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Individual examples:

  • 7 Yüz: Mete in the episode "Büyük Günahlar". After Nihal learns his identity and unmasks the truth, Mete is exposed as an unreliable narrator who distorted events of the story in his favor. He shifts blame onto Elif — who is conveniently unable to defend herself — for instigating the calls and taking the prank too far, when in reality he encouraged her participation. His narrative also depicts himself as a moral crusader who righteously torments the "pervert" Aytaç for traumatizing Elif.
  • In Acapulco Maximo is relating his life story to his nephew (and narrating it to the audience as he does so), so the resulting product is not 100% accurate. He'll misrepresent personalities or misremember names and events sometimes, resulting in flashbacks being repeated with the right information after other characters correct him.
  • The drama The Affair uses this as the key to the show. Each episode is divided between the viewpoints of Noah and Allison as they embark on a relationship. It's soon clear each tells things in a light that makes them look better.
    • Noah sees himself as put upon and a decent guy while others see him as a jerk.
    • Allison is far more dowdy in her versions of her story while others see her as glamorous.
    • Allison sees herself saving Noah's daughter from choking at a diner in their first meeting. In Noah's version, he's the one who saved his daughter.
    • Each one thinks it was the other who initiated the romance in the first place, seeing themselves as more hesitant and the other one as more seductive.
    • The second season introduces the viewpoints of Noah's wife, Helen, and Allison's husband, Cole, who naturally have far different views of this "romance" and can paint their cheating spouses in a harsher light.
    • Noah's POV has him arriving at a meeting with Helen in a nice suit and her acting like a bitch putting him down. In Helen's version, Noah shows up in jeans and leather jacket and he's the one hostile while she's calm and rational.
    • When Cole and Allison kiss and have a hook-up, their views are quite different. Allison's version has it slow and romantic and their old feelings back. Cole sees it as excited and rushed and he regretted it as a mistake.
    • The third season has Noah being mistreated by a guard in prison and believes the man attacked him. He hunts him down only to find the guy is far nicer in person and makes it clear that much of the actions in prison were all in Noah's mind. Although this seems to go beyond simple difference of interpretation as opposed to straight-up hallucinating events.
  • The Afterparty is a "Rashomon"-Style murder mystery with the suspects each telling their point of view with their own genres; naturally there are discrepancies between each person’s testimonies.
  • Alan Bennett's Talking Heads series of monologues is built on this trope. Each narrator tries to tell their story to their own advantage, but we can see through their façade to see the real story. For example, "Her Big Chance" features Julie Walters as a woman who thinks she's a highly professional actress but we get enough hints to see that she is anything but (for example whenever she says a line, the director tells her it might be silent). She also appears to have no idea that she's acting in a soft-core porn movie for the German market.
  • On Alias Grace, the Frame Story is psychiatrist Dr. Simon Jordan trying to figure out whether or not Grace Marks actually murdered her employer and his housekeeper. In the narration Grace admits to changing her retelling of events to please him and in the last episode, we find out that Grace may or may not have a Split Personality that committed the murders.
  • All in the Family had a Rashomon episode where an incident was seen from the points of view of all four principals — Edith's version was the objective, accurate one, of course.
  • Discussed in Angry Birds on the Run S1 E19, where Chuck is telling the story of what has happened up to that point, and Red and Bomb point out the errors in his story.
  • The Black Donnellys: The narrator (Joey "Ice Cream") puts himself into the story in places where he couldn't have been, gets dates wrong by a year or so, and just has the general demeanor of not being a guy whose facts are ready to bank. On the flip side, the story he tells does not make him seem like a Marty Stu. He gets shut down by the ladies. He never plays a pivotal role in the events of the story. This leads us to believe we can accept at least some of what he is saying. Joey generally gives the sense of wishing he had brothers like the Donnellys, and that's why he inserts himself into the story, in a hopeful-sad attempt to feel like part of them while he's really an outsider. Sometimes it seems like he may have been there, and usually it seems like it was probably another Donnelly or sometimes Jenny who was really there.
  • BBC sitcom Coupling had numerous examples of unreliable narrators, notably pretty much anything said by either Jeff or Jane. But the greatest example of was in the third season episode "Remember This", where Patrick and Sally's individual recollections of how they met match in many, but not all details, to great comedic effect. In particular, the print of Munch's The Scream that the exceedingly drunk Sally remembers is revealed to be a mirror in Patrick's memories. When Jane turns up unexpectedly at Patrick's flat, the lads discuss the incident at the bar:
    Steve: [astonished] Why?
    Patrick: [equally astonished] That's the first thing I said to her, I said, "Why?"
    [cut to flashback]
    Patrick: [suave] Come in!
    [cut to bar]
    Patrick: She just came in. I had no idea what to say!
    [cut to flashback]
    Patrick: [suave] Drink?
  • A minor case in Criminologist Himura and Mystery Writer Arisugawa. Akemi suffers from nightmares from when her uncle and home were set on fire. She sees the culprit, her other uncle, with a maniacal grin on their face as they set her uncle alight. However, when she properly confronts the memory, it instead shows that the culprit was shocked after what they had done, painting them in a more sympathetic light.
  • Dexter often mentions his lack of any emotions in his narration, though it becomes increasingly apparent that this is not true. For example, he does clearly care about the people in his life, though with his (eventual) wife and her two kids it's also implied to be a case of Becoming the Mask. He's not lying to the audience so much as he simply doesn't understand a lot of human nature.
  • The Dick Van Dyke Show opened with the end of a particularly nasty marital argument. When Mary complains to her friend, she was being a pleasant wife and her husband was in an inexplicably nasty mood. When he complains to his coworkers, he came home to find her unusually lazy and nagging. The audience then gets to hear from the goldfish what actually happened: they'd both had bad days, and took it out on each other.
  • Doctor Who:
    • In general, it's implied that at least some of the Doctor's Noodle Incidents are just the Doctor being ridiculous (and given what a ridiculous universe it is, there's no way of knowing).
    • "The Trial of a Time Lord": The Valeyard has tampered with the evidence in the Matrix, especially in "Mindwarp", to make the Doctor's conviction certain.
    • "Love & Monsters" is framed as a story being told to the camera by Elton Pope. It's explicitly shown that his memory of how the band sounded and how they actually sounded are rather different, which calls into question a lot of his interpretation of events.
    • "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday" begins with Rose stating that "This is the story of how I died." It turns out she was being very particular, as at the end she's declared dead in her home universe after being Trapped in Another World.
    • "The Runaway Bride": Played for Laughs, as Donna recounts meeting Lance whilst she was temping at H.C. Clements, after he made her coffee; and 6 months prior to the story, despite her saying that he nagged her to marry him, showed her nagging him to marry her.
    • "The Unicorn and the Wasp": The Doctor and Agatha Christie question the attendees at an outdoor party regarding a recent murder. As the suspects each give their story, we see the events that they describe, but as they really happened. For example, one young man claimed to be wandering alone, but in the flashback scene it's shown that he was flirting with another man. His father lies not only about what he was doing but also what he was reminiscing about at the time, leading to a flashback-within-a-flashback. Naturally, the only suspect who isn't lying about what he was doing at the time is the one who turns out to be the murderer.
    • "Midnight": Sky Silvestry, while talking to the Doctor, implies that her recent divorce was on fairly amicable terms. But when the bus comes under attack from a malign entity, she freaks out and immediately assumes it's her ex-wife coming after her, saying "She said she'd get me." That paints a rather different picture.
    • This detail has been used for various spin-off media as well. For example, in many of the Big Finish Doctor Who audios featuring the Meddling Monk, the Monk often tries to win people to his point of view by presenting a scenario where the Doctor is the "villain" for allowing historical events to happen as they should where the Monk is the "hero" for stepping in to try and make things better. Not only is this idea of the Monk as a hero undermined by the times he has aided alien invasions, but even some of his "heroic" actions are questionable, such as preventing the birth of a future dictator by causing an avalanche that killed the dictator's parents and a whole village. Even when the Monk is being mostly benevolent, such as running a clinic to provide futuristic cures for incurable in-the-'70snote  diseases and conditions, up to and including Boom, Headshot!, the Doctor observes that he is deliberately ignoring the wider implications of his actions, such as the idea that by curing someone of a certain disease the Monk could be preventing the inspiration that leads to one of the victim's relatives finding a genuine cure. Not to forget that the Monk tampering with things he didn't quite understand in that last instance very nearly caused the world to turn into a Hive Mind completely by accident.
  • In Dollhouse, Bennett's memory of how her arm was crippled shows Caroline abandoning her to save herself. Caroline's own memory is later seen, and shows her trying to dislodge the rubble pinning Bennett, then explaining that as an employee Bennett can pretend she wasn't involved, and pinning her ID badge to her to make this more obvious before leaving. Which seems very thorough. The apparent implication is that Bennett's memory is incomplete. On the other hand, Caroline is the one whose memory is repeatedly and extensively tampered with, so there's room for multiple interpretations.
  • Drake & Josh: In "Foam Finger", both Drake and Josh tell their parents their perspectives behind an incident at a San Diego Padres game when they were 8-years-old. Josh tells them that Drake had started the tussle by whacking him in the head, while Drake tells him that Josh had started the tussle by tackling him for no reason. They were both revealed to be wrong, since it was actually Megan who had started the tussle by throwing her chocolate chip cookie at Josh's head.
  • Euphoria: By her own admission, Rue is not a reliable narrator.
  • The Farscape episode "The Ugly Truth" has four of the characters being successively interrogated about the destruction of an alien spacecraft by angry compatriots of the aliens who assume that any difference in the stories must be deliberate lies. While we can see that the characters are consciously or subconsciously framing events to make themselves look better (or in one case all mispronounce the alien race's name the same way), the central character Crichton finally delivers a Kirk Summation about how memory is fallible and no one person's description of something will ever be totally accurate. Notably, the aliens claim that this cannot be, as they always remember things in the same way.
    • "Scratch 'n Sniff" features Crichton relaying the events of why he had to leave a planet to Pilot. At several points, Pilot refuses to believe Crichton (even at one point suggesting that if Jool had lost as much fluid from her body as Crichton said, she'd be dead) and in the end it was left ambiguous how much of the story, if any, was true.
  • The final episode of Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond uses this to give a dramatic finale for a person who never saw combat in real life. Ian Fleming goes into a Germany on the verge of defeat, gets into a shootout with SS Werewolf soldiers and escapes with nuclear secrets. We then cut to Fleming back in England telling the admiral in charge of naval intelligence, "And that's what happened." The admiral promptly accuses Fleming of having made some major embellishments.
  • Game of Thrones:
    • The Blu-ray extras of the history of Westeros are narrated by various characters, each with a biased view of the events they describe. For example: Tywin Lannister views his Sack of King's Landing as a just action to end the war and restore order, while Robert Baratheon sees it as a Necessary Evil, Ned Stark views it as a terrible crime, and Viserys Targaryen calls it an unjust betrayal. All of them have a point.
    • Roose claims that Robb ignored his counsel at every turn. However, Robb only rejected his unquestionably evil advice (like flaying people) and in fact did listen to Roose's less sinister plans. For example, he agreed with having Ramsay retake Winterfell. The only adjustment Robb made to the plan was that he wanted Theon brought back to him alive so that he could be the one to take Theon's head.
  • In The George Carlin Show episode "George Sees An Airplane", George sees something unusual in the sky and is convinced it's a flying saucer. The audience never sees what he saw except for in flashbacks, and as a running gag, every time he repeats the story to someone new it gets more exaggerated, with elaborate special effects in flashbacks to match.
  • The entirety of The Goldbergs is this, with every episode narrated as occurring in "nineteen-eighty something". One episode featured the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana (which occurred in 1981), while also including the song "Eternal Flame" (from 1989).
  • Goosebumps (2023) is a unique variation. Harold Biddle (speaking through the possessed Mr. Bret) tells the teens exactly what happened to him in 1993 in how he found evil doll Slappy who manipulated Harold into turning his parents into dolls and the kids' parents tried to stop Slappy, pulling him away from Harold who died by accident. This was all completely true with the kids in the present concluding that their parents tried to save Harold from this evil doll and Harold's death wasn't murder. However, Harold is appalled as his Self-Serving Memory has him insisting their parents horribly bullied him (when they didn't), stole his "best friend" and are murderers. "Were you even listening?" Likewise, when the parents in the present confront him, Harold keeps accusing them of "murdering" him.
  • In Gotham, both Jerome and Jeremiah Valeska, twins who are the Batman prequel show's two main takes on the Joker, are this. When Jeremiah is first introduced, he lies to Jim Gordon to make him trust him more by making it sound like Jerome was the only crazy one in the family and the rest of them were just his victims. There is ample evidence, however, that both his mother and his uncle were extremely abusive and violent people. Jerome later accuses him of telling their mother multiple lies when they were kids to convince her that Jerome was trying to kill him, which caused their mother to completely give up on him. This contradicts some of Jerome's previous stories about his childhood, when he mentioned horrific abuse at the hands of his relatives that happened before Jeremiah supposedly turned them against him. Jeremiah also seems to be genuinely afraid of Jerome, even though he admits that some of what he said wasn't true, so it's likely that they both have extremely biased and not completely accurate perspectives on the events of their childhood.
  • An episode of Happy Days had Fonzie, Chachi, Roger, and Potsie all giving differing versions of the same chain of events leading to Fonzie getting shot in the butt.
  • How I Met Your Mother started off occasionally playing with this, but has used the device increasingly often as it progressed. Unusually, it is not because Future Ted is lying per se (at least, not often — there are some instances of outright lies), but because of ordinary memory lapses (having a character named Blah Blah because he can't recall her name), subjective interpretation of ordinary events (showing Robin's forty-something date as elderly), or sanitizing the story for his children (using "I'm getting too old for this stuff" instead of "shit".). The few times he tells us things that seem to defy reality (such as Lily and Marshall escaping their own party by jumping out the window, or having high school athletes and a Teen Wolf on a kindergarten basketball team), he Hand Waves it by saying that's all he heard about it. In short, if there is a way to exploit the potential of an unreliable narrator for comedic purposes, it's been done on How I Met Your Mother at some point.
    • Episode "The Rough Patch": Since they began happily dating, Barney and Robin have let themselves go a little; however, in Ted's mind, they look like absolute hell, and Barney in particular is now comically overweight. He even admits that he's unreliable on this point, but they stay that way for most of the episode anyway.
      • Especially blatant is the apparent scene right after he came in possession of a architecture-themed porn movie. Porn is bad, so he picks up the box and announces to the empty room, "I am getting rid of this vile porn." He loses his grip on the box of VHS tapes, and the tape just happens to fly out of the box, bounce around the room, and the cover slides off and hits the play button. Ted supposedly just stands there watching in horror, repeating "Oh, no" and collapsing on the couch in shock before sitting up and leaning forward with a big grin on his face.
    • Episode "Zoo or False" includes two more examples. The question of whether or not Marshall was mugged by a monkey goes unanswered, and the last two minutes of the show, where the monkey carries a little doll woman to the top of Ted's scale model of the empire state building while paper airplanes are thrown at him are left similarly ambiguous.
      Ted: Barney, enough with the lies. You can't just tack on a new ending because you're unsatisfied with how a story wraps up.
      Barney: Oh really? Well, mark my words, Mosby, 'cause someday you'll be telling this story, and you'll see it my way.
      Ted: Doubtful. (narrating from the future) And then, kids, you'll never believe what happened!
    • Particularly great, since the setup for the awesome end has been laced throughout the episode — so if Future Ted is making this up he's likely made up a fair chunk of the episode.
    • This also happens to Ted when he goes to see a movie and finds out that the story is based on how Stella left him right before their wedding. It portrays him as a Jerkass and makes him the villain.
    • Speaking of Present!Ted's Jerkass behavior, Ted comes off as a Nice Guy, but continually done some pretty selfish things. Is he worse than he appears? On the other hand, Future!Ted tends to insult his past self fairly often. He seems to recognize his behavior as wrong and learned to grow up. Or has he?
      • Furthering this is an example from episode 3x12 "No Tomorrow". Ted and Barney go to a bar for St. Patrick's Day and pull their typical shenanigans, which is all portrayed in a humorous and positive light. The next day Marshall has Ted listen to all of the voicemails Ted left after accidentally butt-dialing Marshall throughout the night, and it becomes clear that Ted's drunken memories of the night portray him far more positively than he was, as he was actually acting very slimy and dickish the whole time. With that in mind, how many more episodes are there that Ted thinks he was the good guy in the story just because no one pointed out to him how much of a dick he was being?
    • Subverted in Episode 5.5, "Duel Citizenship:" Future Ted says, "And then it happened... Marshall and Lily morphed into one big married blob." This is shown literally happening, indicating Ted's narration is being exaggerated for comic effect. Then Present Ted blinks and says, "Whoa... I gotta dial back on the Tantrum." This refers to a highly caffeinated beverage he'd been consuming, implying that he was hallucinating.
    • An ongoing joke in the series is that Ted doesn't want to admit to his kids that he and his friends occasionally smoked pot, so any time he refers to a joint, he calls it a "sandwich," and the characters are duly portrayed eating sandwiches (while their behavior makes it obvious they're stoned).
    • The trope is used twice in the "Rashomon"-Style episode "The Ashtray", when an unexpected meeting with The Captain is told by Ted, then being retold and corrected by Robin, who reveals Ted was stoned and terrified of The Captain, after which it is retold by Lily who reveals that Ted was stoned, and Robin was drunk.
    • In the memory lapse category, at one point, Ted recalls Barney and Lily are upset with each other (but can't remember why) in the B-Plot after Lily made a comment about Barney's weight and Barney being overly emotional, but they make amends when Lily pulls Barney out of danger... but then remembers that it wasn't Barney that was the victim, Lily was and retells the whole story with their roles reversed, but still can't remember why... he then interrupts the A-Plot to do a third retelling of the B-Plot which reveals that Lily was upset because she was starting to show that she was pregnant and Barney had been teasing her and it wasn't helping that she was very hormonal. And then Ted realizes that, at this point in his A-plot story, Lily couldn't have been pregnant (in series, her pregnancy was a year away) and wondered why the he ever thought the two events went together and decided drop the whole subject.
    • There's an in-universe example in the Slappointment in Slapmarra Episode. Barney has become accustomed to Marshall's slaps from his slap bet. Marshall claims to have traveled to China and studied for a year in under 3 slap masters to maximize his slapping ability. Barney repeatedly questions elements of the story like the slapping tree, the mountain in the shape of a hand (it's the biggest mountain in the Slapalation Range apparently) how Marshall accidentally kills the last of the 3 masters. The fact that the 3 masters are called "Red Bird" Robin , "White Flower" Lily and "The Calligrapher" Ted studied calligraphy doesn't make it more credible. This tale follows a scene where Marshall completely destroys a jukebox with one slap, so it's really a unreliable narration INSIDE an unreliable narrationnote .
  • Legion:
    • David Haller's perception of reality can't be trusted because he's prone to delusions and hallucinations.
      David: I'm insane, you idiot. This is my delusion. It's not real.
    • In "Chapter 26", Charles Xavier is in a state of bewilderment once he arrives at Amahl Farouk's Moroccan palace, being uncertain if he can believe his eyes. For instance, the chauffeur (who was behind Charles and standing next to the car) seems to magically appear from behind a curtain at the front entrance, yet Charles never saw the chauffeur run past him to enter the palace while Charles was walking from the car to the doorway. These odd moments continue throughout the episode and enhance his sense of disorientation (e.g. Charles is eating dinner across the table from Farouk in the dining room, and then suddenly Charles is seated next to Habiba at the palace's theater while still chewing his food). As Harry Lloyd elaborates in this interview:
      Lloyd: Charles, suddenly, is now in the realm of someone else with seemingly even greater powers than he. He's constantly waking up in a different place, and he feels like he's in a dream. You realize, watching Dan Stevens' performance, from the first two seasons, there are so many times when he seems to be reacting to something that's not there, and it's very staccato and confused, and it's almost like he's in a dream. I found this Charles, who was quite composed in [Season 3] Episode 3, suddenly becoming more like his son, in terms of how he's reacting to baffling situations.
  • Leverage:
    • In "The Rashomon Job", each of the characters recounts how they stole a dagger and, in doing so, evaded a wily security chief. In the end, Nate tells the (mostly) true version of what happened and reveals who really stole the dagger, and how the security chief was a bumbling fool who had a crush on Sophie and only stumbled onto the various schemes by accident. One running gag is everybody messing up Sophie's British accent. By Parker, her dialogue has degenerated into gibberish.
    • "The Long Goodbye Job" is mostly told in flashbacks after Nate is caught, however Nate is the one telling what happened. So basically everything he says at every turn is a lie. We get the real version of events as Stirling and the other Interpol agents call Nate's lies out and Nate adjusts the story accordingly.
  • This is regularly played with on Limitless. Brian finds most of the mundane parts of a police investigation to be extremely boring so he will often embellish a story using standard action/spy movie tropes. A Running Gag is Brian telling the other characters how he imagines something happened, only for the other people to tell him that they were there and most of what he describes never happened. This trope is then averted whenever Brian actually narrates things for the audience as he is brutally honest about what is really going on and what he expects to really happen. His fancy stories and ImagineSpots are a coping mechanism Brian uses to deal with the disturbing and horrifying things he experiences while the audience narration is Brian being honest to himself.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: With the revelation that Halbrand is Sauron, is hard to guess whether he was ever truthful or just lying when everything he ever did or said has a Double Meaning now.
  • The Dharma orientation films of Lost are narrated by François Chau's variably named character. The Swan film is located "behind The Turn of the Screw" on the bookshelf, tipping the audience in advance that perhaps "Marvin Candle" is not to be trusted.
  • In Lucifer, the main character, who is actually Satan, always tells what he believes to be the truth, contrary to his reputation. However, because of the psychological issues he has (mainly a lack of self-awareness and a dizzying mix self-centeredness and self-loathing), his version of the truth is sometimes wildly off-base. Played for both laughs and drama during his therapy sessions with Linda, when she gives him advice and he takes a completely different meaning from it than she wants him to, because he is only hearing what he wants to hear. Additionally, due to his extremely poor relationship with his father, he might be portraying God as more of a jerkass than he actually is. He is, at the very least, a disappeared dad to Lucifer and the other angels, and seems to have banished his son to Hell for all eternity for convincing the first humans to eat the forbidden fruit and then having sex with them, which sounds like a case of disproportionate retribution. Whenever he or any of the other characters talk about how he started a rebellion, however, it's never clear if he did anything worse than that to earn his father's wrath. He also is afraid of his father and always thinks he's trying to control him in some way, but the alternate universe bonus episode narrated by God makes it sound like his relationship with Lucifer is a lot less antagonistic than Lucifer assumes it is in the present day, at least on God's end.
  • In one segment of MADtv, Aries Spears tells a story as a photomontage of the events he's detailing accompanies. We start with Aries hanging out on the roof, where he goes to chill out in his downtime, and noting that this would be a great place to launch a glider. After this point, the wholesome and educational narrative he details begins to subtly (and, very very shortly, not so subtly) diverge from the things we're seeing, and ends with Aries high as a kite on glue fumes, under the impression that one of the other actors, aware of what has happened and concerned for Aries' safety, is some kind of demon out to kill him.
  • Malcolm in the Middle plays with the more humorous variant. For one example, Malcolm says the house next-door never seemed to have a permanent resident and they never figured out why. Cue montage of the boys playing all sorts of pranks on the previous residents, then cut to Malcolm saying "I don't know — I think it might be haunted."
  • M*A*S*H:
    • In the fourth season episode "The Novocaine Mutiny", Frank and Hawkeye give wildly differing accounts of the same event.
    • The series finale segment in which Hawkeye — via flashback — describes the bus ride with the chicken to Sidney, is a powerful example; made powerful due to the frighteningly awesome reveal later on.
  • Occasionally used in The Middle. A scene will go surprisingly well, considering things rarely if ever go well for the characters. Frankie will then voice over "OK, that's not really what happened," and show the much worse thing that actually happened.
  • The first episode of the fourth series of Misfits has a framing device of Rudy explaining the most recent strange occurrences at the community center to newcomers Finn and Jess. Each time they catch him in a lie, he backpedals and alters the story he's telling to avoid the relevant lie, admitting to cutting off Michael's hand with a hacksaw and conspiring with Seth to lock Curtis in the freezer and Lampshading his unreliability as a narrator (actually naming this trope outright in the process). Once he's run out of story to tell them, Rudy admits that he is only telling the story to stall while the drugs he has given them take effect, thus ending the framing device.
  • Mr. Robot is told almost entirely through the eyes of the main character, Elliot, so we only see what he sees and know what he knows. He also has issues with his mental health, and at certain points, actively questions his own sanity and how much of what he's seeing is really there. He thinks he's being followed by The Men in Black, but isn't sure if that's true of if he's making that up. He also purposely replaces the name of the company E Corp with Evil Corp because he hates them so much, so whenever any character mentions it, we hear “Evil Corp” instead of what they're actually saying. At the end of the first season, we also find out that Mr. Robot is his father, and also died years ago, and Elliot was hallucinating him the whole time. And Darlene is actually his sister. He's just as shocked as the audience.
    • In Season 2, Elliot is living with his mother and has limited himself to a very strict routine in order to stop himself from hallucinating. Turns out that he's actually been in prison the whole time and lying to us about it.
  • My World… and Welcome to It: In "Rules for a Happy Marriage," John presents an Imagine Spot to his male colleagues at The Manhattanite — one that involved a crotchety exchange between him and Ellen that he says he will repeat to them verbatim. It turns out to have little resemblance to what was seen earlier in the episode, heavily skewed to make his wife look worse.
  • On NCIS Tony tends to embellish his stories. In a sad example he has been embellishing a story about a school prank for so long that he started to believe that his version of events was exactly what happened. When he starts feeling guilty and goes to apologize to the now grown up victim of the prank, the guy is baffled by Tony's apology. Tony was actually the victim of the cruel prank and the other guy was the bully. Tony realized that over the years he managed to flip the story in his head and made himself into the villain.
  • Never Have I Ever: Played for Laughs in S01E02, when Devi tells Fabiola and Eleanor an embellished version of her encounter with Paxton. To be fair, he really did agree to sleep with her, just not as fawningly as he did in her fake version.
  • Night Court has the episode involving Bull's bachelor party, with the events being told by multiple people... until it's discovered at the end that everything including that narration is actually being narrated by Mac, who made up everything as an excuse to his law professor as to why he was late with his term paper.
  • An episode of Perfect Strangers have Larry, Balki, and their neighbor give differing stories to the police about an incident. Each version has the teller as the hero.
  • Pretty Little Liars plays with this a lot.
    • "I won't let Spencer Hastings bully me anymore."
    • Why are there football guys laughing at Hanna and oinking while she eats cupcakes? More likely is that she feels they are laughing at her and we see it as such.
    • Why are swim meets and class elections such a huge deal? Because they are important to Emily and Spencer respectively.
  • Played for laughs on Red Dwarf. In the episode "Blue", the crew travel through an artificial reality version of Rimmer's journal, in which he depicts himself as a brave, handsome leader and the other crew members as reliant on him for various things which, in reality, they're better at than Rimmer.
    • Rimmer tends to fall into this often. He claims that one of his many failed exams was because he offered a revolutionary theory that the exam board simply would not accept (apparently he actually wrote "I am a fish" on every line before fainting), and he tells Kryten of the close childhood bond he had with his three brothers (while he's watching a home movie of them bullying him). He also thinks Kryten is deliberately being this in "Justice" when he's presenting the facts of Rimmer's many, many screw-ups as a means of defending him.
    • Kryten himself falls into this out of jealousy in "Beyond A Joke": he makes mention of the crew of his old ship abandoning him, while Lister quickly reminds him that the crew died when Kryten accidentally caused the ship to crash.
    • Holly, the ship's computer is also this. He's gone "computer senile" over the three million years the ship has been out in deep space and is very scatterbrained as a result. He claims Rimmer was revived as a hologram as the best person to keep Lister sane, despite the fact that they did nothing but fight and drive each other crazy. Even by the eleventh series, Lister thinks the real reasoning was "Holly was nuts."
    • A Psiren reads Lister's mind and recreates his appearance and behavior almost perfectly. This includes the Psiren absolutely shredding it on the guitar, because Lister believes he can do this. Cat and Kryten immediately blast it to pieces because Lister can't. Lister insists that the Psiren's playing was indistinguishable from his, but Kryten insists he's actually a "ten thumbed, tone-deaf, talentless noise polluter." So the Psiren believed the story Lister told himself.
  • The Janitor from Scrubs is a pathological liar. He tells the most bizarre tales about his past and doesn't even keep track of what is true in them, if any at all. Or maybe he does but just wants to screw with you. The only thing we know about him for sure is that he had a bit part in The Fugitive.
    (as Janitor finishes a story)
    J.D.: Is any of that true?
    Janitor: Somebody would have to read it back to me.
  • Sherlock: Sherlock especially during his wedding speech. He tries to convince Mary that he learned origami due to some amazing feat to solve a crime, only to admit he learned it on YouTube. He states that to learn John's middle name was by earning his trust over a long course of time, he simply stole John's birth certificate. When he tells the people at the party that he told the guests he told John he was honored at being made the Best Man, cut to Sherlock being almost frozen in silence multiple times. He did later admit after that he didn't say it at the time.
  • In the Granada series of Sherlock Holmes, it is suggested that this may be the case for "The Last Vampyre", which is an adaptation of the tale "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire". The original short story just involved Jack Ferguson as a disturbed boy trying to poison his new sibling out of jealousy, but here Jack is partially crippled and outright delusional, believing that he and his self-appointed “mentor” John Stockton are actual vampires. After Jack’s actions lead to the death of his infant half-brother, his father is Driven to Madness and actually stakes Stockton’s corpse in the belief he was a true vampire, and Jack dies when he tries to fly off an old castle. As Holmes and Watson prepare to leave by train, Holmes asks if Watson will write up this case, and Watson’s words suggest that he will edit it to make it more palatable for the public, suggesting that this is what actually happened and "Sussex Vampire" is the version Watson wrote for publication.
  • In an episode of Space Cases, when Catalina is asked to describe what happened with the Ion Storm, Harlan acts completely and utterly worthless and it's actually her who saves the day. When this flashback finishes, everyone says "...wait that's not what happened" and they ask for Harlan's version, which is... more or less the same thing but with Harlan presented as the hero and Catalina being useless and her obsession with Suzee being exaggerated.
  • In the Stargate Universe episode "Twin Destinies", both Telford and Rush doubt the reliability of Future!Rush's claims that he tried to save the rest of the crew after the accident. The later episode "Epilogue" reveals that at the very least he was lying about which crew members stayed behind with him.
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • In "Court Martial" Captain Kirk is made to appear as this, until it is found that the video records of the event had been altered.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • In "The Wire", Garak tells Bashir three different stories about the circumstances leading to his exile, with the only consistent detail being presence of another Cardassian named Elim. When Bashir finds Garak's mentor (and father) Enabran Tain, he asks about this. Tain just laughs and reveals that Elim is Garak's first name.
      Bashir: Out of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?
      Garak: My dear doctor, they were all true.
      Bashir: Even the lies?
      Garak: Especially the lies.
    • The moral Garak draws from The Boy Who Cried Wolf? Never tell the same lie twice.
      Garak: The truth is usually just an excuse for lack of imagination.
    • In another episode, Garak claims that was exiled by the Cardassian equivalent of the Intimidating Revenue Service for tax evasion. By this point, everyone in the room is aware that his exile is related to his time with the Obsidian Order.
    • Garak coaches Sisko to encourage the story of falsified evidence that would draw the Romulans into a war with the Dominion. He advises Sisko to say that at least 10 good Federation officers lost their lives. It's remarkably similar to a line Garak told Sisko earlier in that episode. Garak had told Sisko that he had called in all his contacts on Cardassia and used all the favors owed to him... and the next day every one of them was dead. All we had to go on was the word of Garak, who lies like others breathe.
    • On another occasion, Worf calls Garak out on his lie of wanting to join Starfleet. Garak responds that he of course had no intention of joining... he was just practicing his ability to lie. It pays to keep in practice.
  • An episode of Still Game features a subplot involving Winston being barred from the Clansman. As Winston recounts the events which led to him being barred, we also see what really happened. Winston makes out he politely asked Boabby to pour another pint, as he felt it was too cloudy, to which Boabby took offence and threw him out. In reality, Winston went ballistic and spat the contents of the glass over Boabby.
  • Strangers From Hell: The ending uses this constantly.
    • Either Ms. Eom killed Nam-bok or Jong-woo did. Jung-hwa was the only witness and she wasn't able to see what was happening, so it's open to interpretation.
    • Either Moon-jo or Jong-woo killed Ms. Eom and Deuk-jong.
  • Supernatural episode "Tall Tales" is a The Rashomon episode, with Sam and Dean telling their own version of the previous events to their Parental Substitute Bobby — and often end up arguing over who's telling the story and the exact details of what occurred. It is eventuality revealed that a Trickster (a minor god of chaos) has been messing with their relationship in order to distract them from the case at hand, so most of the narrative consists of whichever brother is speaking portraying himself as a suave, dedicated professional searching earnestly for the truth, while painting the other in decidedly uncomplimentary colors. In Sam's narration, Dean appears as a slutty, gluttonous pig with no standards, while Dean portrays Sam as a prissy, super-sensitive do-gooder with Camp Gay mannerisms. They end up working together to defeat the Trickster and sincerely apologizing for their behavior after closing the case.
  • The Teen Wolf episode Visionary is a series of flashbacks framed by Peter and Gerard depicting a tragedy from Derek's past and the events that eventually led to the formation of the alpha pack. What the flashbacks depict vary wildly in some places from what Peter and Gerard actually say happened and the trope is actually mentioned by name. Further complicating matters, Word of God states that while the audience knows more about what really happened than the characters, they should not assume they know the whole story.
  • The trope comes up repeatedly in True Detective. Hart accuses Cohle more than once of coming up with a narrative that might explain a crime and potentially bending the evidence to support the narrative rather than letting the evidence dictate the narrative. Both Hart and Cohle's present day accounts of what happened in 1995 omit and fabricate various details, and in a scene integral to the case in Episode 5 their depositions directly contradict what plays out onscreen. In the same episode, detectives Gilbough and Papania call out Cohle on his unreliability in a big way.
  • In an episode of The Unit, Jonas tells his nephew a story about his father, a Korean war veteran who had recently been posthumously awarded the Silver Star. After returning from duty, he gets a white woman to buy Jonas a Coke from a whites only cafe. Two men, one of them carrying a gun, take exception to this and threaten him, but he's able to deescalate the situation. The onscreen depiction of the encounter ends with Jonas and his father walking away, the camera lingering on the Coke can, which Jonas has left behind for no apparent reason. Jonas's niece can tell he's not being entirely truthful, so he tells her what really happened: the men attacked Jonas's father and he killed them in self-defense, after which he and Jonas fled the scene, Jonas forgetting about his Coke. Jonas tells his niece that her brother isn't ready to hear the real story.
  • Victorious: The episode "Who Did it to Trina" revolves around trying to find out who sabotaged Trina's harness during a School Play, causing her to be seriously hurt. Everyone recounts their own version of events, which are all tainted by their personal biases and feelings towards the other members of the group.
  • The X-Files:
    • In "The Unnatural" an alcoholic ex-cop tells Mulder how he encountered an alien posing as a famous Negro baseball player in 1947 Roswell; a story that even Mulder finds hard to believe. When Mulder tries fitting these facts into what he knows about the Government Conspiracy, the cop basically tells him to just shut up and enjoy the tale.
    • Used this trope very frequently, especially in the more comedic episodes, like "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'" and "Bad Blood", both of which are told "Rashomon"-Style. In "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'", one alien is named "Lord Kinbote" after Charles Kinbote, the unreliable narrator in Nabokov's Pale Fire.


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