The Caligula / Live-Action TV

• Caligula himself, as magnificently depicted by Ralph Bates in The Caesars (1968) and John Hurt in I, Claudius (1976). (See also Brother–Sister Incest.)
• The Centauri Republic's insane emperor Cartagia from Babylon 5. He even sets his planet on a path he knows will probably end with it blown into little pieces because he thinks it'll make a fitting ceremony for his ascension to godhood. In the end, soon-to-be Prime Minister Londo and his associates assassinate him. The sad irony is that Cartagia was believed to be an ineffectual puppet, whom Lord Refa hoped to use as a figurehead for his control over the Republic, but turned out to be truly dangerous. At one point, Cartagia shows Londo his secret room, filled with heads of his enemies (mostly, those who disagreed with him or just got on his bad side; one is implied to have been beheaded because he had coughing fits), which he lovingly maintains and talks to, calling them his "Shadow Cabinet".
  • After Cartagia's death, the Centarum decides to appoint a regent to head the government in order to give them more time to find a suitable candidate for the office who is not insane. Regent Virini tells Londo that with all the Royal Inbreeding that the royal bloodlines were not known for their stability.
• Barbarians Rising doesn't feature Caligula himself, but it does have Valentinian III during the Attila/Geiseric segment. He's incompetent as a ruler but still wants to rule, and as a result, is paranoid that everyone is plotting to usurp him since they keep going behind his back (mostly to protect Rome, but his sister is just power-hungry and is manipulated by Geiseric). This leads to him murdering General Aetius after Aetius defeats Attila and then having his mother, the actual mastermind in the family, executed. He's assassinated afterwards by troops loyal to Aetius, but the damage is done.
• In Blackadder II, Queen Elizabeth I is an example of this trope Played for Laughs.
  • King George III gets the same treatment in series III.
  • Subverted with King Richard the IV in series I; while very crazy and very blood-thirsty, he's actually a successful and prosperous king.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Romans" portrays Nero in this fashion.
  • The Marshall in "The Mutants" is this, as he is crazed and power-hungry to terraform the planet Solos into a second Earth, but its conditions would render it uninhabitable to the native humanoid population (which he sees as inferior to human life). He's so crazed, that even when Earth sends a investigation judge to survey the corruption, the Marshall holds him and his entourage hostage, with malicious hope that they will be the first new Earth citizens on Solos.
  • BOSS, the Big Bad computer pulling the strings in "The Green Death", is definitely more than a little bit loony, particularly as he counts down to launch his plan for global conquest.
    BOSS: Minutes before the moment of truth sails towards us on time's winged chariot!... I love a really juicy mixed metaphor.
  • The Doctor indulges in some Superdickery by pretending to be this in "The Invasion of Time", feigning power-madness and bullying his underlings into feeding him jelly babies.
  • Tekker, and the Borad (previously a crazed scientist), are each this in their respective government positions in "Timelash". Tekker especially seems to take malicious glee in whittling-down and rooting-out any-and-all potential rebels and traitors. That is, until Tekker draws the line at the Borad's complete genocide of his own people. The Borad's reasoning? A freak accident during an experiment fused the DNA of a reptilian species to his own, and he seeks to repopulate the planet with these new creatures, with Peri (set to be transformed as well) as his mate.
  • "The Parting of the Ways": The Daleks are described as having gone mad from hiding in the "dark space" for centuries, and the Dalek Emperor seems to be the maddest of them all.
  • The Master in Series 3, who under the alias of Harold Saxon became Prime Minister, despite still being as mad as ever, if not more so.
    • John Simm had actually played Caligula in a made-for-TV miniseries in 2004, with copious amounts of ham (oh yes). Later, Simm has been quoted as saying that Caligula was just a dress rehearsal for the Master and that he partially based his performance on Caligula.
  • Luke Rattigan in "The Sontaran Stratagem"/"The Poison Sky", who, in addition to being an Insufferable Genius, is quickly revealed to be The Quisling conspiring with the Sontarans to wipe out humanity, with the sole exception of himself and a few chosen intellectuals who will serve as breeding stock as they colonise the planet "Castor 36", aka "Earth.2" or "Rattigan's World". His ultimate Heel–Face Turn only comes after the Sontarans reveal that they had no intention of honouring the deal and the planet itself never existed, leading him to teleport up to the ship with a bomb simply to spite them.
    The Doctor: It's been a long time since anyone's said "No" to you, isn't it?
• In Earth: Final Conflict, Zo'or schemes his way to become leader of the Taelon Synod, but as time goes by he gets more and more out of control, threatens his subordinates, becomes enraged easily, and is willing to sacrifice all of Earth for his own ends. Characters explicitly compare him to Caligula.
  • As bad as Zo'or was, he was downright restrained when compared to Howlyn, the main antagonist from Season 5. Right out of the gate he wants to conquer Earth, is violent, short-sighted and genocidal. He meets his end when he finally takes control of an Atavus ship that has been dormant for millennia and demands they launch it immediately, without even a basic diagnostic. When trying to take off inevitably wrecks the ship beyond repair, Howlyn keeps screaming at his subordinates to make it fly, until one guy has had enough and kills him.
• Game of Thrones:
  • King Joffrey Baratheon is an inbred sadist and an idiot who quickly shapes up into this after taking the throne and publicly murders babies and tortures/kills prostitutes and then wonders why everyone hates him even though he's their king. The notion that people don't automatically love him is completely alien to him. He is responsible for a civil war because he wanted to see Ned Stark's head cut off. He also looks uncannily like the Mad Emperor himself. One of his lines from the Season 3 finale is rather telling:
    Joffrey: I am the King! Everyone is mine to torment!
  • The significantly more evil and demented (if that were possible) Lord Ramsay Bolton as well, who also bears a striking resemblance to perhaps the darkest and most destructive Emperor of them all, Nero.◊
  • He's not the king, but Robin Arryn,^note a renamed Robert Arryn a twelve-year-old who still literally suckles his mother's teat and likes to watch "bad men fly" (people he doesn't like being thrown from the top of his mountain keep), is the hereditary heir to the title of Lord of the Vale and Warden of the East, essentially putting the keeping of one-fourth of the kingdom in his care. And now he's got Littlefinger as his chief counselor... Though, with Littlefinger being executed at the end of Season 7, there's a chance he can get better.
  • A certain saying claimed that upon the birth of a Targaryen the gods flip a coin between madness and greatness, with Aerys II and Viserys^note technically Viserys III being father-son examples of the proverbial coin landing on the side that isn't "greatness". Thankfully, Viserys's exile after his father's death limited the extent to which he could embody this trope, while Aerys II was very much this — he was known as "The Mad King" and apparently had a penchant for killing people in nasty ways.
  • Karl Tanner's reign at Craster's Keep involves a great deal of violence and debauchery.
  • At the end of season 6, Queen Cersei Lannister burns down a significant portion of King's Landing to wipe out all her enemies in one fell swoop before crowning herself Queen and intending to start another inbred royal line with her brother Jaime. When the new Targaryen-Stark alliance presents her with evidence of the undead army planning to invade the Seven Kingdoms, she pledges to aid their war effort but is really planning to let the continent go to hell and hope that she'll survive it.
  • As it turns out, Queen Daenerys Targaryen would probably have turned out somewhat like this, as she starts her reign by making an example of 'the population of King's Landing'' before proceeding to give speeches about freeing the world to her soldiers in the burned-out remains of her capital.
• Horrible Histories features several of the worst Roman examples in one song, including the trope namer himself, plus Commodus, Elagabalus, and Nero.
• Julius Caesar (2003): The Roman dictator Sulla is portrayed as this. His political ambitions to maintain the senatorial system is glossed over and he invades Rome and orders purges just to seize personal power. He massacres all his enemies, orders Caesar's heart cut out by Pompey, and sentences a coin minter to death because he felt like it. His tyranny ends when he drowns in his own bath due to a heart attack.
• Monica Mancuso on Las Vegas. The Montecito's other owners have ranged from reasonable (Gavin Brunson) to friendly (Casey Manning) to aloof but thoughtful (AJ Cooper), but Mancuso gradually devolved into outright megalomania during her stay.
• The Legend of Xiao Chuo: Yelü Jing murders his servants for the slightest offense, including simply walking up to him when he wasn't expecting it, and has his own nephew castrated for sleeping with a maid.
• Princess Agents: The emperor of Wei isn't as obviously deranged as some examples, but he's crazy and paranoid enough to have an entire family murdered because he's convinced some of them are traitors.
• Queen for Seven Days: Lee Yung, better known as Yeonsan-gun of Joseon, is willing to behead his half-brother for losing a race — and that's just the start of his cruelty and insanity. Made worse because the series actually tones down the historical Yeonsan-gun's atrocities.
• See: Queen Sibeth Kane (Sylvia Hoeks) has always been unfit to rule, only caring about her hedonistic and egotistic pursues, killing servants on a whim and turning her sexual frustration with a sighted man into a paranoid cult that killed many people for nothing. It only got From Bad to Worse over the years.
• Stargate SG-1: "Lifeboat" has Daniel accidentally end up sharing his body with multiple consciousnesses from a crashed ship. One of them is their ruling Sovereign, who definitely comes across as one of these.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "The Mirror", as soon as he comes to power, Ramos Clemente proves himself to be extremely irrational, paranoid and blood-thirsty. He sees enemies all around him. As well as ordering mass executions, he becomes convinced that his lieutenants D'Alessandro, Garcia, Tabal, and Cristo are plotting against him due to having seemingly foreseen it in the mirror. Clemente throws D'Alessandro off the balcony of his mansion, has Garcia and Tabal executed as enemies of the state, and shoots Cristo as he believed that the wine that he offered him was poisoned. When he looks in the mirror and sees only his own reflection, Clemente shoots himself. His reign lasted for only a week.
• Wiseguy's Mel Profitt is a billionaire Arms Dealer and drug smuggler who suffers from bipolar disorder and severe paranoia. He's given to sudden manias (in one episode, he forces the protagonist to join him for batting practice at 3 o'clock in the morning so he can rant about his plans to buy an MLB franchise) and weird obsessions (he believes that everyone from Virginia is either a CIA or FBI agent, and has had people killed on that basis in the past). In the end, he completely self-destructs when he convinces himself that a Caribbean strongman he's in business with has put a voodoo hex on him.
• Wonder Woman (1975): Marion Mariposa from “Screaming Javelins” is wildly irrational, violently moody, very intolerant of being told anything he doesn't want to hear, and in control of a micronation, submarines, and his mercenaries. He infiltrates the US by sky diving, kidnaps Olympic athletes in an attempt to gain popularity for his own micronation, Mariposalia, and his Arch-Enemy is not Wonder Woman, but IADC agent Diana Prince.

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