina/penetrative sex).
  • In "The One with the Joke" the characters are talking about a joke we never get to hear in its entirety. We only know that involves a "Doctor Monkey" and that Monica considers it offensive to women, doctors and monkeys.
  • In "The One with All the Candy", there are two: a pornographic figure Rachel draws in Tag's work evaluation, and a threatening note to Monica.
  • And then there's "The One with the Videotape", in which we hear the beginning of a story that makes people want to have sex with you when you tell it to them. The writers did a really good job on that one; the part of the story we hear doesn't suggest anything sexual at all, so the viewer really wants to hear the rest.
  • In "The One Where Rachel Has a Baby", when the child of Janice is shown (not to the audience), we see the faces of Ross and Rachel freeze up, followed by a poor attempt at complimenting the baby. After Janice takes off, they turn to each other: "Did you see the kid on that nose!?"
  • In "The One with Ross's Thing", Ross has a thing on his upper buttock and goes to get it removed. The doctor, having never seen anything like it in 19 years of practicing medicine, calls in every other doctor in, seemingly, the county to have a gander.
  • In "The One with the Birthing Video", the titular video of a Screaming Birth horrifies Chandler and Monica. For obvious reasons, it's not shown to the audience.
  • In "The One Where Joey Dates Rachel", Chandler spent all day playing Pac-Man and putting in dirty words for the high scores screen. The words are never shown, but they are commented on.
    Monica: That one's not dirty.
    Chandler: It is when you combine it with that one.
    Monica: Well, if you don't erase this, you won't be getting one of those from me!
• In the Gilmore Girls episode "The Festival of Living Art", several artworks reproduced using actors (hence Living Art) are shown, but for Pablo Picasso's Guernica, all the viewer sees is the curtain closing and the MC saying "Wasn't that something?"
• The Good Life did this with the music society's performance of The Sound of Music. We cut from leading lady Margot leaving her dressing room for the stage to the speechless after-show reaction from her husband and neighbours. The first line to break the bewildered silence is '... that was The Sound of Music, wasn't it?' (we hear a couple of details, notably that Margot panicked at some point and sang "Maria" from West Side Story...)
• When Heath comes out of the closet to his frat brothers in Greek, they reveal they were more worried about Wade hitting on Heath's underage sister. His defense is, "she did not look fifteen". She's mentioned a couple of more times, but we never see her to judge for ourselves. Just as well; they'd likely cast a 21-year-old for the role.
• A lot of the epic battles in Heroes take place offscreen... or just on the other side of a door.
• Home Improvement has two of these as running gags. The first is Al's mother, who is reported to be very obese and is yet never seen on camera. The other is Tim's eccentric neighbor Wilson, whose face is always partially obscured by props and scenery (generally the fence between the two yards, but when he is in a different scene the length that the set designers go to to obscure his face is very funny). One such incident involved Wilson showing Tim an unfinished self-portrait that lacked any marks beneath the nose.
• In How I Met Your Mother, the episode "Game Night": The group is going around the table sharing their most embarrassing stories. When it gets to Victoria's turn...
  Victoria: OK, it involves a game of Truth or Dare, a squeeze bottle of marshmallow ice cream topping, and the hot tub at my grandparents' retirement community.
  [pause]
  Future Ted: Kids, I tell you a lot of inappropriate stories, but there's no way I'm telling you this one. Don't worry, it wasn't that great.
  [unpause]
  Marshall: That is the greatest story ever!
• iCarly:
  • In “iPromise Not To Tell”, the B on Carly’s history report is completely obscured by the camera and only Carly’s shocked reaction is shown, save for a brief glance of it when Mr. Devlin is handing the report to her.
  • The neck infection video from “iDate a Bad Boy” is never shown, but Carly, Sam, and Freddie find it extremely gross.
  • The knockoff sketches on Totally Teri in "iTake on Dingo" are never shown onscreen, only heard.
  • Carly is rather terrible at art as revealed in “iMust Have Locker 239”, as shown when she draws a rather weird bunny during the webcast. The first one before that was even worse — we never actually get to see it but we do get some awkward detail on it by Sam and Freddie.
  • We never get to see Gibby's Wardrobe Malfunction in "iShock America"; when it has to be onscreen, the crotch area is censored by the camera or someone else covering it; this is probably done on purpose because the malfunction would be too uncomfortable for the show's target audience.
• I'm Alan Partridge:
  • Alan has something embarrassing in a drawer of his hotel room. We never see what it is, though throughout the first season several characters do open the drawer while looking for something else, and do a double-take when they see it. In the final episode Alan throws a party to celebrate his new job: when he emerges from the bathroom he catches everybody looking in the drawer and sniggering.
  • A photo of Alan's daughter, Denise, causes hotel staff member Sophie to burst out laughing, saying "she just really, really looks like you...", much to Alan's confusion and disgust.
• In Living Color! had Mr. McAfee suffering from an ongoing issue with his hemorrhoids. While, obviously, this can't be shown on television, reactions of others who witnessed them (save from his nurse) ranged from hilarity to disgust.
• Played for Laughs in The IT Crowd, when the main trio are in the same room but conversing over laptop chat; Jen and Roy laugh loudly at something which was apparently "classic Moss".
• In an episode of the TV adaptation of Just a Minute, Sue Perkins gets the subject of "Chat-Up Lines". She starts describing how the worst chat-up line she ever heard was by a ten-year-old boy in Paisley, and it's so disgusting she cannot say it. Ruth Jones challenges due to a misunderstanding, while Paul Merton tells her to write the chat-up line down. Ruth discusses the challenge with Nicholas while we see cuts back to Sue writing — she then hands the paper to Paul, who bursts out laughing. "He was ten?" He says, before folding the paper up and "keeping it for future use".
• Then there is the "Venus Butterfly", a sexual technique described in the L.A. Law episode of the same name. The technique is never described on-screen, although it is described to the character Stuart Markowitz, who tries it on his girlfriend, Ann Kelsey, and finds it is as irresistible as advertised. Although the writers made a point of not describing the technique, that didn't stop people from trying to figure it out (possibly in an effort to get useful tips in bed, whether or not it was the "Venus Butterfly"). Most notably, Playboy had a contest on its letters page, which lasted for months, for the best unnamed technique to which the term could be applied. The eventual winner was a combination of cunnilingus and vaginal and rectal stimulation with the fingers. Perhaps intentionally as a nod to the '80s series, that was the definition given nearly two decades later on an episode of Rescue Me in 2004. In 2006, 20 years exactly after the fictional sexual technique was first described, an entire book entitled One Hour Orgasm: How to Learn the Amazing "Venus Butterfly" Technique was published describing in detail the technique eventually chosen by the editors of Playboy.
• In early episodes of Last of the Summer Wine Compo carries a matchbox containing something which disgusts any women he shows it to. One episode ends with his friend Clegg looking into the box with an "Aah, cute!" expression.
• It took quite a long time for the Smoke Monster on Lost to be revealed. For a long time, the audience only had tantalizing hints. One standout example was a Reaction Shot of Locke, staring at it as he crawled away from it on his back. Even Terry O'Quinn, the actor playing Locke, had no idea what it looked like. When asked how to react in the scene, he was told to look as if it was the biggest damn thing he'd ever seen in his life.
• In one episode of Lovejoy, Eric's astonished reaction at an auction to an antique sculpture entitled "My Adonis" wins him the item, and he spends the rest of the show trying to sell or even give it away to anyone who'll stand still long enough to look at it. Not a straight example of the trope, as it is finally revealed to the audience in the very last seconds of the episode to depict a man with an erection at least half the length of his body.
• Luke Cage (2016): Cottonmouth is told by Shades that there's a line of bullets called the Judas, invented by Hammer Industries, that are designed to deal with Luke Cage's durable skin. He can get them by either A) paying for them or B) asking Diamondback to handle Luke. Cottonmouth thinks hiring Diamondback to come in will make him look weak, so he asks what it will cost to pay for the bullets. Shades writes down a number on a piece of paper and hands it to Cottonmouth:
  Cottonmouth: Per bullet?!
  Shades: Mmm-hmmm.
  Cottonmouth: For real?
• In an early sketch on MADtv, we hear about an "insanely bad" report(?), apparently so bad that anyone who reads it instantly goes insane. The boss of the man who wrote it tells of how when he read it, the next thing he remembered was standing naked in a field, howling at the moon. He then goes on to tell the man that his report is out there somewhere causing untold destruction.
• The Magicians (2016): When Quentin and Eliot need to solve a tile puzzle without magic, Quentin decides to just brute force it by trying every possibility, only to immediately discover a problem.
  Quentin: There's a finite number of possible solutions. [checks his math] ...that's a lot of zeroes.
  Eliot: Exactly how many zeroes?
  Quentin: Exactly? A shitload.^explanationAt 784 tile spaces and 15 colors, allowing for repeats and assuming an unlimited amount of each color, the possible permutations comes out to 1.1364415391e+922. The number is so long that the scientific notation is in the triple digits. Shitload, indeed.
• Malcolm in the Middle:
  • Hal's abstract painting was not shown; all we saw was people's jaws drop the second it was completed.
  • In another episode, Hal convinces Lois to fulfill one of his sexual fantasies. When she agrees, he spends the rest of the episode excitedly running around town buying props for it, but we never see what he buys or hear what he's going to do. (This is for the best.)
  • In another episode, Hal is given power of attorney over whether a comatose neighbor's life support should be switched off. He agonises over this for most of the episode. In the end, Lois is praising Hal for making such a great decision about what to do and asks him to summarise (presumably repeat) what he did, but he declines, as he wants to go to bed.
    Hal: When I learnt he was a bird watcher, it all made sense.
  • One episode starts with Reese doing The Worst Thing Ever. Whenever it's described, we get a jump cut to the reaction of the person hearing it, which is all we know about it:
    Hal: ... [Unintelligible Angrish]
    ...
    Malcolm: ...Oh, my God! Did they have to evacuate?!
    ...
    Psychiatrist: [clutching her heart] What were the kittens for?!
    Hal: We don't know.
    ...
    Reese: ...I can name Third World countries where that kind of thing happens all the time!
• Peggy Bundy's mother in Married... with Children is very fat. How fat? Well, so fat that earthquakes accompany her every move, she eats with a pitchfork, Al claims to have "gone blind" when he sees her naked, and just about every fat joke in the book is made at her expense. We never actually get to see her, though. (Though this was done because the actor chosen to play her died while the part was being held for him. Yes, him). We actually got to see Peg's mother in one issue of the comic book series based on the show, and she looked a little on the slim side. This also extends to the horror stories of the fat women who come into the shoe store, which are told by Al but never actually seen by the audience, a trait copied by Bud and Kelly when they deal with fat women in their jobs.
• In the finale of series 3 of Merlin, an immortal army marches on Camelot, overtakes the city, and imprisons King Uther and the Knights of Camelot. According to an eyewitness, it was extremely terrifying. The audience only sees the army preparing, and then the aftermath as Arthur and Merlin sneak back into the destroyed city.
• Monk
  • In "Mr. Monk Paints His Masterpieces", Monk takes up painting as a hobby in one episode and paints a portrait of his (beautiful) assistant Natalie Teeger. Nearly everybody's reaction to it is one of disgust, and the model herself is mortified to find it on display at an art show. It even goes so far as to her trying to burn it, even though it's evidence against a counterfeiting ring. There is a glimpse of it during the scene where Randy is trying to restrain Natalie as she tries to burn it. The result looks a bit like a very bad MS Paint doodle.
  • In "Mr. Monk Fights City Hall", Monk and Natalie are searching the love nest of city councilwoman Eileen Hill for evidence of her disappearance. Natalie opens a drawer to find something surprising and possibly dirty (in both ways), and then right after, she repeatedly tells Monk to never open that drawer.
  • And it happens again in "Mr. Monk's Favorite Show". Natalie and Lt. Disher are reading a former TV star's memoirs, which apparently go into disturbing detail about her sex life. They are visibly shocked, especially at page 73, which Natalie then rips out before Monk can get his hands on the book. Monk is also devastated when he eventually reads the book.
  • In "Mr. Monk Goes to the Bank", when Monk and Natalie find Peter Crawley's dead body stuffed in the trunk of his Jaguar convertible, we don't see the gory aftermath, but we instead get a complimentary Trunk Shot. Natalie is shocked. We do learn from Stottlemeyer that Crawley was shot twice in the head, which implies his head may have been blown off.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus
  • A sketch is centered around a joke, untold to the audience, that is so funny that anyone who happens to read or see it dies from laughter within seconds, including the joke's own writer. The joke catches the eye of the Ministry of Defence and was translated for use against the Germans in WWII. To prove its danger, they told us that one of the translators had accidentally seen two words at once, and had to spend a month in the hospital.
  • The sketch shows some captured British servicemen reciting the joke in German to their captors. Supposedly the British men are safe because they don't speak German and just learned the joke parrot-fashion. But since what they say is actually mock-German, the audience still doesn't know what the joke is. Though there are two actual German words in it: beige dog.
  • Also, there's the famous action sequence from And Now For Something Completely Different, as summed up on the Quotes page.
  • In "The Cycling Tour" episode, Mr. Pither is in front of a firing squad and Mr. Gulliver is being chased by the Soviet Secret Police. He jumps over a fence and ends up right next to Mr. Pither, just in time for the firing squad to attack them with bayonets^note They don't shoot them because they tried several times to shoot Mr. Pither and missed each time. Then we see a card that says "SCENE MISSING" and after that, we see Mr. Pither and Mr. Gulliver back in England, with Pither saying, "Well, that certainly was an amazing escape!"
• The Famous "Banana Sketch" Running Gag on The Muppet Show. Every time they try to explain why it's so funny to an increasingly irate Kermit, everyone starts laughing too much to get beyond "So these two bananas were walking down the street...". Eventually Kermit has enough and snaps, yelling at them that they must be pulling an elaborate joke, certain that there is no such thing as the Banana Sketch.
• Mr. Bean: When Mr Bean is watching television, usually the audience does not see what he sees, only Mr Bean's reaction. The same happens in the horror movie sketch in "The Curse of Mr Bean": the audience knows it is a horror movie from the shot of a sign saying "A Nightmare", and Mr Bean making spooky noises before the movie begins.
• My Hero (2000) has Mrs. Raven's triplets, mentioned frequently but never seen. She shows George a photo of them, and he is horrified.
• My Left Nut: Given the miniseries rating, there's no actual shot of Mick's unclothed swollen testicle. Every time he's "exposed" we only see people's reactions to it while he's only shown from the waist up.
• New Tricks features Gerry doing something particularly gross (but never shown or explained) after being hypnotised. The trigger was a certain song. The other characters even swore never to talk about it. The episode ends with the song sounding and the others screaming "no!"
• Subverted in the first season of Peep Show, there's an episode where Jeremy and Super Hans go on a major drugs binge, which they cannot remember. Jeremy remembers doing "the bad thing", but not exactly what it was. He gradually starts to remember some of the stuff they did, but none of its "the bad thing". Just as it seems the episode is going to end without us finding out, he remembers: they sucked each other off.
  • Played straight with Super Hans' New Years party. Mark and Jeremy arrive to find Super Hans sitting outside, since whatever's happening inside is too depraved even for him. Jeremy goes in alone to investigate, but we still don't see anything after he comes back looking visibly shaken and eager to get out of there. ^note  When Word of God was asked what was going on in that party, the response was "the worst thing you can imagine, but less hygienic".
• The Queen's Gambit: When Beth and Benny face off at the US Championship, we cut from Benny's first move to the pair having a beer at a bar, with beth having defeated Benny. And while we see Beth's first sexual encounter with a guy she has a Russian course with, she has a similar cut to the match when she and Benny finally have sex, with Beth remarking "that's how it's supposed to feel"
• Red Dwarf
  • One episode features Rimmer going insane from a holographic virus and talking to a hand puppet. At one point the puppet whispers a suggestion about what to do to his shipmates, and he simply replies, "Oh no, we can't do that. Who'd clean up the mess?"
  • There's also Kryten's picture of his erect penis when he becomes human. For obvious reasons we don't see it, but we do see that it stretches across two Polaroids. Although the take used in the episode did feature an actual photo of an erect penis to get an appropriate reaction from Craig Charles.
  • Also, when Lister and the Cat are imprisoned on Waxworld by the evil wax droids, Lister watches from his cell window as a firing squad executes Winnie the Pooh.
    Lister: (shaken) That's something no-one should ever have to see!
• Done in every episode of The Red Green Show. It's a sketch comedy show framed by Red Green and Harold Green trying to produce a TV show amid the daily antics of the Possum Lodge members, and Red regularly provides personal updates about the latest big event affecting the lodge. This got more and more elaborate as the show progressed through its 15 seasons, with each episode's final update usually beginning with Red and other members coming into the lodge covered in soot, soaking wet, with shredded clothing, and/or just in time to see something crash through the ceiling before the audience, always due to the adventure they had just finished having.
• Rome:
  • Many of the battles are only described afterward. This is likely for budget reasons, given that historical accounts of the battles are quite clear what happened.
  • The series does not attempt to challenge Shakespeare with new renditions of the famous orations by Brutus and Mark Anthony at Caesar's funeral. Instead, we skip over the funeral and watch a few plebeians recap the funeral's events and marvel about Mark Antony's eloquence. They try to remember specific passages, but mostly fail.
• Roseanne had an episode where D.J. was caught with obscene reading material at school, prompting Dan to be called to come. Initially believing it to be one of his Playboys, he was relieved but later horrified to learn it was a homemade comic book drawn by Darlene that he had confiscated. While Dan was disgusted and angered at the material to the point of grounding her, we never do see what about the comic was so offensive.
• The first episode of The Sarah Silverman Program centres around a TV show called Cookie Party, which involves viewers phoning in to vote for which of the cookies presented this week they prefer. This is apparently a long-running series. Although the opening titles of Cookie Party are shown on screen, the show itself is not, leaving the viewer to speculate as to how such a programme could possibly work. In the second season, we actually do get to see how the show works, when Sarah and Laura end up as contestants. It... doesn't make terribly much sense.
• In the 2009 episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Paul Rudd, Rudd and Andy Samberg appear in a digital short in which they paint a picture together that ends up causing anyone viewing the painting to kill themselves. An auction of the painting results in a room full of people committing suicide.
  • A skit for "Tremfalta," a drug to help with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, involves a woman who apparently does something unspeakably foul in the bathroom during her son's elementary school musical recital. The janitor (Kenan Thompson) and principal (Aidy Briyant) are so horrified they end the performance demanding to know who among the parents was responsible. The woman tells her husband to keep his mouth shut and threatens the woman who gave her Tremfalta (after she left the bathroom) that she'll destroy her life if she says anything.
• In an episode of Scrubs, Elliot has a huge bunion on her foot that she wants removed before her boyfriend comes back. Apparently the bunion is so hideous that seeing it causes J.D. and Turk to feel ill, nurses scream and the surgeon who is supposed to remove it faints.
• Seinfeld:
  • The horrific BO in Jerry's car.
  • The Soup Nazi's knee-buckling soup.
  • In "The Hamptons", there was that really ugly baby.
  • In "The Muffin Tops", Kramer told Jerry about the dangers of continuing to shave his chest, that the hair would keep growing back, fuller and darker. Jerry blew the claim off as an "old wife's tale", until Kramer went off-screen, opened his robe, and showed his utterly horrified friend compelling proof, saying he shaved "there" when he was a lifeguard.
  • In "The Old Man", the characters volunteer to help the elderly; Elaine is assigned to an old woman, who has a goiter so big, that according to Elaine, it looks like she "almost has a second head." Of course, we never see that.
  • In "The Red Dot", where a cashmere sweater is rejected by everyone because it has a red dot on it, which is invisible to the audience.
  • In "The Tape", Elaine leaves an erotic message on Jerry's tape recorder as a joke, which eventually causes all the guys to become attracted to her. The audience, of course, can't hear it.
  • In "The Cheever Letters" Jerry tells George about his date's dirty talk, which causes George to squeeze a ketchup bottle hard enough to squirt a stream far off-camera, but the audience never hears it. We hear Jerry's pathetic attempt at playing along though, which was "You mean the panties your mother laid out for you?"
  • In "The Pick", Elaine accidentally sends Christmas cards with photos of her showing a nipple; those are — obviously — never shown to the audience.
  • In "The Nose Job", George's big-nosed girlfriend gets a rhinoplasty, which is botched up so badly, that George faints when he first sees the results. The audience never sees her nose, only after the mistake is fixed.
  • We hear lots of horror stories about Kenny Bania's Ovaltine-obsessed standup comedy routines but never get to see them.
  • "The Serenity Now" has Jerry getting in touch with the feelings he's always fending off with snark and becoming emotionally expressive and sensitive. When he finally offers to let George confide in him, George launches into an offscreen unburdening of his psychology so intensely disturbing that it traumatizes him into reverting to type.
    George: I thought I could count on you for a little compassion.
    Jerry: I think you scared me straight.
• Parodied in the Stargate SG-1 episode "Wormhole X-Treme!" In the show-within-the-show, the producers plan to show only the reactions of the characters to the arrival of an alien spaceship because they don't have the budget to show the spaceship itself. Until a real spaceship shows up.
  Producer: [pitching dialog to the writers] "Oh, my God! Look at that spaceship! It's...indescribable!"
  • Later, in the epic "200" episode, Wormhole X-Treme returns. This time they have to show how the cast gets to finish an army of Jaffa to reach the gate in 10 seconds (or so) while they are pursued by Replicators. The only thing they'll show? "Wow, I can't believe we did it."
• Star Trek universe:
  • The game of Parrises Squares is repeatedly mentioned, but we never saw an actual game or learned what the rules were. The game has two teams of four who wear matching padded uniforms and wield "ion mallets." The playing field has a ramp, and players can suffer severe injury up to and including facial laceration and broken bones.
  • Star Trek also uses this in a more general fashion for how the Federation, and Earth in particular, became a moneyless paradise largely devoid of internal conflict. Characters often wax poetic about how humanity's only drive now is to better itself because they don't have to worry about anything else other than conflicts that come from outside sources; the details of how such a society came to fruition and how it is maintained are never really explained. This trope comes very close to getting namedropped when Nog asks Jake to explain how the Federation's moneyless society works, and Jake can only respond with "It just does."
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • In "The City on the Edge of Forever", Kirk remarks that ruins extend to the horizon. Only a few fragments are visible in the static shot. (In the Enhanced episode, a skyline was added in the background to indicate buildings in the distance.)
    • In "Is There in Truth No Beauty?", the sight of a Medusan is so hideous it drives one of the Enterprise's chief designers completely insane.
  • In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, we have to take the other characters' word for it that Morn never shuts up any time he's off camera. He also has a lovely singing voice.
  • Star Trek: Voyager:
    • In "Real Life", the Doctor programs a holodeck routine to simulate a real family since he figures, since he's stuck on long term duty (he's a hologram who's intended as an emergency measure until flesh-and-blood medical help arrives, but since that can't happen he's more or less on duty at all times), he might as well grow as a person. Throughout the first half of the episode, he argues with one of his daughters, who wants to move to a higher Parrises Squares league. He repeatedly puts his foot down — he's not happy she's playing the sport at all, because it's so dangerous. Then she ends up getting a severe head injury (playing in the Minor Leagues, even) and is rendered a vegetable. The rest of the episode hinges on the Doctor's struggles with whether or not he should continue the program (he doesn't want to, because he doesn't want to deal with the tragedy, but the rest of the crew repeatedly tells him that while he's free to make that choice, it would defeat the purpose of the program), but still, if you're willing to consider Voyager canon, it's a pretty unambiguous sign of just how dangerous the sport is.
    • In "The 37's", we are told that humans abducted to an alien world in the 1930s have built incredible cities. Take our word for it.
    • In another episode, Neelix praises the performance of an offscreen juggler.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise infamously uses this in its Distant Finale "These Are the Voyages...", showing Riker and Troi watching a holographic simulation of Archer's apparently historic speech at the signing of the Federation Charter. They comment throughout the episode on what a historic speech it was, but the episode cuts to a Montage Out before we hear any of it.
• Three episodes into Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, there was one notable example, "Crazy Christians", a variety-show comedy sketch of which we hear much but see nothing. (It's not until "Friday Night Slaughter" that we even have the slightest idea, beyond the title, what it's about.) There are also a number of smaller examples — usually just the first five seconds of a sketch before moving to the next. Then again, one of the problems that killed the show was that many viewers agreed that what we did see wasn't that funny anyway.
  • The "Peripheral Vision Man" sketches in the pilot episode are considered to be so bad that, when a sketch that "killed in dress rehearsal" is sidelined for an installment of PVM, former showrunner Wes Mendell (Judd Hirsch) snaps and insults the network executives on live television, and characters later mention that the two men who wrote the sketches were "hacks". Considering what the new writing staff comes up with, it's hard to see what exactly is so bad about Peripheral Vision Man.
• Done in Sydney to the Max every time the characters watch TV. We never actually see what they're watching, we only hear them and get their reactions.
• Consciously played with in Top Gear, in the Three Presenters On A Couch section of the show, each week Jeremy Clarkson announces he's found "this" on the internet, the camera then quickly cuts to the audience and other presenters wincing with squick before continuing to some more mundane internet-related news.
• The Thundermans: In "Beat the Parents", the Cutesy Cow show is never actually seen, only heard.
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Need to Know", a man discovers The Meaning of Life. Anyone he told it to instantly became batshit insane. This meant that when the man broadcasted his message on a local radio station, the hero managed to turn off the radio just before it was announced. And when he finally heard it, it was whispered in his ear.
• The West Wing:
  • The series is in love with this trope as we are told multiple speeches were beautiful and moving, yet never shown anybody giving one of these superlative speeches. Of special note is Will Bailey's first big speech he wrote for the president, his inauguration speech after winning re-election. We see Will agonize while writing it, and afterward, multiple people go out of their way to tell him how good it was, but we never even hear a sentence from said speech.
  • When Josh wrote a note to Donna on the inside cover of an antique book that he gave her for Christmas, we saw her reading and her tearful reaction without having a clue what was in the note.
• The Wire:
  • Strip club owner Orlando goes in to buy drugs from an undercover cop. After handing over the money, orlando is given a paper bag. He looks inside and looks back with an Oh, Crap! expression and the cop starts laughing. We never learn what was inside the bag.
  • In season two, McNulty is sent undercover to a brothel, and while he is not supposed to engage sexually he doesn't get the Spy Speak code word out in time before one woman starts pleasuring him orally. Later, he has to write a report about the incident, and aside from Bunk quoting one line, we hear the report is stuff of legends, and prosecutor Rhonda Perlman only reacts with wide eyed shock when she sees the report.
  • Both when McNulty arrests a crew of church burglars, and when Greggs arrests the guy who who hit a state witness with a stray bullet, we don't see the arrest, only others complimenting them on doing good police work.

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