Unintentionally Unsympathetic / Live-Action TV

Unintentionally Unsympathetic in Live-Action TV.

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The following have their own pages:

• 13 Reasons Why
• The Big Bang Theory
• Cobra Kai
• Cold Case
• Game of Thrones
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
• Marvel Cinematic Universe
• The Office (US)
• Once Upon a Time
• Riverdale
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
• Stranger Things
• Titans (2018)

Other examples:

#-D

• The 100:
  • The first season tries not to paint the Grounders as Always Chaotic Evil, showing them to be motivated by defending their territory, as well as humanizing Lincoln. However, it doesn’t really work. For one, in the very first episode, the Grounders attack the Hundred without any provocation or warning. Other than Lincoln, none of the Grounder characters show much in the way of sympathetic traits, even shaming Lincoln for his. Finally, the Grounders deciding to try and kill all the Hundred after only a few skirmishes makes them seem irrationally cruel and extreme. Fortunately, later seasons fixed this by adding more agreeable Grounder characters, showing their culture to be more than just warmongering, and giving them more legitimate grievances.
  • In seasons three and four, Jasper is supposed to be a tragic character, completely broken by the loss of Maya at the end of season two. Unfortunately, his actions make it incredibly hard to care. In season 3, he acts like a complete Jerkass to all his friends, drinks himself into a stupor regularly, and other than helping save Raven midway through the season, does almost nothing productive. This gets even worse in season 4, where he decides to spend what may be humanity’s final months engaging in hedonism, while the rest of the cast is scrambling to try and solve the problem. While his grief is understandable, other characters on the show also lose loved ones, sometimes by their own hand, without becoming so completely destructive to both themselves and others.
• When Tony Almeida underwent a Face–Heel Turn in 24 he was clearly supposed to be seen as some sort of Tragic Villain who has had his family violently taken from him. But it's so quickly thrown in out of the blue that he doesn't come off sympathetic at all. It also doesn't look much better when you compare it to Jack Bauer's Face–Heel Turn period in the final season. Both of them endangered innocent people, but in completely different ways. Jack did become a danger to others during his attacks, but only because at this point they had become so reckless that innocent people were now running the risk of getting harmed in the crossfire — the only people he directly tried to harm were enemy agents the whole time. Tony on the other hand had no qualms about killing anyone and everyone to further his goals, at one point even being willing to infect a crowd of innocent men, women, and children in a subway station with a lethal virus.
• Accused (2023):
  • Ava in "Ava's Story", while her belief that cochlear implants are a form of abuse is understandable given her own experiences (she was never able to master her own implant's use and it gave her constant headaches, and her mother only treated this as further grounds to look down on her), her refusal to admit (a) that Lucie, as an infant, would have a much higher chance of successfully learning how to use the implant than she did, and (b) that she had no right whatsoever to intervene in parental medical treatment of a child, are not.
  • Kara in "Jessie's Story", as while she genuinely loves her daughter Jessie, her behavior regarding Jessie's desire to learn who her biological father is was highly manipulative and controlling, making her come across as an emotionally abusive Control Freak trying to force Jessie to be dependent solely on her. It's only made worse with the reveal that Dominic is Jessie's father, not a sperm donor, and that Will is her half-brother, as her reasoning has large shades of It's All About Me, and is so wangsty that it makes it sound like she wanted to have her cake and eat it too, only to have a meltdown when that predictably didn't work out (not helped by her being a Karma Houdini by the end of the episode).
• In American Horror Story: Double Feature the way the scene is filmed the audience is meant to sympathize with the college professor after Ursula chews him out, but minutes earlier he very rudely cussed out a student and told him to leave his classroom after he questioned an aspect of writing.
• Michael Bluth from Arrested Development is clearly meant to be the character the audience sympathises with, and it works to an extent, at least in the first three seasons. But anytime he interacts with a character outside of his family it becomes apparent that he's only "the nice one" by comparison — just a quick run-down of his first few romantic relationships shows him attempting to seduce his brother's girlfriend, sleeping with his son's crush (and later blaming said brother when his son finds out), and giving a fake name to a one-night stand (and later lying to her about losing her dog when he discovers she's blind). He's also not above manipulating his relatives' insecurities to get them to do what he wants and as an employer is shown to expect everyone to be as much of a workaholic as he is, calling for long hours and weekend work even when he can't afford to pay people on time. The fact that he's most often contrasted with his brother GOB, who is largely viewed by fans as an Unintentionally Sympathetic Jerkass Woobie, probably doesn't help this trope.
• Arrow:
  • In Season 4, Felicity becomes this full-force. We are supposed to feel sorry for her when she learns that Oliver has kept his long-lost illegitimate son a secret. But she comes off as very entitled with a nasty It's All About Me attitude. She accuses him of being untrustworthy (even though he just learned about it a day prior), only thinking of himself and not caring about what she feels, ignoring what he's going through over this knowledge, and breaks up with him over it. And she gets upset with him going behind her back, even though she was doing the same thing at the beginning of the season when she was still assisting Team Arrow without his knowledge. Many fans feel she went too far when the first thing she does after being able to walk again is turn her back on Oliver and walk away, right after he had to record a heartbreaking message to William telling him why he can never be a part of his life.
  • In Season 6, the New Recruits become this. While their concerns about being spied on and lied to by the "veterans" are justified, them choosing to leave Team Arrow and form their own, at the time when they all need to work together to deal with Cayden James, seems very childish.
• This was a serious problem with the early episodes of Batwoman (2019). Kate refuses to apprehend Alice, a terrorist who's killed many and tried to blow up a park full of men, women, and children in her debut, and even actively stops others from doing so, all because Alice is her long lost sister, and she thinks, without evidence, that she can redeem Alice and that bringing her in will hurt her chances at that (and maybe that Alice will be killed if she's in police custody, but the Crows would likely be far more careful after the first time that was attempted, especially once they knew she was their boss's daughter). She's only slightly more bothered when Alice breaks her word to stop killing and tortures and tries to kill other members of her family, whom for the most part, she continues to treat poorly and blame for what happened to Beth, making one wonder if part of Kate wants Alice to punish her family for their various slights against her. Kate does eventually get over this, but her qualifications as Gotham's new protector are never called into question because of this, and she's made the paragon of courage in the chronological next episode after this revalation despite her obvious moral and emotional cowardice.
• While the title character in Being Mary Jane has her moments, her niece, Niecy, is a better example. Although she mostly grew up without her father and is a single mother of two, she feels that she's owed something because of her circumstances. Aside from being morbidly obese (which unfortunately could make her unsympathetic alone), she has a huge chip on her shoulder, rarely takes responsibility for her actions and has virtually no ambition for herself. Even in the third season finale, after she's pulled over by the police for blasting her music too loudly and driving without any license plates (the latter which is illegal just about everywhere), she mouths off to them, tries to drive away and once being ordered to step out of the car, thinks it was a good idea to shove one of the officers, causing him to taser her. Even though in-universe it's treated like a case of Police Brutality and she's given compassion, the fans don't agree.
• Beverly Hills, 90210: Donna Martin gets this in the infamous "Donna Martin Graduates" storyline. Before the prom, the school administration explicitly warns the students that having or consuming alcohol at the prom is strictly forbidden and that anyone breaking this rule will be suspended, barred from graduation activities, and have to attend summer school. So Donna gets drunk, gets the punishment... and we're supposed to feel sorry for her and see the administration as the bad guys. ^note This was later addressed In-Universe. Brandon had to explain to his new college classmates that the protest wasn't about Donna's right to get drunk at the prom, it was about the Moral Guardians circumventing procedure to quietly pass draconian rules.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Buffy runs away from home in the season 2 finale after killing her boyfriend Angel in order to avert an apocalypse, returning in the end of the season 3 premiere. The next episode, "Dead Man's Party", deals with Buffy awkwardly settling back in with her mother and friends. During a party the gang throws for her at her house, Buffy overhears Joyce saying that Buffy being back is "almost worse in some ways" and is tempted to run away again. This results in Willow, Xander and Joyce having an explosive argument with Buffy in front of all her guests, tearing into her for running away and abandoning them. However, one of the reasons Buffy has run away from home (and which Buffy herself calls out) is that Joyce had told Buffy not to come back to the house if she left upon learning about the supernatural world Buffy secretly dealt with. Xander and Willow's anger at Buffy for leaving and not trying to talk to them is also undercut by the fact that they have spent most of the episode avoiding her when she did try to talk to them and then threw her a party at her hosue where they invited a bunch of people she didn't know and still avoided talking to her until she was ready to run away again.
  • The the Season 5 finale portrays Buffy as heroic for wanting to protect Dawn at all costs. However, Buffy knows that if she fails to keep Dawn away from the villain Buffy herself admits she can't defeat, there'll be unimaginable suffering and probable death for everyone and everything in existence, including Dawn, making Buffy seem extremely cowardly and selfish.
• The main protagonists of Charmed slowly become this in later series, turning from the Big Good into a bunch of selfish heroes-in-name-only that are more concerned with their own petty lives, than actually saving the world. The Avatar arc of Series 7 had them ultimately agree to a plan to end the battle between good and evil once and for all. Except, their reasons for agreeing was not because they'd hit the Godzilla Threshold where the apocalypse was looming and evil was in danger of winning, but because they were simply too lazy to continue fighting!
  • Phoebe, who the show insisted was the victim of Cole's actions, despite being technically responsible for his descent into insanity and preventing him from attempting a Heroic Suicide at least twice because he felt he was in danger of becoming evil again. We're meant to sympathise with her, but the large majority of the audience felt that she was the bigger villain.
• Cirilo Rivera from Carrusel. His unrequited crush on Maria Joaquina sometimes bordered on obsession. He never stalked her — let alone hurt her — but he did not give up on her no matter how much she turned him down. And let's face it — she was out of his league, which has NOTHING to do with their being of different races or even socioeconomic statuses; she, well, just didn't like him that way. But he would not stop, and kept showering her with gifts and attentions that she clearly didn't want and either upset her or creeped her out. Viewers were supposed to take Cirilo's side... but Maria Joaquina ended up being the one often favored by the audience instead since in practice, nobody blamed her for not loving a kid that clingy (and borderline creepy) back.
• The Chosen TV Series: In "Matthew 4:24" Simon's "Reason You Suck" Speech towards Matthew is meant to come off as absolutely correct, with one caveat. The Jews are suffering terribly under Roman rule, oppression that they've experienced multiple times in the past, and Matthew turned his back on them to become a tax collector. Not only that, he personally got onto Simon's back about his debt, and would've sold him out to the Roman authorities had Jesus not intervened. And to top it all off, he hasn't apologized about any of this. Still, most people online sympathized more with Matthew because of his socially awkward tendencies and inability to defend himself from Simon's anger, to the point that Dallas Jenkins said in his commentary on the episode that the only thing you're meant to disagree with Simon about is his refusal to forgive Matthew.
• Control Z: Rosita threw a birthday party at her house, ignoring Sofía's warnings to call it off because that's where the avenger would attack next. Since the perpetrator tampered with a vodka bottle, Sofía's attempts to save the day were misinterpreted by Rosita as excuses of wanting to ruin everyone's night. Also, Rosita showed no concern for María's wellbeing, only telling her that if she needed to throw up she could use the bathroom. It doesn't help that she rushes over to María alongside the others just after she overdoses and remain indifferent over someone's well-being is not what should be expected from a friend, let alone the kind who has lots of fun. In short, she should've taken Sofía's advice.
• Desperate Housewives gave us Katherine Mayfair, who, after being dumped by Mike Delfino, went insane and delusional. She then orchestrated a plot in which Mike was framed for attacking her (complete with her pointing to him as the ambulance arrived, getting him arrested.) Later, the women, including Susan, Mike's wife, are all shown as forgiving her, and we're supposed to take their side, but what happened is treated as water under the bridge, she never once apologizes to Mike or shows any regret for her actions. She came off more as a sociopath, and we were still supposed to like her.
• Dexter:
  • You are supposed to root for the title character, since he only kills other Serial Killers, but that doesn't make him not a Serial Killer. Not to mention the "sympathetic" part being that these are killers that got away with their crimes. Then we see Dexter intentionally sabotaging the cases against them just so he could go after them.
  • Detective Quinn is supposed to be a good cop who was wrongfully accused of being dirty and kept in a dead-end position, and the audience wants him to get ahead and clear his record. However, over the course of the series, he comes across as hopelessly incompetent, pointlessly aggressive, and seriously corrupt at many points, meaning a lot of people in the audience thought that him being kept in his current position was, if anything, too nice.
• Doctor Who:
  • Rose Tyler falls into this category for a lot of the fanbase, despite a lot of them liking her in Series 1. She gets angry at any woman who speaks to the Doctor, treats her boyfriend Mickey horribly in her first appearance, and doesn't seem to care that due to her disappearing for a year he got accused of murdering her. Her losing the Doctor by being trapped in another Universe may be a Tear Jerker but she implies she would be willing to destroy both worlds to get back to him. And "Journey's End" when she returns to her Universe due to the Daleks collapsing reality her dialogue clearly shows she was trying to get back before this happened, despite the Doctor telling her it would destroy both worlds. It doesn't help any that her own mother is also in this alternate universe, and she now essentially has her father back when the one in her own universe died when she was a baby, and her family is now fabulously rich, yet Rose acts remarkably ungrateful about all this.
  • Alien child or no, the Isolus in "Fear Her" can be very hard to sympathize with. The narrative clearly hypes it up to be a lost kid with no proper guidance who is desperate for companionship, and it expects us to feel pathos for it. The episode tries to make the Isolus' feelings toward its human child host out to be a genuine if one-sided sense of kinship and love on the Isolus' end, whilst doing nothing to address the implications that the Isolus has been using the animated, monstrous drawing of Chloe's Abusive Dad to threaten her into being compliant, making the Isolus guilty of full-blown fantastic domestic abuse for which it expresses no shame. Even when the Isolus leaves Chloe's body, its expression of loving farewell to her is undermined by the fact that it doesn't give a shit that it's leaving Chloe and her mother at the mercy of the loosed drawing of Chloe's father. It doesn't help that the Isolus and the possessed Chloe conduct theirself like an entitled brat the moment they don't get their own way, nor that they do everything in their power to obstruct Rose and the Doctor's actual efforts to help the Isolus reunite with its mother and siblings, making the Isolus come off as an Easily Forgiven Karma Houdini when the Doctor sends it home at the end.
  • The Tenth Doctor's attitude to regeneration being equivalent to death in "The End of Time" makes him come across as a whiny brat. Not helping his case is his outrage at the fact that he has to perform a Heroic Sacrifice and how no Doctor in the past reacted in this manner and neither did the Eleventh. No other Time Lord (and, for that matter, no other incarnation of the Doctor) does this either in the entire history of the show; at one point Twelve compares it to "man flu" and when his time to regenerate comes, he's defiant because he's tired of the endless cycle and just wants to die for good (but decides to regenerate with dignity in the end).
  • River Song as of the "The Wedding of River Song", in which she risks destroying the entire universe so she can save her "sweetie". Keep in mind that this directly threatens every single supporting character the Whoniverse has ever had, to say nothing of the countless innocent people who would have suffered because of her actions. She only stops once she gets assurance that the Doctor will survive her forced assassination of him, and never displays so much as a shred of remorse for what she's done. Interestingly enough, a similar scenario appears in "Hell Bent" three seasons later — and this time, the person responsible is appropriately treated as having crossed the Moral Event Horizon by the narrative.
  • Clara in "Nightmare in Silver", when she gets angry at the Doctor for putting Angie and Artie in danger. Considering they're only there because she gave in to their blackmail and allowed them to accompany her, it's hard to sympathize with her.
• Drake & Josh: Walter and Audrey in "Steered Straight". We're supposed to side with them when Drake and Josh get caught using fake IDs to get into a club, but the way they go about this is rather questionable. They sign the two up for "The Steered Straight Program", which shows children and teenagers what it's like to get arrested. While the false ID cards are understandable, the parents also mention the Gary Grill incident, burning down their neighbor's kid's treehouse, and Drake's speeding ticket (first off, they didn't know that the grills were stolen; second, burning down the treehouse was an accident, and they tried to rebuild it; and thirdly, the ticket was already taken care of). But the parents' plan backfires when, on the way to the program, the cop stops at a nearby gas station and a real criminal hijacks the car, taking the two boys with him. In reality, Blaze would've hurt the boys or, worse, had them both killed. At the end, only Walter ends up getting Laser-Guided Karma when he's forced to miss his date, handcuffed by his own sons, and shoved into a closet, while Audrey ends up being a Karma Houdini. When the boys explain their situation, she remarks, "Well, how were we supposed to know you were going to get tangled up with real criminals?", indicating she shows little to no remorse and only displaying concern for Walter when the duo forgot that they shoved him in a closet.

E-K

• Euphoria: While nobody argues that Maddy deserves to be abused, there are a lot of fans who find it hard to sympathize with her when she ruins other people's lives in order to escape from the consequences of her own terrible decisions.
• Debra Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond was supposed to come off as a long-suffering Closer to Earth housewife who has to put up with her idiot husband and Obnoxious In-Laws. Instead, she frequently came off as a hypocrite who belittled and bullied her husband, especially as the series went on.
• The Facts of Life: Mr. Gideon, the journalism teacher from the episode "Front Page." Granted, Jo was wrong and unprofessional to run the story about him being arrested at a cocaine bust (he was at the party, but was clean and was released after an hour). But he chose to stay at the party in spite of drug use on the premises. He also spent months being tougher on Jo in class over the "potential" she had in journalism...which consisted of routinely humiliating her, berating her, and putting her on the spot, which came off as bullying. The last straw was him yelling at her and dismissing an assignment that she spent weeks researching. She had to learn a hard lesson, but he was still an asshole and a terrible teacher who forgot he was dealing with a student, not a professional reporter. In the end, he is asked to leave the school and figures his teaching career is done...so he will simply be returning to his journalism career. Not exactly a professional setback.
• Fate: The Winx Saga:
  • Vanessa in the flashbacks in "To the Waters and the Wild", is presumably intended to be a sympathetic adoptive mother who has to put up with Bloom's teenage angst. However, in the main flashback, she seems to be extremely judgmental in shaming Bloom for having unconventional hobbies and not having friends. When Bloom is understandably offended and calls her a "basic bitch", Vanessa responds by taking away the door to her room. It's hard not to see getting third-degree burns in Bloom's fire as Laser-Guided Karma.
  • For that matter, Bloom also comes off like this. We're supposed to empathize with her struggles with her family and social anxiety, and wanting to find out more about her identity, when instead she comes off as a selfish and cocky girl who shows flagrant disregard for the rules, ignores her friends' problems to focus on her own, and defies Farah's authority, which puts the school in danger.
  • Stella's rude, nasty behavior is chalked up to her having an domineering, abusive mother; however, these revelations don't wash, seeing as this came after we saw her treating the other girls-especially Bloom-terribly. Thankfully, she gets better in the second season.
• Shows up with Martin Crane in the Halloween Episode of Frasier where the cast dress up as their heroes for a party. Niles Crane, paying tribute by dressing up as Martin, becomes drunk and begins badmouthing both Frasier and himself, expressing what he thinks are his father's feelings towards his sons. Martin becomes upset, angrily declaring Niles is putting words in his mouth and that he always loved his sons. The problem is there are several episodes before and after this point in the show where Martin has no problem openly stating his disdain for his sons' less-than-macho behavior and more highbrow tastes, even openly mocking them when he doesn't feel their problems warrant much concern. There are also strong hints that he wasn't any less judgmental of the two when they were younger and he couldn't manage to find anything to bond with them over. It comes off less like he's upset Niles is putting words in his mouth and more like he doesn't like hearing his own words thrown back in his face.
• From Friends:
  • Ross is portrayed as someone who has bad luck with women and has been divorced multiple times. One would think he is someone to feel sorry for, but Ross' jealousy of other men when it comes to dating women and how he would rather lie his way out of situations instead of being truthful just so he can look good makes Ross look more like a jerk.
  • Rachel, who we're meant to feel sorry for because she keeps losing Ross and has to watch him date other women... except she's the one who broke up with him (and refused to take him back), malevolently manipulates The Unfair Sex, and backstabs any woman he tries to move on with. We're also meant to sympathize with her 'empowering' journey of getting over her spoiled upbringing and breaking into the fashion industry. That works early on when she's vulnerable and hard-working, but not much later when she's unprofessional, lazy, and 'empowering' equals taking Ross's daughter to a different continent from him. It doesn't help that Monica is clearly more hard-working, Chandler more capable, and Ross more intelligent in their respective jobs, but she's still the 'Career' character. Rachel even hires a man she is attracted to rather than someone who has the qualifications and has an affair with him.
• The George Lopez Show:
  • George's mother Benny falls into this quite often.
    • During Benny's trial in season 6, George brings his maternal grandmother Luiza as a witness, hoping that her testimony will sway the jury's decision in Benny's favor. While on the stand, Luiza proceeds to mock Benny in front of the entire courtroom and shows how terrible a parent she was to Benny. This was done to make Benny seem like a Jerkass Woobie by showing how bad she had it growing up but for some viewers, it fell flat because Benny was just as awful towards George — being emotionally and physically abusive to him, being neglectful of his feelings, disregarding his learning disability, not supporting his goals, and lying to him constantly. And as an adult, she is still a Jerkass to him and his family, often taking advantage of his charity and familial obligation to her with little to no gratitude. It is pretty hard to sympathize with her.
    • Another example of Benny falling into this is an episode where George remodels her bathroom, free of charge (and even throws in some custom changes). When she complains about this and he rightfully calls her out for being ungrateful, she launches into a rant about all the bad things that happened in her life. The logic gap between being angry at people in your past and never saying thank you to your own son is pretty blatant.
    • One episode reveals that George's little league coach bequeathed him $100,000, which Benny proceeded to quickly fritter away on a new car and a trip to Las Vegas. The event is never mentioned again after the episode but it means that every attempt to portray Benny as a flawed but hardworking and underprivileged mother rings hollow as she had the funds to provide George with a comfortable life but wasted it on herself.
• Girlboss: This was a common source of criticism regrading the main protagonist Sophia. She was intentionally written to be a flawed yet still interesting character, with her idiosyncrasies intended to be amusing or endearing. However, many viewers found her so-called quirks irritating or off-putting instead; they also felt her flaws tended to outweigh her positive traits or were so glaring, she came across as very entitled, self-absorbed, and generally out-of-touch with reality, making it difficult for viewers to root for her or even tolerate her character. Nor does it help that many of her hardships are more her own fault than due to factors outside her control (e.g. she gets fired for turning up nearly half an hour late, spending her shift messing around on her phone and even eating her employer's food). The controversy surrounding her real-life counterpart did not exactly help endear Sophia to some viewers.^note Sophia was based upon Sophia Amoruso, founder of Nasty Gal, who was accused of mistreating her employees, including firing pregnant employees and not addressing the toxic work culture; Nasty Gal also went bankrupt shortly before the show's debut due in part to Amoruso's mismanagement of the company
• Glee:
  • Will Schuester. His supposed virtue is that he is a compassionate teacher who genuinely cares for and puts all of his students first. But it's a bit hard to see him as the sweet teacher he's made out to be after he planted drugs in a student's locker to blackmail him into joining Glee Club. And after he blatantly favors a select handful of students within his group. And after he abandons his students on their competition day to pursue a personal audition. And after he lets open acts of bullying of his own students go unreported, even when it lands one of them in the hospital. And after he suspends a female student (who always dresses modestly and had suffered from bulimia in the past) from school for refusing to wear a skimpy bikini in a musical performance.
  • Kurt is another frequent victim of this trope. Half the time he's a genuine Woobie; the other half, he's self-centered, hypocritical, and prone to fits of jealousy. Not to mention the sexual harassment he refused to apologize for.
• Gossip Girl: Viewers are meant to sympathize with Dan Humphrey for being an underprivileged outcast struggling to be accepted by the rich, cool kids and for having to work hard for everything he gets while the Upper East Side characters get everything handed to them because they are wealthy and know the right people. He was even referred to as "the pauper" in promos at one point. We're also supposed to sympathize with him on account of him being the moral compass on a show filled with people stabbing each other in the back and going to any lengths to pursue their own selfish interests. This quickly falls apart on all accounts, starting with the fact that he's able to attend an expensive private school in Manhattan, lives in a large loft in Brooklyn, for a while took a limo to school, and had a rich stepmother who paved the way for him. He oftentimes sabotaged other characters, including his own long-time best friend and (at the time) girlfriend Vanessa when she got accepted into Tish and he didn't, not to mention he sabotaged Blair's wedding via a Gossip Girl blast but when she thought it was Chuck's doing Dan not only allowed her to keep thinking that, he encouraged it. Then there's the fact that he was Gossip Girl and thus responsible for much of the misery in the other characters' lives, including putting their lives at risk on occasion.
• Gotham:
  • Renee Montoya. In her mind she might see herself as a good friend to Barbara, coming to her believing that Gordon is actually a Dirty Cop who's manipulating her. But her actions in doing so are to go behind Gordon's back twice to warn Barbara without any evidence aside from two separate informants — both of whom, she knows, have strong mob ties and also have every reason to lie to her. In addition, the second time she broke into Barbara's home, which Barbara is not pleased about. If anything it looks more like she's a jealous ex who's willing to latch onto any idea without evidence to break the couple up so she can get back together with Barbara. In fact, when the breakup does happen, it's clear that Barbara brought it on herself by blabbing about the child snatchers earlier, before Cobblepot's return (if anything, Gordon was smart to not tell her anything about Cobblepot); Montoya was little more than the accelerator in the long run.
  • Then there is how she acted after receiving the information from Cobblepot. After he stated that Fish had the necklace before it was found on Pepper and flat out admitted he is using this information to get rid of his boss. What does Montoya do? Does she follow up on this information? Does she take it with a grain of salt from a guy that is most likely lying to her? Does she go to Gordon to find out if he was even aware of this? No. She takes this very flimsy information and jumps to the conclusion that Jim must have been fully aware and even planted the evidence on Pepper. Then instead of bringing this to the police, she goes right to Barbara and flat out tells Barbara with no evidence that her fiance is guilty to get them to break up. Gordon wasn't even aware of this theory until after he hears it secondhand from Barbara which means after using this information to try to break up Barbara and Gordon, she did absolutely nothing else with it.
  • Barbara herself counts. One of the first things we of her is Jim telling her, in the strictest confidence, that the police force is chasing a ring of child snatchers, but that the police force is keeping it out of the press so the snatchers aren't tipped off. Barbara's reaction to this is to immediately pick up the phone and call the newspaper to spill everything. Next episode, she's upset at Jim for not telling her about his work. Several episodes later, she comes to the conclusion that Jim is cheating on her when she calls their apartment and a 12-year-old girl answers the phone. Since she'd previously dumped him, and since she'd genuinely cheated on Jim while they were still together, her anger only made her look hypocritical. The writers eventually gave up on trying to make her actions justifiable or sympathetic entirely and just made her an actual murdering psychopath the moment she had any opportunity to do so, without much more than a Hand Wave for justification.
• Happy Valley:
  • In Season 3, Ann's drunken rant at Ryan about Tommy is supposed to be an eye-opener for Ryan about what his father is really like. However, many viewers felt that Ann went too far and was very harsh on Ryan by telling him Catherine was the only one that wanted him. Yes, Ann was kidnapped and raped by Tommy, but, not only is Ryan an innocent kid in all of this, but he is also a victim, as he was born through his father raping his mother, and also, Tommy even tried to burn Ryan to death when Ryan was eight.
• H₂O: Just Add Water:
  • The main trio of Cleo, Emma, and Rikki tend to do this where Charlotte is concerned. Charlotte's only "crime" during her first few episodes was being interested in Lewis, fresh after being dumped by Cleo; she's civil to the girls otherwise. This doesn't stop them from messing with her with their superpowers, stealing her diary, and generally humiliating her. In fact, the Lewis/Charlotte relationship is primarily Cleo's fault, as Lewis was forced to reciprocate Charlotte's affection to stop her from seeing Cleo in mermaid form.
  • Will has moments of questionable entitlement, like trespassing into the dolphin enclosure at the marine park just to show off, but the cake is taken by his behavior when he decides to learn Bella's secret. He notices that she flees from water, so he dumps a glass of water on her when he's sure she can't easily run away from him. As a result, he discovers she's a mermaid by violating her trust and forcing it out of her. To make matters worse, a few episodes later, Rikki gets kidnapped, and Will is the only one who knows where she might be, information he withholds until he confirms that Rikki and Cleo are mermaids as well. Bella still gets together with him after that, and he implies that her being a mermaid is the most attractive part about her.
• The Here Come the Brides episode "Two Worlds" has Josh's Love Interest's father, who reacts to his daughter's successful cataract surgery by whining about how she doesn't need him anymore and guilt tripping her about any independence she might achieve.
• A worker at a coffee house in Hot in Cleveland gets promptly fired in front of his young daughter and weakly tells her "I'll buy you a bicycle next year," when Melanie tells him he's been getting her order wrong. We're meant to feel sorry for him because he's clearly not doing well in life at the moment... but it's hard to feel sorry for the guy when he's been doing his job completely wrong consistently for three straight weeks.
• How I Met Your Mother: Towards the end of season 3, Ted temporarily ends his friendship with Barney after learning he slept with Robin and broke the "bro code" in the process. However, this moment notwithstanding, Ted never takes the bro code seriously and treats it like a joke. Not to mention he never holds this against Robin in spite of her consenting to it equally. While Barney may take the bro code seriously, he only ever broke it in the heat of the moment to console Robin and had no intention of hurting anyone. Furthermore, by the final season, Ted breaks the bro code himself just hours before Barney and Robin's wedding and he treats it like it's just another thing and no big deal.
• Several zombies in iZombie. Unlike most depictions of zombies, these zombies retain their sentience if they regularly eat brains, making them collectively more of a Tragic Monster. However, a lot of zombies do not show an interest in assimilating with society, preferring to eat the brains of murdered humans instead of tubes of donated humans brain mush provided for them, and their feelings of oppression feel hollow because, as stated before, they eat human brains they know were collected through less than savory means. It gets especially bad in season four after Seattle is cut off from the rest of the world to contain the zombie outbreak, when people willingly turn themselves into zombies even though they know the brain supply is very limited.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Mutsuki Kamijo from Kamen Rider Blade is supposed to be a naive, insecure young boy struggling with the powers he suddenly gains. He mostly came across as an immature whiny brat instead, particularly after his pathetic efforts at a Face–Heel Turn.
  • In Kamen Rider Kiva, Mio Suzuki is forbidden to love the hero Wataru because she is forced to marry his brother Taiga for political reasons. This would indeed have made her sympathetic — had she not repeatedly put pressure on Wataru to murder Taiga, then tried to do it herself in front of everyone at their wedding, and sneered about killing Taiga to his own mother's face.
  • One episode of Kamen Rider Wizard involved a Phantom trying to make the Victim of the Week despair by turning her husband and friends against her. However, the character was so shrill and obnoxious that most fans felt that little effort was needed on the Phantom's part.
  • Kamen Rider Zero-One:
    • Gai Amatsu's Freudian Excuse is that his dad told him to study more and spend less time playing with his Robot Dog. While it's somewhat sad to see him put his robot dog, it's hard to sympathize with Gai as a character given how horrific a lot of his actions throughout the show are, which include but are not limited to corrupting an AI and setting it loose so it kills a bunch of people just to sabotage his business rival, Mind Controlling and abusing his right-hand woman, torturing someone for funsies, commandeering a government agency to use as his own private hit squad and enabling a terrorist group to run rampant all so he can exploit it to drive down his competitor's stocks. Not helping matters is that even post-Heel–Face Turn, Gai only gives an incredibly vague apology for his actions and gets off scot-free in the end, even though it's not an exaggeration to say he caused everything bad that happens in the show.
    • Horobi decides to keep on being a genocidal terrorist, even after being released the Ark's influence, and his purported intentions of trying to protect Humagears are completely undercut when he murders Izu, a fellow Humagear for the pettiest of reasons. He's intended to be seen as a Tragic Villain, particularly when he loses Jin, but the fact that he refuses to hold any accountability and even goes so far as using an Ark-Driver just make him seem like a repulsive hypocrite. And even when he does see the error of his ways, it's not because he acknowledges that killing Izu in itself was wrong, but because it led to consequences that affected someone he cares about. The fact that he, like Gai, is Easily Forgiven and never actually punished even though he directly murdered someone the heroes cared about also doesn't help matters.
• The titular character of Kirby Buckets is supposed to be designed as an Audience Surrogate for the show's main demographic of preteen boys, whose interests always seem to come into conflict with girls' and aren't given the same mainstream acceptance (a theme Disney XD leans heavily into with their original shows; in fact, it's kind of a Reality Subtext for the network's breakaway from the girl-oriented Disney Channel). This cultural clash is best exemplified in the show's central conflict, Kirby's Sibling Rivalry with his older sister Dawn. Dawn is supposed to be a symbol of a "girl culture" that looks down upon Kirby's unique boy interests (itself an inherently sexist message), and Kirby is intended to be seen as a plucky underdog fighting back against a Big Sister Bully. The only problem? The power dynamic is more often than not completely backwards: In-Universe, Kirby is usually a very popular guy as he is a prominent cartoonist, while Dawn is liked by very few people. Even their own parents constantly show more favoritism towards Kirby and berate Dawn constantly. And because of that, "Dawnzilla", Kirby's caricature of Dawn, seems to come off as Kirby being a bully more than anything else. So yeah, it's no surprise that many viewers have a hard time taking Kirby's side on the show.

L-R

• Law & Order:
  • The son in "All My Children". Everyone is somehow sympathetic to his side of the story, but while the father was indeed a major Jerkass, the son never tried to live for himself and seemed to only want to make the father pay for not spoiling him. This is coupled with the fact that had the son had just got a job and gotten off of drugs instead of riding his father's coattails, he would have never been kicked out of the house. Plus, he brought an innocent girl just looking for her biological father into his sick game and got mad at her for realizing what his real motives were and wanting no part of it.
  • Stephanie Harker in the episode “True North” certainly counts; she has her soon-to-be ex-husband, young stepdaughter, and the friend who did the killings murdered, then it's revealed that she killed the man's first wife years earlier just so she can marry him. She tries to explain at her trial a sob story about being looked down on for being working class and a rich boy getting her pregnant in high school and she had to terminate the pregnancy due to him refusing to marry her, but even that displayed her true nature from back then. McCoy himself said prior to her being sentenced to death, "Stephanie Harker doesn't push my pity buttons."
  • This was combined with The Unfair Sex in "Good Girl" where the murderer was treated sympathetically despite the fact if the genders in this situation were reversed (a man had an affair and killed the woman when she tried to end it) he would have never been depicted sympathetically, especially if he claimed that he did it because he couldn’t live without her. When you add to that the fact that she seems to have a race fetish and the first thing she did after she was arrested was accuse him (the person she claimed to love) of trying to rape her, it's hard to take her crying seriously.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Galadriel's brash nature, bluntness, and impatience have caused some viewers and reviewers to deem her as being bratty and unlikeable. An often cited example is her instant dismissal of Elrond's opinions and experience with the line "You have not seen what I have seen"; when he responds that he has seen his share, she simply repeats this line in an aggravated tone rather than explaining further. Other commonly cited examples include her lack of concern for her own soldiers and her swiftness to threaten violence on people with minimal provocation. Some viewers have stated they would've found Galadriel's attitude easier to accept as a side effect of youth... except by this stage Galadriel is already thousands of years old, yet characters with a fraction of her life experience show more maturity and wisdom.
• In the episode "Welcome, Stranger" of Lost in Space, Mr and Mrs. Robinson come off as this. (Well, by today's standards, anyway.) A space cowboy homes in on their ship's signal after wandering through space for a while and says he needs a new navigation system to get back to earth. Later, the two debate in private on whether to send their kids with him because they feel it was a mistake bringing them with them. We're supposed to feel their anguish, but there's one problem: They don't know this guy. They met him two hours ago and now they plan to send their kids with him? He could be someone who'd sell their kids to some aliens as slaves or he could be some lonely pervert. They don't even know if he's really going to earth. He could be a con artist looking for suckers to get parts from to sell to the highest bidder. If that's not bad enough, they tell their kids their plan but decide to spring it on the stranger at the last minute. The cowboy himself calls them out on this and yet we're supposed to see him as being the one who's wrong.
• Mad Men gives us Glen Bishop. We're supposed to see him as an ignored, pitiful kid that no one pays attention to and whose misguided affection for Betty is sympathetic and cute. But due to his actor's less-than-stellar performance and how his "affections" (wanting a piece of Betty's hair, wanting to "rescue" her from her marriage) come across as creepy and weird rather than cute, he quickly became the series' Scrappy. Not helping matters is that he's twenty years younger than Betty.
• Mahabharata: This television adaptation of the ancient Hindu epic has quite a few such characters.
  • First we have Bhishma, the grandsire of the dynasty. While he is presented as a wise statesman as well as an honorable and formidable warrior, his stubborn adherence to his oath which in turn is a My Master, Right or Wrong type oath to always defend the ruler of Hastinapur leads to him committing evil acts on multiple instances. Which includes not acting against Duryodhan when the wax house plot is revealed, and instead partitioning the kingdom and ejecting the Pandavas from Hastinapur. Which includes being an Accomplice by Inaction during the infamous dice game. And finally fighting on Duryodhan’s side during the Kurukshetra War.
  • Then we have Karna, another one of Duryodhan’s allies. His Parental Abandonment, exclusion from the Kshatriya warrior class, his famous generosity, and his unmatched skill as a warrior are meant to endear viewers to him. His curse from Parashuram to forget all his advanced archery knowledge when he needs it the most, for no fault except displaying a trait which Parashuram cannot attribute to someone who isn’t a Kshatriya warrior, pushes him into Woobiedom. His Undying Loyalty to Duryodhan because the latter gifted him a kingdom and formally inducted him into the warrior caste is endearing and you can’t help but feel for him when princess Draupadi rejects him as a suitor for being a “charioteer’s son”. But that said, he was taught archery so he can be a Vigilante Man taking down corrupt and evil warriors; instead, he gatecrashes a private ceremony for the Kuru princes and challenges Arjun to a duel for no reason whatsoever. He feels indebted to Duryodhan who buys his loyalty by gifting him a minor province to rule. And during the dice game, he is the one who shames Draupadi for having five husbands, calls her a prostitute, and rhetorically asks if she could be brought naked before the court. When given a chance for a Heel–Face Turn, he refuses out of loyalty to Duryodhan and even participates in the dog-piling on a defenseless Abhimanyu. And his second curse, which actually dooms him is well deserved. He had fired an arrow into the open with no consideration for what it might hit, and it ended up killing a defenseless calf — a huge sin in Hinduism.
  • Yudhistir is supposed to be sympathetic for being a cerebral wise statesman who would rather govern a kingdom than fight battles. But it is his gambling addiction that leads to utter ruination for him, his brothers, and Draupadi. In the dice game, he could have stopped playing after losing some wealth. Instead he stakes his entire kingdom. And then stakes his brothers, then himself and finally Draupadi, without even asking them if they wanted to assume such a risk. And then prevents his brothers from doing anything to stop Draupadi’s disrobing. Then he stakes everything again in a Loser Goes Into Exile game. And once his exile begins, he starts spouting the need to be the better man and forgive Duryodhan, even saving the latter from judgement and execution by the Gandharva tribe to spare Duryodhan’s mother Gandhari the grief.
• The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel:
  • Some viewers find Midge hard to sympathize with because of the minimal amount of attention she seems to give to her children. We hardly ever see her interacting with her kids. As the show goes on, more screen time is dedicated to showing Midge's struggle to balance her budding professional life with her parental responsibilities as well as Joel's increasing willingness to pitch in while Midge is away. The subject of parenthood gets brought up a lot by fans, and the cast and crew have had to point out that the show's focus isn't on parenthood, so it simply gets less screen time.
  • Abe and Rose in Season 3, after Abe quits his job and they give up their apartment and move in with the Maisels. We're supposed to feel sympathetic for them because of how annoying Moishe and Shirley are, ignoring the fact that they are voluntarily living rent-free in the Maisels' house so they don't have to pay to live somewhere else (including the fact they turned down their son and daughter-in-laws' offer of staying at their apartment due to the accommodations not being up to their standards and Rose turned down living in an area that wasn't up to hers).
• The Nanny:
  • Maxwell Sheffield can come off as this. Yes, he is dealing with the death of his wife and had to deal with less-than-ideal and emotionally distant parents. And yes, being a Broadway producer is a stressful job. Regardless, anytime Fran messes up something for him, no matter how minor, his response is always to yell "Miss Fine!" and threaten to fire her or sometimes with implied physical abuse, even if she apologizes for it. Fran Drescher admitted she wanted the show to be like I Love Lucy so he was probably doing what Ricky always used to do, but that kind of behavior wasn't as accepted in the '90s as it was in the '50s.
  • Probably the biggest example of this would be his infamous telling Fran he loved her, then taking it back from season 4. His justification is he was worried about how it would affect his kids if their relationship failed, and "Samson, he Denied Her," tries to spin as though he was so worried about losing her that he chose not to have a relationship. However, it comes off more as "there's the slightest chance the relationship won't work, so it's better not to have one at all," essentially the romance equivalent of "work was hard, so we quit." Also, later that season, when Fran starts attending therapy to get over her need for marriage, Max basically admits he's happy for the therapist because it means he doesn't have to make a commitment; while C.C. is supposed to come off as a jerk in a later episode for implying that Max is stringing Fran along, the truth is, she's not wrong.
• The Outer Limits (1995): The shapeshifting aliens from "First Anniversary" are intended to come off as lonely and misunderstood because they're trapped on Earth, but their true appearance is shown to cause insanity or death in their human husbands when they start suffering Glamour Failure. It's naive at best and malicious at worst for them to continue seeking attention like that, especially when they already have each other for company as well (if it was just the one alien, it still wouldn't be right, but at least a bit more understandable).
• In the 2002 Lifetime Movie of the Week The Pact, we meet a young man, Chris Harte, who was charged in the murder of his pregnant, which was unbeknownst to him until after her demise girlfriend Emily Gold, whom he killed in a failed suicide pact she initiated. Instead of him being portrayed as the conflicted and heartbroken boyfriend who just lost the love of his life and plagued by confusion and guilt over the situation who was sent off to prison, like he was in the original book the movie was based on, he comes off as a sneaky, creepy, emotionally-detached douchebag who who ends up getting away with his crime due to the father of a dead girl testifying on his behalf. Perhaps if a better actor had portrayed Chris, he would be seen in a more sympathetic light.
• Power Rangers:
  • Power Rangers Time Force has many fans see Time Force themselves as this for propping up the racist government that makes threats like Ransik possible. In the Sentai source material, the Rangers' superior Captain Ryuya (the analogue to Captain Logan) is actually the true Big Bad of the show, and as such, it's very easy to spin the main characters' bosses as villains. Ransik, however, is not free of this. The show wants you to sympathize with him, but in his backstory, he's shown getting wounded by a fellow mutant and only surviving thanks to the then-human Frax, who tells him he sees no difference between humans and mutants. But then, Ransik kills Frax, calling him a fool for trusting him and after Frax becomes his robot servant, he continues to treat him like crap. He's never called out for how ungrateful he was of a charitable human, nor does he ever realize that. All of this makes Ransik less of a tragic victim of prejudice and more of a hypocrite.
  • There's a subplot in Power Rangers Zeo that revolves around a blind woman. She drops her books and the rangers try to help, only for her to get pissed and storm off. When Adam goes to see her, she takes off again. One of the rangers tell him it was because he "felt sorry for her", but it doesn't come off that way. Rather, it comes off as her being ungrateful.
  • Power Rangers Operation Overdrive: The Overdrive Rangers are meant to come off as sympathetic in "Once A Ranger" when they lose their powers and feel useless enough that they quit. However: 1) They still have their civilian powers, 2) Their mission was not to be just Power Rangers, but to find the jewels, which they could still do while the veteran rangers dealt with the monsters, 3) All of them, save for Tyzonn, were gloating about how awesome it is to be Power Rangers before being reminded it's about saving lives, 4) They only return because they found returning to their old lives boring rather than wanting to actually do something heroic, and 5) Mack, unmorphed, uses Excelsior to slash through a giant monster in half. While Excelsior's power is hyped up this episode, the fact remains that Mack had to jump several hundred feet in the air and perform a slash powerful enough to one shot the monster. With civilian powers this strong, why complain about not having Ranger powers?
  • Power Rangers Samurai ends up doing this to the rest of the cast, minus Lauren. After the revelation that Lauren is the real heir and Jayden merely acted as a body-double while she underwent training for the ultimate sealing technique, the rest of the team focus so much on Jayden and how he must feel about having kept this secret from them while blatantly ignoring Lauren's attempts at getting to know and become friends with them or not taking them seriously. Along with repeatedly hero-worshipping Jayden, the rest of the Samurai group comes across as just rude to a new team member who is honestly trying her best to make good out of the situation. This is a complete 180 from the source material, Samurai Sentai Shinkenger, where Lauren's analogue, Kaoru, is only disliked by Sixth Ranger Genta and that's only because he felt she took his best friend's spot. Even more, the team does accept her as part of the team once she shows a more caring side.
  • Compounded by the other change from Shinken: We get to know Lauren better than Kaoru, and we find that Lauren's life has focused around samurai and symbol power training to master the sealing technique — she's basically been a prisoner of the job she inherited from her father, separated from her family and never having any friends. She tries to make friends with the rest of the team — her first opportunity to try and have friends ever — but is treated like a Replacement Scrappy for Jayden. When Master Xandred can't be re-sealed, having absorbed Dayu and gained immunity, it's not like any other case of a failed weapon or technique — this is her entire life we're talking about. It would be real nice to see someone acknowledge what it had to mean to her. We get it, guys, you really really really love Jayden. But come one, somebody give some consideration for someone whose life has been so lonely, consisting of nothing but this burden thrust on her from birth, and All for Nothing.
• Primeval: New World: Mac at the end of his Roaring Rampage of Revenge in Episode 5, when he shoots the male Lycaenops dead in utter cold blood, right when the creature is mourning the death of its mate. The latter moment was meant to show how badly Samantha's death by the female Lycaenops has gotten to Mac and make the audience pity him, but for the majority of viewers, it seemed like a completely asshole move of him. You'd think Mac would relate to the Lycaenops' pain of losing a loved one at least for a moment, besides the fact that it's the already-slain female who killed Samantha. Not helping the fact is Mac handling the Jerkass Ball earlier in the episode, when he tried to innocently trick Toby into flattening the unconscious female Lycaenops with a truck (directly after the rest of the team had explained to him why they weren't killing the creature), which almost makes the same female later killing his loved ones seem like a disproportionately-overblown helping of karma for Mac. Fortunately, the next episode did a bit to make up for Mac's actions here.
• In the first episode of ProjectMc2, the protagonists stalk a teenage girl, following her home and putting cameras in her room... wait, why are they the heroes again? (Even worse, the girl inexplicably totally forgives them for this, within the space of one conversation.)
• On an episode of Promised Land (1996), a woman becomes completely convinced that Russell Greene has divine healing powers after witnessing him rescue and revive a drowning girl. From then on, no matter how many times he tells her otherwise, she refuses to listen, insisting that he's just being modest. The conflict increases when she begs him to cure her cancer and stops seeing her doctor and offering him money, again, over his numerous protests. When she inevitably collapses, she and her husband have the gall to blame Russell for supposedly having scammed them, completely overlooking that they ignored his repeated denials. It's hard not to feel sorry for a cancer patient, but not given this one's thoroughly stupid actions.
• Reba has Kyra. It's hard to deny that she gets the short end of the stick at points, but this is often because of very justifiable reasons, such as trying to help the teenage mother in the family get on her feet and raising a newborn child. In addition, with all the complaining Kyra does, she almost never does anything to help improve the situation, or at least help make things easier for everyone. The closest thing that can remotely count was moving out to her dad's place, which only succeeded in causing even more stress on the family and bringing Reba to tears. Combine this with her slowly sliding into the Teens Are Monsters trope during her teenaged years and her Deadpan Snarker tendencies being taken up to near Jerkass levels in the later seasons, and it's a bit hard to feel bad for her at times when she starts complaining about things.
• Ripper Street has Susan “Long Susan” Hart. At first, she comes off as a sympathetic brothel owner who cares for her girls. This ends in the third season when she a) helps organize a train accident that kills and injures hundreds, just so she and her partner can profit from the insurance. b) almost kills detective Reid by shooting him in the head when he gets close to discovering the truth. And c) effectively kidnapping Reid’s amnesiac daughter and lying to him about it. In the end, her hanging seems more like a well-deserved end than a sad event.
• Robin Hood:
  • At the end of season two, Guy of Gisborne stabbed Maid Marian to death, sending his Character Development and Redemption Arc back to square one. Season Three tried to turn him into a Heartbroken Badass, ignoring the fact that for a significant portion of the fanbase, he had already crossed the Moral Event Horizon when he stabbed Maid Marian to death and thus forfeited any right to the goodwill of the audience. Even his actor hated him.
  • In the same show, the death of Kate's brother did not carry the emotional weight it should have done thanks to Kate's refusal to utilize common sense in her repeated attempts to rescue him. The writers were going for "headstrong" and "impulsive" in their characterization of Kate — unfortunately, all they really managed was "stupid." The ridiculous swinging between Wangst and trying to romance Robin didn't help her either.
    • And the cherry on top is the fact that Kate's brother was killed by Guy, resulting in a scene in which the audience has no reason to care about anyone involved.
    • And the cherry on top of that cherry is that depending on how you see it, Kate is at fault as well for the murder. He died because she got captured trying to get him out of the army and he died trying to save her. Some fans wonder if he might have survived had she just left him in the army.
• Roseanne had an episode where Darlene, who was a vegetarian, deciding to express her beliefs by drawing chalk outlines of cows outside of The Lunch Box, the diner where Roseanne worked. While the incident could be seen as funny and it was admirable that she stood by her beliefs, what isn't nearly as admirable is the fact that she was potentially sabotaging her family's finances and adding more stress to her parents' lives, especially since this happened not too long after both Dan lost the bike shop and Becky eloped with Mark. Plus, in addition to contributing nothing in the way of financial support to the family herself, when her mother made her work as a vendor serving the meat sandwiches at the carnival as punishment, she not only routinely insults her and her coworkers who are just doing what they're told, but she actively tries to stop customers from giving them business all in an effort to stand her ground.
• Runaways (2017): Gert often runs into this. Even if we accept that her biggest character flaw is her self-righteousness, it doesn't entirely excuse the fact that she treats her on-and-off boyfriend Chase like complete and utter garbage and treats him like a dumb jock even after it's clear that he's brilliant. And yet, Chase does nothing but respect her and is constantly begging her to take him back. Given his own upbringing with an abusive father and a long-suffering mother, it quickly becomes uncomfortable to watch.

S-Y

• Occurs in Scrubs when The Janitor, after losing a bet to Dr. Cox, has to watch his van being crashed into a wall, and the viewer is meant to feel sorry for him. Except that The Janitor has in the past done a number of similar actions, and many that were worse and show outright lack of regard for people that might get hurt and gotten away with them, with the only difference being that his actions were Played for Laughs. It doesn't help that The Janitor won the bet by tricking Elliot, only to have it blow up in his face in a "Fawlty Towers" Plot. If he had been honest with her, she might've played along since they're good friends.
  • It's obvious from the way her stories tend to end that the writers think Elliot is supposed to be sympathized with. Yet sometimes, she does end up looking like a jerk so other people can learn their Aesops. An early episode has her berating Carla for underestimating her, and not apologizing, and another has her acting high-and-mighty at her new private practice job so J.D. and Cox could learn to deal with their jealousy. In the end, even the writers noticed they had taken this too far with Elliot and Keith's relationship, where she's practically just using and abusing him, breaks up with him when they are engaged, and then laughs it off at work — they had her give a big apology to Keith a few episodes afterwards but to many viewers, it was too little, too late.
• Debbie during Season 7 of Shameless (US). The viewer is obviously supposed to feel bad for her as she struggles to find ways to earn money while taking care of her baby daughter Franny on her own (with Fiona coldly refusing to help in any way), and Ian and Lip even both accuse Fiona of being too hard on Debbie when Fiona threatens to kick Debbie out of the house for not pulling her weight. But many found it hard to really sympathize with Debbie, as Fiona did make it extremely clear with Debbie during the latter's pregnancy in Season 6 that she was not going to be responsible for the baby or support what she considered a bad decision, as Debbie was barely 16 years old at the time and had gotten pregnant on purpose to invoke The Baby Trap on her boyfriend (who ran out on her when he found out) and was still choosing to keep her baby in spite of her family's constantly poor financial state. Debbie's lackluster attempts at finding honest work (a single Dunkin Donuts interview), choosing instead to either demand Fiona give her a job (while refusing to take orders from her), trying to find a boyfriend to mooch off of or steal from other mothers at the park, didn't quite endear her to the viewers. It also didn't help that Debbie's reputation with many viewers as The Scrappy because of those aforementioned actions was already longstanding by then.
• In yet another example of a Lifetime Movie of the Week, Sins of the Mother has a Broken Bird who grew up with a single alcoholic mother. While you may sympathize with her at first, the fact that her mother, in the present day, is a responsible, sober woman trying to make amends with her and her past actions, she herself remains bitter and antagonistic towards everyone, including her innocent five-year-old half-sister and repeatedly rebuffs her mother's (genuine) attempts at reconciliation makes her this. Fortunately, she forgives her mother by the movie's end and has become more optimistic and likable.
• The Sopranos abused this trope a lot, especially when the most despicable characters were humanized and sympathetic to some degree. The worst case of this being Ralph Cifaretto, a depraved, Ax-Crazy mobster. We are supposed to feel sorry for him during his sympathetic moments before his death. However, it's difficult to side with Ralph when you realize that this is the same man who killed a pregnant woman with his bare hands.
• Many of the older alien races in the Stargate-verse are meant to be seen in a sympathetic light but come a bit short.
  • The Nox, an ancient race who were once members of the Four Great Races, who keep to themselves in modern times. They claim to have an advanced pacifist philosophy due to their stance of never fighting anyone even to defend themselves. Of course they have the ability to render themselves invisible and revive the dead, but never offering these wonders to those countless innocents suffering under the Goa'uld every day makes them come across as selfish at best. Many of them claim that the Earthlings' policy "the strong defend the weak" is self-righteous and stupid, often calling them "very young". At the end of their introductory episode, it comes across as extremely hypocritical when their leader tells the team that "Your way is not the only way".
  • The Tollan were an advanced race who made some mistakes during their first ever "first contact". After the neighboring aliens used the technology given to them to blow themselves all up, the Tollans decided to strictly adhere to a policy of never sharing any advanced technology with any alien race less advanced than their own (as opposed to, say, being more careful about which technology they share and with whom). This came back to bite them hard when this policy (combined with their lack of upgrading their defensive technology) led to them being blackmailed and later wiped out as a whole.
  • The series' best example would most likely be the Ancients, an ancient and super-advanced race who built the Stargates and later evolved into Energy Beings. They'd often claim that they never use their powers to help unascended beings because they do not wish to abuse that power and turn out like their evil cousins, the Ori. They still come across as extreme Neglectful Precursors who never own up to their responsibility to repair the damage they themselves caused even before their ascension, such as the creation of the Wraith and Replicators, among others. It's made worse because apparently, if you're an Ancient, it's all right to not dismantle unbelievably hazardous or dangerous technology (or at least put safeties in), such as the machine that would download the entire Ancient database into one's head (with the only safety being "Had the Ancient Tech Gene," and would eventually kill you in a day or so), the exploding tumor machine, an infinite time loop device, and a healing device that will turn you into a zombie. To top it off many of them also appear to have a rather low opinion of non-ascended beings.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: The viewers in "The Galileo Seven" were meant to side with the lieutenants, since the episode was meant to be Spock learning his lesson about empathy. However, they spend most of the episode berating Spock, and they do unreasonable things like demand a dead crewman be given a burial, despite the fact that doing that would put them at risk.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • In "Half a Life", Lwaxana Troi tries to persuade Timicin (who had dedicated his life to researching a method to rejuvenate the dying sun of his homeworld Kaelon II) to reject his culture's tradition of euthanasia on his 60th birthday. The Kaelons are portrayed as rightfully offended by Lwaxana interfering in their culture, but it's hard to grant them any sympathy when they imply that they'd rather go extinct than compromise their traditions even slightly. They refuse to allow Timicin any more time to continue his work, even while acknowledging that anyone else trying to learn his method might take too long to properly refine it, and go so far as to state that their scientific community will reject his work if he refuses to kill himself as per tradition.
  • In "Ethics", Worf is paralyzed in an accident and is intent on performing ritual suicide in accordance with Klingon tradition (as by their standards, being disabled such that one cannot fight is a major dishonor). Understandably, Riker and Dr. Crusher do not approve of him killing himself. How they handle the situation is, however, rather questionable: Riker chews out Worf for being determined to follow Klingon tradition without regard to how his suicide would affect his friends and family, citing examples of recently deceased crewmembers who fought for life until the end. Crusher expresses a willingness to put Worf in restraints to prevent him from doing the deed. Yet neither of them is ever shown making any attempt to actually convince Worf that he could potentially achieve a life worth living in his condition. As such, their behavior can easily come off as them blindly upholding the human paradigm of "suicide bad" with little to no actual concern for Worf's quality of life.
• The Step by Step episode "Major Pain" has Dana go to the career testing center to figure out what she wants with her life. The result is correctional officer at a women's prison. She does raise some valid points to how Rich and JT got doctoral level careers despite both being rather unintelligent, but the sheer level of whining she gives about her career is flat out insulting to actual correctional officers and makes them sound like the absolute bottom of the career ladder. She finds out at the end that the center is run by a con man who flicks gum on a wall and decides she wants to be an investigative journalist. She's never called out for her condescending and elitist attitude and you almost wish the career test hadn't been a scam just so she would humble up.
• Supernatural flirts with this with a great deal since its protagonists are written to be morally ambiguous. However, a particularly egregious example occurs in Season 8 when Sam quit hunting and moved in with a woman named Amelia. For starters, Amelia is shown pressuring Sam into adopting a dog that he has no apparent means to care for which made fans hate her more than they usually hated love interests on the show, which is saying something. Moreover, Sam doesn't even look for Dean and Castiel, who are trapped in Purgatory. He doesn't look for Kevin Tran or Meg, who both have been captured by Crowley. He doesn't even check his messages, which include a message from Kevin begging for help after Kevin escapes Crowley. This was initially written as a sorrowful attempt to start a new life away from hunting, and a blatant rip-off of Dean's arc between Seasons 5 and 6, but fans recognized that the circumstances were very different since Dean was fulfilling a promise to Sam while Sam simply outright abandoned Dean and his other friends. Even Jared Padalecki criticized the storyline as being wildly out of character for Sam. Writers recognized it, too, and many characters called Sam out for his actions.
• Teen Wolf: A problem some had regarding Theo Raeken's redemption arc in seasons 6A and B. Theo spent all of season five being an unrepentant and power-hungry murderer, whose crimes include willingly assisting the Dread Doctors in their chimera experiments; stoically watching his sister freeze to death just so he can take her heart, as a young boy; manipulating Scott to turn him against Stiles; temporarily killed Scott when his plans went south; attacked Lydia and rendering catatonic; sacrificed his own "pack" and girlfriend for the sake of power. Season six tries to redeem him by putting him in situations where he’d team up with Scott and his pack, against The Wild Hunt and Gerard's army, which even then Theo came off as more self-serving than altruistic. There are moments where they try to play Theo for sympathy, but this falls flat as Theo never shows or expresses any remorse for his past, even when called out to his face. His one genuinely good deed — taking to pain of a mortally wounded teenager — is also remarkably small fry compared to his previous wickedness, so it’s a little jarring that he’s seemingly accepted into the pack in the end.
• Deena from the 1996 TV Movie A Terror in the Family. The film tries to portray her as a troubled teen who only lashed out verbally and physically against her parents because her mother is an alcoholic (who's still dealing with her own abusive mother), her father's emotionally distant and never wanted children, and Deena herself is being heavily influenced by her boyfriend. Unfortunately, by the time the root of her problems comes up, she had already broken her father's hand in her bedroom door, hit her mother with a phone, causing her to bleed, and upon going to juvenile detention and seeing a counselor, even making threats to claim that he touched her so they would go to jail. This isn't even figuring into what the stress of her rebellion is doing to her Cool Aunt or her kid brother and it all ends up being for naught when the boy she was willing to give up her family for turns out to have been cheating on her all along.
• Gwen Cooper in Torchwood got a bad case of this trope a few episodes into Series 1, when she decides that the only way to cope with all the new and frightening things she's discovering about the universe is to cheat on her basically decent boyfriend with the office Jerkass womaniser and then confessing to said boyfriend to assuage her guilt, only to drug him so he'd have no memory of the event and she could feel better without facing the consequences. Though most everyone agrees she came back as one of the more sympathetic characters on the show later on, this event put a lot of fans off of her for a while.
• Veronica Mars: Lilly Kane is never really presented in a negative light for what she did to her boyfriend Logan by cheating on him with his own father, though she was 16 at the time and most would blame the adult movie star who later murdered her to cover it up.
• Jade from Victorious is this character overall, but "The Worst Couple" is probably the worst example of it. The writers want you to feel sorry for her that Beck broke up with her, but it's hard to actually do that when she acts like a spiteful jerk to everyone. Giving a "Reason You Suck" Speech to her so-called friends and breaking Sinjin's leg by running him down made the audience cheer for her misery rather than feel sorry for her.
• In one story arc in the third season of The West Wing, it's revealed that C. J. Cregg is opposed to affirmative action, with the reason being given that her father, a schoolteacher in the 1960s, kept being passed up for promotion due to the school favoring less qualified black women. This is treated by the narrative as a perfectly sensible reason to be opposed to it, even if it ultimately comes down in favor of affirmative action. But affirmative action or not, the idea of a well-educated and well-qualified white man being passed up for promotion in favor of a black woman, multiple times, in 1960s Ohio, sounds implausible at best. To a good number of viewers, it seemed more likely that her father was passed up because he was just bad at his job in favor of actually qualified people who managed to beat the odds and take positions he'd seen as fait accompli for him. It's also noted that he didn't even lose his job; he just didn't get promoted much and ended up somewhat low on the totem pole, which makes her anger at affirmative action having ruined her father's life feel even less deserved.
• Dolores in Season 2 of Westworld. Ever since she merged with her Wyatt personality, viewers have had a hard time rooting for her. It's understandable that she wants to get back at the humans for the abuse and mistreatment that she and her people suffered. However, her extreme methods (which are very similar to what her oppressors did to the hosts), including her reprogramming Teddy and her callous treatment towards her fellow hosts, which also includes her lack of concern for her followers who died during the rebellion, made a lot of viewers lose sympathy for her. Likewise, her justification for doing it is because she claims she has been outside the park and concluded that Humans Are the Real Monsters. Except that she had only been outside of the park during parties hosted by Delos as a server and her interactions with the humans are only limited to those who can afford to enter the park, with most of them generally being rich and selfish jerks who like to use the park's services to live out their most depraved fantasies because they have little else to do. She never met the humans who are on the lower class and who have never been in the park, which makes her statement about humanity in general feel one-sided. The third season pulled an Author's Saving Throw on this by having her finally go explore more of the outside world and strike up a friendship with Caleb, a blue-collar worker and Nice Guy who's never been to, much less afford to go to the titular park.
• Wonder Woman (2011 pilot):
  • Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman, came off this way. We're supposed to feel sorry for her because she had to leave her boyfriend for his own safety, and her life as an ordinary person is limited. That sympathy doesn't last long when one realizes that she has a Secret Identity in Diana Prince that she apparently only uses to watch movies and spend time on Facebook and that she's publicly known to be the CEO of Themyscira Industries which means all her employees have targets on their backs. We're supposed to feel sorry for her because she thinks a doll reduces her to a sex object. That sympathy doesn't last long when one realizes that she had approved of the doll's design before suddenly changing her mind, deliberately dresses the same way for marketing purposes, and tries to use sex appeal to get someone to open a door for her. We're supposed to feel sorry for her because she's expected to be perfect all the time. That sympathy doesn't last long when one realizes that she's not expected to be a good role model due to anything beyond her control, but due to her own decision to be a superhero. And all this is before getting into the unsavory things she does during her superhero work: namely, torturing hospitalized suspects, bullying cops who are only doing their jobs, slandering rivals with no evidence to back up her claims, and killing security guards who are just workers for hire and otherwise uninvolved in the villain's plot.
  • Willis, the teenager whose poisoning kicks off the plot. We're supposed to see him as an innocent victim, but that doesn't change the fact that he was intentionally taking performance-enhancing drugs to get a college scholarship — in other words, he lied, cheated, straight up broke the law and stole a scholarship, thus depriving it from a more honest person who actually worked to earn one.
  • Also, Willis' mother, who voiced that she wished Wonder Woman had killed the drug dealer she'd captured and acted as if the drug dealer had forced her kid to take the drugs, completely ignoring any responsibility on her son's part for taking the drugs to steal the scholarship. This is along with the fact that there is no evidence that he's actually the guy that sold Willis the drugs, other than Wonder Woman's word, and even she admits she's not fully sure he was the one in the first place. At the very least, she does acknowledge that what she says is terrible, which puts her ahead of most of Wonder Woman's supporters, and as a distraught mother whose son is dying in the hospital, one can give her a free pass for not being the most rational and unbiased of people, especially with a convenient scapegoat nearby.
• Drucilla Winters from The Young and the Restless. At one point in her tenure, she became estranged from her husband Neil after he discovered that she cheated on him with his brother and that he was actually the uncle of the daughter he'd raised for 15 years. When Dru returned to town, she was enraged to discover that Neil had become involved with another woman, Carmen Mesta. She promptly broke into Carmen's apartment and trashed it. When Carmen filed charges and a restraining order against Dru, somehow SHE was made into the bad guy. Her and Neil's mutual relationship was suddenly retconned as her being The Vamp out to wreck a blissfully happy marriage and her filing a complaint against Dru was made to look like the vindictive act of a Woman Scorned. When Dru put her in a headlock following another argument and she filed new charges regarding the physical assault and violation of the restraining order, this attitude was ramped up even more until Carmen became the supposed Asshole Victim in a murder mystery that had every member of the Winters' family as a suspect. Dru was clearly supposed to be the sympathetic person in the whole mess but her hypocrisy paired with her borderline deranged and illegal actions had the opposite effect.
• Young Sheldon: Missy in "The Wild and Woolly World of Nonlinear Dynamics". She pulls a Jerkass Ball being even more hostile than usual taking her heartbreak-induced anger out on her whole family (especially Sheldon) to the point very few people really have sympathy for Missy for the way she's behaving.

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