Hard Work Hardly Works / Live-Action TV

• This is a problem Carlton has with Will in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. For all the hard work Carlton puts into it, Will has street and people skills that make it look easy. An example of this is in the episode where the boys get interviewed for Princeton. Will is reluctant to even get in but his wise cracks and street smarts impress the interviewer. Carlton gets jealous and mimics Will, resulting in the interviewer thinking he is insane and rejects him. This leads to Carlton begging, bribing and finally threatening the interviewer, resulting in his suspension.
• This is part of Lindsey McDonald's motivation in Angel Season 5. He started in the mailroom of Wolfram & Hart and worked his butt off to become a good lawyer, while the Senior Partners just gave Angel the position of CEO overnight.
• This was actually used as motivation for Amy the witch in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At one point she was really powerful and not unfriendly to the main cast, what with them saving her from being trapped in her mom's body. Fast forward five seasons: Willow is now the resident Deus ex Machina, and Amy is royally pissed that Willow (who wasn't even aware magic existed until the age of sixteen) has more magic in her pinky than it took Amy, an already accomplished mage, years of training to get. In her words, most born magic users nowadays have to "work twice as hard to be half as good" was Willow, who picked up witchcraft during high school.
  • She's also rather upset that Willow attempted to destroy the world and didn't get more than a slap on the wrist and some friendly counseling.
  • The whole "stuck as a rat" issue probably didn't help her attitude either.
    • However, in almost all of the Amy episodes up to this point Willow is not shown to really be stronger. Amy seems to be incredibly powerful when she can turn people into rats, and at the same time Willow complains about being able to barely levitate a pencil. Willow is complimented on her magical abilities in Season 5 just for having the ability to summon a little lightning and magically throw knives. Willow seems to get her magical upgrade in Season 6 from Rack. While it may be argued that she was stronger at that point, she had three more years of training while Amy was still a rat yet Amy's complaint in Season 7 was that Willow was "always" stronger.
  • Anya invokes this trope in Season 7 when she tells Buffy that she is not "better" than the rest of them, just "luckier".
• Prue in Charmed (1998) suddenly gains super awesome fighting abilities with her telekinesis, better than Phoebe's who had been studying martial arts for years. Sure Prue was a cheerleader in high school but she worked in a museum and an auction house in her adult years. Though this averted with regards to the sisters' powers as they are shown developing slowly over the course of the series. Though Prue's develop faster than her sisters' do.
  • Perhaps understandable in that Prue, as the oldest sister, has the rawest power at her disposal. After Prue dies, Piper is the oldest sister and the most powerful of the three.
• Averted and Lampshaded with Jeff Winger on Community. Despite thinking it applies to him, Jeff can not simply win a debate or create pottery just because he thinks he is special. He actually has to end up working hard to succeed.
  Jeff: The funny thing about being smart is that you can get through most of life without having to do any work.
  • Played Straight with Troy. He is shown to be naturally gifted in repairing things. He's so good that the air conditioning repair department of the college believes him to be their chosen one. At one point Troy challenges the head of the department to a duel centering around repairing broken air conditioners and bests him.
• Played Straight in Drake & Josh when the two brothers get jobs at the local movie theater. Josh is a dedicated employee who applies himself to the job. Drake on the other hand charms the boss. Naturally, Drake is the one who gets promoted to manager.
• Glee: At the start of the show, Finn was a stereotypical jock who looked down on the glee club. However, Mr. Schue forced him to join after hearing he had a fabulous singing voice. He soon became the club's lead male singer, beating out Kurt and Artie, who both had more of a musical background then him.
• Averted in Heroes. Of all the main characters, only the main antagonist Sylar is shown rapidly mastering his abilities (his original power, Intuitive Aptitude, is a literal applied version of The Gift). All the actual Heroes have to spend several episodes (the space of a couple of months) figuring out How Do I Shot Web? or trying to avoid a Super-Power Meltdown.
  • Played straight in that office worker Hiro Nakamura, after a single sword-fighting lesson from his father, becomes skilled enough with a katana to fight evenly against and ultimately defeat Takezo Kensai, a professional mercenary and swordsman. Of course, Hiro can slow down time. It could be an extra long lesson…
• Felton from Homicide: Life on the Street espouses this viewpoint.
  Felton: You think people get things because they earn it? No. The more you deserve, the less you get.
• Played straight in House. House cheated on his exams at Johns Hopkins and spends much of his time watching cable tv or playing a video game rather than reading about new medicine, new treatments, etc. He tries to invoke Eureka Moments. Then again, he is "almost always eventually right" because he still knows his stuff.
• Sam on iCarly gets away with multiple school projects by winging it, whilst Freddie and Carly fail after spending an inordinate amount of time and effort on theirs. Example, the Green Aesop science experiments in iGo Nuclear where Sam passes by demonstrating the "green qualities" of an orange. Namely that it's edible, and the peel is biodegradable.
  • Although admittedly, the teacher was a Straw New-Age Retro Hippie.
• In Lie to Me, Dr. Lightman has spent years of his life memorizing and learning the various reactions and facial tics he uses in the show to be a human lie detector. Ria Torres, a former airport security guard, intuitively recognizes all of these with no formal training.
  • Also subverted. Lightman repeatedly notes that while Torres intuitively recognizes facial cues, she doesn't necessarily understand the context. So The Gift works, but practice is better.
    • Also, The Gift isn't much of a gift. Torres picked up the ability to intuitively recognize facial cues because her father was a vicious prick and an alcoholic. She learned how to recognize micro-expressions because if she didn't know when he was in one of his moods and had to be avoided and/or placated, she got badly beaten. Talk about Power at a Price...of a screwed-up childhood.
• The Next Step eventually reveals this as the reasoning behind Emily’s dislike of Michelle. Emily had been at the studio for years, starting from the bottom and working her way up to be captain of their best troupe, while Michelle merely walked in one day and was given a spot on said troupe without even doing anything.
• An episode of My Name Is Earl had the woman who Joy had stolen Earl from undergoing Training from Hell so that she could get stronger and become a bounty hunter and one day get revenge. From all that training, she's built up as a complete and total badass... but when she finally gets her rematch with Joy at the very end of the episode, she gets taken down in the span of a few seconds.
• The Pretender: Surgery? Profiling? Sniping? Naval tactics? Golf? If Jarod doesn't know how to it, he can learn overnight. The Justification? He's a One In A Million Mutant stolen from his parents at age six and taught to do nothing other than this for thirty years.
  • Subverted in one episode where he has to learn to play pool to deal with that episode's Big Bad. Jennifer Garner's character tells him something along the lines of "You can put away your books. They can teach you how to play pool, but they can't make you a pool player."
• Averted in Scrubs, which indicates on several occasions that hard work is the most important part of being a good doctor. For example, Dr. Cox tells J.D. that Elliot has overtaken him as a doctor because he spends too much time goofing off with Turk.
  • In Season 8, new intern Ed is another subversion in that while he was initially smart enough to get by with little work, eventually it became impossible for him to keep up and he was fired.
• Victorious: Tori Vega only got accepted at Hollywood Arts because she needed to fill in for her sister and had no prior experience in singing or acting. However, she repeatedly manages to out shine Jade, who is implied to have been studying performing arts since her childhood. This is a big factor as to why Jade resents Tori.
  • In one episode, Tori needed to take her Tech Theater Exam. She's tutored by Robbie, who had not only passed it, but had the highest score. Through out the series, Robbie has been shown to be the more tech minded of the group, while Tori needed to be shown the ropes when she had to do theater tech. Yet, despite spending only one night studying, Tori easily aces the test and beats Robbie's score.
• WandaVision: As noted by Agatha Harkness, the Hex around the town of Westview is a complex set of thousands of simultaneous transfiguration and mind control spells that need to be maintained 24/7. Wanda manages the feat without even being aware of it. Meanwhile, it took Agatha years of study to master a spell that turns a cicada into a bird. As it turns out, it's because Wanda is the Scarlet Witch, a legendary magic user with the power to reshape reality as they see fit and create things and people from nothing.