Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse / Live-Action TV

Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse in Live-Action TV.

---

The following have their own pages:

• Arrowverse

---

A-D

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has the team's arch-foe and former friend, Grant Ward. Even before being revealed to be evil, Ward's tragic past as a victim of abuse (from both his parents and elder brother) was referenced more than once. He is eventually outed as a bad guy towards the end of season one and remains Team Coulson's most persistent and reoccurring enemy through the next season-and-a-half. Despite this, he likes to constantly tell others (and himself) that his actions are either not his fault or are completely justified due to his terrible childhood, but the other main characters constantly make it a point to call him out on his actions and even say that in his anger towards his family, he's become something worse than them. It's subverted long after his death however: Ward's Framework version proved he would've been a truly good person and devoted SHIELD agent if he was truly given a choice in the matter because in the Framework, Victoria Hand trained him and not John Garrett, and Daisy/Skye told him she understood him better now. When Kora mentions in Season 7 that Ward would be the first target of Project Insight, Coulson defends him not only because he's just a child in that time period, but also because they met a version of him that became good because he was given a chance to be.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003): The Cylon "John" (Number One, though he prefers "Cavil") is hateful towards his creators for giving him a human body and dismissive towards their care for humanity, hatching an Evil Plan to wipe their memories and annihilate mankind as some sort of lesson to them. However, one of his creators points out that he never truly attempted to become more machine-like, instead debasing himself by pursuing revenge and wallowing in hatred, a very human reaction.
• The Big Bang Theory: In "The Justice League Recombination," Penny drops by Leonard and Sheldon's apartment with Zack, her Brainless Beauty on-again, off-again boyfriend. Zack, a sincerely Nice Guy, is eager to "talk science with the science dudes," but Leonard, Sheldon, Howard, and Raj all pull an Insufferable Genius act and mock him for being stupid. When Zack catches on, he's deeply hurt and leaves. Penny stays behind and calls them out, saying that though the quartet may have been teased and harassed for their nerdy interests in the past, they have no excuse for acting the same way toward people who are genuinely trying to be friends.
  Penny: You know, for a group of guys who claim they spent most of their lives being bullied, you can be real jerks. Shame on ALL of you.
• Black Bird: Larry Hall and his twin brother were affected by Feto-Fetal Transfusion Syndrome, and Larry got the short-end of the stick. While his brother turned out good-looking, intelligent, and athletic, Larry is unattractive and dimwitted, causing him trouble with attracting women. However, this is never treated as an excuse for his raping and killing of several young women and children because he feels "owed" romance, and he is rightfully treated as a monster.
• Black Mirror: USS Callister: Said almost word-for-word by Walton. During the escape attempt, Walton starts to give a heartfelt apology to Daly for his disrespectful and dismissive attitude towards him in real life that led to their entire situation, which seems to get through to Daly somewhat, but then Walton angrily takes it back by saying it still doesn't excuse throwing Walton's son out of an airlock, and then telling Daly "Fuck you to death!" before he commits a Heroic Sacrifice to save the rest of the crew.
• The Boys: While his family still empathizes with him, Hughie and Becca have both made it clear that regardless of how bad Butcher had it, his own behavior is toxic and causes significant harm to innocents and that Butcher needs to grow up, get his anger under control, and stop using others as excuses for his problems. To Billy's credit, he actually makes improvements in this regard, even if they are small.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine:
  • Jake frequently uses being brought up without his father to justify a lot of his more childish behavior or even to try to gather sympathy, especially early on. He uses this as an excuse for being a jerk to Santiago when she tries to host a Thanksgiving dinner to the detectives since his memories of Thanksgiving weren't pleasant and again to try to convince Captain Holt to give him half a million dollars to pay for his apartment. Eventually he becomes more likely to acknowledge when it is affecting him but not use it as a defense as a sign of his Character Development. Considering the show is a comedy, it is almost always played for laughs (particularly the asking for a half a million from Holt).
    Holt: Peralta, I will not give you a cool half mil because you had a slightly sad childhood.
  • Ironically, in one episode Jake himself gives us this gem, often used in fandom as a rebuttal towards Draco in Leather Pants:
    Jake: Cool motive! Still murder.
  • In many ways this trope is one of the central themes of the series. Often times the criminals the Nine-Nine confront have understandable and sympathetic reasons for doing what they do. A few examples include Edmund Grail who sends death threats to his former boss because his boss slept with his wife and then fired him when he found out or corrupt cop Bob Annderson who became disillusioned with the law for being underappreciated despite all his hard work. Despite this, the show makes clear that whatever reasons they might have it doesn't justify breaking the law and becoming a criminal.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In "Out of Mind, Out of Sight", Marcie Ross had a Friendless Background and was ignored by everyone, including the teachers, to the extent that the Hellmouth's influence literally turned her invisible. Marcie subsequently becomes a psychopathic Invisible Jerkass who takes violent revenge against everyone who scorned and ignored her. Buffy is initially sympathetic to Marcie but drops it when she realizes just how twisted she's become and how far she's willing to go for payback.
    Buffy: Y'know, I really felt sorry for you. You've suffered. But there's one thing I really didn't factor into all this. You're a thundering loony!
  • Buffy herself gets a moment of this in "When She Was Bad". Throughout the episode, she's sullen, moody, bitchy, and lashing out at people because she's traumatized over her temporary death at the Master's hands. By the time Giles and Willow get captured by vampires due to her refusal to cooperate with them, Xander's beyond caring why she's acting that way and tells Buffy point-blank he'll kill her if anything happens to Willow.
    Xander: I don't know what your problem is, what your issues are... and as of right now, I officially don't care.
  • In "Lie to Me", Ford is Secretly Dying from brain tumors and wants to become a vampire to escape that fate. To that end, he's willing to sacrifice Buffy and several innocents to Spike in exchange for being turned. While Buffy is sympathetic to Ford's plight when he reveals his brain cancer, she still points out that he's essentially committing mass murder, and nothing will make that okay.
    Buffy: Isn't this exactly how you imagined it? You tell me how you've suffered and I feel sorry for you. Well, I do feel sorry for you, and if those vampires come in here and start feeding, I'll kill you myself!
  • Alternate timeline Cordelia has this in "The Wish" when she sees the consequences of wishing that "Buffy never came to Sunnydale." The reason she did is she blamed Buffy for inviting weirdness into her life and encouraging her indirectly to take a risk on dating Xander, who cheated on her. She finds out that her former bullies are meek as lambs in vampire country, while Xander and Willow have been turned into evil vampires that hunt her down for saying they need to find Buffy, the "slayer". When Giles revives her, Cordelia starts apologizing to him, saying that her selfish wish ruined the world. Sadly, alternate Willow slits her throat, so prime Cordelia doesn't learn this after Giles fixes the timeline.
  • Similarly with Faith in the third season. Buffy explicitly mentions Faith's bad childhood as a reason to give her a second chance when she has a Face–Heel Turn in the third season, but later on, in "Choices", when Faith expects Willow to offer her a chance at redeeming herself, Willow denies her that and said she had Buffy and the others supporting her but now she has nothing. Buffy herself later attempts to murder Faith after finding out that following Faith stealing her body, she slept with Riley, raping both him and buffy; she tells Angel and Faith that Faith's shitty background and redemption quest is no excuse for her to evade consequences.
  • Spike reeks of this trope when he could literally be the poster child. When he isn't blaming his problems on Drusilla breaking his heart, he's blaming Buffy, not accepting any blame for himself. It takes being tortured by a rogue slayer in season 5 of Angel to bring him around and make him accept responsibility for what he has done.
    Spike: And I'm supposed to, what? Complain, because hers was one of the thousands of families I didn't kill!?!
• In Castle, Beckett firmly drives this point home to the mother who kidnapped her own daughter to prove her husband was neglecting their daughter as Beckett strikes down all of the mother's attempts to justify the kidnapping. While yes the husband was neglecting the daughter, it doesn't change the fact that the mother broke the law and violated the husband's custodial rights, even if he does take those rights for granted.
• Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: Billy is a Jerk Jock bully who constantly pesters Sabrina's friend Theo, who is struggling with his gender identity. At one point, he tries to bully Theo in a bookshop, but is stopped by Sabrina's aunt, Hilda, who reads his mind. She proceeds to hint at something terrible that happened to him at a summer camp as a child and shows him sympathy, but also makes it clear that it doesn't excuse him being mean to others and picking on people weaker than him.
  Hilda: I know everything about you, Billy. And I know why you're a bully. And it's terrible, what happened to you at that summer camp when you were eleven years old. It is awful what those boys did to you, and how none of your counselors believed you, and how your dad didn't either, and how your mother washed your mouth out with detergent until you 'just stopped talking. But it doesn't give you the right to harass anybody, especially someone much smaller than you.
• Cobra Kai:
  • While Johnny admits to Kreese he knows the man went through some terrible things in the Vietnam War and he himself will never truly understand the horrors, he also tells him that civilian life is not the same as the war and Kreese's philosophy is just going to cause problems for the kids. It becomes more prominent when remembering from the films that his Foil Mr. Miyagi was himself a World War II veteran who lost his wife and son, and still ended up becoming the opposite.
    • Season 3 takes this to its logical conclusion; we see first hand the horrors he experienced and the mistakes he personally made that lead to his "No Mercy" belief. It's understandably traumatising and we realize why he holds the beliefs he does, but it gets clearer that civilian life is not the same as getting your platoon captured as prisoners of war and some of them killed. If anything, the fact he's gone from surviving as a POW to wanting to murder a car salesman for indirectly ruining his business over three decades ago shows how unhinged his philosophy is.
  • Tory Nichols' mother had to rely on leftovers from the restaurant she worked at in order to feed her and her brother — and her mother was fired for that, despite that the leftovers would have ended up in the garbage anyway. Season 3 reveals it's actually worse. Her mother is now on dialysis and her brother's young age forces her to be the sole breadwinner of the family. Despite all of this, most of her darker actions (stealing liquor from a club, attempting to maim Sam) have nothing to do with it and fall squarely under Disproportionate Retribution. Even Miguel knows that her assault on Sam is going too far and he (unsuccessfully) tries to stop her. He later calls her out on this in Season 3 and the finale proves Tory is willing to forsake the well-being of her family just so she can satisfy her personal grudge against Sam.
    • This becomes deconstructed in Season 4, however: while Sam was justified in criticizing Tory's behavior, she is now using this trope as an excuse to dismiss Tory's objectively difficult situation and continue their grudge. Part of her Character Development in Season 5 involves her coming to realize that while Tory's behavior is wrong, just dismissing her personal problems outright is an ineffective way to help the situation and that her circumstances really did have a poor effect on her mental health and decision-making.
• Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: Rebecca gets to this conclusion by the Season 3 finale "Nathaniel is Irrelevant". She realizes she's been using her upbringing as an excuse for all of her bad actions (parodying the idea with a song called "Nothing is Ever Anyone's Fault"), and finally decides she has to take responsibility.
• The BAU in Criminal Minds have to figure out why the serial killers they hunt down are killing people the way they are, often going into their tragic and traumatic backstories. However, they only really 'sympathize' so that they can track down the killer's next move and talk them down from hurting their latest target, and are under no illusions about how they are still psychopaths and murderers who need to be brought down with a few notable exceptions. This is spectacularly highlighted by JJ in "The Longest Night":
  "Look, I'm supposed to emphasize with you. Sympathize. Understand. But I can't. That would be a lie. The truth is, I don't understand what you've done. I don't sympathize with you killing people all these years, and I especially don't understand you taking Ellie. What I can do is tell you what a mother should tell you — that you can't take away your pain by hurting someone else. That it doesn't make all the nights you spent alone any better if you scare someone else the way you're scaring Ellie. What happened to you, it isn't fair, but what you're doing to her isn't fair either. And if anyone understands what that feels like, it's YOU."
• CSI-verse:
  • CSI: A Serial Killer tries to use the MAOA gene as part of what amounts to an Insanity Defense, essentially arguing that he isn't responsible for his actions because they were genetically predetermined. Dr. Langston blows it out of the water by testifying that he himself has the same variant of that gene, but he became, well, a CSI.
  • CSI: NY: Mac shuts down a Serial Killer's Motive Rant about being disinherited and mistreated by his adoptive family with this retort, made all the more dramatic by the fact that he barely raises his voice:
    "Me, I don't pity you, Darius. There's a lot of people with worse stories than yours. They never hurt anyone. You killed 12 people in two states over the last 72 hours and you want me to feel sorry for you because your daddy didn't kiss you when you were a baby? You asked for my help? I did help you; you're where you belong...You rot in hell, you son of a bitch."
  • CSI: Miami has a former Marine Cold Sniper who is, presumably, firing on targets at random. When he's apprehended in the end he outright offers to tell Horatio why as he's marched down in handcuffs. Horatio couldn't care less and doesn't even hear him out.
    Sniper: Don't you want to know why?
    Horatio: You killed four innocent people. You're evil and you enjoy death. I hope you enjoy your own.
• Dead to Me: In season 2, Judy meets with her recovered addict, neglectful mother. She keeps trying to get Judy to do things for her, but Judy eventually realizes she's just being used, and when she calls her out, her mom's response is to say that Judy was a needy baby and she was a young mom, which is why she became an addict. Judy's response is just disbelief on her.
  Judy: A baby doesn't make you an addict.
• Doctor Who: very bluntly spelled out by the 12th Doctor when dealing with a Zygon, "Bonnie", who wants to start a war for control over Earth after she and her fellow Zygons were forced to live among humans. The Doctor coldly dismisses every single one of her points about why her war is "necessary".
  Bonnie: We've been treated like cattle!
  The Doctor: So what?
  Bonnie: We've been forced to fend for ourselves!
  The Doctor: So's everyone.
  Bonnie: It's not fair!
  The Doctor: Oh, it's not fair! Oh, I did not realize it was not fair! Well, you know what? My TARDIS doesn't work properly and I don't have my own personal tailor!
  Bonnie: The things don't equate.
  The Doctor: The things have happened. They are facts. You just want cruelty to beget cruelty! You are not superior to people who were cruel to you! You're just a whole bunch of new cruel people!

E-M

• In The Expanse, Anna Volovodov starts to become friends with a woman named Melba, only to later learn that she's really Clarissa Mao, and has hurt and killed many people (including another of Anna's friends) in a quest to avenge her father. After Anna tasers Melba to keep her from killing someone else, she visits her in the brig to try to understand her actions and gives her a gently-spoken but harsh "Reason You Suck" Speech that pretty much boils down to this. It actually does have an effect on Clarissa, being one of the biggest drives for her subsequent Heel–Face Turn.
  Anna: I keep looking for a way to care about you. I think, "Her father was a terrible person." But a lot of people have terrible parents, and...I think "Well, she's clearly a damaged person", but then...who isn't? So, I'm down to "Maybe she has a brain tumor?" Do you have a brain tumor?
  Clarissa: (As a tear runs down her cheek)...No.
• The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: While Sam agrees with Karli's motivation for her fight, he doesn't agree with her method of using it, especially when it comes to killing innocent people, something he or Mama Donya would certainly not get with.
• Subverted in Farscape. Scorpius tries to convince a neural clone of Crichton to help him create wormhole technology to stop the Scarrans by showing Crichton how, for his entire childhood, he was horrifically abused by the Scarrans until he escaped and joined the Peacekeepers to take revenge by stopping them. Crichton is sympathetic but points out that there is no difference between the xenophobic, genocidal Peacekeepers and the xenophobic, genocidal Scarrans. Scorpius promptly tells Crichton that there is a difference between them by showing Crichton how he that he was conceived via industrial scale sexual abuse.
• In Friends, Phoebe often plays the victim card (by bringing up her adoptive mom's suicide or having to live on the streets as a teenager) in order to avoid punishment by making the others feel bad for her. However, as the series goes on, her friends wise up to this and start refusing to accept it as an excuse for her behavior.
• Gen V: Dean Shetty's motivation for creating a virus to wipe out all Supes is because Homelander killed her daughter and husband when he deliberately chose not to save the hijacked plane they were on. Everyone who's aware of this and not in on the plot rejects that as a justification.
• The George Lopez Show: Occurs with Zack Powers, Carmen's one-time boyfriend and just an all-around unpleasant little asshole. Carmen tries to excuse his actions (which include getting a girl pregnant because he didn't respect her enough to be safe, vandalizing the factory—an act that almost costs Benny her job—just to spite his father and coercing Carmen into running away to San Fransisco so he can sleep with her with the intent of dumping her as soon as he gets what he wants) by stating that his father's never there for him and his mother's a bitter alcoholic. George silently calls out how weak this excuse is, noting that he also had an absent father and an alcoholic mother and he didn't turn out nearly as bad.
• The Good Place: Throughout the first season, Eleanor often mentioned how her terrible upbringing messed her up. This falls flat when she hears "Real Eleanor" / Vicky tell her tragic (albeit fictional) life story, which ends with her becoming a selfless humanitarian. One of the demons mocks how pedestrian having irresponsible and divorced parents is, by comparison. As her character develops, Eleanor realizes that her parents were pretty lousy, but she still has to take responsibility for her own life.
• Hercules: The Legendary Journeys: Hercules' evil Mirror Universe counterpart, the Sovereign, reveals his many tragedies that led him to evil. His mother Alcmene abandoned him as a child, his father Zeus went insane, Cheiron was a Sadist Teacher who taught him to be evil, and what truly drove him over the Despair Event Horizon was when his wife and children spontaneously died. When he finds out the reason why they died was because the main universe Hera killed their counterparts (people are in Synchronization with their counterparts) to spite Hercules, he rages it is all Hercules' fault. Hercules says no matter what happened to him, it doesn't excuse all his atrocities because everyone is responsible for their own choices.
• This is frequently used as a rebuttal in Homicide: Life on the Street, though how much weight it holds tends to vary.
  • Vaughn Perkins from "Bop Gun" is a sensitive teenager who lost his father at an early age and grew up with an abusive, drug-addicted mother, and eventually had to be raised by his aunt. He moved back in with his mother and fell in with a bad crowd, and he kicks off the events of the episode when he shoots a woman during a fit of rage during a mugging. When Howard, who has been sympathetic to him and believes him to be covering up for his comparatively more hardened accomplices, visits him in prison and confronts him about it, Vaughn bluntly tells her that what he did was unforgivable and that he deserves to pay. It's also deconstructed, as the episode still portrays what happens to him as tragic and points out that he's only being sentenced so harshly because he's a black kid who shot a white woman.
  • In "Extreme Unction", Pembleton confronts a serial killer who the detectives have been conducting a manhunt for for the past few episodes about her motives. The killer goes on an impassioned monologue on how her upbringing with an abusive fundamentalist mother inspired her to kill her victims "in the name of God" (i.e., because they were women who didn't Stay in the Kitchen). Pembleton laughs in her face and shuts her down.
  Pembleton: You had no right to kill them, especially in God's name! Now I gotta believe, EVEN IF YOU WALK OUT OF HERE SCOT-FREE, GOD IS GONNA MAKE YOU PAY! One way or another.
  • In "The Last of the Watermen", Howard helps the Chesapeake Bay police arrest her brother's friend, who had murdered a conservationist whose restrictions on how much fishing the local oystermen could do essentially destroyed the local economy. When her brother confronts her on it, she points out that he still murdered someone regardless of the reason.
  • After Felton gets overwhelmed at a crime scene due to lingering trauma from getting shot a few episodes ago, Giardello goes to check on him. When Felton snaps at him, Giardello in turn angrily gives him a "The Reason You Suck" Speech about how he's a subpar detective and that he's sick of Felton making excuses for it. While Giardello does have a point about Felton's poor track record, it's still played as a Kick the Dog moment.
• How I Met Your Mother: In season 9, Marshall has an imagine spot where he talks with Lily, 7-years-ago Lily, his father and briefly, Robin, about a fight he just had with Lily where he accused her of considering him and their family to be a consolation prize for her failed career and brings up when she left him for a summer seven years prior. When he attempts to make a point out of her biggest mistake, Marvin calls him out on it.
  Marvin: What's your point? That just because she hurt you, you now get to hurt her? That's not how it works in a marriage, son.
• Imposters: Richie tells Hull's father, who tries to speculate on why he became a crime boss and seems like he blames himself, that this wasn't his fault, because Hull chose his path.
• The Inbetweeners: Will is roped into dating a girl called Kerry because Simon wants to date her friend, Tara. Will isn't really interested in Kerry but Kerry takes it very seriously. At a birthday party, however, Will decides to end the relationship before it turns serious and turns down her offer of oral sex, which causes Kerry to cry. Will discovers from an angry Tara that Kerry's dad died a month prior (something Simon forgot to mention) and he internally realises the hook-up was intended to help her through her grief. Will does offer his sympathies while also doubling down on his decision; he says that her dad's death is irrelevant to their perceived break-up, he calls himself a gentleman for turning down her offer of sex, and he still believes he shouldn't be forced to date someone out of pity. Even though Will had a point, he's treated as if he's in the wrong and forced to leave since he still upset a grieving woman, whether he intended to or not.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): In "A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart", while reading Claudia's diaries, Daniel Molloy doesn't have much sympathy for her despite all the horrible things she suffers because she's a vicious Serial Killer.
  Louis: We made [Claudia into a vampire] out of remorse... out of selfishness.
  Daniel: Poor dear. She wasn't held enough in between ritualistic murders.
  Louis: She spent every night for half a decade with no friends, locked in the emotional storm of puberty.
  Daniel: Look, Charles Manson wrote a couple of beautiful songs. Still, he was Charlie Manson.
  Louis: Is that all you think of her?
  Daniel: Mostly.
• Jessica Jones (2015):
  • Kilgrave is a sociopathic prick who uses his mind-controlling powers to kill people, rape women and generally abuse others for his own selfish desires. He repeatedly tries to justify his behavior and blame everyone else. It is later revealed that when he was ten years old, his parents subjected him to frequent, painful experimentation causing Jessica to feel sympathy for him. However, it is later revealed that his parents were actually trying to cure his disease, leading to Jessica realizing he's just a monster who enjoys hurting others and tells him "You're not ten anymore."
  • Jessica herself is on the receiving end of this in the second season when her mother debunks her claims that her abrasive and cynical demeanor is a response to the tragedy she went through in her life by pointing out that she was just as anti-social and needlessly hostile to others as a child before anything happened to her.
• Kamen Rider Saber: Bahat is mostly driven by an unshakable hatred of humanity and considers destroying the world a merciful end to all life. That is because he literally Maddened Into Misanthropy after losing his family at the hands of someone he thought to be a friend and when he lashed out at the world, his other friend sealed him inside Book of Ruin. He was released thousand years later in present time of the story with a massive grudge and as much of a desire for destruction. Touma tried to remind him that not all Humans Are Bastards and failing that, expresses his sympathy for Bahat one last time before telling him that it was his decision not to move on from his grief and rage even in so long. This is mostly fueled by Touma's own experience with people who were consumed by their emotions and ended tragically.
• In Law & Order: Criminal Intent. The culprit of "Please Note We Are No Longer Accepting Letters of Recommendation from Henry Kissinger" gunned down people to get her own son into a prestigious daycare after snapping because of the pressure and verbal abuse of her mother-in-law. During the final confrontation, Goren sympathizes with the culprit to prevent them from harming their hostages. When the culprit gives him the gun, he immediately roughly restrains them and has them arrested. When the culprit, sounding hurt, reproaches him, he retorts that the people they murdered also had children and didn't deserve to die.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Galadriel makes sure to let Sauron know that absolutely nothing can justify all the evil he ever did, no matter the circumstances.
• Lucifer (2016): In "Spoiler Alert", Ella Lopez discovers that her boyfriend Pete is actually the "Whisper Killer" that she's been helping to investigate. When she confronts him after he's arrested Pete reveals he did what he did because his mother was cruel to him as a child. Ella quickly shuts his argument down.
  Ella: A lot of people have crappy childhoods, Pete. We don't become serial killers.
• Mom: Bonnie was abandoned by her mom at age three and grew up in the foster care system, eventually becoming an alcoholic, a drug addict, and a teen mother not necessarily in that order. Years later, when her mom dies, she finds out that her mom had another family without her. Harboring resentment for her mom deserting her but keeping another child, she is advised to write a letter and read it to her mom’s grave. While reading it, she recites how her drinking and drug use was “because of [her mom]”, but halfway through the letter realizes that it's bullshit, accepts that her problems are her own fault, and lets her mom off the hook.
  Bonnie: You’re not responsible for my life. I’m responsible for my life.

O-X

• Most Once Upon a Time villains have terrible backstories but do get told off for the evil things they're doing in the present as a result. The Evil Queen was horribly abused by her mother her entire life, and when her mother killed her first love, she blamed Snow White for telling her mother about him in the first place. People consistently comment on how stupid and petty her Misplaced Retribution is, including Snow White herself yelling "I WAS TEN!" back at her when a Hate Plague hits and Regina brings up the incident again.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Medusa here is far more sympathetic and justified in her anger at Athena and Poseidon then in her book and movie portrayals. With the writers and Rick Riordan himself using Ovid's version of her backstory. But she still has killed countless innocent people (including Grover's uncle) and was more then okay with killing the main trio. As such, Percy has no problem killing her off in the end and is not portrayed in the wrong for doing so.
• Poldark: In season 1, Ross's employee Jim is arrested for poaching. Ross pleads his case as Jim's sick and fell in with a bad crowd while the magistrate retorts that so many other poor workers had similar upbringings and didn't resort to poaching. Ross accuses the judges of interpreting the law to be as unsympathetic as possible and they accuse him of being a bleeding heart. Jim later dies in prison due to the appalling conditions all because he tried to steal a bird.
• In Power Rangers S.P.D., when Commander Cruger snaps at the Rangers, Dr. Kat later explains to them that it's the anniversary of when he became The Last of His Kind. She then clarifies that she's not telling them this to excuse Cruger, but to explain him.
• In the Power Rangers Time Force episode "Ransik Lives", Wes brings up that he feels sorry for Ransik after hearing of the villain's origins of being an outcast because of his mutation. Jen explains to Wes that there were people who tried to help Ransik, but he kept pushing them away. She also points out that Ransik's past suffering does not warrant the evil he's done.
• Professor T.: In the second episode of the UK remake, Tempest reads from an essay that now-Detective Sergeant Donckers wrote when she was in his class: it sums up that everybody has the capacity to commit crimes, no matter their background, but most people still don't, even under severe stress.
• Red Dwarf: Arnold Rimmer likes to blame the lack of love from his parents as the reason he's a neurotic screw-up of a chicken soup machine repairman, unlike his far more successful brothers, but as early as the first season, Lister points out Rimmer's always found someone else to blame for his own shortcomings. Later in the show, the crew are attacked by a mutated squid whose ink causes them to hallucinate their most crippling existential fears in the hopes of driving them to suicide: Rimmer is forced to confront the fact that he can't blame his parents for his problems.
  Lister: In the end, you can't turn around and say "I'm sorry I buggered up me life, it's all Lister's fault".
• The Rising: Neve tells Michael flat out she's not interested in any issues in his childhood or anything of that kind when demanding an explanation as to why he'd murdered her.
• In A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017), Charles tries to justify Sir's "prickly" behavior as the result of him having "a very terrible childhood." Klaus sarcastically responds "I understand. I'm having a very terrible childhood right now."
• Scrubs
  • In season 2, Dr. Cox's therapist calls him out for this. He knows that his patient had a hard life, with a drunken, abusive father, a wife that cheated on him, and no support system. But Dr. Cox is not willing to put in the work to change, to shed his baggage, or even trust a single damn person. Dr. Cox gets a Jerkass Realization about this when said therapist nearly fires him as a patient, especially when a disappointed J.D. also says that he's having Doug replace him for intern work. He thinks about it when J.D.'s recommendation to give Dr. Kelso an honest physical exam ends up saving Kelso's life, and realizes there is one person he can trust.
  • Dr. Kelso bursts out laughing in "My Fruit Cups" when Elliott attempts to do OB-Gyn and can't pronounce "vagina" while kvetching about how her day went, calling it a "bajingo" instead. Her excuse is that her sexually promiscuous mother used a lot of euphemisms for organs and orgasms while telling her underage daughter about various escapades, including ruining a teacher's marriage for making fun of Elliott's singing. Dr. Kelso mocks her by saying, "Bajingo" and later Elliott works to rectify that as a doctor she can't go around saying "bajingo" all the time.
  • Season 8 had an episode where a new intern named Katie was slyly manipulating the staff and taking credit for procedures handled by the nurses. Carla takes her aside and lets her know that behavior won't fly and Katie responds with her Freudian Excuse, involving a Disappeared Dad and alcoholic mother, in a manner indicating it was a rehearsed speech and she felt entitled to this behavior. Carla feigns compassion before bluntly saying "Heard it!" and casually explains all the other Parental Issues of the rest of the cast and that she wasn't special for it, while the nursing staff and other interns were also catching on to her game and if she didn't shape up they would turn on her.
• Sense8: Sun wonders if their mother's early death is why her younger brother turned out to be such a selfish jerk who had their father killed to cover his own ass. Her clustermate Nomi disagrees with that notion.
  Nomi: A lot of people never got the kind of love you got from your mother. I certainly didn't, but it didn't turn me into a monster.
• In Shooting Joe Exotic, Louis Theroux is allowed to investigate Joe Exotic's former personal belongings by Carole and Howard Baskin, and discovers a journal entry wherein Joe ruminates on his rough childhood and even claims that his oldest brother had molested him. However, when Louis visits said brother and brings this up, he reveals that Joe made this up too, having made the exact same claim against two other people, including their father. While they did have to endure many harsh physical punishments, Joe was simply a manipulative, gaslighting narcissist driven primarily by greed.
• In The Sopranos, whenever Meadow's boyfriend Finn voices his reservations regarding Tony and his associates' work, Meadow justifies on the basis that the poverty and dire conditions of Southern Italy bred their mindset and it can't be helped. Finn finally calls bullshit on this after he's forced to tell the mobsters he saw Vito giving a man a blowjob, telling her that they are generations separated from that environment and nothing their ancestors went through justifies executing a person just because they're gay.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • Comes up in the episode "The Most Toys" when Data is being held by Kivas Fajo as part of his "collection" of rare things.
      Fajo: Perhaps you would not judge me so harshly if you knew of my desperate youth, wasted, wasted on the streets of Zimballia.
      Data: Your past does not excuse unethical or immoral behavior, sir.
      Fajo: Well, it doesn't matter. It isn't true anyway. My father was quite wealthy, actually. He was a thief.
    • In "Chain of Command", Gul Madred tries to gain Picard's sympathy by recounting his unhappy childhood as a Street Urchin on the streets of Lakat, where he had to steal and beg to survive. Picard shoots him down by pointing out how much enjoyment he gets from making other people suffer.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Done by Garak to himself, when he's suffering repeated claustrophobic panic attacks. Ezri Dax tries figuring out why they're happening, and the topic of Garak's childhood under Enebran Tain comes up. Tain used to lock Garak in the closet whenever he misbehaved, and Garak misbehaved a lot. However, Garak sneers that his problems aren't simply "my daddy wasn't nice to me". He's right. Sort of. The claustrophobia is from childhood, but the flare-ups are caused by guilt over helping the Federation fight the Cardassians in the Dominion War.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: In "Warlord", Kes is Body Surfed by Villain of the Week Tieran, who rose from the gutter to become a great military leader and then an immortal planetary dictator. At one point Tieran rants over how he was abandoned on the streets by his mother because he was assumed to be too sickly to survive. During a Battle in the Center of the Mind, the normally kind and gentle Kes says just what she thinks of him.
    Kes: I know all about your life. I know about your suffering. It doesn't justify what you've become. You're a monster, Tieran, and I have no compassion for you.
• Supernatural:
  • Subverted in "Jus in Bello". After catching (what he thinks) are a pair of violent Satanic murderers, FBI Agent Henriksen addresses the upbringing they must've had before saying it still doesn't justify their actions... of course, he's saying this to the two heroes of the show, who aren't guilty of (most of) the crimes they're accused of. While their childhood really was bad, he has also figured it to be even worse to rationalize how the brothers came to be as seemingly deranged and delusional as they are. Unlike most examples on this page, all this combined with his borderline Smug Snake behavior in the scene makes him come off as a Jerkass, though he still comes out of the episode looking pretty damn heroic thanks to more screentime.
    Henriksen: Oh yeah, I forgot. You fight monsters. Sorry, Dean. Truth is, your daddy brainwashed you with all that Devil talk and no doubt touched you in a bad place. That's all. That's reality.
    Dean: Why don't you shut your mouth?
    Henriksen: Well, guess what. Life sucks, get a helmet. 'Cause everybody’s got a sob story. But not everybody becomes a killer.
  • Also inverted in the case of Bela from Season 3. Dean is irritated by her behavior and flat-out asks her what happened to make her the way she is, mockingly suggesting her father didn't hug her enough. He later finds out that she killed her parents, and when he confronts her on it, she has a flashback indicating that her father sexually abused her — before smiling and telling him that they were "wonderful people" who she only killed for money. It makes her look more despicable than ever to the other characters, but had the strange inverse effect on much of the audience of making them feel incredibly sorry for her when before they'd hated her guts, despite Henriksen having voiced the above take on Freudian Excuses only a few episodes before, because it drove home how deeply damaged and closed-off she is that she refused to make herself vulnerable even to save her own life. Thus playing straight the often intended side effect of Freudian Excuses to make the antagonist sympathetic, which this trope usually subverts.
  • Played straight with Lucifer in Season 5, who strongly believes he was wronged by God when he was ordered to be imprisoned for thousands of years in Hell by his most beloved brother, the Archangel Michael. Lucifer's take on it makes it sound like God did all this just because Lucifer criticized God's beloved humans as flawed and murderous. Word of God (i.e. Eric Kripke) even agreed that he was a sympathetic, tragic villain. This ignores canon established less than five episodes previous that Lucifer was actually imprisoned after he forcibly transformed a human soul into the first demon (Lilith), which involves massive amounts of spiritual mutilation and torture to the point that the person loses all humanity and memories of their human life, and becomes pure evil. Lucifer tries to convince many other characters of his righteousness, but it works a grand total of once. Every other single character he tries to persuade reject his attempts to get sympathy, treat him with disdain and even his own brothers call him a Psychopathic Manchild who caused his own problems and drove God away.
    • Funnily enough, his argument suddenly gets stronger in Season 11 as the Mark of Cain is RetConed into the show as an ancient, powerful force of darkness that corrupts everyone who bears it — with God having entrusted it to Lucifer to bear, and influencing him to turn him as evil as he is, taking away Lucifer's responsibility for his own Fallen Hero status. By the time this comes out, however, Lucifer's character is written much differently from his Season 5 incarnation, into an overly comedic, thoroughly evil villain who no longer cares about getting the heroes to agree with him and is exactly the kind of Psychopathic Manchild he was described as back in Season 5. However, when this possibility is suggested to God, he rejects it and says that Lucifer was always like this and that while the Mark may have made him worse it didn't make him the way he was, and Lucifer further actively tries to blame the Mark for his misdeeds while also saying that they are no excuse for being cast out. While God is presented as something of an insensitive jerk, Lucifer is still handwaving his own atrocities and even resents God for still controlling him when he stops Lucifer from murdering Dean on a whim. God does later concede that he thought Lucifer would have been strong enough to contain the Mark and was aghast when he too failed, but since Lucifer ends up going right back to trying to kill, conquer and enslave everyone once God is out of the picture later on, it's fair to say that the Mark (which he hasn't had for millennia) is only part of the problem at best, the bigger part being Lucifer himself.
• Ted Lasso: Rebecca is the closest thing that season 1 has to a Big Bad. Rebecca is a woman that was publicly humiliated by her husband, who had already kept her away from her friends and spent years undermining her self-confidence, when it came out that he cheated on her with several women. Vindictive, she decides to set up the team that he loved so much to fail by hiring a coach with no experience in the game and sabotaging the team where she could. Over the course of the season, however, as she opens up to friendships with Ted and Keeley and her plan goes to ruin when Keeley finds out about it, she realizes that while her situation is awful, she did put good people who had nothing to do with her problems in the middle of the cross-fire. Downplayed in that regardless of it, she is forgiven, since Ted, also going through a divorce, admits that it is hard to think clearly during it.
• Teen Wolf: The Master of the Kanima, Matt Daehler, as a child almost drowned to death after being tossed in a swimming pool while teenagers did nothing to save him. He takes revenge by unleashing a murderous beast after them. However, he has no problem targeting innocents and acts like creepy Stalker with a Crush toward Allison, eventually deciding to kill her for rejecting his advances. During a therapy session, Stiles makes clear how little sympathy he feels for him.
  Stiles: Just because a bunch of dumbasses dragged him into a pool when he couldn't swim doesn't really give him the right to go off killing them one by one. And by the way, my dad told me that they found a bunch of pictures of Allison on Matt's computer. And not just of her though. I mean, he photoshopped himself into these pictures. Stuff like them holding hands and kissing. You know, like he had built this whole fake relationship. So yeah, maybe drowning when he was nine years old was what sent him off the rails, but the dude was definitely riding the crazy train.
• Tyrant (2014): Mocked by Deliyah when she questions Samira why she would join a militant fundamentalist insurgency like the Caliphate, sarcastically asking her if her parents did not love her enough.
• The Umbrella Academy:
  • At one point, Vanya and Allison discuss after the former accidentally says that the latter is probably better off away from her family (including her daughter). Specifically, Vanya said that her ex sounds like an asshole in an attempt to comfort her sister. Allison rebukes that she wouldn't ask Vanya for relationship advice since she would never connect to anyone or let herself love anyone, and is likely to not have had any relationships. Vanya responds that this was due to how her father raised her but Allison says that she is not a kid anymore and she can make her own decisions, such as how she decided to write a book to expose all of their family's dirty laundry to the world.
  • Of course, Allison herself realizes that she went too far in saying this, but Vanya coldly rejects her apology because she's late to meet her new boyfriend. She has her own baggage, in that Reginald taught her how to use her gifts but not how to be a good person. Allison also has a Jerkass Realization when she flashes back to the reason why her ex Patrick divorced her and is denying custody of their daughter — he caught her Rumoring their daughter into sleeping when she was about to throw a tantrum, walking away with an expression of quiet horror and anger. The courts don't care that she had to miss counseling for her father's funeral, she has to prove she is a fit parent. And she blurts out at the worst time that she remembers when she was four, Reginald told her to tell a sick Vanya, "I heard a Rumor you thought you were ordinary." Cue the nervous breakdown from Vanya when the implications of this sink in as her powers flare. Allison tries to justify that she was too little to know better, but Vanya retorts that Allison ruined her life and there is no excuse for that. In season 2, Allison herself acknowledges that she ought to have known better when confronting Reginal d in the past.
  • Allison also recognized this in herself, since she and her brothers went along with their father's treatment of Vanya well into adulthood. She attempts to rectify this by apologizing and talking with Vanya. Then it turns out that Reginald was still controlling and isolating Vanya by drugging her and kept the brainwashing intact. So it didn't matter what Vanya did, she would never leave his abuse.
• Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Lilian uses the death of her husband to justify her animosity towards Artie and why she opposes gentrification so much. He is sympathetic to it... up until he learns that said husband actually died 40 years ago, and Lilian has been resisting moving on and living in the past ever since and he calls her out on it. They start arguing and he calls her out on the fact that when they were young, they were fighting for change, and that change can be something good.
• Xena: Warrior Princess: A recurring enemy, Callisto, was once an ordinary girl until Xena's army invaded her village and murdered her family. As a result, Xena feels responsible for the psychopathic warrior Callisto is today, but several other characters reject this, telling her that she made her own choices. Gabrielle takes this even further in the Episode "Fallen Angel"
  Gabrielle: Callisto, when Xena burned your family did you see them on fire? Did you... did you smell their flesh sizzling? Do you know what I think? I think you wanted them to die so you'd have a reason to be a bitch.

---