Times where somebody is Made Out to Be a Jerkass for reacting to an actual Jerkass in Live-Action TV series.
- The Big Bang Theory:
- In one episode, Raj has Howard and Bernadette babysit his dog, only for them to lose it. Raj manages to find the dog and decides to make Howard and Bernadette squirm for a few hours. When the pair calls Raj to cover up they lost his dog, Raj reveals he found it a few hours ago, resulting in Bernadette getting on his case about making them worry sick about the dog, resulting in Raj being the one to apologize, with Howard and Bernadette's losing his dog forgotten.
- There's also the one where Penny finally loses it with Howard and sends him into a downward spiral of self-loathing despair because of the scathing put-down she gives him. It doesn't help that she was pretty much in the right and it's remarkable she waited so long before calling Howard out on his boorish clumsy chat-up lines. She is still made to feel like a jerk by the others for being so brutally candid. She feels she has to go and apoogise. But still ends up breaking his nose.
- In Everybody Loves Raymond, Ray used to hate playing ping-pong with Frank due to his Unsportsmanlike Gloating, but holds proud memories of the one time he beat him, so when Frank reveals that he let him win, he demands another game to settle the score. Frank wins again and rubs it in Ray's face like he usually does, until Ray tells him that he let him win. Frank storms out in a huff and Marie immediately tells Ray off for humiliating his father.
- Fastlane: Van's father Ray Ray happens to be a Con Man that exploits his "coolness" to make people drop their guard around him. Van has been around him long enough to develop savviness and keep his guard up, but the plot constantly conspires to make him look horrible when he orders his own father to assume the position for frisking, for example (turns out he got a gun from a contact).
- Frasier An In-Universe incident occurs in "Frasier Has Spokane." Frasier's show is going to be syndicated in Spokane, Washington, and he travels there to do a live show for the debut. Unfortunately, he's replacing local legend Neil "Sully" Sullivan, and as such he's treated like an utter pariah who "stole" the show, even though it was the station that fired Sully and, worse, didn't tell Frasier about his predecessor's reputation. Despite Frasier being nothing but gracious and polite to Sully when they meet, the first show features angry callers saying they're going to boycott the station until Sully comes back. By the episode's end, though, Frasier and Roz have proven their worth and get the audience to listen.
- A Season Five episode of Friends, “The One With the Girl Who Hits Joey”, has Ross move into a new apartment. A resident tries to get him to give $100 for the super's retirement, but Ross only just moved in and doesn't feel obliged. Everyone in the building treats him like a pariah.
- In The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Season Six episode "Stress Related", Carlton shows up to give a speech at Ashley's school for Career Day (as their father, Phil, can’t make it,) but everyone at the assembly quickly determines that he doesn't have a job, despite what he says about career success in general. After one student quips that Carlton is a bum (causing laughter among the students present,) another student actually has the nerve to raise her hand to question if that is, in fact, the truth. "Excuse me, sir. Are you really a bum?", she "politely" inquires. Suffice to say that she is genuinely shocked and unprepared when he angrily snaps, "Back off, sister!", but then a third student in the audience has the nerve to stand up for her by calling Carlton out on his "attitude problem" and basically say that he is being insensitive to her feelings, not vice versa. And to add further insult to her brother's emotional injury, Ashley reinforces this trope at the end of the episode when she laments to her father that, while she can understand that he was too busy to make it to the career fair himself, she can't understand why, of all people, he'd send Carlton in his place, further implying her brother's (quite justified) defensive outburst towards that girl was completely out of line.
- One episode of Good Luck Charlie features Amy trying to get the family prepared for a singing contest. Seeing them underachieving, she uses a fake family in the performance. When she gets home, the family is upset over the deception, but Amy's fast talking results in the family apologizing to her for being terrible at the routine.
- In one episode of Grounded for Life, upon learning that Eddie had an adult movie shot at their house, Claudia bans him from the house. When the kids find out, they get upset that they'll never see their uncle again. Claudia even lampshades it as shown in the page quote.
- The Home Improvement "Some Like It Hot Rod" features Jill putting Tim's car outside, only for it to get covered in snow. When Tim gets upset with her, she turns it around about how all the times he ruined her things, she forgave him, only for him to not do the same, ending with her storming out of the garage upset. It's then that Tim realizes what just happened.Tim: Wait a minute! You are really good. You screw up, and I'm getting yelled at! You are really, really good!
- In the How I Met Your Mother episode "Columns", Ted deals with a worker (his former boss) who keeps belittling his ideas and being a jerk, prompting him to fire him. However, he finds himself unable to do it due to circumstances: his birthday, his wife left him and served him divorce papers, and his dog died. Finally, Ted has enough and decides to fire him at last. However, as he does, the worker has a heart attack. Ted thinks he's faking it and fires him anyway. The worker is then carried off in a stretcher and everyone despises Ted, including the paramedics.
- In the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Alien", the detectives are brought in to investigate a stabbing at a Catholic school. While there, they find that the stabber in question had been the victim of a vicious bullying campaign that the school had done nothing to quell because they wanted her parents, a lesbian couple, to pull her out.
- In the Madam Secretary episode "The Ninth Circle", the McCords' son Jason is expelled from a Quaker school after he breaks the school bully's nose for insulting his mother Elizabeth and refuses to apologize. Admittedly Quakers are big on nonviolence, but Dean Ward blames the whole thing on Jason without addressing the prior cyberbullying by the Spoiled Brat rich kid, and Liz and Henry McCord are way angrier at Ward than at Jason.Liz: If I ran the State Department the way you run this school, the world would be a smoldering ember!
- Wonderfully inverted in an episode of Malcolm in the Middle. Lois grounds Malcolm for not helping move a couch even though he was doing some school work. Then when the family is forced to evacuate due to a train wreck releasing toxic fumes, she says the grounding still stands and makes him stay on a cot. When he finally stands up to her, she humiliates him in front of everyone. This results in her being forced to stay outside with the others for things they did (Reese creating a black market for supplies, Dewey lying to everyone to get sympathy, and Hal for causing the accident that forced the evacuation in the first place), resulting in the one time Malcolm came out on top.
- Newhart: Dick hosts a new talk show with bubbly, vapid co-host Buffy Denver (Julie Brown). At a history museum, he gently tries to get her to tone down her giggly airhead comments while interviewing a curator. She immediately breaks down crying, and the curator tears into Dick for crushing her enthusiasm, and shouts "Go to hell, Mister Loudon!"
- In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Picard tells Wesley to shut up when he tries to warn the captain about Lore.
- Two and a Half Men features an episode where Charlie gives his mother a Calling the Old Man Out speech but then she turns it around and treats him like he's being a brat.
