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Unfortunate Implications / Live-Action TV

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Please remember to cite your sources so we have proof it's not just one person's thinking! Citations are done as follows:

  • Blah Story Blah Blah Circumstance Blah Blah Implication Blah. Example Website

  • The citation needs to record the opinions of several people; a citation that mentions only one person isn't enough.
  • The citation should be from a reputable source. We'd prefer you cite something a bit more formal than someone's Tumblr blog. Anyone can write a blog post and then call it a "citation".
  • Also, citations stuck behind paywalls or mandatory logins don't count. If people can't see your proof, then it doesn't prove much.

Keep in mind that Unfortunate Implications are unintentional. An intended offensive message (for example, a piece of Axis propaganda about Jews) does not belong here, nor does natter about the author's true intentions.

Shows with their own pages:

Individual examples:

  • 2 Broke Girls had been accused many times of showing negative stereotypes of various characters, including Han Lee, an Asian American character who is the boss of the diner. Many viewers felt that the show was showing negative stereotypes of Asian Americans through Han’s character, which includes speaking in broken English and not understanding American culture very well. It only dug itself deeper with this one joke that goes:
    “I’m in a casual flirtation with a woman in Australia! She’s part Aboriginal, but has a great personality!”
  • 24's trope-naming abuse of the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique has been accused of normalizing torture by law enforcement, military, and intelligence officers. Even the US Army brass complained.
  • During the 2016 Oscars, host Chris Rock spoke about the #oscarssowhite controversy, which sought to bring attention to the lack of representation by ethnic minorities in Oscar-nominated films. His gag, that the Oscar ballots were counted by some Asian kids, had many labeling Rock a hypocrite.
  • When one strips away the various pieces of flat-out wrong information produced on Ancient Aliens, it can fall into this: a great deal of the "alien" artifacts or human sites built "with alien assistance" are from pre-Columbian civilizations or sub-Saharan Africa, the implication being that these civilizations were too backward or stupid to create such impressive structures.
    • For instance, the show once claimed that Puma Punku, a fifth-century Aymara site in the Bolivian Andes, was "the only site created directly by extra-terrestrials". At the same time as Puma Punku was constructed, the Romans were building equally-if-not-more advanced stone structures... but of course those stupid Amerindians couldn't build anything white people could, they must have been helped by aliens!
    • It's not hugely far-removed from the 19th-century theories that Great Zimbabwe was built by "southern Jews". In fact, many such claims do date back to 19th-century theories which claimed ancient artifacts in Africa and the Americas were built by lost white people. Modern theories just replace this with aliens (though some white supremacists still push the original ones, and even combine them at times, for instance claiming the white race descended from more advanced aliens, with everyone else slowly evolving from apes-the claim that people of color "devolved" has also been made).
    • Erich von Daniken, ur-popularizer of the ancient astronauts idea (though others before and since have also made them), offered some bizarre theories about humankind's origins in his lesser-known Signs Of The Gods, ranging from the above into humanity being created by aliens, with white people posited as the best result. Regardless, they all rely upon distinct and biological races, saying their supposed different abilities were possibly "programmed" by ancient aliens. Not only are the racist claims extremely unfortunate, it all relies on a very poor understanding of evolution and genetics. Worse, he then advocated eugenics.
    • The first citation also mentions that there is a significant crossover between Ufologists and antisemitic conspiracy theorists (a supposed media coverup of UFOs/aliens has often been blamed on "the Jews"), while some theorists have made similar claims in regards to malicious aliens which echo antisemitic canards even when Jewish people aren't explicitly mentioned.
  • Arrow:
    • With An Accent feels that Arrow suffers from "white feminism" and does a disservice to women of color, either by whitewashing them or by showing them as unsympathetic villains most of the time.
    • Lampshaded in one episode: when Oliver becomes CEO, he makes computer genius MIT graduate Felicity his secretary so he can quickly consult with her whenever he needs to. She's obviously very angry at being put in a traditionally low-skill submissive female role. Diggle, who is black, also points out that his official role is as Oliver's chauffeur, a servile job often stereotyped as being done by African Americans.
  • Atypical: Among the many complaints this show has drawn from the autistic community:
  • The Big Bang Theory:
    • There have been issues with how the show treats homosexuality. Raj is repeatedly given effeminate quirks. His relationship with Howard is once outright said to be a replacement for a traditional heterosexual relationship that neither can get, with the idea being that it's sad and pathetic as claimed by a professional and well-renowned psychologist, and his later close relationship with Ambiguously Bi Stuart is treated similarly. Asexual Sheldon was noted prior for subverting usual sitcom standards by having no interest in women until they decided to add in a female love interest to avoid people thinking he was gay (ironically, his actor actually is).
    • The show has additionally attracted criticism for portraying Sheldon and Amy as characters who embody characteristics of neurological conditions such as autism spectrum disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder but play them as nothing beyond the butt of ridicule, with the implication of neurodivergence being a nuisance being seen as representative of a still-pervasive culture of ableism within western media.
    • The stereotype that women cannot be comic book, sci-fi, or video game geeks, no matter how nerdy they are, has not gone unnoticed.
    • This two part series on the show discusses the show's more problematic elements when it comes to gender politics, such as treating sexism as a harmless joke.
  • Blue Bloods: This critique of the show points out how the show reinforces negative stereotypes about racial minorities by often having them portrayed as untrustworthy by having them manufacture fraudulent claims about Police Brutality. Recurring character Rev. Darnell Potter, being a fairly transparent strawman of the Rev. Al Sharpton, is a particular offender here: he's repeatedly picked needless fights with the NYPD but has miraculously never caught Cowboy Cop Danny Reagan in particular at any of his many actual Police Brutality incidents.
  • The Book of Boba Fett: The total massacre of the indigenous-coded Tusken Raiders has led to some controversy about the show using colonialist tropes unironically: Boba Fett essentially re-enacts a Mighty Whitey story with the Sand People and then has them Stuffed into the Fridge to advance his own story. Boba is portrayed by a Maori actor, but he hails from a larger, more technologically advanced civilization, coding him as white.
  • Bridgerton:
    • Some critics consider the final sex scene of Episode 6 to be an example of Double Standard Rape: Female on Male. While it's still Lighter and Softer than the novel's version (in which Simon was drunk and unquestionably unable to consent), it still involves "nonconsensual insemination", which is a form of criminal battery (even if it's the woman who consents to the batter, ba-dum ching). Plus, there's the fact that a black man is sexually assaulted by a white woman when black men and women are often made scapegoats for sexual violence and the blame is shifted away from the white men and women who assault them. This is not addressed in succeeding scenes, with the show instead of focusing on Daphne's own feelings of betrayal that Simon said he couldn't have children when he really meant he didn't want children, the discovery of which has prompted her sexual aggression in the first place.
    • More than a few critics and viewers lambasted the show for its queerbaiting, highlighting a gay storyline and implying Benedict was gay or bi in promotional material when within the show itself it's only a minor subplot centered on two characters who are otherwise irrelevant to the story. Another major criticism about Bridgerton's handling of the gay content is that the gay couple's struggle is ultimately used to motivate Benedict to disregard class when it comes to romance, which comes off as deeply insensitive since canonically and historically the gay characters could be punished, imprisoned or even executed if found out while Benedict, being straight, would be completely safe. Showrunner Chris Van Dusen went so far as to state "But the storyline [of him befriending] Henry was really about tolerance in a really intolerant time, and showing Benedict in that world." Except that this is not what was depicted in the show. Instead, Benedict essentially breaks off his friendship with Henry after seeing him with a man and is subsequently openly uncomfortable around Henry at social events. So no "tolerance" was actually shown. Instead, the gay characters are relegated to the sidelines and saddled with a period-accurate tragic storyline while the show is far more inclusive with regards to race, which felt for many like performative activism and, as written above, exacerbated problems they meant to reduce.
    • Other critics took issue with the series' casting of its black characters, accusing it of colorism (favoring light-skinned actors who likely fall into Eurocentric beauty standards). Of the major black characters, four (Simon, Marina, Queen Charlotte, and Genevieve) are relatively light-skinned (Lady Danbury straddles the line between light-skinned and dark-skinned), and the only important dark-skinned black characters are a working-class fighter and Simon's father, probably the most villainous character in the show. The rest of the dark-skinned characters are servants or extras.
  • The Briefcase was a 2015 CBS reality TV show described as poverty pornography, about two struggling families deciding whether to keep a briefcase of money or give it to the other family.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer was subject to criticism about its treatment of minority characters, namely the fact that there were very few of them, and the ones that did exist had a nasty habit of getting killed off.
  • Chilling Adventures of Sabrina:
    • Several reviewers have pointed out the general ickiness of Sabrina and the Weird Sisters enchanting Susie's bullies into making out with each other, photographing the results and threatening to blackmail them, essentially using gay panic for comedy.
    • Some viewers see the dynamic between Sabrina and Prudence as having unfortunate racial implications, with Sabrina and the ghosts' revenge against the Weird Sisters in the fourth episode being particularly controversial (as it bears a resemblance to lynching, which is not good, given that Prudence is black).
    • The series finale was immediately attacked for Nick's apparent suicide so he and Sabrina could be Together in Death. This article points out that the show essentially glorifies teen suicide as a beautiful, romantic gesture, comparing it to a similar controversy over 13 Reasons Why and its own extremely problematic presentation of teens killing themselves. While technically speaking it's never stated if Nick killed himself on purpose or simply had an error in judgment, the evidence is heavily suggestive of the first option, prompting critics and fans alike to attack the show's final moments without mercy.
  • Coronation Street was heavily criticized by LGBT viewers for killing off a lesbian character on her wedding day. Not helping matters is that the character in question was also a woman of colour.
  • Doctor Who:
    • Susan Foreman of was not originally intended to be the Doctor's granddaughter, but a writer created the family tie because of the connotations of an older man traveling around with an attractive young woman.
    • The TARDIS Eruditorum has observed that it's uncomfortable watching "The Daleks", which has a theoretically anti-racist moral but also uses Beauty Equals Goodness and presents the Inhumanly Beautiful Race as resembling Aryan supermen — not least that Carole Ann Ford, the actress playing Susan, is Jewish and is asked to say dialogue calling them "perfect". This was also lampshaded indirectly in the Big Finish Doctor Who drama The Alchemists, set in 1930s Germany, where Susan remarks that a young Nazi SS officer looks "almost Thal-like", while herself receiving negative comments based on her dark-eyed appearance. Considering that the Daleks are based on the Nazis, making the Thals look like the Nazi "Übermensch" model was likely done for the sake of Irony.
    • As sites such as Den of Geek, the Guardian, and the Nerdist point out, Chris Chibnall's tenure as showrunner has some problems regarding its portrayal of race ​(and we're not talking about the Rosa Parks episode). Casting people without consideration of traits to be killed as one-offs to establish the threat level of the Villain of the Week has unfortunately led to looking like the show follows the Black Dude Dies First and Bury Your Gays tropes, and there was the controversial scene when the Doctor broke the Master's perception filter in "Spyfall" and leave him with a bunch of Nazis just to stall him further when she had already defeated him, followed by a scene in "Revolution of the Daleks" where she decides to call a Dalek fleet and use their desire for purity to get rid of a second group of Daleks, which set up an Accidental Aesop of "racism is bad... unless you can weaponise it!". More minor examples include continuing to call Tzim Sha "Tim Shaw" because she has a hard time pronouncing Tzim Sha, which might call to mind how many ethnicities were forced to adopt Anglicised names for similar reasons, threatening to bark like a dog at Hyph3n in "Orphan 55", and saying that she's "got a bone to pick with" Karvanista in "The Halloween Apocalypse" when it was previously established that he finds being called a dog insulting.
    • At the end of "The Power of the Doctor", the Thirteenth Doctor's outfit regenerates along with the rest of her body into David Tennant's Fourteenth Doctor outfit, the first time such a thing has happened since the very first regeneration, when the rules were still being worked out. However, much of the plot of the episode revolves around the (male) Master stealing the (female) Doctor's body and regenerations in order to both live forever and permanently discredit the Doctor; when the Master forced the Doctor to regenerate into him, he kept Thirteen's clothes and earrings, only changing out of them later. Returning showrunner Russell T Davies told the Radio Times that, essentially, he didn't want the growing political atmosphere against trans people and drag in the UK to be turned against the show or give the impression that Davies was taking the piss, so he had the clothes regenerate. However, as SlashFilm and CBR note, thanks to Word of God, we are left with the idea that "evil" men wear women's clothing while "good" men wear men's clothing, thus inadvertently leaning into a lot of horrific and false stereotypes about trans women and drag queens that have returned to prominence in recent years.
  • In the wake of the George Floyd protests, a large number of cop shows, including COPS, Live PD, and Chicago P.D. were called out for presenting a very one-sided, black-and-white view of the police as good guys who all too often are right for doing the wrong thing in the pursuit of justice. This backlash against what has been described as "copaganda" ultimately got the former two shows cancelled.
  • De Nieuwe Orde lampshades in the second episode the problems that arise from All Germans Are Nazis, since one of the interviewees of that episode is clearly pro-Nazi Germany, saying that this trope is proof (among with many other reasons, such as the idea that people had more freedom there) that everyone was happy under the Nazi regime. Maurice De Wilde himself then answers back by saying that there was German resistance, but that the Nazis themselves hid it away from the public. The interviewed man promptly ignores it.
  • The Disney Channel has been criticized for playing Jerkass, bullying behavior for laughs in many of their live-action shows, as well as portraying adults as useless and continuously implying that girls need to be attractive over being kind, smart, or successful. This is especially unfortunate given the target audience for such shows are tweens, who are likely to emulate such behavior.
    • There have also been at least two Disney Channel shows — So Random! and Shake it Up — that got flak for making light of eating disorders. When Demi Lovato (who had left Disney Channel to go into rehab for their own eating disorder) called the network out, both episodes were pulled until the offending jokes were edited out.
  • El Chavo del ocho has several gay jokes, including Don Ramon's famous Catchphrase: "Yo le voy al Necaxa" (I support the Necaxa [soccer team]) this is because the followers of the Puebla (Necaxa's rival team) were accused to be gay. But probably the most inappropriate example was an episode in which Don Ramón and Profesor Jirafales are mistaken to be homosexuals and the rest of the cast reacts with anger, fear, and disgust. This will be very offensive for modern audiences, especially in some very liberal parts of Mexico like Mexico City (where the show is supposed to happen), a very progressive place and the first part of Mexico in legalizing same-sex marriage.
  • The decision of the 2021 Live-Action Adaptation of Cowboy Bebop to change Gren from a man who was forcibly experimented on in prison as part of an unethical scientific study to a nonbinary trans person was very sharply criticized online for sending the exact opposite message of the original, where the entire point was that he was perfectly happy with male identity and his chemically-induced androgyny was a source of trauma, rather than something to celebrate. The fact that the live-action Gren dresses much more provocatively and is far more sexualized really doesn't help matters.
  • Euphoria:
    • Cassie’s storyline in Season 2 has gotten several complaints that she’s lost the depth and complexity of her first Season portrayal, and has been turned into a misogynistic caricature to be laughed at or leered at. This is largely thanks to her personality traits and her plot lines from the first Season being dropped in favor of her rapid obsession towards and affair with Nate, which also felt abrupt and out of character to a lot of fans. These accusations only got worse when it was revealed that there were intended to be even more nude scenes of Cassie, which were cut at the actress’s request, which aggravated the many fans who felt like the amount of nudity her character gets in the show is already excessive.
    • A common criticism of the show is that it contributes to a long-standing problem of television sexualizing underage characters, particularly teenage girls. Of particular complaint is Kat's plotline about becoming a camgirl with an audience of older men. Though this is treated as empowering within the show, many feel it ignores that this is an instance of a child being groomed, and celebrates a minor going into sex work.
  • Family Matters: Steve Urkel's relentless pursuit of Laura's affections was a staple during the height of the show's popularity but more recent reception of the show has taken a more negative view of the character. In hindsight, Steve's behavior has been viewed as creepy and disrespectful of Laura's boundaries. Not helping matters is that female foils in the show to Steve Urkel, Myra Monkhouse and Myrtle Urkel, did not receive the same type of sympathetic portrayal that Steve did, leading to views of double standards being at play.
  • Fate: The Winx Saga:
  • Firefly
    • It's very hard to ignore that Firefly is essentially a Lost Cause fantasy, in which the Noble Confederates' failed rebellion was actually about "planet's rights" and savages lurked around every asteroid of the frontier.
    • Another big criticism of is the fact that despite taking place in a future where China was a massive superpower and Chinese influence could be felt in everything from dialogue to clothing, there were almost no actual Chinese (or indeed any Asian) characters in the show. Even the Tam siblings, who had a Chinese surname, were played by white actors.note 
  • Game of Thrones:
  • Gilmore Girls: The original show was not considered perfect in the representation department either, but A Year in the Life, the 2016 reboot, has been considered even worse in its treatment of homosexuals and POC, (especially considering nine years have passed), along with Rory and Lorelai spending the opening scene of "Summer" making fun of overweight people. This article in particular sums the issues up.
  • Glee:
    • The storyline about Quinn trying to get Beth back was criticized by adoption advocates for giving a bad image of open adoptions, as well as just factual inaccuracy (i.e. once the birth parents sign away their parental rights, they're gone for good, so if the adoptive parent is declared to be "unfit," the child is taken into foster care, not given to the birth parents). They petitioned the show to do a PSA dispelling myths about adoption; so far, nothing has come of it, but the controversial storyline also seems to have been wrapped up.
    • Kurt's behavior in "Grilled Cheesus" is treated as unreasonable. It would be one thing to tell friends they're not allowed to pray, but they went beyond praying — they made a big show of being religious in his dad's waiting room, despite the fact that no one except Carol, Finn, and maybe Mercedes actually knows Burt, and Rachel, the person in the room who is the least close to Burt (tied with Quinn), is the one who does the solo over his bedside. Mercedes also doesn't accept Kurt's atheism until he goes to church with her... and yet Kurt is supposed to be the intolerant one. No wonder some atheists got really pissed off.
    • Kurt's speech to Blaine (who is questioning his sexuality) in "Blame It On The Alcohol", where he states that bisexuality doesn't exist and that men claiming to be bisexual are really just closeted gay people. While it could just be dismissed as Kurt holding the Jerkass Ball, and Blaine does call him out on his insensitivity, the fact that Kurt is validated at the end of the episode combined with his usual history of being seen as an Author Avatar regarding LGBT issues was seen by many viewers as a case of the show being biphobic. Not helping were comments from Ryan Murphy made soon after regarding the fact that Blaine is 100% gay that "it’s very important to young kids that they know this character [Blaine] is one of them", as if bisexual kids don't matter. Especially considering male bisexuality has even less representation in the media than male homosexuality does.
      • The controversy got reignited after "Tina In the Sky With Diamonds", where Santana spends half of her courtship with Dani panicking over having no "real" experience since she dated a bisexual woman, and the other half sighing in relief that she didn't have to worry about her girlfriend "straying for penis". Between implying that bisexuals aren't "real" members of the LGBT community, claiming that they're unfaithful and promiscuous by nature, and wrongfully smearing Brittany's character (Brittany didn't even end the relationship between her and Santana — Santana did), viewers got angry.
    • Kurt, in general, has been accused of being an unflattering stereotype of gay people. While Kurt is commended for his courage in not hiding his sexuality and standing up to adversity, he is also rather disliked by many gay viewers for being hard to identify with due to his extreme Camp Gay tendencies or criticized for doing more harm than good for representation of gay people in the media. On top of that is resentment over the above-mentioned issues and the way he's seen as a mouthpiece for controversial views expressed by some portions of the gay community that are not necessarily shared by the rest of its members.
    • Artie has received criticism from disabled viewers for being a very stereotypical portrayal of wheelchair users, with a key factor being that he's portrayed by a non-disabled actor. Particularly (as described here), he never stops wishing to be able to walk (with the Imagine Spot scene where he stands up and dances in a mall being very controversial), he accepts behavior from abled characters that would be considered patronizing or even creepy in real life, never mentions wheelchair dancing exists, and makes having a wheelchair (aka. the disability itself, instead of the lack of accessibility) the problem that stops him from doing similar activities as his abled friends, plus various factual errors.
      Moreover, there seems to be no understanding of disability as an identity or a community, and paralysis as a life-changing injury, but not always life worsening. There was no understanding that wheelchairs provide freedom, not restriction, that other people pushing a wheelchair is an act of trust and wouldn't be done randomly, and that most teenagers and adults find it infantilizing. It was a lazy and uninspiring character who look like he was plonked in a wheelchair and everyone assumed he hated his wheelchair, because that's what non-disabled people assume. Not only is disability its own identity, it is not interchangeable with other marginalized identity, and it's not a shield to avoid criticisms of racism or misogyny..
  • Girl Meets World: The episode "Girl Meets Farkle" is universally despised by the autistic community for the prospect of Farkle having autism being treated with concern as if it was a terminal illness and diluting the symptomotology to simply not understanding love.
  • The Good Doctor: Despite many episodes focusing on protagonist Shaun Murphy encountering ableism due to his autism, the show has been argued by many to be guilty of ableism itself in Shaun's depiction. Critics, including those in the neurodivergent community, argue that the show treats Shaun as more of a stereotype of a person with autism than an actual well-rounded character—partly by over-relying on instances of his literal-mindedness and missing of social cues as a gimmick, and partly by depicting him as a savant. While savant syndrome (in which a person with a developmental disorder is exceptionally talented in one or more areas) is a recognized phenomenon, some fear that its over-portrayal in media falsely implies that it is more common than it is in reality. In addition, by showing that Shaun being a savant is why he is allowed to work at the hospital despite his unprofessionalism, the show also implies that people with autism have to "make up for it" by going above and beyond.
  • Heathers (2018) has received intense criticism for its decision to change the conflict from a bunch of rich socialite bullies into Political Overcorrectness, pushing the narrative that minorities are the real power now in schools (which is very much not the case) and that the straight white kids are the "real" victims.
  • This review of Hemlock Grove points out that, for a show that tries to "shake up" the horror genre, it still kills off a good chunk of its female cast, especially the ones who are sexually active.
  • Hollywood (2020): Quite a few reviews have accused the series of being an insult to the actual marginalized people of Hollywood who had to fight and claw against prejudice every day to get at most a sliver of acclaim, saying they just weren't trying hard enough and could have magically solved racism, sexism, and homophobia if they just tried a little bit more. It gets worse for anyone who remembers Gentleman's Agreement, a hard-hitting exploration of anti-Semitism: It was the real-life Best Picture winner in 1947, which is replaced by Meg in the show.
  • Homeland:
    • There have been criticism of the show's depiction of Muslims and the Middle East in general. Whether seemingly Westernized and educated or ignorant and fanatical, the overwhelming bulk of the show's "Muslim" cast has ended up being linked to the terrorists in one way or another. The Islam of Homeland is presented almost like a monolith, with Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda teaming up to kill Americans without complicated ideas like "Shia" and "Sunni" being introduced to complicate such a team-up or acknowledging that Hezbollah has never targeted the United States for an attack. The show's presentation of Hamra Street in Beirut — in reality, a bustling and cosmopolitan area with shops and cafes — as a dirty haven for terrorists and armed militias even led Lebanon to threaten legal action.
    • The third season makes things worse by making the entire nation of Iran the enemy and by making Javadi a cartoonish Evil Muslim who stabs his ex-wife to death because all Muslims are Straw Misogynists. Iran, a country whose people once held candlelight vigils for the victims of the 9/11 attacks, is here shown as a place where everyone cheers Brody the suspected terrorist when they discover who he is, with the CIA bomber quickly becoming a national hero.
  • House:
    • The Intersex Society of North America (now closed and succeeded by interACT) criticized the episode "Skin Deep", in which House misgenders a 15-year-old supermodel after discovering that she's intersex and suffering from testicular cancer due to androgen insensitivity syndrome. He then labels her by the outdated term "male pseudohermaphrodite" and dismisses her anger and emotional turmoil as being solely due to the cancer.
    • Another episode titled "Better Half" sends the message that asexuals are all either in denial or have a hormone imbalance, accusations real-life asexuals have to deal with from people who don't realize (or don't care) that it's a legitimate orientation. The asexual community was not pleased by this.
  • How I Met Your Mother:
    • Throughout the series, some feel there is a running theme that the only success for a woman is raising a family, leading to some claiming the show made female characters into nothing more than just a walking uterus. There's also talk of how it reduces the value of the gang's friendship and every message about how important it is by having them split up, essentially saying that his friends had no value outside of how they got Ted and Robin together.
    • The Season 9 episode, "Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment in Slapmarra," got a lot of criticism on the Yellow Face. Carter Bays admits that they were trying to pay homage to the Kung Fu movies that they grew up on and apologized to people who were offended.
    • As a fewarticles out, How I Met Your Mother is rife with sexist problems, most of which stem from Barney due to his misogyny being played for comedy despite how doing things such as using fake identities to get laid (rape by deception), his mention of him selling a girl once, the Crazy Hot Matrix (invoking the Hysterical Woman trope and fetishing mentally ill women). That's not even counting how women in the show are portrayed as problematic yet exist to make the male characters seem sympathic in comparison despite Barney and Ted being two different flavours of sexist.
  • Shortly after its premiere, The Idol came under fire from critics who took issues with the show's depiction of its protagonist Jocelyn. A popstar who is delicately healing from a nervous breakdown, Jocelyn is time and again manipulated and exploited in the industry, particularly by her paramour-slash-abuser Tedros, who wreaks havoc on her mental health in the name of "art." The show seems to claim criticism against Jocelyn's treatment, but critics instead find that it relishes in depicting every uncomfortable moment for sensationalism. One such example is that while the show tackles young celebrities like Jocelyn having their image sexualized even (or perhaps especially) when their mental health is at a low point, the show also does plenty of sexualizing itself in what Rolling Stone considers a "have your cake and eat it too" fashion.
  • Jersey Shore: They portrayed all Italian-Americans as drunken, steroid-fueled party kids and Hard Drinking Party Girls. In addition to several Italian-American groups, Kevin Smith (a New Jersey native) commented that it's an Italian equivalent to the early 20th-century practice of "cooning", where black entertainers played to the "Uncle Tom" stereotype.
  • Jessie: Ravi Ross is considered an Ethnic Scrappy by many Indian-American individuals, mainly because he's a checklist of a lot of negative stereotypes (like being skilled at yoga and a nerd). Even his actor Karan Brar called him a walking stereotype. Many Indians were also angry that his pet was named after Rudyard Kipling, as Kipling in real life was racist to Indians.
  • The third episode of The Last of Us (2023) is beloved, but many people have taken offense to the ending, claiming their well-intended effort to avert Bury Your Gays instead glorified suicide.
  • Law & Order: Special Victims Unit dropped a planned subplot for this reason. Originally, it was going to be revealed in Season 2 that Olivia Benson's mother hadn't actually been raped. Realizing that would feed into a problematic cultural narrative (one which, in fact, the series debunks or deconstructs on multiple occasions), producers made the decision to cut the subplot, and those scenes were never aired. (In fact, a subplot several seasons later that did make it into the series raised this possibility but then debunked it, confirming that Olivia's mother was raped.)
  • Legends of Tomorrow: A prominent episode guide noted that in the episode Night of the Hawk the behavior of Sara Lance — an established bisexual — promoted the stereotype that bisexuals are only after casual sex. Sara determines that one of the nurses at the 1950s hospital she's infiltrating is a lesbian and begins to woo said nurse, dismissing her teammate's concerns over what her eventual abandonment of this woman once their mission is complete and they return to their own time will do to her.
  • Many a Lifetime Movie of the Week featuring women being beaten to near-death have been repeated over and over and over and over again on broadcast television. One Movie of the Week produced by CBS in 1993 dealt with a male victim of Domestic Abuse. This film, Men Don't Tell, never aired on that channel again, though Lifetime snuck in a few repeat showings. At least one reviewer discussed this disparity and pointed out exactly what message this was sending in an article in the New York Times.
  • Many Irish viewers felt alienated by how The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power chose to use Irish accents to represent the Harfoots. Reporters of The Irish Times quickly picked up on the Harfoots stage-Irish accents and questioned their depiction as "hungry simpletons".
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
      • The show took criticism for having the first super powered threat be a black man. Later episodes with this character in the first season may have made things worse. Most of the criticism appears to stem, however, from individuals unfamiliar with the character Deathlok, who Peterson was always intended to become and who, by the end of season 1 and into season 2, was not an "angry black man" at all, but a hero.
      • "Yes Men" was a clumsy attempt at a female empowerment story that managed to garner accusations of sexism from both sides. For women, it was the episode's need to "justify" Sif's presence in the plot by having a Villain of the Week only a woman could defeat, and for having the first major female supervillain to appear on the show be a seductress. For men, it was the episode's sentiment that "men are weak", which is echoed by several heroic characters and never contested, as well as the treatment of Grant Ward, who is brainwashed and raped by the female villain, the implications of which are ignored.
    • Daredevil (2015):
      • It had been brought up that out of all the stereotyped criminal organizations in Wilson Fisk's criminal enterprise in season 1, the Chinese and Japanese are essentially modern-day Yellow Peril cliches. Moreover, there's the fact that they're barely considered human (Matt killing Nobu isn't even counted as a blip on his moral radar, despite his Catholic guilt and Thou Shalt Not Kill being a huge part of his character). In fact, canon-wise, they aren't: Gao is clearly supernatural and Nobu is undead (as he reappears towards the end of season 2).
      • The second season also came under fire. The need to equate the Asian gangs and ninjas comes across as a bit racist, as does the fact that the one decent person tied to The Hand is Stan Gibson, a white accountant who is being forced to help them against his will. In fact, Iron Fist (2017) takes steps to make the Hand a lot more ethnically diverse: Madame Gao uses Caucasian, Mestizo Latina, and African-American women to market her heroin; Radovan's jailer, King, seems of Middle-Eastern origin; Danny gets pitched against a pair of Slav brothers; Bakuto's camp includes black and Hispanic kids, etc.
      • Some people take issues with the way the show treats Matt Murdock's potential love interests. Namely, that Matt takes great pains to hide the darker aspects of his personality from the white Karen Page, being very chivalrous and gentle with her, but is hostile and abrasive with the Afro-Latina Claire and the French-Cambodian Elektra, continuing an unfortunate media trend wherein white women are seen as the "happily ever after" instead of non-white ones. The article also takes issue with the way Karen has quite a few men who shield her from harm compared to Elektra and Claire, who only ever have Matt or have no one at all. Or that whenever Karen does get injured, the injuries disappear to avoid tarnishing her appearance, but the same is not said for Claire or Elektra.
    • Iron Fist (2017):
      • Particular ire has fallen on the Mighty Whitey overtones of a scene where Danny lectures Colleen about East Asian philosophy and the true nature of martial arts in her own dojo. Bad enough in-universe, and worse when you consider that everything he's saying is based on a fictional martial art made up in the '70s. Though she does get her own back a couple of episodes later when she calls out Danny's sword work (using a traditional Japanese katana like a Chinese sword) and shows him the proper technique, to which he calls her amazing.
      • As one review put it, "It blows my mind that despite the sheer number of people who worked on this episode no one flagged that it would be a bad idea to have Danny chastise a room full of black and brown students by calling them 'chattering monkeys.' It's stuff like that that makes me hesitant to give the show the benefit of the doubt when it comes to issues of representation. If the creators aren't even aware of basic racially charged language, how am I supposed to trust that they've thought out the racial politics of their show?"
    • The Falcon and the Winter Soldier:
      • Although the show does not shy away from portraying the US government and military as severely flawed, some critics are wary of the show perpetuating the MCU's pro-military/interventionist undertones, with specific examples including the changing of multiple characters' backgrounds from civilians to (ex-)military servicemen and its portrayal of Wakandan interventionism as justified.
      • The show has received numerous accusations of deliberate queerbaiting by LGBTQ fans who felt that Marvel was consciously exploiting the show's LGBT Fanbase by engaging in Bait-and-Switch Lesbians with its main characters. Several controversial interviews given during and after its release then led to accusations of Disney and Marvel higher-ups deliberately using their creative staff and actors as scapegoats to absorb criticism from LGBTQ fans upset at their failure to provide any actual LGBT representation.
    • Secret Invasion (2023): The use of the Skrulls as a thinly-veiled metaphor for displaced refugees and immigrants has come under a lot of criticism over its execution, with many feeling the show ends up coming off as siding with racist fearmongerers and far-right anti-immigrant propaganda, not helped by the fact that the Skrulls' portrayal in this show compared to Captain Marvel (2019), where they were a sympathetic metaphor for Jewish persecution, now comes off as flagrantly antisemitic.
  • Merlin:
    • The treatment of female characters was bad enough for commentator Dave Bradley◊ to write an article on the subject, pointing out that without exception, all its female characters were either a Damsel in Distress, a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, or a Disposable Woman.
    • The Problem of Morgana points out that Morgana's Face–Heel Turn is presented as her choosing the dark side - except she only becomes evil because she gets her trust betrayed by a friend who thought killing her was more convenient than revealing his secret, and is presented as irredeemable despite being a victim of everyone else's meddling. That one of the show's only prominent female characters is robbed of any agency in her own story, and has her fate dictated by the males around her did not go unnoticed.
  • Done In-Universe in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode featuring The Time Travelers where Jonah calls out the movie for using an actor with an actual deformity to portray one of the mutants.
  • The Newsroom:
    • There have been many criticisms of the portrayal of female characters in the series. These tend to center around how female characters tend to have their competence undercut by naiveté/personal problems to a greater extent than do male ones, and are often corrected on their ignorance by male characters. While improved over the course of the series, these features stood out because at least in initial episodes, the supposed competence of the female characters was an Informed Ability.
    • The show's penultimate episode "Oh, Shenandoah." drew a great deal of criticism over the subject of rape accusations, the potential for false accusations, and which party, if either, should be treated as correct. In the episode, a woman who accused a man of rape but found no justice with the police or college made a website where women can anonymously accuse men of rape. Don interviews both the man and the woman in turn, and tells the woman, whom he admits is credible and has no reason to lie, that he is "morally obligated" to believe the man, whom he regards as "sketchy", just on the off chance that she could be lying and the episode ends with Don lying that he couldn't track her down, denying her the chance to speak on air about her site as she vocally wanted because he believed he knew better. The Internet lit the fuck up, with many critics launching the accusation that Sorkin was again using men to correct women and mitigate their concerns, this time in the worst way possible.
  • Mission: Impossible was frequently criticized for the protagonists' Pay Evil unto Evil ethos. Patrick J. White sums it up in his series history The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier:
    Mission: Impossible matter-of-factly offered the premise that the United States government sponsored a group of saboteurs who were answerable to no one. In the course of their duties, the IMF could — and did — lie, cheat, steal, falsify media, hold persons illegally, falsely incriminate, destroy the property of innocent people, kidnap, plot (though never personally execute) assassinations, and break any civil and criminal rule that stood in their way. Individual rights were ignored... The IMF framed and entrapped opponents with no qualms, regrets, or remorse. If they couldn't nail [a villain] for something he did, they'd see to it he was punished for something he didn't do, or something they made him do.
  • In 2017, Netflix ran a short-lived show starring Naomi Watts as a psychotherapist who gets overly involved in her patients' lives. The series was titled Gypsy, a word now considered a racial slur for the Romani people, which the creators didn't seem to realize. The resulting controversy was discussed briefly by Bleeding Cool and in-depth by Bitch Magazine.
  • The Orville's episode "Cupid's Dagger" drew the ire of both viewers and reviewers for its poor grasp of sexual consent. Darulio is essentially guilty of three known counts of date rape (by way of estrus pheromones that evidently work on humans) by the end of the episode, which is ignored completely. The episode was made worse by its real-world timing, having aired amidst a wide-ranging spate of sexual misconduct scandals that started with Hollywood casting mogul Harvey Weinstein being publicly accused of crimes up to and including rape.
  • Pretty Little Liars took a massive flak broadside when it revealed that A was actually Ce Ce Drake, formerly known as Mister Charles DiLaurentis. This was heavily criticized for playing into negative stereotypes about transgender women, in that they're deceitful crossdressing men at best and depraved, violent, and insane at worst. The fact that the character wasn't played by a transgender actress either did not help matters.
  • The Price Is Right had a short-lived pricing game in 1978 called "Shower Game", where the contestant had to guess which of six shower stalls had the correct price of a car. Complaints soon ensued from viewers that its rules and setup reminded them of The Holocaust, which ended three decades earlier. While this wasn't why the game was retired, the complaints probably didn't help its case.
  • Quantico:
    • Has been called out various times for its grossly egregious misrepresentation and villainization of queer characters, with some calling out the fact that Simon became a better, more competent person AFTER he revealed he wasn't gay.
    • This article also points out that Simon's story is full of anti-Semitic stereotypes since he lies about his identity and is presented as someone unreliable and misleading (plus adding a fake claim of Israel blowing up greenhouses in Gaza, which were actually destroyed by Palestinian rioters).
  • Riverdale:
    • Black Girl Nerds praised aspects of the show but criticized it for not "embracing the social and political" and being "too ignorant to consider the implications behind the only black guy in Riverdale being predatory toward a bunch of white girls and a light-skinned Latina."
    • Monique Jones wrote a long article for Just Add Color taking the show to task for its handling of Chuck, wondering if no one in production questioned whether Betty binding and torturing a young black man and calling him "boy" was really a good idea.
    • Andre the Black Nerd called out this aspect of episode 3 in an otherwise fairly positive review.
    • These two posts point out how the African-American characters are usually used to further the development of the white characters and then disappear.
  • Scream: Resurrection: As noted in this article by Trace Thurman for Bloody-Disgusting, Ghostface's motive can easily come off to horror fans as downright insulting. Beth claims that her love of violent horror movies is the result of her being a sociopath, and that she was using horror to vicariously live out her own sick fantasies until, eventually, they no longer cut it and she had to start killing for real to satisfy her urges. Not only is this an idea that the Scream films frequently mocked, it is one that has been used in real life to justify censorship campaigns against violence in the media.
  • Star Trek:
    "In their attempt to address the elephant in the room, they've unwittingly called attention to the mammoth standing next to it."
    • Heterosexuality is virtually universal. Exceptions to this are rare and always involve alien species in some way. Even bodiless Energy Beings seem to have gender identities and are depicted as heterosexual. Q jokes about appearing to Picard as a woman, but never does so (although he appears in nonhuman forms several times). He also has a long-term (billion year) Q "girlfriend", with whom he has a son — a stereotypical heterosexual horny teenager that is obsessed with females even from the "lesser" species. While Interspecies Romance is quite common to the point of being expected, any deviation from heterosexuality is definitively explained by Bizarre Alien Biology. The only episodes which depict ordinary humanoid characters being other than straight in an ordinary way are those set in the Mirror Universe whose whole set-up is "evil is dominant" (and the depictions often tend to show shallow Girl on Girl Is Hot pseudo-lesbian fluff to titillate fanboys). Arguably, stuff like this was done to get past the censors, where they could get away with showing gay stuff as long as aliens are involved and not humans (Gene Roddenberry always wanted to show gay humans, but was always thwarted for obvious reasons). This topic has been much discussed, including on the Other Wiki, Star Trek's own Memory Alpha, as well as other essays and articles. This was finally averted in Star Trek Beyond where it's revealed that in this timeline, Sulu is gay and has both a husband and a daughternote  and averted more definitively in Star Trek: Discovery where astromycologist Lt. Paul Stamets and ship's physician Dr. Hugh Culber are in a relationship with each other.
    • StarDestroyer.net has four pages in its database about Federation culture. This trope dominates the comments, mostly in regards to the Federation's nebulous economics and highly conformist society. Debates about both topics are extremely common in fandom, not least because the various series are extremely vague about how the post-monetary economy works (not helped by the fact that there are frequent references to Federation characters buying things, which is inconsistent with other episodes where they claim not to have money) and because of the apparent lack of any contemporary pop culture (almost every character is a history buff with a preference for mid-20th Century or earlier subject matter). Site creator Mike Wong, a Canadian of Chinese descent with a wife of Caucasian descent, also wrote an essay that makes hay out of the '90s series' reliance on the Planet of Hats and the recurring trope that Half Human Hybrids are trapped between two cultures, arguing that, contrary to Star Trek's intent to present a post-racial world, it rather reinforces racial stereotyping, racial separatism, and negative attitudes to interracial relationships.
    • Star Trek: Enterprise:
      • The book "Gender And Sexuality In Star Trek" discusses how, with Leonard Nimoy's Actor-Inspired Element, Vulcans have always been coded by Jewishness. So Enterprise, with Vulcans being seen as greedy and untrustworthy, and humans hating them, suffice to say is a bad look.
      • As pointed out by SF Debris in his review of "Stigma", the retcon of T'Pol having a mind meld forced upon her — instead of what actually happened in "Fusion", where she willingly went through it at first, then later had second thoughts and broke it off — unwittingly undermines the episode's message, instead giving it the message that the only HIV-positive people deserving of sympathy are those who contracted it through being raped. The episode was likely trying to argue against that viewpoint by having T'Pol complain about the double standard involved, but the retconning of "Fusion" ends up completely muddling the message.
    • Star Trek: Discovery's first season was marketed as having one of the more diverse casts of the franchise, and especially was heavily marketed to the LGBT Fanbase on having the first explicitly gay main cast pairing in Trek.note  To viewers' annoyance, two of the three nonwhite women with speaking roles are dead by episode four (with Landry's death firmly a case of Too Dumb to Live). This backlash was then completely swamped by the reaction to the sudden murder of Dr. Culber, the brown half of the gay couple. Seemingly as a response to the controversy,note  the series brought him Back from the Dead in season two.
  • Stranger Things:
    • A few commentators have perceived a sexist streak in the first season. It doesn't exactly help that the treatment of Barb Holland is textbook Stuffed in the Fridge.
    • This review deconstructs the implications of Eleven being treated the same way as E.T. in the first season, despite the fact that she's a human girl who's been abused, not an alien.
    • Season 3 seems to gladly indulge in toxic masculinity, and no better place is this shown than in Hopper's behavior. Many of the commenters have noted that the behavior Hopper exhibits is the kind of behavior that's tantamount to domestic abuse, both in his handling of Mike spending time with Eleven, and in his constant belittling of Joyce (which many see as character derailment from the way Hopper treated her in seasons 1 and 2). However, this behavior is treated as a minor character flaw at best, not to mention Played for Laughs several times and ultimately excused by the show.
  • Supernatural:
  • For the 13th season of Survivor (Cook Islands), the tribes were separated by race. Although this meant that there was much more racial diversity in a show that had previously been very monochrome, and the tribes were mixed up after only two episodes, many viewers couldn't help but feel offended by the stunt, finding it reminiscent of Jim Crow-era segregation.
  • Teen Wolf:
  • Tiger King: Some have argued that the show occasionally goes out of its way to misgender Saff, and the way his name is written suggests he goes by Kelci and "Saff" is just a nickname. However, the show itself never refers to Saff by any pronouns (beyond the subtitles that say "woman's voice"), though many of the interviewees do use “her”. It should be noted that in an interview after the show aired, Saff said that he didn't care that much about it. In the retrospective eighth episode of the series, Joel McHale uses male pronouns when interviewing Saff.
  • True Blood:
    • As this article shows, the series has a tendency to downplay rape with sentences such as "I was almost raped in Dallas, but this is so much worse." The Hemo Erotic nature of vampire/human relationships does not help either. Sookie could be viewed as someone who voluntarily seeks out emotionally and/or physically abusive relationships with vampires like Bill and Eric. She knows that they are murderers and that they do things such as Mind Control people. But it is treated as something to be overlooked because they are sexy.
    • A rape victim is actually considered deserving of his fate because he really got around and because of his gender. The character in question is Jason Stackhouse.
      Alan Ball: It’s kind of interesting to see the kind of guy who really gets his sense of worth from his sexual prowess to all of a sudden to be kind of objectified and sort of [laughs] used against his will.note 
    • This article makes a valid case that Jason's relationship with Violet in seasons 6-7 invokes Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male, and calls into question whether or not Jason had a choice when it came to this relationship. The article also takes note of how the show perpetrates harmful notions of rape culture, such as the way Sookie and Warlow's relationship is portrayed in season 6.
  • Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has garnered a lot of flack for casting Jane Krakowski, a white Polish-American, as a Native American pretending to be Caucasian and hiding her past.
  • The Umbrella Academy (2019): The Handler's use of Yiddish was alleged as playing into anti-semitic stereotypes of coding villainous characters who control things behind the scenes as Jewish (though other characters like Five used Yiddish as well). Showrunner Steve Blackman, who is Jewish, stated that he did not set out to make her anti-semitic and that her organization is neither evil nor meant to be secretly in control of media/finance/the government, but acknowledged that audiences could take a character differently than the writers intended.
  • The Vampire Diaries has been criticized by reviewers such as FriendlySpaceNinja and Jenny Nicholson for its poor treatment of characters of color, particularly Bonnie, the only nonwhite member of the main cast. They point out that Bonnie is consistently sidelined (to the point that it wasn't until season three that Bonnie's house got a set), given weak, flimsy arcs and often used as nothing more than a get-out-of-plot-problems-free card. Nicholson particularly criticizes Bonnie's romance arcs, contrasting how Caroline and Elena (who are white) get big, sweeping, epic romances with important characters, while Bonnie largely gets stuck with the afterthoughts (and later, the show goes almost out of its way to affirm that Damon's affection for her is strictly platonic, seemingly to undermine them being a popular ship and much better received than the extremely divisive pairing of Damon and Elena).
  • Wheel of Fortune:
    • The week of March 20, 2017, designated as Southern Charm, came under fire for one of the backdrop images portraying African Americans in slave-era clothing. This was only discovered after the Thursday episode reran, likely because its original airing was pre-empted by March Madness in many markets. Wheel had barely enough time to get the Friday episode pulled. The entire week and six other Southern-themed weeks in the 21st century have since been placed on the "do not rerun" list.
    • The Round 1 puzzle on September 16, 2022 was EENIE MEENIE MINY MOE CATCH A TIGER BY THE TOE. Wheel got swamped with complaints accusing the show of allowing a puzzle with racist connotations (since pre-Civil Rights versions of the rhyme used the n-word in place of "tiger"). Wheel would later bar the episode from reruns.

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