Cool And Unusual Punishment / Live-Action TV

• In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., it turns out that S.H.I.E.L.D. is fond of passive-aggressively dealing with their less dangerous prisoners.
  Quinn: I've been locked in a cell smaller than my shoe closet! I was forbidden from eating with a fork, which would be okay if I was fed anything other than meatloaf!
• In The Alienist, the protagonist Laszlo Kreizler has to be aided by his housekeeper Mary even in simplest everyday tasks like tying his shoelaces due to his crippled arm. Laszlo has a bad temper, and when he misbehaves towards Mary, she is not above "punishing" him by leaving him to do these tasks on his own (which would not be a big deal for a person with two functioning arms, but renders Kreizler basically helpless). There are also romantic feelings between Kreizler and Mary, so the trope overlaps with Power Dynamics Kink.
• All About Me: In "Little Voice" Raj bullies his best friend, apparently in a bid to show off in front of a girl named Sarah. To punish him, his parents force him to spend a day out with their annoying neighbors, Charles and Miranda.
• This occurred at the end of every "Judge Trudy" skit on The Amanda Show, when Trudy would rule in favor of the child plaintiff and sentence the hapless adult defendant to something odd, which the bailiff would immediately carry out.
• Arrow: When Diggle needs information from a captured mook, he has Felicity hack the man's finances and start donating his money to charity.
  Felicity: Oh, look at this, you have a bank account in the Cayman Islands. Wow, two million dollars, quite the little nest egg. But it looks like you just approved a wire transfer of $1 million to a charity here in Starling City. Very generous. What should I do with the rest?
  Diggle: Greenpeace!
  Felicity: Great cause! And they really appreciate the support.
  Clinton: Bitch!
  Felicity: Bitch with Wi-Fi. Hey Clinton, looks like your mom and dad have a really nice retirement portfolio too, but they, oh no, are just about to make some really bad investments.
  Clinton: Okay, just wait, just wait, stop. What do you want to know?
• In Auction Kings, Cindy has done this to Jon via Using a toe-pulling device on Jon's fingers to find out if he left a case unlocked. Don't mess with Cindy.
• Babylon 5:
  • In the very first episode, Commander Sinclair tells G'Kar that G'Kar has ingested a micro-tracker which will keep a complete record of his movements for the next five years because of G'Kar's involvement in the events of the episode. After G'Kar leaves Sinclair tells Michael Garibaldi that there is no tracker, but just think of all the unspeakable procedures G'Kar will be subjected to in search of the tracker.
  • In "The Geometry of Shadows", Londo learns the hard way not to cross a Technomage. They respond by planting a Holodemon in his quarters, subjecting him and Vir to Narn opera as well as draining his account in such investments as a spoo ranch and Fireflies, Inc. before finally killing the power to his quarters. It was the last bit that convinced Londo to give the Technomages an apology.
• Batman (1966) has one of these every other episode, with the Dynamic Dunderheads being captured and put in a Rube Goldberg-esque Death Trap.
• One of the earliest sketches from A Bit of Fry and Laurie was one that featured Hugh Laurie enthusiastically showing the most boring holiday pictures you can think of and describing each one while Stephen Fry made sarcastic comments that appeared to be falling on deaf ears.
  Laurie: And this is one of me on the toilet half an hour later. I used a self-timer for that one. Because the whole new Minolta range have got self-timers.
  Fry: Self-timers? Oh, well, then I must leave at once.
  Laurie: I discovered this marvelous little man in Hadia who developed film the traditional Cretan way. Nikos his name was, or Costas. Could have been Andreas.
  Fry: Oh, but I must find out. Which? Which was his name?
  Laurie: This is him on the toilet.
  Fry: GO AWAY! [hugs himself and cries]
  Laurie: Right. Well, you touch my daughter again and it'll be a slide show. You understand?
  [Fry nods weakly]
• In Blackadder Goes Forth, Edmund and Baldrick are at one point captured by the Germans and sentenced to a "fate worse than death". Since said fate apparently consists of spending the rest of the war at a German convent school teaching home economics, Blackadder is pretty miffed when he gets rescued and promptly sent back to the front.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine: In the Cold Open for "The Bimbo", Jake comes in late. As punishment, Captain Holt invented a unique high-five for everyone in the precinct, including the guy who was just there to install the copier, because he knows Jake loves high-fives.
  Jake: But you hate high-fives!
  Holt: Yes, every minute of it was hell, but it'll be worse for you.
• Castle.
  Rick Castle: There has to be a way to get it out of him. We could force him to watch Paris Hilton videos.
  Kate Beckett: You want to be brought up on charges?
• Cheers: When Doctor Simon Finch-Royce deliberately overcharges Frasier, despite his heavy hint dropping, Frasier points Diane back in his direction, knowing her refusal to admit defeat or that she's wrong will drive Simon nuts. And he's right, as Diane is in full-on I Reject Your Reality mode.
• The Cosby Show: After Vanessa comes home drunk, her parents make her participate in the same drinking game again, even watching her younger sister have to take a shot. (What they don't tell her is that they're using tea.)
• Danger 5. Tucker is captured by Italian sailors and forced to drink endless cups of coffee (though they might just have been having a good time). In Season 2, Hitler torments our heroes by imprisoning them in a sitcom starring himself: Hitler's Haus.
• Daybreak (2019): After an Assassination Attempt on Turbo, he and Mona Lisa interrogate the captured assassins for the name of the traitor who helped them, by means of making them watch disturbingly graphic Educational Shorts.
• In Dexter, a character is shown torturing someone for information by shaking up bottles of Coke and opening them so they spray straight up the guy's nose.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "The Ribos Operation", the White Guardian gives us this gem:
    Doctor: Ah! You want me to volunteer, isn't that it?
    White Guardian: Precisely.
    Doctor: And if I don't?
    White Guardian: Nothing.
    Doctor: Nothing? You mean nothing will happen to me?
    White Guardian: Nothing at all. Ever.
    Doctor: Ah.
  • In "A Good Man Goes to War", a Sontaran was forced to restore his honor by serving duties as a nurse, prolonging life, rather than allowing them to die in the glory of battle. In the same episode the losing commander Manton is explicitly told by The Doctor to order his troops not to retreat, but "run away". He will be known as Colonel Runaway from that day on.
  • In "The Return of Doctor Mysterio", Lucy Fletcher tortures a squeeze toy to get information from the Doctor — and it works. This is especially hilarious since the Doctor had just endured over four billion years of being horrifically and painfully murdered over and over again at the hands of the Time Lords without giving up anything, but squeezing poor Mr. Huffle was too much for him to bear.
    Lucy Fletcher: This is Mr. Huffle. Mr. Huffle feels pain.
• The Drew Carey Show
  • You know what happened to the last guy who played a game of "I'm not touching the Devil"? He wound up wiping a fly's mouth for all eternity.
  • In another episode, Mimi blasted the Van Halen song "Panama" over and over for several days to attempt to drive Drew out of his house.^note This is in reference to the same being done to Manuel Noriega, described below.
  • When Mimi pulls a prank by putting Drew's obituary in the paper, it activates his "Doomsday Prank" on her. Mimi is handcuffed to a chair and forced to watch four Drew lookalikes in only their underwear dance to "I'm Too Sexy."
• ER: In the season six premiere episode "Leave it to Weaver", the ER is busy because of a car accident that injured severa bystanders, and a man with a migraine is upset because everyone is too busy to attend to him. He ends up pulling a fire alarm so he can get someone to help, and Randi responds by decking him. When the man protests, Kerry warns him if he complains any more, she'll let Randi hit him again.
• In Friends, there was one episode in which Joey forces Chandler to wear blue lipstick as punishment for lying to him. There was also an earlier episode where Joey makes Chandler stay in a wooden box for six hours as punishment for kissing Joey's girlfriend (his reasons were threefold). In another episode, Rachel tells Ross to drink a glass of fat to make up for him insulting her (although she stops him when she sees that he was actually going to do it). Ross was harsh to Phoebe, who thought her dead mother's spirit was inside of a cat, so Rachel made Ross apologize to the cat. And yep, all of those make sense in context.
• Glee:
  • Sue is upset with Will:
  Sue: I will go to the animal shelter and get you a kitty cat. I will let you fall in love with that kitty cat. And on some dark, cold night I will steal away into your home, and punch you in the face.
  • Sue also punished her moles' failures by revoking their tanning privileges. It causes Santana to burst into tears.
  • Everything Sue does, really...
  • When Will has finally had enough of Sue, he gets her to fall in love with him, mends all the damaged caused by their rivalry, and then dumps her just because he can.
• Alton Brown tries this on his overreaching torture technician, Ygor J. Dungeonmaster. It backfires.
  Alton: "BAD DUNGEONMASTER, BAD! Now... go skim the moat!"
  Dungeonmaster (gleefully): "Oh, goody!" (takes out bendy straw) "Lucky straw, lucky straw!"
• In The Good Place, this turns out to be Michael's plan to torture the main four human characters: make them think they're in Heaven but subtly manipulate things behind the scenes so that they constantly get on each other's nerves, are continually reminded of their insecurities and life's failures, and end up being utterly miserable and stressed in what should be a paradise for them.
  • Later on in the series, it turns out that among the legitimately horrific tortures of the Bad Place (penis flatteners, acid pits filled with spikes, flesh-eating lightning, spastic dentistry) there also exist departments such as children's dance recitals and weekend holiday shopping at IKEA.
  • The almighty judge of all reality threatens to torment Shawn, a head demon, by taping his eyes open and make him watch videos of soldiers returning home and being reunited with their dogs.
• Hank Zipzer: In "Hank's New School", Mr. Rock forces Mr. Joy to give in to his demands by handcuffing him to a chair and singing protest songs at him.
• In the Hannah Montana episode "Ready, Set, Don't Drive", Miley gets arrested for driving with an invalid license. She got her license as Hannah Montana because she didn't want to wait two weeks for a retest. Why, you ask? She couldn't handle the embarrassment of showing up to Amber's big party when Amber had her license and she didn't. Does Robbie Ray ground her? Passe! Take away her allowance? Old hat! Instead, he drives her to the big party, and announces over a bullhorn that Miley didn't get her license.
• In Happy!, after the reality TV producer insults Mr. Blue's gangster profession, Blue breaks a Christmas tree ornament across the producer's face, complete with broken shards lodging themselves into the skin.
• On Heroes, Mohinder knows his mortal nemesis Sylar has absorbed the power of super-hearing. His hearing is so keen he can hear other people's breathing and heartbeats, and in fact suffered terrible headaches from the noise. So when Mohinder goes to torture Sylar, what does he do? He strikes a tuning fork and holds it up next to Sylar's ear in all of its shrill, discordant glory and lets Sylar scream for mercy.
• The Hexer: Witcher trainees are punished by standing still on tiny stone pillars, barely big enough to plant both feet on the top. For few days and nights, Exposed to the Elements. By the end of their punishment, they usually just fall flat on the ground, too exhausted to even bother covering their face. Geralt calmly endures his punishment, but in an act of utter defiance, steps down from the pillar and taking tiny steps, slowly walks away, just to show everyone he can't be broken that easily. All while clearly shaking from pain and muscle strain.
• During an episode of Home Improvement, Tim gets himself and his wife lost while driving but stubbornly refuses to ask for directions. To make Tim change his mind, his wife threatens to get up each morning and cut out the sports section of the newspapers they get if he continues to refuse to stop and ask for directions. It works.
• House:
  • When a girl comes in with neck pain in "Kids", instead of firing Chase for being Vogler's Mole, House decides to be creative:
    House: You, sir, will research all the causes in the universe of neck pain.
    Chase: The list is, like, two miles long!
    House: Start with the letter A.
  • When Ron Livingston's global altruist character in "TB or not TB" orders a press conference on the unfairness of Africa's lack of Western medical care, House breaks into his hospital room and increases the heat, turns off the TV, knocks his supplies on the floor and flushes his cell phone down the toilet to simulate the third world environment he "obviously wants".
• In How I Met Your Mother, Barney is a frequent victim of this trope:
  • When Barney loses a slap bet against Marshall, he continuously gets slapped by Marshall over and over in several episodes.
  • And after losing yet another bet, Barney is forced to wear Marshall's duckie tie for most of the seventh season. Until he exchanges it for further slaps.
  • In "Woo", Ted nearly loses his dream job of building the new GNB building when Barney hires a band called the Sven Brothers instead before reconsidering Marshall's preposition that Ted is better fit for the job. After Marshall tells Ted that Barney is the reason why he didn't get the job at first, Ted punishes Barney by strapping him to a mechanical bull and deliberately leaves it on making Barney spin uncontrollably. And to add insult to injury, when Barney finally breaks free he is so dizzy he misses out on a chance of having a threeway with two of the "Woo Girls".
  • In "Magician's Code Part 2", Quinn redecorates everything in Barney's apartment pink as punishment for Barney sneaking off to Atlantic City with Marshall.
  • Combined with a You Are What You Hate situation; Barney who has been making fun of Canada for years, finds out he himself is one-quarter Canadian. Robin spends an entire episode teasing him about it as punishment and even tries to make him wear a Canadian costume for a Holloween in exchange for her stopping (although Barney doesn't follow through).
• In I Am Frankie, Tammy frames Robbie for vandalizing the school lockers. When she confesses to framing him, her punishment is to be his "genie" and grant him three "wishes".
• This is the entire point of Impractical Jokers. Four lifelong friends compete to embarass each other in public with challenges, and if one loses too many times, they become that episode's "Big Loser". They can be pretty creative when it comes to dishing out the pain:
  • Murr was tricked into thinking that all four of them were posing as skydiving instructors. Turns out, it was only him, which didn't sit well with the acrophobic loser.
  • In a rare three-way=tie between Sal, Murr, and Q, Joe decided to get them all tattoos. Q got a tattoo of a cat with the text "38. Lives alone. Has 3 cats" on his arm. Murr got a picture of a ferret skydiving on his thigh, and Sal got a picture of a young Jaden Smith on his other thigh... for some reason
  • Joe was dressed up like a superhero and strapped to the top of the Roosevelt Island tram car. He wasn't as scared of heights as Murr, but it was hard being "Captain Fatbelly"
  • Sal was sent in a prison uniform and blackout sunglasses to speak with teenagers about life in prison. Sal offered a relatively decent monologue as he walked around the room, telling the story around his apparent crimes and life behind bars. The main issue came when he took the sunglasses off and realized what everyone else knew; the people in the room were all elderly.
  • Q was strapped to a machine that stimulated the abdominal pains of childbirth.
  • Joe was to investigate which tables were real and which were fake cardboard tables. With dozens of real and fake customers around him, Joe went table to table, testing each one that he found to be suspicious. In order to crumple a table that was “harder than others,” Joe was finally prompted to climb a ladder and fall on the last one.
  • Q was handcuffed to a mime for 24 hours.
  • Sal was strapped down to a flat board as Murr married his sister.
• JAG: After Harm and Mic get into a fight that inadvertently breaks Bud's jaw (he stepped in between their simultaneous punches), Admiral Chegwidden offers them "non-judicial punishment". He takes them to an empty building, opens the door, and tells them they are not to leave until they inflict damage and pain on each other equal to what they inflicted on Bud. The next day in court, they both look like they went 10 rounds with the heavyweight champ.
• In Kamen Rider Decade, Natsumi will respond to anything Tsukasa does to annoy her - and I mean anything - by hitting him with the Laughing Pressure Point, a thumb-jab to the neck that causes him to laugh uncontrollably for the next several minutes. She even hit Tetsuya with it in one episode where she couldn't use it on Tsukasa.
• In one episode of Lizzie McGuire, Matt pretends to have an Imaginary Friend so his parents would buy him whatever he wanted. They punish him by making him wash a number of imaginary animals while the rest of the family watches.
• Reese in Malcolm in the Middle discovered that he was a natural chef. When he sabotages a cooking contest he would've won easily with his natural skill, his parents punish him by banning him from the kitchen for a month, and it works! This example at least has the justification that Reese is such a hard-core borderline-sociopathic Jerkass that Lois and Hal had completely run out of ideas - this is literally the only punishment that could hurt him.
• "Damn Bundys" from Married... with Children: When Al goes to hell because of a Deal with the Devil, the latter condemns Al to eat "Weenie Tots" (Which Al loves) for the rest of forever because they will force Al to spend eternity in the bathroom (and we all know how bad this is for Al). When The Devil notices that this has not had the effect he wanted, he proclaims, "For the rest of eternity you'll never see your family again", causing Al to fall on his knees saying "This is heaven." However, the Devil finally manages to come up with a Cruel and Unusual Punishment: Forcing Al to continue his normal life forever.
  • He also inflicts some Cool and Unusual Punishments on the rest of his family and neighbors as well. Bud ends up with claws, which results in him constantly popping his blow-up sex dolls. Kelly is turned into a gargoyle, which scares off would-be dates. Peggy's hands are turned into hooves, which means she can't operate the TV Remote or the Phone. And Marcy and Jefferson are forced to come over every day and be subjected to Al's insults.
  • The season 7 episode "Peggy and the Pirates" showcased Peggy telling their (temporary) house guest Seven a bedtime story, with her as the heroine who is kidnapped by "Rubio The Cruel" (played by David Garrison), the most feared pirate on the Seven Seas. Why is he so feared? because his awful, awful singing of showtunes brings searing pain to the ears of whomever hears it. Half of the crew of the ship he captures jumps overboard to escape it.
  Captain Courage (played by Ed O'Neil): Now we know why he's called "Rubio The Cruel"!
• M*A*S*H:
  • In "Chief Surgeon Who" General Barker tells Henry Blake that if Frank Burns keeps complaining that Henry should give Burns a high colonic (a type of enema) and send him on a long hike. Trapper adds that Burns should have to make the hike in full pack, which Barker approves of.
  • Left in temporary command of the 4077th during the episode "Tell it to the Marines" Major Winchester went a bit overboard in ordering creature comforts for himself and having Klinger work on Winchester's personal projects. Returning home Colonel Potter finds a half dressed Winchester in his office and makes Charles do a "100 yard flash" across the camp followed by making him work as the company clerk for a period of time.
• Some of the bad guys in Medium ended up being punished this way, especially Jeremy and his girlfriend from An Everlasting Love, stuck together as ghosts for all eternity, the lone thing that bound them together (kidnapping and killing young women) gone and the Gold Digger wife from Will The Real Fred Rovick Please Stand Up? who ends up being conned out of her inheritance - for which she had murdered her 91-year-old husband - by the guy she used to corrupt one of the jurors.
• Mel during one episode of Melissa & Joey tells her niece and nephew under her care: "Stay out of trouble, or I'll come to your school and kiss you at lunch."
• Modern Family: Fail to accomplish what you're tasked to do, and Luke will punish you with his water gun. Better have some spare clothes with you if he's supervising your work.
• During the second to last episode of Season 2 of The Mole, three of the four contestants have to spend one night in a creepy room. One room is a glass box filled with cockroaches and harsh light, the second is a completely dark room with a python slithering around, and the last(and worst) is a completely normal room where the song "Tiny Bubbles" by Don Ho plays over and over in different iterations(sometimes very slowly, sometimes speeded up, sometimes backwards, etc.)
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: Confess, or the Spanish Inquisition will poke you with soft cushions. And if that fails... "Cardinal Fang! Fetch... the comfy chair!" This might be considered a subversion, since the people tortured in this way are just confused, and do not react as if being tortured. Unlike...
  • Doug Piranha from the Piranha brothers sketch was so scary that grown men would pull their own heads off rather than endure this:
    Vercotti: He used... Sarcasm. He knew all the tricks; dramatic irony, metaphor, pathos, puns, parody, litotes and... Satire. He was vicious.
• Used in an episode of Mork & Mindy, where Mork gets captured by Amazon-esque aliens who torture him with massages and the dreaded bubble bath!.
  • Were these the ones commanded by Raquel Welch? Whose character complained about her skimpy silver toned costume, 'Who could look good in this?'
• Parodied on the VHS cover synopsis for A Muppet Family Christmas: "Don't miss it or they'll send you a fruitcake!"
• A Cool and Unusual Punishment was used as the final punchline for a Season Four episode of The Muppet Show (the episode guest-starring Liza Minnelli). When Statler and Waldorf are caught trying to "bump off" the Muppets, they're taken away. It's only after the credits, during their traditional "last laugh", that we see their fate: they're locked in the theater box (complete with bars) and forced to watch the Muppet Show.
  Statler: How long are we here for?
  Waldorf: 20 years.
  Statler: If I'd known that judge was giving us the Box, I'd have asked for the Chair!
• Murdoch Mysteries: The B-plot in "Murdoch Ahoy" starts with a mention of Annie Edison Taylor, the first person to take a trip down Niagara Falls, who is touring with the barrel she rode down the falls in. When her barrel is stolen during an appearance in Toronto, she enlists Crabtree's help. Crabtree discovers that the thieves are a group of university students who stole the barrel as a prank, along with Dr. Grace's mounted skeleton Shelley and Constable Jackson's helmet. The boys plead with Crabtree not to arrest them, since the scandal would lead to their being disowned by their families. In lieu of arresting them, Crabtree punishes the boys by forcing them to clean the entire stationhouse from top to bottom, and he insists they write a letter of apology to Ms. Taylor.
• My Wife and Kids:
  • This is how Michael Kyle would usually punish his kids every time they get out of line.
  • Michael himself gets threatened with this trope in one occasion — it involves his wife, ill with flu at the time, threatening to kiss him unless he agrees to the task she sets for him (taking their youngest daughter, who's also sick with flu, to their physician). Not wishing to risk being infected, Michael obliges at once.
• The entire premise of Mystery Science Theater 3000. The main characters are forced to watch crappy movies as part of an experiment; the villain is hoping to discover a film so bad it drives them insane, at which point he will turn it into a Weapon of Mass Destruction.
  • Pearl Forrester gives the crew the especially hellishly god-awful film Hobgoblins as a punishment for jumping on her rent-to-own sofas.
  • Pearl came oh-so-close to succeeding with Invasion of the Neptune Men, which nearly drove Mike and the bots insane. Their spirits were lifted by a visit from Krankor.
  • The original baddest of the bad, "Manos" The Hands of Fate, a film so terrible that both Frank and Dr. Forrester apologized for showing it to them.
  • Pearl at one point threatens Mike Nelson with "a John Agar film festival" as punishment for one of Mike and the 'bots transgressions, though the threat is not carried out.
• Parodied by the MythBusters. One of the selected myths for the third viewer special was whether bamboo could grow through a person's body. The setup sequence in the blueprint room featured Adam pretending to be tied to a chair while Jamie said "I can keep singing all day".
• In The Nanny, Maxwell grounds Brighton for trying to sneak past Fran to go to the mall in New Jersey. He then says that Brighton isn't allowed to go to his play premiere, which Brighton didn't want to go to anyway. Brighton is okay with that, until Fran convinces Maxwell to be "lenient" and let him go to the play.
  • This showed up fairly early in the series, when he tried smoking. After consulting her mother, Fran brought him to visit Grandma Yetta in her nursing home and watch her cough incessantly while puffing. To rub it in, Yetta then took him to visit another resident, described as "phlegm in a hairnet".
  • In "The Two Mrs. Sheffields", Maxwell's mother visits him, but takes an immediate dislike for Fran, demanding that he fire her. So, Maxwell decides to get back at her by proposing to Fran. Eventually, Fran realizes that Maxwell's only going through this out of spite, so she starts playing along, soon making him feel guilty about this insincere proposal.
    Maxwell: There must be something I can do to make it up to you.
    Fran: No, there's really not.
    Maxwell: No, please, I insist. Anything.
    Fran: Come on, you're insulting me.
    Maxwell: Are you sure?
    Fran: Well, maybe three things. Don't tell Miss Babcock for 48 hours. I promised Niles. Oh, and someone's gonna have to tell Ma. I figured you'd wanna do that personally. And then the third thing is, well, you can return this. [hands him a bag] It's what I was gonna wear on our honeymoon night.
    Maxwell: There's nothing in here but lip gloss.
    [Beat]
    Fran: [smirks] Suffer.
    [Fran winks at Maxwell]
• Night Gallery: A hippie finds he's gone to Hell. He's cool with it and can't wait to see the groovy fire and brimstone and demons... then is horrified to find his custom-made Hell is spending eternity with an old couple, watching their nonstop vacation slide show and listening to a mile-high stack of Lawrence Welk records. This set-up is also the old couple's custom-made Heaven.
• In The Noddy Shop, whenever Warloworth is caught playing a trick on the toys, he has to take care of Whiny and Whimper, Noah's two baby dolls.
• Police, Camera, Action! is not averse to this trope in the Retool series presented by Gethin Jones since December 2008. All participants in the show learn the consequences of their driving misdemeanors in some shocking way. But Values Dissonance comes into play here.
• In Power Rangers in Space, Elgar once fouled up and let the Rangers get an important diskette; Astronema punished him by making him "play with Scrudley". (Exactly who "Scrudley" is isn't clear; presumably its a monster of some sort that's very rough with anyone who plays with it.)
• In Power Rangers S.P.D., a villain who wouldn't give up any information under threats, promises of a reduced sentence or even another character's hit single "Me" crumbled under the Cloudcuckoolander's stream-of-consciousness rambling.
  • Their was also a subversion in a different episode with Piggy. Gruumm had left Piggy in a disgusting filthy pit for half an hour to convince him to help him defeat the rangers. The subversion isn't that it was a punishment, both of them saw it as a taste of a reward.
• Radio Enfer: When Laplante learns that Carl, Léo, and Maria cheated on his math test, he interrogates each of them to figure out how they did it. When interrogating Léo, Laplante threatens to make him watch all the school's concert band rehearsals.
• Reba:
  • Jake once gripes to Cheyenne about having Kyra as babysitter because Kyra makes him watch "The Wiggles" with his niece. Kyra, standing right behind Jake, replies: "Keep complaining. I got Barney tapes here."
  • Kyra spends much of the episode "Go Far" making snarky remarks while strumming her guitar. At the end of the selfsame episode, when she does it once too many for Reba to tolerate any further, Reba threatens to sell Kyra's guitar. Kyra, not wishing to run that risk, puts her guitar away.
  • After Reba wrecks Rhonda, Van gets back at her by calling Barbra Jean to tell her of Reba's temporary blind condition, knowing full well that she would rush to Reba's aid despite Reba's dislike of having Barbra Jean around.
• On an episode of ''Roseanne", Darlene wants D.J. punished for messing up her room. Roseanne and Dan decide to let Darlene name the punishment, and she decides to make D.J. wear a suit and tie to school the next day, which he hates.
  Roseanne: Of course, I would have made him wear a dress. (Darlene gapes) Too late!
  • D.J.'s punishment for grand theft auto was equally bad, if not worse. Roseanne would bring him to school, except she would wear the embarrassing apparel, namely a hillbilly outfit and very messy lipstick.
  • Becky and Darlene were hit with this too when they gave Roseanne a particularly generous Mother's Day gift as a way to suck up to attend a concert out of town. They got their trip out of town, all right...to visit their grandparents. They got to meet Bev's garden club, watch an endless vacation slide show, and sing showtunes.
• Salem in Sabrina the Teenage Witch was a warlock who was turned into a cat by the Witch's Council as punishment for trying to Take Over the World.
• One Saturday Night Live sketch was a History Channel-style documentary about an Allied attack on the Germans in World War II. Eventually, a former POW talks about how his friend went insane in prison, after being taken into a round room and told to go sit in the corner.
• Scrubs
  • Dr. Cox and Jordan punish the doctor responsible for Dr. Cox's failed vasectomy by strapping him to a chair while an a cappella group continuously sings the baritone part to the "Chili's Baby Back Ribs" Jingle over and over. The torture is so horrendous that ten minutes into the singing, the doctor starts eating his own face.
    Doctor: When do they say "ribs?"
    Dr. Cox: Never. They never say "ribs."
  • It seems Dr. Cox is the distributor of cool and unusual punishments; at one point he made Keith check the countertop's heartbeat for two hours. JD then relates the story of Dr. Cox making him give every air conditioning duct in the hospital a papsmear. Dr. Cox also once made all his interns stand in a corner for saying "let's rock and roll." JD says it a few moments later, with predictable results (despite him being an Attending at the time.)
  • A bizarre one: To get back at Elliot for dating Keith, JD in one of his yandere moments demands to be part of their sexual fantasies.
  • The Janitor also gets a few of these because he hates JD. One episode has the Janitor paint stars and stripes on JD and hang him from a flagpole, telling him to "act like a flag" for a while. Another episode has him punishing JD for his pride by recruiting everyone in the hospital, including JD's friends, to pelt JD with balls. This one gets bonus Laser-Guided Karma points because if JD had just swallowed his pride and asked someone what was going on, nothing would have happened to him.
• In Seinfeld, this was one of the ideas Jerry and George pitched to NBC for Jerry's sitcom pilot. After hitting Jerry's car, a man has no insurance or ability to pay for the damages, so a judge sentences him to be Jerry's butler. The network executives like this ridiculous premise much more than "a show about nothing."
• This was part of a running gag on an episode of Sesame Street where Oscar's mother comes to visit and every time she heard him say "please" (a word that grouches never say) she would wash his mouth out with ice cream.
• A few episodes of 'Stargate Atlantis have Major Sheppard threaten Dr. McKay with, of all things, a lemon.
  • This is a credible threat, considering McKay is highly allergic to lemons.
• Star Trek: The Original Series has a few:
  • "The Trouble with Tribbles":
    • Cyrano Jones is offered his choice of two punishments for peddling the eponymous Tribbles: either serving 20 years in prison, or spending the next 17.9 years (as calculated by Spock) removing the millions of Tribbles from the Starbase.
    • To punish the Tribble-hating Klingons for calling the Enterprise "a garbage scow" (and attempting to poison an entire Federation colony), Scotty rids the Enterprise of its Tribbles by beaming them all directly in the engine room of the Klingon ship. This eventually proved so disruptive to the Klingon Empire that, by the time of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's "Trials and Tribblelations", Klingon warriors had hunted adorable their "mortal enemies" to extinction and destroyed their homeworld.
  • In "I Mudd", Harry is "paroled" to the reprogrammed androids along with a new "special attendant" who Kirk promises will encourage Harry to "work with the androids, and not exploit them." Harry thinks he's getting off lightly until he realizes that his new attendant is actually attendants, plural: 500 android copies of his shrewish wife programmed to henpeck him into eternity.
• While not technically a punishment, the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Royale" has a 21st-century astronaut who was accidentally abducted by aliens; when they couldn't return him home, they made him a small reality where he could live out the rest of his days in the company of pseudo-humans based around a book as an attempt at apologizing for screwing him. Unfortunately, they based the reality off such a godawful book that the astronaut writes in his logbook "I hold no malice toward my benefactors. They could not possibly know the hell they have put me through, for it was such a badly written book, filled with endless cliché and shallow characters. I shall welcome death when it comes." Of course, this leads to the minor logical problem of why the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens never noticed that the technology level described in the 1930's novel clearly wasn't the same as the 21st century spacecraft they were dealing with, not to mention that if they could understand the language written down in the paperback novel, why didn't they simply ask the astronaut what his home planet was like?
• In the Suite Life On Deck episode "Model Behavior", Moseby punishes Zack, Marcus, and Woody for throwing a party without his authorization and encouraging a group of teen models to stay out past curfew by making them don snorkeling gear and fish the floaties they threw overboard out of the ocean.
  • Also in another episode, Zack Marcus and Woody set up a fake beauty pageant to meet girls and then announce that the pageant is canceled leading to many complaints from disappointed girls. When Mr. Moseby finds out, he punishes Zack Woody and Marcus by hosting a real beauty pageant, appoints them as judges, puts them in charge of the preparations and cleaning up afterwards, and even forbids them from flirting with any of the contestants.
• Supernatural: In "The Man Who Would Be King", it is shown that after Crowley took over Hell, he got rid of the agonizing torture and turned it from Fire and Brimstone Hell into a Celestial Bureaucracy consisting of nothing but one long line that everyone is forced to wait in for eternity. According to Crowley, a lot of people sent to Hell are masochists who are Too Kinky to Torture, but everybody hates waiting in line.
  Castiel: And what happens when they reach the front?
  Crowley: Nothing. They go right back to the end again. That's efficiency.
• In one episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Sarah threatens to have Cameron shipped off to boarding school when she gets a bit too carried away.
• Tomica Hero Rescue Fire takes it literally with the "cool" part. Whenever the villainous underlings fail one of their plans, Big Bad Donkaen punishes them with an ice-related punishment, which makes sense, as they are fiery demons.
• In Top Gear, when the presenters are making a long journey in second-hand cars (bought under a narrow budget according to certain criteria; e.g. two-wheel drive and not modified for off-roading), the producers send along an emergency backup car which is either 1. hateful to all three of them, 2. entirely inappropriate for the setting, or both. If a car breaks down and the presenter cannot get it going again, his punishment is to use the backup car for the rest of the journey.
  • In the Botswana special, the backup was an old-model VW Beetle.
  • In the Vietnam special, it was a motorbike painted in a bright and gaudy American flag livery and blasting Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA", with the radio controls disabled.
    • Ironically if you listen to the lyrics, "Born in the USA" is a protest song about a man who gets sent to Vietnam, loses his best friend, and can't find work after coming back home as a disgruntled veteran. If the Vietnamese understood the song, they might even like it. Unfortunately, most of them don't speak English.
    • Due to copyright laws, on US streaming services and video sales it has been replace with The Star Spangled Banner. This is arguably less of a perceived offense (and ruins the joke that comes a few seconds later).
  • In a Season 13 episode involving a long drive in France and a race on Val Thorens's ice-driving track, it was a Morris Marina—a car which, inexplicably, usually winds up crushed under a piano whenever it appears on the show. The presenters blame a nearby piano moving service, Careless Airways.
    • Adding insult to injury, this was a rare instance where the backup car was required (as James's selection died.) Heaping a metric ton of insult to injury, it proved to be the car that won the challenge. (One guess what happened after they walked away from it at the ice-track finish line. They blamed Careless Airways' French affiliate.)
  • The one where they went to America, although they had no idea it was going to be punishment. As a joke on the stereotypes of USA Southerners (which aren't true... right?) they paint some joke things on each other's car. Hammond's (painted by May) says "Man-love rules OK", Clarkson's (painted by Hammond) says "Country and western is rubbish", and May's (painted by Clarkson) says "Hillary for President". They laugh at how idiotic they feel, and stop at a petrol station to fill up. The owner is like 'Are you serious?' and they're like 'It's just a joke, we're sorry if you're offended'... and she subsequently calls her friends and they have a mob of people chasing after the 3 guys and the camera crew. The rest we see of that is a mobile phone recording of them absolutely shitting themselves and trying to rub the words off their cars. Completely unexpected but a cool and unusual punishment for thinking that Southerners aren't like their stereotype.
  • Subverted in the hunt for the "source of the Nile" when the backup car, a Ford Scorpio, failed to make it to the destination because the men in white coats dropped it in a river the presenters had crossed in their self-made car ferry.
  • Series 13's "Cars For Teenagers" challenge, parking quietly at night. Hammond and Jeremy elected to push their cars into position. James, on the other hand, was doomed before he started...
  Jeremy: Ahem. *holds up the remote for James May's superglued (max volume, adjustment knob removed) stereo*
  Richard: Is that the control..?! *corpses as he realises what Jeremy's holding*
  Jeremy: *aims the remote squarely at James' car* Ready... steady... aaaand... *LOUD MUSIC*
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In the episode "A Nice Place to Visit", a prideful, greedy burglar named Rocky Valentine is shot dead and wakes up in what he believes to be Heaven. He meets a man in a white suit named Pip, who promises to grant him anything he wants. Rocky gets it all: beautiful women, delicious food, fancy clothes, success at gambling, and millions of dollars. He gets all of that and more... and then he finds that, no matter what he does, he'll always get what he wants. Always. The boredom drives him out of his mind and he decides he doesn't want to stay and begs to go to the Other Place. That's when Pip reveals where he's been all along.
  Pip: Heaven? Whatever gave you the idea you were in Heaven, Mr. Valentine? This is the Other Place!
• In one episode of The Weird Al Show, a sadistic kid's show host threatens his sidekick with a "Pauly Shore marathon" if he doesn't win a coveted award. He doesn't win (but nor does the other guy he's aiming to beat). The last shot of the episode is his sidekick, bound and gagged to a chair, as the host snarls, "Which do you want to see first? Encino Man or Jury Duty?"
• In The West Wing, C.J. once accidentally arranged for a photo op wherein the president would pose with a goat. Leo was not happy.
  Leo: If he's wearing a hat, or that thing's wearing a Bartlet button — I'm hiding snakes in your car.
  C.J.: Come on, don't say that, not even to joke!
  Leo: You're never gonna know where they are...
  C.J.: Leo!
  Leo: ...or if you got 'em all out. Gonna lay their eggs right in your glove compartment.
• Will & Grace
  • Karen throws a wild party and trashes Will's apartment. Her punishment? Will denies Karen her afternoon martini (a.k.a. "lunch") and makes her look at Grace's endless honeymoon photos.
    Karen: [to Will] I HATE YOU!
    Grace: Roll One: my luggage!
  • In another episode, Karen and Jack are coming up with some type of revenge against the English Lorraine Finster for stealing Karen's husband. Jack's idea? Make her watch the American version of anything British.
  • Another time, Grace forces Karen (who has just gone on a multi-thousand-dollar shopping spree) to cut back on her spending habits by threatening to cut up part of the sweater set she just bought.
    Karan: No! You kill one piece and the whole ensemble dies!
    Grace: Maybe I'll just start with... the label.
    Karen: No! Honey that's the BEST PART! [covers mouth in abject horror] No...
    Grace: [moving scissors in a cutting motion] Dah dah! Dah dah! Dah nah dah nah dah nah...
• Wizards of Waverly Place:
  • In response for Alex always taking things from his room, Justin creates a female Frankenstine's monster named "Franken Girl" to guard his room, makes Franken Girl befriend Alex, and eventually forces Alex to join the cheerleading squad.
  • During the episode "Dancing With Angels" Max (who has been turned into a little girl) refuses to tell his parents where Alex, Harper and Justin have sneaked off to. His punishment? Being entered into a beauty pageant for 7-12 year-old girls.
• A lot of Whose Line Is It Anyway? sketches feature some form of this, particularly "World's Worst". For example, in one "Hoedown", Colin claims he hates the Backstreet Boys so much that he punished them by making them wear copies of his loud Hawaiian shirt.
• During one episode of Yes, Dear, Greg got threatened with one of these by his boss: "Warner, if you keep talking, you're going to come to work in a thong and a beefeater hat." That got Greg quiet.
• In Yes, Prime Minister, Prime Minister Hacker manages to get a slimy Foreign Office Mole, who has been meddling with his attempts to work with Israel in accordance with the Foreign Office's pro-Palestinian leanings, a cushy promotion as ambassador to an important friendly nation. Unfortunately, the embassy is in Tel Aviv...

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