Internal Deconstruction / Live-Action TV

Internal Deconstruction in Live-Action TV.

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• Adam Ruins Everything deconstructs its own premise in the episode "Emily Ruins Adam", pointing out how Adam's attempt to fix things by going around and giving impromptu lectures just makes people dislike him and come off more like he's personally attacking them.
• American Housewife deconstructs Katie's relationship with the other mothers in her town with the second season premiere. She attempts to apologize to all of them with an online video, but can't act sincere enough. Afterward, one of them tells her that the real problem is how she has treated them in the past. No one wants to be near someone who openly looks down on their lifestyle and acts like she is better than them for not participating. Katie's later attempts to fix things fail because she can't seem to stop insulting them as lonely and bored housewives living off their husbands' money, so she has to resort to volunteering for the Spring Gala, something she really didn't want to do.
• The Big Bang Theory
  • Raj is so insecure around women that he literally cannot talk to them unless drunk or drugged up. This is largely treated as a joke; how he shuts up immediately when they're around and how he quickly becomes a smooth talker after one sip of alcohol. While never quite giving it up as a joke, later episodes he confides how frustrating it is to be that socially inept while his (also very nerdy) friends are going on to have meaningful romantic relationships.
  • Leonard and Penny exemplify the Give Geeks a Chance along with the Ugly Guy, Hot Wife, but through sheer longevity the show explored a number of the underlying problems with those tropes. Leonard is massively insecure over their difference in attractiveness and terrified she would find someone else, while Penny is intimidated by his intelligence and feels she is just a Trophy Wife that he'll eventually get bored of. A season ten episode "The Bitcoin Entanglement" ends up resolving some of those issues as a Whole Episode Flashback reminded them that their love and affection for each other has evolved, not stagnated, and they are much happier together.
• Blackadder: The Blackadder Goes Forth series is a hilarious satire of the madness of World War I. However, the final episode plays that madness for grimness rather than comedy: the characters who we've come to love and laugh at are being sent to a pointless demise, the people in charge don't give a damn, and as the reality of the situation dawns on them, they quickly go from quirky to despondent. Even the acerbic Blackadder can't make light of the situation. The final scene is an unusually sympathetic Blackadder wishing his comrades good luck, and the characters implicitly getting killed in the trenches. What began as satire ends as a horrific tragedy.
• The Blacklist gradually picks apart the FBI's relationship with Reddington. Recently, his business has come under attack by a mysterious enemy who is sending assassins after his people. However, due to the fact that Red is sending the FBI after these criminals because it solely affects him, the FBI is slowly getting fed up with his demands and now questioning the viability of their arrangement, Ressler especially so when he misses his brother's surgery due to a mission. His brother survives, but he is still pissed.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In the episode "The Zeppo", the Non-Action Guy Xander is confined to the sidelines while his friends fend off a mass demonic invasion. Meanwhile, he deals with an event that could have similarly disastrous consequences, which is treated as the main story while the so-called "apocalypse" is seen only in glimpses. The next day the others are commenting that nobody will ever know that the world almost ended last night and they stopped it, reflecting Xander's own situation. The episode deconstructs how the main protagonists think they are unique and special for what they do, when there are probably plenty of other people doing the same thing all over the world.
  • The Grand Finale features the unleashing of the Slayer power to all potential slayers, which may number into the thousands worldwide. It's portrayed as a triumphant moment of empowerment and relieving Buffy of the stress of being The Chosen One. The following year, in Angel, they come across a mentally scarred girl in a mental hospital who was suddenly given enhanced Slayer strength and abilities. She mutilated and nearly killed Spike before they were able to bring her down. The "Season Eight" comics would end up showcasing how bad an idea this was even further by having a recurring villain who is a terrorist with Slayer powers.
  • A similar thing happens in the seventh season by deconstructing Buffy's Heroic Sacrifice of the fifth season, wherein she refused to let anything happen to Dawn and instead let herself die in her place. Giles points out that by doing so, the world kept a relatively helpless girl and lost the Slayer, and that there may come a time when she has to let go of her friends in order to save the world.
  • The final season of the show has Buffy rising to become a "general" for the Potential (and eventually unlocked) Slayers, and having to deal with the responsibility. This arc by itself eventually deconstructed Buffy's increasing apathy and bitchiness of the previous seasons as making her so annoying (and dangerous) to be around that the other characters decided to toss her out of her own house so they could train in peace, while the "Season Eight" comics went on to show that, while Buffy can be a very good combat commander when she feels like it, she is absolutely horrible when it comes to more long-range and "peacetime" decisions, starting with robbing a bank to fund the Slayers (and invoking Omniscient Morality License for it) and the situation escalating until the vampires and demons have become Villains With Good Publicity and the Slayers are Public Enemy Number One (and believed to be hyper-homicidal Knights Templar).
• Burn Notice spends a solid four seasons of Michael playing up being the bad guy and doing borderline criminal activities to sell those roles in the name of the greater good. As it turns out, spending all your time acting like a criminal makes it hard to sell to people that you are really a good guy. The point is made especially clear when the team is pitted up against the CIA.
• Cheers: Despite being one of the codifiers for Will They or Won't They?, sometimes the show points out the flaws in Sam and Diane's relationship, with it being extremely toxic and co-dependent, due to a lack of maturity and trust on both sides, and Sam eventually figures much as he does genuinely love Diane, if they'd ever tried making it permanent he'd have ended up killing her.
• The Closer explores the real-life consequences of Brenda's loose interpretation of the law and her tendency to arrange for untouchable criminals to get killed. The final season features Brenda being sued, losing money from paying for legal reasons, and being watched constantly by her superiors.
• Cobra Kai:
  • The series deconstructs Johnny's characterization as the spoiled, rich bully who embraced Cobra Kai's thuggery in the first The Karate Kid movie by showing that he was actually an emotionally abused youth who found an escape from his abusive stepdad and real mentorship (even if it was toxic) from Kreese and the Cobra Kai dojo. While Daniel's victory at the All-Valley tournament was a great accomplishment for him, for Johnny the loss caused him to lose the girl he loved, his surrogate father figure, and the one thing in his life that gave him meaning.
    Johnny: Just because you live in a nice house doesn't mean nice things are going on inside.
  • The series also takes to deconstructing the revenge on bullies and the inherent problems to Cobra Kai training. Unlike Miyagi-Do, which trains a person both on and off the battlefield in equal balance, Cobra Kai isn't meant for out-the ring-lifestyle. Johnny had ideals that the Cobra Kai mentality can be put to good use and the positive traits to his dojo can be used to toughen up some victims and help give them the confidence to fight back and stand up for themselves. Unfortunately, it's only after the tournament that Johnny finally gets a massive wakeup call: without proper emotional training and restraint, especially to bullying victims, the Cobra Kai mentality and training can only produce violent thugs and bullies, and when Johnny sees what he has created, he's actually equally disgusted and horrified. Things get a whole lot worse in the second season when Kreese takes over the dojo and the students that became bullies grew a hell of a lot worse, becoming Rival Dojos with the newly reborn Miyagi school out of sheer Jerkass hatred and ending in a full-blown bloodbath of a fight that puts many kids in the hospital, including Johnny's own (estranged) son. The season ends with Johnny being nothing but horrified.
  • The show has sometimes poked at the Miyagi-Do philosophy and a loophole many of its students find by accident. They may try to be a Martial Pacifist but end up goading a opponent into attacking first so they can feel justified in retaliating. They are certainly on a better path than the Thug Dojo that is Cobra-Kai, without some discipline in de-escalating a situation they may not be all that different from their rivals from the viewpoint of outside parties.
• The Repilot of Community shows the darker implications of Greendale being a Sucky School that the past four seasons had for the most part ignored. All the main characters' lives have gone down the toilet (again) thanks to the poor education they received there, and the school itself is facing a lawsuit by another former student for the exact same reasons. The cast resolves to return to Greendale and form a committee to make it a better place.
• Doctor Who:
  • In the classic series, the Doctor is an itinerant wanderer who frequently inducts random humans from the contemporary time period and takes them on adventures until real-life circumstances cause the companion to be dropped, one way or the other. The new series deconstructs this by having consequences for a young woman running off with a strange traveler for a long period of time (the exact consequences have varied per companion). For example, when Rose disappears, her mother is frantic with worry and her boyfriend is accused of her murder. A similar idea had previously been touched upon in the last story of the original classic series, "Survival", in which Ace goes home and finds that she was presumed dead.
  • Later still, the character of the Doctor himself is given the same treatment: his habit of getting into the middle of any trouble, and of causing vast death and destruction to defeat an alien force, results in him being pegged by many as the greatest threat to life in the universe. A Renegade Splinter Faction of the Church of Silence arises devoted entirely to his undoing and raises a Laser-Guided Tyke-Bomb to that end.
  • This was already being done in the Doctor Who New Adventures, a Darker and Edgier version of the series showing the Seventh Doctor becoming more morally ambiguous. It could even be argued that this began well before the classic series ended; in "Resurrection of the Daleks", companion Tegan leaves because she can't handle the violence.
  • The new series also interrogates why the Doctor needs companions in the first place (because they get jaded and need fresh eyes to see the universe, and because they tend to go bad places without someone else around), and what effect repeated loss of companions has on them (emotional trauma and withdrawal), then follows through by showing what happens when they try to Take a Third Option and emotionally distance themselves from their companions — the Doctor has no one they can confide in when dealing with trauma, and the companions are left Locked Out of the Loop, ignorant of what's going on.
  • The First Doctor's tenure goes into this after a while. After he quickly abandons being straight-up nasty, he goes on a lot of adventures which portray him as a flawed but brilliant saviour and adventurer. A whole string of companion losses, Downer Endings and problems simply too big for him to overcome soon makes it very explicit that he's just a troubled and very lonely old man, stuck in a box he can't control and with nowhere to go. Some of the more obvious examples of this are "Mission to the Unknown" (everyone dies and the Doctor never even shows up), "The Daleks' Master Plan" (the Doctor wins but by committing a genocide and two of his companions die in the process), "The Massacre" (the Doctor fails to do anything to stop a historical massacre and Steven spends the whole story watching everything get worse while being powerless to intervene), "The Ark" (simply by arriving in a time period the Doctor is altering it for the worse, and the long-term consequences of his meddling can be absolutely disastrous) and "The Savages" (a civilization which venerates him as a hero is actually a very classist society which ignores its real social problems to watch his adventures on viewing screens).
  • In "The Face of Evil", the Fourth Doctor lands on a horrible, primitive planet full of vicious monsters and warring tribes with spears, and slowly discovers that he was responsible for making it that way in the first place (by saving the day in an adventure we never see, and not bothering to think about the long-term consequences of his actions). In fact, one of the tribes worships him as their God of Evil, a merciless creature of destruction who Eats Babies.
  • "Midnight" deconstructs the Doctor's usual mode of operation by putting the Tenth Doctor in a situation where he's treated as the Monster of the Week and the monster takes his role: his attitude and behaviour get the supporting cast suspicious from the start, he's the prime suspect when it becomes clear the monster is possessing someone on board, he's unable to even identify what the monster is, let alone how to deal with it, while it turns all his tactics against him, and in the end the monster's only defeated by a last-minute Heroic Sacrifice from a Heroic Bystander before the Doctor can be thrown to his death.
• Drake & Josh: "Josh Is Done" is a deconstruction to Drake and Josh's relationship. From the start of the show Josh was the responsible, moral but awkward one while Drake was the goofy, free-spirited but impulsive one, and together they manage to balance each other out. But after one too many times getting screwed over, Josh gets fed up with Drake's inconsiderate behavior and decides to cut ties with him. Without Drake, Josh no longer has to stress over the complications Drake brings and his life is almost uniformly better for it. Meanwhile, Drake realizes how much he relies on Josh's reliability to function day to day. At the end, Drake realizes how much Josh really matters to him and how toxic he was behaving.
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • The series has always portrayed the closeness of their group as being a very positive thing, including Robin and Ted becoming friends again after their break-up. Come Season 7, and we see that there are some real issues with them interfering with each others' lives, and Ted learns that in order to move on with his life, he needs to stop being so close with Robin.
  • Furthermore, as noted in the main page's quote, Ted and Robin's promise to get married if they reach a certain age and they're both single is gradually shown to be less romantic as it was first depicted and more a depressing indictment of how co-dependent and unlucky in love both of them are. Ted even realizes that him subconsciously holding a torch for Robin through this "back-up marriage" pact has likely caused him to self-sabotage some of his romances that could've potentially gone very well for him.
• Kamen Rider Gaim deconstructs a scenario that crops up occasionally in the franchise. Often in Kamen Rider, "wet" means "defeated"; with The Dragon or some other tougher-than-usual enemy roughing up a heroic Rider and throwing them into a nearby body of water. This allows the Rider to climb out, take time to regroup, and then come back for a rematch. In Gaim, Zangetsu fights and gets blown into the water... and is presumed dead for the rest of the series. Even when he turns up alive in the epilogue, he's in a coma thanks to oxygen deprivation.
• Leverage: The team attempts to pull off one of their typical over-the-top 'no one could pull this off but us' cons in "The White Rabbit Job". It goes horribly wrong and almost leads to the suicide of the mark, who turns out to not actually be a bad guy of the type they take down. It's a deconstruction both of the 'playing God' vigilantism of the team and the fact that the majority of their cons are overly elaborate not out of necessity but for the fun and challenge they get out of it.
• The Mandalorian is another Star Wars Internal Deconstruction. The fall of the Empire and revival of the Jedi Order did not instantly bring peace, happiness, and freedom for all. Instead, it has left the galaxy in turmoil and confusion as the Outer Rim loses any sense of order, the New Republic increasingly reaches out to assert power (sometimes quite brutally), Luke's new Jedi Order recluse themselves to rebuild (to the point that many don't even know they exist), Imperial Remnants try to make power plays, and a massive economic recession devastates numerous systems. For many communities, the only hope for law and justice comes in the form of the Bounty Hunters Guild, which is a shadow of its former self and spends most of its time chasing bail jumpers, in contrast to its glamorous portrayal in Legends. The protagonist is not a mighty Jedi destined for greatness, but a Mandalorian (the traditional enemies of the Jedi) bounty hunter scraping together a living in the post-war galaxy as he and his people grapple with the aftermath of decades of oppression, mistreatment, and retaliation for ancient sins from the Republic and Empire alike. The Force is portrayed less like a wondrous and benevolent Background Magic Field and more like scary, inscrutable sorcery wielded by mysterious figures that the average person has no understanding of. The Mooks who get killed by the dozen in the films are deadly and terrifying enforcers of brutal regimes to anybody who isn't a super-skilled hero with Plot Armor. A great many of the franchise's other tropes and conventions are heavily toyed with or subverted, such as the supposedly Always Chaotic Evil Sand People appearing as friendly natives of Tatooine who happily give direction to the protagonists in exchange for a small payment.
• The Office (US) deconstructs how infuriating having a coworker like Jim would actually be in "Conflict Resolution"; Dwight gets fed up with Jim's pranks and tells Michael that either Jim goes or he goes, while Jim realizes that his pranks aren't actually funny and that rarely gets any actual work done.
• Scrubs humorously deconstructs its use of the Imagine Spot. A few episodes are shown from the perspective of the other characters and show how what J.D. says makes little sense to the other characters. In particular, his "pause to contemplate" motion is not instantaneous like implied but J.D. in fact zones out for upwards of 30 seconds or more. People have played tricks on him in that stage, and he has injured himself doing one while running.
  Elliot: J.D., be sensitive. Don't act like you're at a ping pong match between a ninja and Bigfoot...
  [Dr. Kelso gives Elliot an odd look]
  Elliot: I know that made no sense, but he's totally there now in his head.
  [J.D.'s eyes dart back and forth]
  Dr. Kelso: Would you look at that...
• Star Trek gradually became a little bit more cynical of its own utopia themes, with several of the later series deconstructing The Federation's depiction as a utopian society resolving social wrongs on other planets they found on other planets, something played straight throughout the early series under Gene Roddenberry's direction.
  • Since the titular Space Station in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is, well, stationary, Sisko and his crew have to face the consequences for whatever changes they do enact. The series takes place partially from the perspective of various non-Starfleet citizens who view Starfleet and the Federation as a "sleeping giant" that can either save them or crush them with no regard for how they want to live their lives.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise even has one episode, "Cogenitor", in which a noble but ignorant attempt at social change leads to a lot of hurt feelings and even someone committing suicide.
  • Star Trek: Lower Decks takes place from the perspective of ensigns on the crew of a ship generally in charge of taking care of whatever mess Starfleet has left behind, and thus takes a rather critical look at the habit of abandoning planets after supposedly "fixing" them. Several planets from previous series are shown to have either fallen back into their old ways or to be pissed at the Federation for leaving them to deal with the consequences of their meddling, and the Federation's negligence results in the Pakleds becoming a serious threat.
  • Multiple later series also dismantle the idea of the Federation being a Perfect Pacifist People. Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Discovery prominently feature Section 31, an amoral black ops division, showing that the Federation has just as many skeletons in the closet as its enemies and similarly demonstrates that it can be just as ruthless. Star Trek: Picard starkly shows the consequences of Starfleet's imperialism and demonstrates that it can be just as prejudiced as any of its enemies. Finally, Lower Decks shows that for every heroic idealist serving in Starfleet, there are just as many corrupt, venal bureaucrats who are more interested in their own careers than actually serving Starfleet's ideals and are willing to screw over other officers for their own ambitions. Lower Decks also combines this with a deconstruction of Starfleet's Mildly Military ideals in that their willingness to act as a military without it being their primary purpose leaves them ill-suited when an actual war breaks out. Mariner's authority issues come from a combination of her close friend Sito Jaxa dying during a spy mission and Mariner herself having to run black-ops missions during the Dominion War when she joined Starfleet to just be a xenobiologist.
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds picks apart the aforementioned Lower Decks when the latter's shows lead characters end up on the Pike-era Enterprise during "Those Old Scientists". The antics that Ensigns Brad Boimler and Becket Mariner try to pull on the Enterprise that they would normally be able to do on the Cerritos fail, because unlike the Dysfunction Junction of the starship they serve on, the Enterprise is staffed by trained professionals who take their duties very seriously (the big E is the flagship after all). For example, Mariner and Boimler try to steal a shuttlecraft, but Uhura was very paranoid they might do so and the two are promptly caught by La'an.
• Season four of Stranger Things deconstructs the general premise of the show (kid and teenage heroes in a small town battling a paranormal threat) by showing the actual impact that all these deadly and obviously supernatural events are having on the town. The townsfolk are increasingly confused, terrified, and grief-stricken and begin to wonder what sort of unholy curse has afflicted their homes. They become paranoid, nervous, and easily panicked into a hysteria. And such a hysteria occurs thanks to Jason, an Evil Counterpart to the main characters; a teenager who realizes the town is under an unnatural threat, but unlike the heroes, is an arrogant, sociopathic, and ignorant Jerk Jock whose failure to understand the nature of the enemy, prejudices, and refusal to admit being wrong ends up disrupting the heroes' efforts at a critical juncture, giving the Big Bad his first major victory against them. Said victory ends up devastating the town and causing the biggest number of deaths yet, leading to a mass-exodus as people finally get fed up and move elsewhere. The show's signature Dungeons & Dragons homages are also deconstructed by reminding viewer of just what exactly DND was going through at the time the story takes place and using it as a plot point, with the Satanic Panic's onset being another cause of the mass hysteria that pervades the town. By the end of the season, DND is demonized and feared as Hollywood Satanism thanks to everything.
• The Vampire Diaries deconstructs the whole premise of a vampire "turning off his/her humanity" in season eight, when the siren Sybil arrives. After she shows him a vision of what Hell looks like, Damon gets scared and turns off his humanity. While a vampire tends to do horrible things with his humanity turned off, Sybil ends up taking advantage of this and puts him under her complete control. She is even able to erase his memories of Elena to further control him. As a result, he kills Tyler under her orders and alienates all of his friends while being loyal to Sybil.
• Victorious: "The Worst Couple" deconstructs both Beck and Jade's toxic relationship and Jade's transformation from an abrasive bitch to borderline sociopathy. As a favor to Sinjin, the gang goes on a Newlywed Game-style game show that Sinjin is pitching. Beck and Jade get into an incredibly petty fight, which culminates in Beck saying on TV he's not happy with their relationship and them winning the worst couple award despite no one else playing dating yet. After the incident, things get Played for Drama. Beck feels remorseful for his outburst, but recognizes that he shouldn't brush off how he felt and tries to talk with her. Jade, unlike Season 1, where she was more willing to talk if they were having issues in "Robarazzi" and "Jade Dumps Beck", wants to forget about what happened because she's too stubborn to admit they're having severe problems. At this point, the rest of the group starts distancing themselves from them and flat-out telling them when confronted about it. Jade's personality hits new lows when she runs over Sinjin and insults her friends while they're in earshot. This proves to be the last straw for Beck, and he demands that they either work to fix their issues or break up. Jade walks out and threatens to end the relationship on her terms if he doesn't follow. Beck almost leaves, but backs out at the last second, and Jade too almost walks back in, but is unwilling to swallow her pride and dumps him. It's not until Jade undergoes long-overdue Character Development and Beck realizes why he liked her to begin with that the two reconcile. After this, their relationship is shown to be far less toxic.

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