The Coroner / Live-Action TV

• Alexandra Ehle (Julie Depardieu), French thanatologist and medical examiner who doubles as an Amateur Sleuth.
• Quincy, eponymous main character of Quincy, M.E., is an example where the coroner is the star of the show. Every week a dead body and a mystery that the cops alone cannot solve.
• The job of Dr. Elizabeth Stunia (Smadi Wolfman) in Caïn.
• CSI-verse:
  • CSI:
    • Dr. Jenna Williams (played by Judith Scott) serves as Coroner at the onset of the series.
    • Dr. Al Robbins (played by Robert David Hall) takes over the Coroner's position in the 6th episode.
    • David 'Superdave' Philips, assistant coroner (played by former real life coroner David Berman).
    • Doc Robbins once complained about a predecessor whom he described as eating chili dogs over the corpses he examined.
  • CSI: Miami:
    • Alexx Woods (played by Khandi Alexander), although she was eventually Put on a Bus.
    • Shannon Higgins, who replaced Alexx... only to take one right between the eyes shortly after her debut.
    • Tara Price, who quickly replaces Shannon, but gets busted for drug addiction.
    • The fairly goofy Tom Loman (played by Christian Clemenson) replaces Tara and remains in the position for the duration of the series.
  • CSI: NY:
    • Dr. Sheldon Hawkes (played by Hill Harper) in the first season, before transferring to the Crime Lab.
    • Dr. Evan Zao, who disappears with no trace after a few episodes.
    • Dr. Marty Pino (who shows up twice in season 2 before showing up again in season 5, having been fired from the coroner's office, becoming a gambling addict, and raising the money for his gambling debts by extracting drugs out of dead drug users and selling them. He also happens to get his wife killed in that episode and ends up in jail by the end of it.
    • Dr. Sid Hammerback (played by Robert Joy), who has cool glasses, officially becomes the M. E. about halfway through Season 2 and stays on board through the finale.
    • Dr. Peyton Driscoll (played by Claire Forlani) shares duties with Sid for Season 3 but then gets Put on a Bus.
  • CSI: Vegas, the original's revival series:
    • Dr. Hugo Ramirez (played by Mel Rodriguez) serves as Coroner in Season 1.
    • Dr. Ramirez is inexplicably replaced by a female M. E. at the beginning of Season 2.
    • Dr. Milton Hudson (played by Derek Webster) takes over as M. E. in the 14th episode of Season 2.
• Homicide: Life on the Street had several. Most memorable were the stereotypical crusty sardonic old man Dr. Lausanne, and the very unstereotypical Dr. Julianna Cox.
• Most of the cast on Crossing Jordan.
• In an episode of Night Court, a storm causes the cast to take refuge in the morgue; the elderly coroner there is so used to his job that he can eat his lunch while doing an autopsy. (Sure, that would be a pretty serious safety violation in reality, but anything to make it funny, supposedly.)
• During its 13 year run, Inspector Morse went through a number of coroners and pathologists, with varying degrees of desensitisation. Series 1 and 2 had Max Debryn (who also appears in the prequel series Endeavour). In series 3, the pathologist is Grayling Russell, and Laura Hobson, who goes on to appear in Lewis, is the pathologist in the specials. Series 4-7 have various one-off pathologists.
• Inspector Rex
  • In Vienna, Leo Graf is the elderly forensic doctor who helps the Criminal Police.
  • In the Italian seasons (at least the six earlier ones) Katia Martelli does both chemical studies and forensic medicine. After Fabbri's death, she appears less frequently and other women also take her role. Giorgio Gaiba, who has a similar role to that of Leo Graf, also works in that aspect.
  • In the latest seasons, Giorgio Vettori and Sonia Randalli are the ones who analyze the bodies.
• Dr. Pasquano from Italian crime series Il Commissario Montalbano is always at odds with the titular detective. He takes every opportunity to drily snark and snipe at the poor detective who just wants details on the victim.
• Kamen Rider Ex-Aid's fourth Rider, Kiriya Kujo, is a medical examiner. Though, given that he seems to show up whenever needed and also whenever he wants, he's probably off duty most of the time. Not surprisingly, given that a forensic pathologist may not have as much to do as a surgeon or a pediatrician. Also, he's officially dead for most of the series, so he probably ended up working fulltime with CR after that.
• Dr. Robert Kolmaar (Ulrich Mühe), the protagonist of the German series The Last Witness (Der letzte Zeuge).
• A Coroner character is a regular on NCIS and its spinoffs:
  • NCIS itself started with the unfortunately-named Donald "Ducky" Mallard (David McCallum), who fills the role from the first episode until his retirement in Season 16. His protégé, Jimmy Palmer, evolves gradually over time from wide-eyed newbie to fully qualified assistant. After Ducky retires from his medical duties, Jimmy officially becomes the NCIS Medical Examiner.
  • Ducky's counterpart in NCIS: New Orleans is Dr. Loretta Wade (C.C.H. Pounder). She loves the city and the surrounding area at least as much as Pride. In the NCIS Backdoor Pilot, she explains that she originally came with a round-trip ticket and still has the return ticket from all those years ago.
  • NCIS: Sydney offers forensic pathologist Roy "Rosie" Penrose, who is (so far) similar to Ducky in early seasons.
• The ever-cheerful George Bullard in Midsomer Murders (except for a brief spell when the ME was snarky replacement Dan Peterson). Bullard later retires and is replaced by Dr. Kate Wilding, who herself ends up leaving and being replaced by Dr. Kam Karimore.
• On Law & Order and Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Elizabeth Rodgers (Leslie Hendrix). On Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie).
• NUMB3RS has a few (some recurring, others who only appeared once), but the most notable is Claudia Gomez, who is also David Sinclair's love interest for a while.
  • One episode also had a corrupt coroner using his job to hide the body of a victim.
• On The X-Files, Dr. Dana Scully's specialty certification is in pathology; prior to and occasionally during her tenure in the eponymous unit, she taught forensic path at the FBI Academy in Quantico.
• Non-standard personality type: Doug Murphy of Scrubs. Despite being a pathologist, or at least working in the morgue, he retains a very odd mix of loser and cloudcuckoolander. In fact, the reason he was shifted to the morgue is that he is a horrible doctor, having killed nearly all of his patients. This is what leads him to being such a great pathologist: he has seen nearly every way someone can die, because he probably caused it at one time or another. Still, he is seen forgetting where he left bodies, tagging patients before they've died, and playing Texas Hold'Em with a group of corpses.
• Pushing Daisies has an (unnamed) coroner who lets the main characters into the morgue in every episode, complete with an incredibly dry wit and the tendency to be skeptical about any excuse he's given for needing to see the bodies. Word of God say he lets them in because he has a crush on Emerson.
• On Tru Calling, Davis is completely desensitized to anything dead, but extremely squicked out by working on anyone living.
• The Reality Show Doctor G, Medical Examiner, which bounces between the various Discovery Channel networks.
• Dr. Lanie Parish in Castle.
  • Also Dr. Sidney Perlmutter - one of the MEs who eats his lunch in the morgue. Thanks to the industrial-strength disinfectants, it's the cleanest place in the city.
• Natalie Lambert from Forever Knight was a city medical examiner, and although her work was only occasionally relevant to the plot, she did have the novel experience of having a guy who'd been blown up by a pipe bomb reassemble and wake up on her table. Most of the time she tries to help Vampire Detective Nick Knight Find the Cure! for his vampirism.
• Dr. Maura Isles of Rizzoli & Isles; also gets points for an amusing tendency not to notice which of the morgue refrigerators is for staff use.
  "Is this from the good fridge or the dead-people fridge?"
  "Cold air is cold air."
• Gordy the Ghoul from Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Ran a lottery based on the corpses time of death. Often bribed by Kolchak into giving him information.
• Psych plays with the trope. Woody looks like the typical coroner... except he's full out a Cloud Cuckoolander . He's predicted how Shawn and Gus will die, offered to hold organs in the freezer overnight (not for medical reasons), and when he woke up from a drunken stupor surrounded by a white powder he assumes his cocaine problem returned. But his autopsies are usually right, at least.
• In Supernatural, a different one appears in many episodes (since the Winchesters are moving all over the country working on cases) to explain to the Winchesters how the latest Victim of the Week met his or her gruesome end.
• Dr. Ogden in Murdoch Mysteries is more sensitive than most examples, but her occasional mild jokes over the bodies are enough to make the straitlaced Murdoch uncomfortable. (And not for the usual reason being around Dr. Ogden makes Murdoch uncomfortable.) Her temporary replacement at the start of Season 4, Dr. Francis, maintains a constant stream of barbed sarcasm, apparently thinking Murdoch discovers murders just to annoy him. From Season 5, the coroner is Dr Emily Grace, who is essentially a younger Dr Ogden, although once Dr Ogden returns to Toronto, she also helps out occasionally. When Emily moves to London at the start of Season 9, Dr Ogden takes over again, Dr Ogden takes over again, training Rebecca James as her successor. Miss James later leaves the morgue, and is replaced by Violet Hart, who has a dispassionate efficiency, but feels she has something to prove, and therefore dislikes Murdoch questioning her findings (although she's also ruthlessly ambitious enough to fake them if she has a reason to).
• Sherlock has the recurring character of Molly, a coroner who often ends up contributing useful information and even became close enough to him that she was one of the only people, along with Mycroft, who knew Holmes faked his suicide by jumping off a large building, though how she was involved is not stated.
• There are a number of pathologists on the German police procedural series Tatort, the most famous and popular being Wagner-loving Professor Karl-Friedrich Boerne (Jan Josef Liefers) of Münster. In the episode Der doppelte Lott he even has a cross-over with his colleague from the Cologne "Tatort", Dr. Joseph Roth. (Joe Bausch, the man playing Dr. Roth is a doctor in real life.)
• Mort, the opera-singing coroner on Due South.
• Two Patients-of-the-Week on House were coroners/medical examiners: a woman who started hallucinating that her subjects had come to life and were attacking her, and an employee of PPTH who kept records on which doctors killed the most patients, and insisted on being diagnosed by House because he had the best record (not terribly surprising given that House is the chief of Diagnostic Medicine). The patient didn't think much of Chase as a diagnostician, but did insist on having his surgery done by Chase, as he apparently had the best surgical record.
• Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan serves a similar role as a forensic anthropologist, but she only studies the skeletal remains. A full autopsy, flesh and all, usually falls to Dr. Camille Saroyan. They've been known to butt heads over who gets the body first - reasonably in the case of Saroyan, since Bones is only interested in the bones and tends to do things like dissolve the flesh off with acid in order to be able to see them better, which would destroy any soft tissue evidence.
• Dr. Max Bergman of Hawaii Five-0 is the Asian and Nerdy medical examiner with mental issues. He's about the same age as the main team, though, so he's a younger example, and his sense of humor tends to be more goofy than dark.
• Dr. Henry Morgan in Forever. Having lived (and died) for centuries means he has a lot of experience with death, to the point where he can frequently figure out the cause of death without even opening up a body. It helps that he keeps a journal of all of his deaths, and the pilot even shows him testing how long a particular poison takes to kill on himself.
• Dominic Da Vinci in Da Vinci's Inquest. He's a crusading coroner in Vancouver, once an undercover officer for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who now seeks justice in the cases he investigates.
• Vera has the irreverent Dr. Billy Carstairs in seasons 1 - 3, who had numerous quirks (such as hiding car magazines in the ceiling of his office) and was probably a pathologist because no living patient could tolerate him. He is replaced in later seasons by Dr. Marcus Sumner, who is younger but more serious.
• A Touch of Cloth: Like many crime drama tropes, parodied. Natasha is a female coroner whose every line dialogue consists of her aggressively flirting with Jack Cloth, she has an incredibly dry sense of humor related to death, and at one point dissected a cat because she thought it would be amusing.
• John Sutherland, the central character of the 1970s BBC series Sutherland's Law played by Iain Cuthbertson, is the Procurator Fiscal of a fictional small Scottish town with a close resemblance to Oban. The procurator fiscal is a uniquely Scottish public official who has nothing to do with tax matters but combines the roles of District Attorney and Coroner.
• The Closer and Major Crimes has the non-nonsense Dr. Fernando Morales, who generally appears in the operating room and gives the cause of death and other clues. He became a regular character on Major Crimes and after that was seen occasionally at crime scenes.
• Coroner, the cases of a Canadian female coroner working in Toronto.
• Pie in the Sky: The medical examiner in "Who Only Stand and Wait" is a good example of the type.
• Russian series Trace has two active medical examiners - Valentina Antonova (who is mother of four and never takes easy cases related to children) and Artyom Tukaev (who was an intern in FES). There are also mtwo retired coroners - Pyotr Romashin (Antonova's mentor and typical old professor) and Boris Selivanov (who is snarky phlegmatic. He served in army during both Afghanistan and Chechnya and was plastic surgeon before joining FES).
• Astrid: Dr. Henry Fournier, a grumpy, grizzled old doctor. He's initially dismissive and hostile towards Astrid, an autistic criminal records clerk with an interest in criminology; however, after her suggestions for closer checks on autopsies in "Puzzles" and "The Haunting" prove correct, he warms up to her and starts being more thorough in his examinations in hopes of anticipating her. She in turn tries to be a little nicer to him after Coste explains she's being a bit rude.

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