Drowning My Sorrows / Live-Action TV

People attempting to deal with depression by getting drunk in Live-Action TV.

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• Angel:
  • Angel appears to be doing this in "City of, but it's merely a cover to allow him to stake some (other) vampires.
  • Wesley, Lorne and Spike all drowned their sorrows after Fred died.
  • Played Straight in "Redefinition" when Angel fires the rest of his staff — they immediately go to a karaoke bar they know, get incredibly drunk, and sing "We Are The Champions". Badly.
  • Maybe not drowning, but Wesley certainly takes his sorrows for a swim after his split from AI.
• Barney attempts to do this when he returns to The Andy Griffith Show for a class reunion, where he finds out that his old girlfriend, Thelma Lou, moved on since he left and had gotten married. He spends some time at the punch bowl, and appears to start getting tipsy, only for Andy to inform him that the punch is nonalcoholic.
• Ashes to Ashes (2008). Alex Drake may be the only woman born who can hold her own in a wine bar with Gene Hunt and an epically bad mood, and she has every excuse in the world for doing so.
• Babylon 5:
  • Vir, after killing Emperor Cartagia. Notably, the scene manages to go from dead serious to completely hilarious and back, mostly because Vir doesn't get drunk very often.
    Vir: I was toasting Emperor Cartagia. And since he wasn't here, I drank for him. And then, I couldn't be rude, so I had to drink with him. So first it was me drinking for him and then him drinking for me and then I kinda got into this kinda cycle. And then here comes Cartagia, his glass broke — or maybe it was my glass. Would you like some? Because you know what, I think this is Cartagia's glass after all, so it would be quite appropriate, don't you think?
    Vir: How much more before I can look in the mirror and not see myself? Because I keep looking, and I'm always there. And right now, I don't want to see me.
  • It's also a significant part of Garibaldi's Backstory. Garibaldi restarts drinking when he realizes that he can't kill Bester for brainwashing him into accidentally betraying Sheridan.
  • Londo is also a heavy drinker. First, he drinks to the lost glory of the Centauri Republic, then to Adira and finally to ruined Centauri Prime and to keep the Drakh Keeper from ruining his Thanatos Gambit. Unlike the other examples, it's not a phase or a problem so much as a universal constant.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003) has this happen to several characters several times during the show's run. Bill Adama hits this trope in the fourth season, so much so that his best friend and second in command (and accomplished alcoholic himself) Saul Tigh has to snap him out of it.
• When Leonard's mother, a neurophysiologist and psychologist, comes to visit on The Big Bang Theory, her influence prompts Leonard to knock on Penny's door and simply ask, "Do you have any alcohol?" The two of them spend most of the rest of the episode getting sloppy drunk.
• In the third episode of Black Mirror Liam ends up getting drunk after suspecting his wife was flirting with another man. Decides to get the babysitter involved before driving over and attacking the guy.
• On Boy Meets World, Cory does this once after his break up with Topanga in Season 5. In a later episode, Shawn does this after he is unable to find his real mother.
• The Boys (2019). Averted with Grace Mallory, the former leader of The Boys. After her grandchildren were murdered as a result of her investigation into the Supes, she retired and took up birdwatching, saying it was that or alcoholism.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Giles starts drinking heavily after Jenny's death, and it's not played for laughs. Jenny's death drove Giles to seek fiery vengeance, as well as a bottle. He also got scarily drunk, alone, when the fallout from his Ripper days first encroached on Sunnydale in the form of a demon-possessed corpse by the name of Eyghon. He worked his way through a list of old friends' phone numbers (plus half a bottle of scotch) only to learn they were all dead. His missing an appointment with Buffy for the first time ever was enough to tip her off that something was wrong.
  • In "The Wish", an alternate-universe Sunnydale without Buffy is overrun by vampires. Giles leads a ragtag band of vampire hunters, and his apartment littered with liquor bottles spells out his desperation.
  • He also got drunk in Season 4's "The Yoko Factor" when Spike's manipulations got him feeling he was useless.
  • In "A New Man", he was so upset about feeling useless that he went out and got drunk with Ethan Rayne. Bad idea.
  • In "Something Blue", Willow isn't drowning her sorrows. She's just bathing them.
  • The episode where Buffy's beer-drinking spree made her go, in her own words, one million years BC. If ever there was a more literal way to convey the message, "drinking is bad, kids." The only more literal way would be if the episode had been called "Beer Bad", WHICH IT WAS. Given this exchange at the end of the episode, one gets the impression that Joss Whedon couldn't resist subverting the anti-alcohol message:
    Xander: And was there a lesson in all this, huh? What did we learn about beer?
    Buffy: Foamy!
    Xander: Good. Just as long as that's clear.
  • In "Doppelgangland", Anya tries to drown her sorrows at the Bronze, but as she looks outwardly like a teenage girl the bartender stubbornly insists on an I.D. "I'm 1,120 years old! Just give me a frickin' BEER!!!"
  • There's Spike in "Lovers Walk". Apparently alcohol does affect vampires.
  • "Life Serial" has the trio trying to destroy Buffy's life. Spike steps in and helps her with scotch before she agrees to go with him to a Bad Guy Bar for information. She promptly takes a bottle of alcohol and spends the night snarking as she gets drunk off her dial. She regrets it later as she spent the rest of the night puking. Next time Spike asks if she wants a drink she firmly declines.
  • In "Entropy", Anya tries to get Spike drunk so he'll curse Xander after breaking up with him. As Spike has been dumped by Buffy, the two end up sharing the bottle and having Sex for Solace.
• In Burn Notice, it's inverted with Sam Axe, who's almost always seen with a beer in hand. It's the times he's not drinking that show he's either being serious or he's dealing with personal issues.
• The Canadian TV series Butch Patterson Private Dick, features a title character who drinks for a number of reasons, not least his shame over his tendency to wet his pants, to prematurely ejaculate, or his inability to have sex without paying a woman for it. He normally keeps up a brave front, but he occasionally lets his private shame and self-pitying show through, bursting into tears, yelling at whoever is in the room and then running away.
• In the first episode of Charité at War, Anni's brother Otto, a Shell-Shocked Veteran, gets massively drunk on his sister's party in an attempt to forget about his war trauma. It's not pretty, but at least he doesn't make it a habit.
• Charmed (1998): After Phoebe pulls a Face–Heel Turn to be with Cole, who's now the Source of Evil, Piper blames herself because she's the older sister and is supposed to look out for Phoebe. Leo eventually finds Piper drinking the alcohol inventory at her nightclub to try and deal with her despair.
• On an episode of Cheers, Rebecca is devastated when she loses her last chance to confess her feelings to the boss she's nursed a crush on for years. Sam comes to her apartment to console her, but quickly makes his excuses when he realizes he doesn't have the willpower to stay there without trying to seduce her. Left alone and bereft, Rebecca casually lines up a series of shots of liquor to consume in succession. Subverted when Sam calls from the downstairs lobby, insisting it's the only way he can be there for her without giving in to his baser nature.
• In the Community episode "Mixology Certification" Annie starts off the night ordering root beers but as she gets progressively worked up about planning out her entire life she eventually switches to screwdrivers.
• Flack, after Angell's death on CSI: NY. Unfortunately, he got beat up on the subway and almost passed out. A former C.I. took him to his place because he was so drunk. No one knew where he was at the time, even when he was supposed to come to work, and Mac had to try pulling him back to reality once they found him, which the group had been trying to do for a while but he rebuffed them. Fortunately nearly losing his job (and worse, his life) woke him up.
• Dexter:
  • Sgt. Doakes discussed this with Dexter, telling him that lots of cops deal with the stress of the job with either booze or drugs and that lots of them became addicts.
  • Debra drinks once when she reminisces about her father, a legendary cop on the force, Harry Morgan. She was proud of herself to moderate her drinking, but any time she hears some crap that happened with him, she needs to drink.
• Doctor Who: In "Extremis", a group of scientists at CERN do this after reading The Veritas, before they blow themselves up.
• The Dropout: Ian Gibbons is fired and later rehired but Reassigned to Antarctica. He ends up stuck in a meaningless do-nothing job and unable to quit (he needs the health insurance). To cope with this, Ian increasingly retreats into a bottle.
• In Farscape, Aeryn spends all of "The Choice" drunk while she mourns Crichton's death.
• A flashback in one episode of Frasier shows Niles hitting the (wine) bottle especially hard during his divorce from Maris, making a reference to the term when he said, "Who knew my sorrows were such strong swimmers."
• Fellow Travelers: After losing his son, Hawk goes to Fire Island where he uses cocaine, drinks heavily and has sex with a much younger boyfriend as a means of coping.
• On Fringe most of the cast has gotten in on this at one point or another.
  • Walter Bishop is normally on any number of psychotropic drugs at once. When he hits rock bottom, instead of drowning his sorrows, he smokes them out. To similar, but far more hilarious, effect.
  • Olivia drinks so often it's pretty much her nightly ritual now.
  • The Olivia from the Alternate Universe is usually The Teetotaler because she can't stand the taste of alcohol. She makes an exception to this after her partner is killed in action. Walter finds her drinking the booze her ex-boyfriend left in their apartment, which she admits is mostly making her feel sick.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Robert Baratheon's drinking problem is strongly implied to be caused by his lost Lyanna. He even claims that "seven kingdoms couldn't fill the hole she left behind."
  • Bronn encourages Tyrion to drink until it feels like he did the right thing in "The Lion and the Rose".
• House of the Dragon: By Season 1's third episode, King Viserys Targaryen has become heavily depressed due to falling out with his daughter Rhaenyra, his brother Daemon, lingering guilt over Aemma's death, and an increasing concern that perhaps Aegon was his true prophesized son, and he made a mistake when he named Rhaenyra his heir. He spends much of The Grand Hunt drinking heavily to cope with this.
• Goodbye My Princess:
  • Gu Jian spends most of his time drinking after he almost dies and realises Xiao Feng has lost her memory.
  • Mi Luo gets drunk when Pei Zhao marries Luo Xi.
• Good Omens (2019): When Crowley thinks Aziraphale is dead he's so heartbroken that he completely gives up on his plan to run away from the impending Armageddon and gets drunk in a nearby pub.
• On Good Times, Keith does this after feeling frustrated about not being able to play football, working part-time as a cab driver, and the lack of full-time work. The drinking escalates when his old college roommate (now a pro football player) comes to visit. Keith then starts insulting everyone around him and he slaps Thelma. Thelma packs his bags and tells him that he can either quit drinking for good and stop feeling sorry for himself or he can leave her for good. Keith chooses Thelma.
• Gossip Girl: Modus operandi of Chuck Bass.
• Probably the best way to explain Meredith's relationship with tequila, on Grey's Anatomy, is through this delightful quote, by, of all people, Alex Karev, who wasn't exactly her BFF:
  Alex: When your life is sucky you get drunk and sleep with inappropriate men. It's your thing.
• Nathan Petrelli, complete with Beard of Sorrow, at the beginning of the second season of Heroes.
• In the Horatio Hornblower miniseries, this is how Mr. Buckland deals with being an Acting Captain and not quite fit for command — drinking lots of port. He starts with "freaking drinks" to calm himself down and ends up getting drunk on a regular basis. He's once found napping in a net in his cabin, holding an empty bottle. One scene depicts him sadly pouring himself port, and the wine overflows the glass and he just sadly watches the stream flowing on the table.
• In I Dream of Jeannie Roger and Tony were depressed and decided to get loaded on ice cream sundaes.
• In the miniseries Innocent, Tarık began self-medicating with alcohol after the death of his wife Emel, whom he believes he killed himself during a heated argument.
• Inspector Lynley, after his wife's death in the series five finale, which he believes is his fault, takes to this. His partner, DS Barbara Havers, is not amused, but even though she's his Most Important Person, even she can't reach him. It takes an It's Personal case, a near brush with arrest for murder, and Barbara nearly being killed to make him something remotely like himself again. The first thing he does after he comes to his senses is apologize to Barbara, after which she remarks, "You know, I probably shouldn't say this, but d'you fancy a drink?" Clearly, this time she trusts him not to go off the deep end.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): In "In Throes of Increasing Wonder...", a forlorn Louis de Pointe du Lac drinks from his flask after his brother Paul's funeral and orders a Sazerac at the Fairplay Saloon.
• Many Korean Dramas use this trope, both as drama and as comedy.
  • In Best Love, Ae Jeong drinks an entire bottle of wine in one gulp to make a point, Jae Suk gives a drunken confession of love to his boss, and Aw Hwan mumbles a request to Jenny not to drink red wine with anyone but him. And so on...
  • Woo Ri and Min Sook get sloshed while male-bashing in Can You Hear My Heart?. Joon Ha does it one night which leads to his confession that he's the Long Lost Sibling.
  • The fusion historical drama Sungkyunkwan Scandal has Kim Yoon Shik giving a drunken Lee Seon Jung a ride back to the school one night.
  • Twinkle Twinkle: Mostly serious sorrowful drinking, especially by the female leads.
  • You Are Beautiful: Go Mi Nam gets drunk on champagne his first night and ends up throwing up on the lead singer of the band he just joined. This is after throwing up in a flower pot, and before anyone knows he's a girl.
• LazyTown: Milford does this with hot cocoa in "Secret Agent Zero".
• On Lie to Me Foster gets totally smashed (on a bottle of Lightman's very, very expensive Scotch, no less, which she stole from his office). When he confronts her, she is both hilarious in her chattiness and heartbreakingly honest, as she displays her vulnerability and her love and loyalty for Lightman, while finally taking a stand against his aggressive personality.
• It happens in both versions of Life On Mars as well. "What? I had no idea how long this stakeout was going to last!"
• Lost:
  • Christian Shephard spent the last week or so of his life drowning his sorrows in Australia.
  • Jack's taken to doing so in the flash forwards.
  • Desmond, especially when he realized he couldn't escape the island and returned in this state in the Season 2 finale. Plus his time travelling woes led him to the bottle too (although Charlie and Hurley were exploiting him a bit).
  • Sawyer is fond of drinking to drowns his sorrows as well.
• Just about every M*A*S*H character was prone to this at some point or another.
  Hawkeye: Drowning your sorrows, Margaret?
  Margaret: No... just taking them out for a little swim.
• The Mentalist: Jane gets hammered on Bloody Marys in "Red Rover, Red Rover". This was on the anniversary of his family's death. Since he had a "regular table" with two empty places, it is possible he does this on special dates (birthdays, happier anniversaries, etc.).
• Miami Vice: After his second wife Caitlin is killed, Crockett spends the next three weeks drunk, cleaning and polishing everything on his boat.
• Midnight Caller: After shooting his partner Rusty, Jack "climbed into a bottle" for six months.
• Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries: Jack Robinson tries this after the accident in "Blood at the Wheel", because he thinks the Victim of the Week is Phryne herself — a prospect he later admits is "unbearable".
• Moon Knight (2022) sees Marc Spector being evidently more prone to using alcohol to dampen his dissociative mental problems than his other identity, Steven Grant. One significant flashback displaying the moment where his split identities really diverged was as Marc was approaching his mother's shiva. Given how she was abusive to him while growing up, Marc attempted to get himself plastered just to build up the courage to attend, but not only did he render himself barely able to walk straight, he still broke down sobbing on the sidewalk in grief.
• My Country: The New Age: Seon-ho starts drinking after Bang-won kills Nam Jeon, depriving Seon-ho of his revenge.
• Ben Harper from My Family: One episode features him being unable to get at his booze, resulting in him grinding through a fair chunk of the 10,000 or so choices on the combination lock in order to get at whiskey that turns out to be cold tea, courtesy Nick's new job as a background actor.
• My Left Nut: Mick ends up drinking a lot in the Wild Teen Party, due to his fear of having cancer and fumbling his relationship with Rachael.
• The Outpost: After Garret is reportedly killed, Gwynn starts to drink and gamble frequently while not occupied with her duties.
• Part of Me: Rodrigo turned to the bottle due to his depression after his dream of being a film screenwriter failed. During his very first scene, he is very distressed when he learns of Mónica's death and starts drinking after a long period of sobriety.
• In The Pinkertons episode "On Account of Huckleberries", this is how Sheriff Logan responds when the corpse of a woman he once loved is discovered and he's accused of her murder. It only makes things worse for him.
• During the Las Vegas season of The Real World, Frank drinks water in anger during Steven and Trishelle's first hook-up.
• Queen Sugar: Ralph Angel drives off and gets wasted after his fiancée Darla confesses that their son Blue might not be his biological child.
• The Rise of Phoenixes: Zhi Wei gets drunk after being disowned.
• Michael attempts to do this in Roswell, only to discover that he's genetically an extreme lightweight. He spends the rest of the night in severe pain.
• Chimatsuri Doukoku, the Big Bad from Samurai Sentai Shinkenger is stuck in another dimension, without being able to conquer earth, he deals with his frustration about not being able to do anything by drinking large amounts of sake (rice wine). His Power Rangers Samurai counterpart Master Xandred averts this trope by using medicine for his constant headaches instead.
• Scandal: Both the President and Cyrus do this (sometimes together).
  • Mellie became a pretty heavy drinker in Season 3, and it escalated to the point of constant inebriation after Jerry's death. She still has occasion to hit the hooch now and then.
• Schitt's Creek: When Bob kicks him out of the garage, Johnny spends the afternoon getting drunk at the cafe. When Jocelyn brings him home, he confesses to Moira that he is demoralized by their situation and doesn't feel like a good provider anymore. In a role reversal, Moira consoles him and assures him he's the one holding the family together.
• Almost every (major) character has done this at least once on Scrubs. Probably most notable is the occasion when Dr. Cox spends around a solid week doing this after killing three patients by causing them to have rabies-infected organs transplanted and needs babysitting by all the other characters.
  • After their father dies, J.D.'s older brother Dan spends several days sitting in J.D.'s bathtub drinking beer. He refuses to get out even when J.D. needs to shower.
• Sex/Life: Cooper deals with divorcing Billie by drinking, doing coke and having casual sex, before it all comes down when he's in a car accident, gets arrested for DUI then ordered to get into AA.
• Damar of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine spent several episodes getting drunk, to drown out first his unease and his conscience over dealing with the Dominion, his murder of Dukat's daughter, then his problems when promoted to leader of Cardassia. His snapping out of this and becoming a good guy marks the beginning of his becoming truly badass. And he slips a bit of information to Quark, leading to a particularly entertaining scene in which he is trying to tell Kira and Odo what he learned while roaring drunk.
  "I just shared a bottle of kanar...with Damar!...Hey...that rhymes! [unintelligible giggling]"
• Stranger Things:
  • Hawkins sheriff Jim Hopper delved deep into alcoholism after his daughter died of cancer and his wife divorced him.
  • In "Trick or Treat, Freak," Nancy attends a Halloween party with Steve, while still racked with the guilt over the death of her best friend Barb at the hands of the Demogorgon the year before. She quickly gets wasted on the alcoholic punch being served. Steve tries to snatch her cup away when he notices her getting too intoxicated to walk, and in the struggle, she ends up spilling punch on her dress. When he takes her to the bathroom so she can try to dry off, she lashes out at Steve and implies that she doesn't love him. A heartbroken Steve storms out, and Jonathan has to take her home and put her to bed.
• Supernatural:
  • It's shown that Sam and Bobby both drink a lot after Dean's death by hellhound at the end of Season 3. Bobby, at least, has been hinted to be avoiding alcohol now, but with the whole Apocalypse, Sam using his powers, and Dean's memories of Hell, the boys have still been drinking in a not-so-healthy way.
  • After finding out that God doesn't intend to do anything about the Apocalypse, Castiel goes and drinks a liquor store.
    Castiel: I found a liquor store.
    Sam: ...and?
    Castiel: And I drank it!
    [later]
    Dean: Where have you been?
    Castiel: On a bender.
  • In "The End", Dean travels to a Bad Future where Castiel has lost all his powers and now feels useless, so has become a new-age guru losing himself in sex and drugs.
  • Dean's at the bottle again in Season 7 after Cas' death.
  • In the Season 9 finale, after bringing Dean's dead body back from the fight with Metatron, Sam hits the scotch.
• Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms:
  • Bai Qian gets drunk after catching Li Jing cheating on her.
  • Feng Jiu starts drinking after she's sent back to the Fox Kingdom.
• Subverted in an episode of Titus: Christopher Titus' father, habitual drinker Ken Titus, goes on the wagon, and his relatives find his sober behavior so insufferable that within two weeks they have an intervention to urge him to start drinking again.
• After being killed and brought back to life in Torchwood, Owen went out drinking. This, however, ended badly for him seeing as dead people can't digest anything. He also goes through more mild forms of this after Diane leaves him.
• Damon often resorts to this on The Vampire Diaries.
• We Are Who We Are: Richard gets quite drunk after three soldiers who he trained are killed in Afghanistan.
• Neal and Mozzie get drunk in the White Collar episode "Family Business", shortly after Neal discovers that the man pretending to be Sam is actually his father, James. It's partly justified in that it was for a case Neal was working (they had to counterfeit a particular brand of whiskey), but he points out that after the events of the last few days, he's more than happy to let himself get drunk.
• Whose Line Is It Anyway?:
  • The Irish Drinking Song game in this series is based on this and is sometimes played after the 'winner' is decided so the host can join in.
  • There's a game aptly titled 'Bartender' where one player acts as the bartender and the other three sing their sorrows out (which are provided by the audience members.)
• Word of Honor:
  • Zhou Zishu starts drinking after he leaves Tian Chuang and again after his fight with Wen Kexing.
  • Wen Kexing also gets drunk after the fight.
• The X-Files, "The Blessing Way": When Mulder is presumed dead at the beginning of Season 3, Frohike shows up at Scully's house and mumbles something vaguely nonsensical. Scully takes one long look at him and asks, "How drunk are you?" to which Frohike replies by holding up a near-empty bottle of something that is probably stronger than wine. She just nods knowingly and lets him in, implying that she's done a bit of drinking herself.
• 7 Yüz: Aylin tasks her husband Bülent to hit the bar with Metin in "Biyolojik Saat", hoping it will distract him from his breakup with Gökçe. It doesn't go as expected, as Metin Can't Hold His Liquor and spends the early hours of the morning vomiting profusely.
• In Yes, Minister, Jim Hacker, at the end of "The Whisky Priest", seems at first to just Need A Freaking Drink (OK, several drinks). Then:
  Annie: You're sort of a whisky priest. You do at least know when you've done the wrong thing.
  Jim: Whisky priest?
  Annie: That's right.
  Jim: Good. [Beat] Let's open another bottle.
  Annie: You haven't got one.
  Jim: That's what you think. [turns, opens a red box, which turns to be filled with bottles of whisky] Who said nothing good ever came out of Whitehall?
• You Me Her: Andy, after Izzy dumps him, gets drunk with her best friend Nina before they sleep together.

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