This is possibly a death trope, and it may include spoilers, especially if this isn't revealed until later in the media.
Your Days Are Numbered in Live-Action TV series.- 12 Monkeys: In the Season 4 premiere, Jones is exposed to a fatal dose of radiation from Project Splinter's power core. Over the course of the rest of the season, her nervous system steadily starts failing, until by the Grand Finale she can't even stand without assistance, and it's clear that she's only still going due to sheer determination to not die until the mission to stop the Army of the 12 Monkeys is completed. Shortly after the Final Battle is won by the heroes, she quietly dies with a smile.
- 24:
- Early in the second season, George Mason is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation and is told he has a day or so to live. Twelve episodes/hours later, he takes Jack's place in making a Heroic Sacrifice.
- The plot gets reused in season seven when Jack is infected by the terrorists' weapon and will die within hours, which means he has to bring the villains to justice from the sidelines (his weakened health could make him a liability on the field) and also try to make peace with himself in the remaining time he has left. He's the main character, so he gets a last-minute save by a miracle cure at the end of the season.
- 45 RPM: The second episode has Robert reveal to Maribel that he only has six months to live due to a heart illness.
- Babylon 5: After dying in a Heroic Sacrifice and being brought back by a Sufficiently Advanced Alien, Sheridan is given twenty years to live, implied to be a side-effect of his artificial restoration.
- The premise of Breaking Bad is that after a chemistry teacher learns that he has lung cancer, he starts cooking crystal meth to secure his family's financial future before he dies.
- In The Boys (2019), Butcher and Hughie learn that the Psycho Serum they've been using causes brain death with extended use. Butcher uses Percussive Prevention to prevent Hughie from crossing the point of no return but continues to use it himself — as a result, a doctor tells him that he has around a year left to live.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
- Cassie in season seven had future-seeing powers and knew exactly when she was going to die (a few days from when she was introduced, at age 16). "Help" revolved around Buffy and the gang trying to protect her while convincing her that she might live. They were wrong.
- Due to the dangerous nature of their profession, most Slayers aren't expected to live long; in "Helpless", it's outright stated that several of them didn't even make it to age 18. Buffy is stated to be the longest-lived Slayer, because, unlike the others, she has friends and family that love her and help her, thus actually giving her something to live for.
- Buffy herself had the prophecy in "Prophecy Girl". She died, but it didn't stick.
- Used as the basis for "Lie to Me", where a friend from Buffy's past is dying of a brain tumor, so he arranges a deal with Spike that if he can turn her over to him Spike will, in turn, make him a vampire, as he would rather be immortal even if it means becoming evil than eventually becoming a withered husk. Buffy escapes, but since he technically lived up to his part of the bargain Spike still turns him, only for Buffy to dust him moments after he reawakens.
- Happens to most of the main characters in Chernobyl. Simply spending time near the eponymous power plant guarantees that Legasov and Scherbina will die of cancer in less than 5 years, and they didn't do any of the more risky tasks. Almost everyone who exposes themselves directly to radiation (the first responder firefighters, several plant workers) is doomed to die in weeks if not days of Acute Radiation Syndrome (not a fun way to go at all).
- The Chosen: Jesus is intimately aware of the fact that He's on a ticking clock. In the first season, He almost seems to procrastinate starting His ministry because of it, with the implication being He wants to spend just a little more time as a semi-regular person living with His friends and family.Yusif: What are you losing?Jesus: Time.
- In The Crown (2016), George VI continues to cough blood even after one cancerous lung is removed. He is told by his physician that the team of doctors around him has been keeping secret the extent of George's cancer and that he likely has less than a year to live.
- The main premise of the obscure MTV series Dead at 21, in which the fugitive victim of a government experiment has one year to keep intelligence-boosting microchips from burning out his brain.
- In Dead Like Me everyone is predestined to die at an appointed time if The Grim Reaper assigned to collect their soul intervenes to prevent their death their soul rots until taken to the afterlife as it should have been, as George finds out with her first reap. And it turns out that refusing to pick up the sticky note with the reap's name and time doesn't help either as her second one ends up trapped in his dead body while being autopsied.
- Doctor Who:
- The Fourth Doctor got a preview of his regeneration in the form of the Watcher.
- On the other side of this trope, the Sixth Doctor spends about an episode of "The Two Doctors" taking unnecessary risks and generally moping about when he believes he is about to be erased from existence due to a time paradox of some sort.
- The Tenth Doctor got a lot more warning about his impending death than the previous ones, thanks to the "knock four times" prophecy.
- Eleven was told this in the 2011 series, with the added complication of his companions watching his future self being killed. He got out of it, naturally, but decided to let much of the universe think he hadn't, as his Memetic Badass reputation was becoming more of a hindrance than help.
- Eleven had already discovered his prophecized death on Trenzalore for which his previous death escape was intended to stop from happening. Once he arrived on Trenzalore and figured out where he was, he made no attempt to run away and lived out his final 900 years there protecting the planet from all his enemies. Fortunately, altering his own past to save the Time Lords instead of destroying them allowed them to send him a new regeneration cycle.
- Played straight, with a literal timer counting the days, in "A Christmas Carol".
- The Eternal Love: Lian Cheng can't live past twenty-five. A case of amnesia and time-travel later, and he's (possibly) cured.
- In The Expanse's first season finale, Jim and Miller unwittingly step into a quarantine room during a bioweapon test and are hit by a gamma radiation sterilization beam, giving them acute - and terminal - radiation sickness. When they finally reach the Rocinante Cool Starship, they are barely able to stand and the ship's Auto Doc keeps entering hospice mode.
- Fantasy Island (2021): Ruby was dying of cancer when she came to the island along with her husband Mel. The couple wanted a last wonderful vacation for her before she died.
- The Flash (2014): Due to changes in the timeline at the end of Season 5, the Crisis that would originally happen in 2024 where Barry would disappear will now happen earlier. The exact date is December 10, 2019, and according to The Monitor, in order to save The Multiverse, the Flash has to die.
- From FlashForward (2009), Demetri didn't have a flash-forward, making him fear that he won't live up until those six months.
- Played for Laughs in Friends when Phoebe's psychic friend tells her she will die in three days, making Phoebe distressed and trying to do everything she can to enjoy her last few days alive. Then it turns out the psychic read her cards wrong and she was the one who was supposed to die instead.
- In Season 4 of Fringe, September, an Observer, appears from the future when he gets shot by Jessica he tells Olivia that, "in every possible outcome you have to die" when she is waiting for Lincoln and Peter to return from the other side. In the season finale she is shot and killed by Walter to prevent the collapse of both Universes, however, she is resurrected by the Cortexiphan in her system (debatable fulfillment of September's prophecy).
- Game of Thrones: Thanks to his greyscale infection, Jorah is pretty much doomed no matter what he does. Sam's treatment manages to save his life.
- The plot of the first two series of GARO. In series one, Kaoru is covered in the blood of a Horror and will die within 100 days. In series two, all Makai Knights in the show are branded with a cursed seal that is slowly killing them.
- In the Heroes episode "Seven Minutes to Midnight", a waitress named Charlie is murdered in the diner in which she worked. In a later episode in that season, "Six Months Ago", Hiro travels back in time to prevent Charlie's death, only to find out that she has a blood clot in her brain that will kill her soon, no matter what. And then, in a surprising twist in the FAR later "Once Upon a Time in Texas", Hiro returns to the past again, crosses his own timeline, and saves her and removes the clot in a particularly risky trade by effectively telling still morally-confused Sylar that he is destined to be a villain. Hiro ends up telling him that by the time he's come back, Sylar had already died alone. He managed to prevent Charlie's doom and (unknowingly mis)inform Sylar of his own.
- Used in Highlander, when the immortal Methos falls in love with terminally ill Alexa Bond and tries to cure her by finding the Methuselah stone.
- Several patients in House have, or believe they have, a limited amount of time left to live. That's not even counting the ones who get this as part of their diagnosis.
- The Patient of the Week in "Autopsy" is a little girl with terminal cancer who has about a year left to live and then develops a condition that could cut even that short. Because of her age, they make the decision to do a risky procedure in hopes of buying her that year.
- A secondary character in "House vs. God" is a terminal cancer patient. The events of the episode end up buying her a little extra time, but Wilson warns that it's not permanent.
- "Brave Heart" involves a man convinced he's doomed to die at the age of 40 because his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all did. Subverted in the end when House determines the hereditary issue that caused this and it's curable.
- The B-plot of "The C Word" involves a little girl who has a genetic disorder that cuts her life expectancy to 20 years.
- In the penultimate episode, Wilson learns that his cancer is terminal and that he has a few years to live with treatment, or about five months to live without it. He chooses the latter option, wanting to get the most out of the time he has left rather than stretch it out at the expense of spending all that time sick.
- Thirteen has Huntington's chorea, a hereditary, degenerative, and fatal disease.
- At the start of the second season of Jessica Jones (2015), law shark Jeri Hogarth is diagnosed with ALS. Most of her actions from the rest of the series relate to her struggling to cope with the fact that she'll be dead within a few years, and also that she'll have a long period of physical degeneration first.
- Kamen Rider:
- Yui in Kamen Rider Ryuki is fated to disappear on her 20th birthday. Ren/Knight's fiancee Eri Ogawa and Kitaoka/Zolda also don't have much time left with their respective illness.
- The Orphnochs in Kamen Rider 555 are doomed to short lives, including the main character. The only method of fixing this involves permanently losing their humanity, and the series ends with the implication that Faiz, who refuses to give up his, dies the moment the camera stops rolling. How much this death sticks when it's time for a Crisis Crossover, however, varies substantially.
- Akira Date in Kamen Rider OOO has limited time to live due to a bullet lodged in his brain, although he eventually recovers after leaving to have surgery.
- The entire premise of Kamen Rider Ghost is that the main character dies in the first episode, turns into a ghost with superpowers, and has 99 days to find a way to come back to life before he disappears.
- Kamen Rider Zi-O brings this up as a consequence of Geiz gaining his Super Mode, Geiz Revive, which history says he's supposed to use to kill Zi-O and then die from the strain. When he defies fate and decides not to kill Zi-O, however, this leads him to actually master the powerup and avoid dying from it.
- Kamen Rider Revice has this as one of the potential consequences of a Deal with the Devil, and in particular the first Kamen Rider Demons ends up with only a few days to live after feeding most of his lifeforce to his Artifact of Death. Fortunately, this doesn't actually end up killing him; unfortunately, it's because the second person to take the mantle of Demons kills him first. (Or seems to, anyway; he manages to survive and returns months later after recuperating, but his body's still wrecked and transforming again would risk his life.)
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Elrond's subplot of Season 1 in a nutshell. For some unknown reasons, the light of the Eldar is disappearing in Middle-earth, and the Elves are now desperate to find a solution to their problems, because they don't have much time left. Elrond is tasked to find a solution to this before his kind fades away.
- Charlie and Locke from Lost both get in this situation, albeit differently. Charlie nearly all of Season 3 with the knowledge that he's doomed due to Desmond's prophetic visions, while John Locke is explicitly told by Richard that he's going to have to die (which we already knew he was dead, as of the end of season 4, which is one of the mysteries of season 5. Locke is resurrected. Except he isn't.
- Midsomer Murders has an episode named Second Sight involving people with, well, second sight. One of them is firmly established to genuinely have it (consistently and repeatedly knowing things he should not have been able to know in advance), and turns out to have turned into a recluse by looking as far ahead as he could. While he didn't get the exact date he did get a lot of details about the circumstances around that as far ahead — almost being run over by someone looking like Barnaby a few days prior, a terrible storm, lying in the door to the church, etc — which makes him understandably rather shaken when he almost gets run over by Barnaby. Though ultimately it turns out he got one crucial detail wrong. Everything happened exactly as he'd foreseen up to and including lying in the front door to the church... only he wasn't dead, just knocked out. He didn't even lose his predictive powers after it.
- Mouse (2021): The Brain Transplant is slowly killing Ba-reum. He dies in prison after finally making amends for his crimes.
- In the NCIS episode "Dead Man Walking," Ziva becomes very close to Lt. Roy Sanders while he is dying of radiation poisoning, causing her and Jenny considerable distress.
- In Nine: Nine Time Travels, a Korean Drama, Sun-woo has a limited amount of time to defeat the man who killed his father and ruined his family, because Sun-woo has brain cancer and about six months left to live. Luckily, he has some magic incense sticks that allow him to travel through time.
- Nirvana in Fire: Mei Changsu is driven to avenge his family and put Jingyan on the throne as quickly as possible because he's slowly dying of poison.
- Once Upon a Time features the Evil Queen crashing Snow White and Prince Charming's wedding to announce that she was going to cast a curse that would take away everything they loved and send them all someplace horrible. The time frame between her making this threat and actually completing the curse is several months — at least nine, as Snow conceived and gave birth to Emma in time to send her out of reach of the curse before it hit.
- One Liter Of Tears has the protagonist Aya dying of Spino Cerebellar Ataxia.
- The Prime Minister and I: Da-jung's father has both Alzheimer's and cancer, and is slated to die in six months.
- Princess Silver: Rong Qi was poisoned, and as a result, he can't live past the age of twenty-four.
- Sledge Hammer! goes through this when as the result of mistaken identity, he is dosed with a poison that will kill him in twenty-four hours. Naturally he finds the antidote at the last second, but Trunk and the rest are convinced this is it for him.
- Joked with in the Stargate SG-1 episode "The Warrior":
- In Star Trek: Picard, Picard learns that the brain defect detected in Star Trek: The Next Generation's Grand Finale has advanced enough that he'll pass on very soon. He's able to complete his mission of saving a colony of synthoids from the Romulans before his body fails him, but his mind is transferred to a synthoid body and allowed to live on for a little while longer.
- Supernatural
- Dean sold his soul to a demon in exchange for Sam returning to life and was given only one year until the contract came up and he died. He subsequently spends the entirety of Season 3 either trying to get out of the deal, trying to cope with the inevitable, or coming to terms with the fact that he doesn't want to die or go to Hell. Thanks to the Writer's Strike not allowing for the planned story, the show shocked viewers by having him die and go to Hell in the Season Finale.
- In the show's universe, a normal term for a Deal with the Devil is ten years before you die. Despite this and the usual price of torture in hell, there are still plenty of people making such deals for things like artistic talent, career success, and massive wealth.
- Super Sentai:
- In Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, Burai has a limited time to live determined by a green candle, and has to stay inside a "Lapseless Chamber" to prevent it from burning out. Turns out this is because he died before due to a cave-in and could only be revived with a limited lifespan.
- In Mirai Sentai Timeranger, Ayase is terminally ill with "Osiris Syndrome" and has about a year left to live. Due to changes in the timeline, he is able to be cured at the end of the series.
- Mahou Sentai Magiranger had the Hades Beast Skeleton who would curse its victims to vanish after one week. Later, after Big Bad N Ma fully revives, we are told that there would only be three days left before he wiped out all life in existence.
- In This Is Us: Upon meeting his biological father William, Randall finds out that he has advanced stomach cancer and they will only have a few months to get to know each other. William dies at the end of season 1 while the two take a trip to his hometown.
- The Twilight Zone (1959): In "Still Valley", Teague can sense that he is going to die when The Sun goes down and gives his book of black magic to Sgt. Joseph Paradine to use against the Union.
- Wonder Woman (1975): In "Time Bomb", Diana meets a time traveler from the future named Adam Clement who casually reveals that a nuclear war occurs in 2007. The fact that Wonder Woman now has 30 years to save the world from nuclear annihilation or she'll face a Crapsack World is never addressed.
- Word of Honor: Zhou Zishu has six nails implanted into his body, and has three years to live as they slowly destroy his physical and mental health.
- Earth, and everyone on it, has just 34 days left in You, Me and the Apocalypse due to an imminent comet collision.
