History AirVentPassageway / LiveActionTV

* ''Series/TheSuiteLifeOfZackAndCody'': Zack and Cody easily spend more time traversing the Tipton's air vents than just using the hallways and doors.

* ''Series/The100'' has Bellamy repeatedly use air vents to get around in Mount Weather without being seen. Possibly {{justified|Trope}} since Mount Weather is a large facility that needs a huge air filtration system to filter out radiation from the surface; if any place is going to have person sized air vents, it'd probably be them.

* In the ''Series/{{Goosebumps}}'' episode "The Perfect School", the main character of the day sneaks past the faculty/guards through the vents.

* ''Series/MythBusters'' tested this trick along with a variety of other cat-burglar techniques. Jamie used the common technique of using powerful hand-held magnets to climb the vertical shaft, only to cause a ''thunderous'' sound as they connected to the vent walls, defeating the point of it being a "stealth" technique. It was so ridiculously loud that ''everyone on set'' — including [[TheStoic Jamie]] — broke out laughing after the first step. Adam, on the other hand, used vacuum "cups" on his hands and feet that would grip the vent. Though it wasn't nearly as noisy, it was far from silent, and the equipment lacked reliability (breaking down several times during the course of the show) and it was tricky to use. Adam himself said that he wouldn't trust his life to such machinery.

Examples of [[AirVentPassageway Air-Vent Passageways]] in live-action TV.

* ''Series/TheOuterLimits'': Averted in one episode where it's mocked when one character suggests they escape a school through the impossibly small air vents.

* ''Series/PersonOfInterest''. In "Razgovor", Shaw and the POI escape into the air vents of an old apartment building, only to be flushed out when the villains puncture the air conditioning system, causing [[KnockoutGas chlorodifluoromethane to flood into the vents]].

** ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries''
*** In "Dagger of the Mind", Dr. Helen Noel saves the day by using a passage to get to the power room and shut off the Tantalus Colony's force field.
*** In "Miri", the children use an air vent to infiltrate the lab where the Enterprise crew is working and steal their communicators.
*** In "The Trouble With Tribbles", Scotty speculates that the tribbles got into the food processors on the ''Enterprise'' via the actual air vents. Spock realizes that the grain the ''Enterprise'' is guarding on the nearby space station is in storage compartments with similar vents, prompting Kirk to beam over and leading to the episode's [[SugarWiki/FunnyMoments Crowning Moment of Funny]].
** ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' had a few DieHardOnAnX episodes where the Jefferies Tubes come in handy this way.
** ''Series/StarTrekEnterprise''. The ship is taken over and everyone is locked in their rooms. Hoshi, being the smallest person on board (and a regular) manages to wriggle out through the vents. Presumably, Hoshi is the one called upon when something in the vent needs fixing. Or she was chosen so we could have a gratuitous {{Fanservice}} moment where her [[ShirtlessScene shirt gets pulled off]]. Especially since the ducts didn't seem that narrow anyway. If anything, that was at least acknowledging that the Jefferies Tubes would be guarded by the bad guys. That vent existed solely during construction and was closed off upon completion, it was never intended for people to pass through.
*** In the MirrorUniverse episode "In A Mirror, Darkly", the crew of Mirror NX-01 Enterprise pursue a [[TheDreaded Gorn]] through the Jeffries tubes of an Original Series vessel.
** Not exactly an air vent, but in ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'' they once had Jake crawl through a disused ore-processing chute that was too small for a grown man, but not for a scrawny fourteen-year-old.
*** Another occurrence was a WalkAndTalk (er, Crawl and Talk) between Quark and Rom when their mother was kidnapped by the Dominion. Quark, however, doesn't know where he's going...and they end up opening a hatch into Captain Sisko's office.

* Still shows up regularly in ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'', with Sam and Dean playing RockPaperScissors to see who'll go down in the ductwork. (It's always Dean. Dean is really bad at RockPaperScissors.) Although it was [[TheBigGuy Sam]] who crawled through the vent to the old cell block in [[Recap/SupernaturalS02E19FolsomPrisonBlues "Folsom Prison Blues" (S02, Ep19)]].

* ''Series/OuterLimits'': Averted in one episode where it's mocked when one character suggests they escape a school through the impossibly small air vents.

** Justified in episodes "Squeeze" and "Tooms", since the killer — Eugene Victor Tooms — is a mutant whose power is to be capable of squeezing through tiny openings.
** Used with absolutely no justification in "Ghost in the Machine". Though there is a slight subversion when Scully learns firsthand the downside of trying to climb through the airducts when an [[AIIsACrapshoot insane AI]] controls the ventilation system...
** A conspiracy theorist trying to spy on a defense contractor's meeting in "Three of a Kind" gets caught when the duct audibly flexes under his weight.

* ''Series/SweetHome'': Yi-kyung crawls through the building's air-vents as she flees the spider monster.

* Played with but ultimately averted in part two of the ''Series/TheIncredibleHulk1977'' episode "Prometheus", where the blind girl who is leading Banner (stuck in a demi-Hulk state that severely limited his intelligence) suggests to him that he remove the grating covering an air vent to escape the underground government research facility they're trapped in, but they don't get the chance to actually try it before they're caught. Possibly double-subverted when they wind up escaping through a large ventilation shaft to the surface anyway.

* ''Series/StrangerThings'': Air vents show up in Season 3. Realistically, the mall's air vents are very small, forcing Dustin and Steve to recruit a ten-year-old who ''still'' finds it a tight fit. The vents in the [[spoiler: secret Russian base]] are much larger, allowing an adult to use them. Being underground, the vents would need to be much larger to handle the necessary airflow.
** The vents are also dust-free and spotless...because the mall just opened.

** It would be easier to list the ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'' episodes that don't involve Jefferies Tubes.
** In Star trek in general, jefferies tubes should be considered a justification, since they are specifically designed to allow crew to move through them. They are cramped, but are viable service corridors.

** Somewhat justified and subverted in some episodes, particularly early ones. In one they had to employ a contortionist (played by Eartha Kitt): only she was small and limber enough to crawl through the ducts, and they even gave her a CoolTool so she could unfasten, from inside the duct, the screws that hold the grille on from the outside. At other times they sent a miniature remote controlled hovercraft and a small trained dog through vent ducts and similar. But most of the time, yeah.

* ''Series/MythBusters'' tested this trick along with a variety of other cat-burglar techniques. Jamie used the common technique of using powerful hand-held magnets to climb the vertical shaft, only to cause a ''thunderous'' sound as they connected to the vent walls, defying the point of it being a "stealth" technique. It was so ridiculously loud that ''everyone on set'' — including [[TheStoic Jamie]] — broke out laughing after the first step. Adam, on the other hand, used vacuum "cups" on his hands and feet that would grip the vent. Though it wasn't nearly as noisy, it was far from silent, and the equipment lacked reliability (breaking down several times during the course of the show) and it was tricky to use. Adam himself said that he wouldn't trust his life to such machinery.