An episode of a TV show, especially a Crime and Punishment Series, focusing on a particular subculture. Accuracy is optional since the only research that goes into the episode is reading the paper... especially when even the paper isn't right or decided to focus on a subsection of the subculture. This is also common on Medical Dramas with the subculture having a connection to the Patient of the Week, and Sitcoms when one of the main characters becomes involved with a strange new crowd.
The subculture in question is most often presented as one cheap stereotype after another. They aren't just average people with non-mainstream interests. Rather, they are total creeps with no social skills unrelated to their subculture, which dominates every aspect of their lives. If it's sexual, they'll wear fetish gear to the supermarket and make inappropriate come-ons to the main character. If it's gamers, they'll be 30-something basement dwellers who imitate the violence they commit in the game. If it's NeoPaganism, they'll wear ridiculous Goth or Hippy-ish clothing and talk about casting spells and "cursing" people they don't like. And if it's Furries, they'll be depraved borderline zoophiles (or not so borderline). To real people within these communities, the misconceptions and poor research on these shows can be either a source of mockery or a Fandom-Enraging Misconception.
See The Quincy Punk, Small Reference Pools, Public Medium Ignorance, Drop-In Character, and the Ghetto Index. Compare Mistaken for Subculture and Extreme Sports Plot.
For more info, see check the Useful Notes page about Subcultures.
Examples:
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Comics
- Many Chick Tracts "discussed" subcultures Chick disapproved of- Freemasons, Pagans, Harry Potter fans, Muslims, Catholics, rock musicians and (most famously) Dungeons & Dragons players.
- Judge Dredd has this kind of format but taken to the point of parody because of the goofy new subcultures that exist in Mega-City One, including Fatties (eating contest jocks), Uglies (go out of their way to look unattractive as possible) and Normals (basically just Young Republican types; sober, conservative, and sensibly dressed, and treated as the most bizarre of the lot).
Literature
- In the Lee Goldberg novel Mr. Monk in Outer Space, an investigation takes him into a convention of fans of the show "After Earth", who among other things, bicker about whether they should be called "Earthers" or "Earthies" —- an obvious Trekkies expy. Even Monk finds them bizarre and scary. (Or should one say, especially Monk.) Particularly after finding out that his brother is the leading authority on the show's fictional "Dratch" language. (Named after series staff member Daniel Dratch.)
- Discworld often features snippets about various fantasy counterpart subcultures ranging from Music With Rocks In and Rat Music fans, Goth-style Witches, Hackers and obsessive pin collectors, and the invention of stamp collecting, and football hooligans.
Live-Action TV
- UK series The Bill featured a guy playing an "Assassins"-style game using a realistic-looking paint gun in public. People who play these sort of games do not use realistic weapons. One guy from the Oxford University Assassin's Guild did that and encountered some armed police.
- Many of the cases on CSI have dealt with some strange sexual fetish, subculture, sexual fetish, hobby, or sexual fetish.
- The infamous episode "Fur and Loathing," set at a furry convention began it all. The portrayal of furries caused considerable controversy in that fandom. The episode was also a Jump the Shark moment for CSI fans, who saw it as the start of a freak-a-week format.
- "King Baby" where the victim, a powerful casino owner, was an adult baby in his spare time. He wore (and used) diapers and had a nanny who nursed and changed him.
- "Slaves of Las Vegas" introduced viewers to Lady Heather and her BDSM club. Lady Heather actually became a well-developed, sporadically-recurring character.
- A murder-at-the-Star-Trek-convention storyline, albeit with the serial numbers filed off. Trekkies, Trekkies everywhere...and a bit of deconstruction about how even if "Darker and Edgier" is supposed to be the 'hot new thing' with creating remakes, not a lot of people are willing to accept it, or can write it well (and yes, this was an important part of the murderer's motive, although it was mostly the fact that her work was plagiarized, and it still was an Accidental Murder.)
- "Unleashed" dealt with Human Pet role play. The (accidental) murderer was a woman that was trying to "rescue" the pet roleplayer, believing that the "poor girl" was suffering a strange type of spousal abuse.
- "The Panty Sniffer." You can guess what fetish that episode was built around (and Nick was equally embarrassed to be in the same room as the man who led him into figuring it out).
- CSI: Miami
- The episode dealing with video games, in which the characters had to actually play the game in question to find out its plot, which was necessary for them to solve the case. Why they don't just look up its plot online is anyone's guess. There's also a notable level of New Media Are Evil, as in the episode, a video games company decides that a good advertising tactic for their GTA clone (which somehow still had "levels" and "points") is to give teenagers submachine guns and have them rob a bank, with bonus points if there's a police officer inside and for rape.
- "Rich people doing crazy things for the sake of getting entertainment" was pretty much a constant target on this series. As an example: a group of professionals that performed simulated kidnappings for hire—the idea is that the people who hired the group's services would go through the standard "rescue thriller" motions and get an adrenaline rush out of it, with a lampshade that Rescue Sex was a pretty typical aftermath of the service. Unfortunately, the guy who hired their services on the episode ended up deciding mid-Rescue Sex that it would be interesting to see what murder sex would feel like...
- CSI: NY, like all of the shows in the CSI-verse, is pretty much in love with this trope.
- "Fare Game" has a Water Wars expy. Someone uses a realistic-looking water pistol. Someone else gets killed for real with a prop gun.
- One of the victims in "Tri-Borough" practiced Le Parkour. A friend of his tells investigators they "find new ways to traverse the urban landscape."
- "Down the Rabbit Hole" and "D.O.A. for a Day" deal with Second Life. The first victim is found dressed like an avatar and had been forced to have plastic surgery as well. (Fame and relationships within the game had almost nothing to do with the murder, however. "Venus," or rather the girl dressed as her, was killed by a professional assassin who was trying to take her real and online identity and use Second Life to gather information.)
- "Sanguine Love" features a vampire cult who drink each others' blood. Surprisingly, no vampires committed any crimes. The episode treated vampirism like an unpopular but venerable religion.
- "Sex, Lies and Silicone" involves the owners of life-size adult dolls (although it turns out that the doll ownership was irrelevant to the murder).
- In "Kill Screen," the team investigates a murder at a gaming convention, and while there's some disparaging about people who play video games for a living, they still consider the motive (the multi-thousand-dollar grand prize of a gaming tournament and hacked consoles that allowed cheating) pretty seriously.
- Bones does this quite often. There have been episodes about competitive arcade gaming, role-playing teens, pony play fetishists, and karaoke singers (with actual former American Idol contestants).
- Mostly averted in the episode dealing with black metal, though. Some of the stranger excesses of the subculture are brought to the fore, but Bones' psychiatrist is revealed to have a history in the scene and Booth compares the distaste over it to his dad's distaste for punk. The most significant error they make is that, while virtually everything regarding extreme black metal is true to a degree, the death metal subculture really isn't as violent or cult-like as the Norwegian black metal scene that clearly inspired the events of the episode. Furthermore, few death metal bands wear corpse paint or use fake names, and only a handful are Satanic. Additionally, the music the bands featured in the episode play bears scant resemblance to actual black metal and is more akin to groove metal or nu-metal, making the bands in question all examples of Scary Musician, Harmless Music.
- An episode focusing on roleplayers compared them to school shooters.
- One episode focused on Wicca, and was criticized by Wiccans for using stereotypes.
- One episode focused on doomsday preppers, with a member of the group being a murder suspect. Sweets declared them irredeemably freakish.
- One of the defining examples was "Next Stop, Nowhere," a.k.a, "the punk rock episode of Quincy, M.E.." In the '80s Hardcore Punk subculture, the episode spawned the slur "Quincy punk," applied to scene members and bands who personified the old Sex Pistols stereotype of the sloppy, antisocial, mohawked/spiky-haired punk rocker. This was at a time when hardcore was about dressing normal, playing tight, and maintaining a positive or at least thoughtful attitude.
- In one episode, only one cop on Law & Order had heard of foot fetishes.
- One Pushing Daisies episode focuses on a murder at a rent-a-friend agency. The actual customers are portrayed sympathetically, but Ned eventually decries the whole enterprise as useless, because while the patrons may enjoy it for a time, "deep down they never stop thinking of themselves as weirdos who need to be fixed".
- Most crime shows had a vampire-related episode at some point in time.
- Criminal Minds even did some namedropping by referencing Twilight. At least they didn't portray the subculture as the cause of the culprit's murderous ways; it was made very clear that the killer was suffering from a rare mental illness that provoked obsession with blood-drinking, and had likely had it since childhood.
- Hilariously, an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer did this with a vampire wannabe cult (mind you, in a show where vampires were very real). At one point, Angel (the resident good guy vampire) is complaining about how these kids know nothing about vampires, don't know how they dress... and pauses as a guy walks by dressed exactly the same as him. At the end of the episode, Buffy has to save the vampire wannabes from the real vampires, who mostly just want to kill them and feed off them.
- Supernatural also did an episode about vampire wannabes. In it, Dean discovers that vampires are pushing the vampire obsession started by media such as Twilight to get more willing victims for a vampire army.
- Castle did a Halloween episode with the vampire subculture. The victim's family dislikes it, but the team treats it with respect. Ryan even admits to having dated a "vampire" in the past, and the only turnoff for him was having sex in a coffin. Otherwise, he describes it as a club like any other: "You like sports? I like sports. You like to drink blood? I like to drink blood."
- An episode of CSI had a werewolf LARPer as the Victim of the Week... and then it turns out that his "clan" was on a pretty heated rivalry with a vampire LARPer group (so we have simulated Fur Against Fang) and then it turned out that the kid used to be a vampire but because he was dating a "werewolf" girl he switched groups (and the both of them were starting to see the whole thing as too dumb and were planning to ditch the groups), and this alone made members of both groups decide to drag him into the desert and nail him to a barbed-wire fence to die from exposure and blood loss as befitted a "traitor". The investigators had to occasionally remind the members of both groups that they weren't supernatural beings and to cut it out and give them a straight answer.
- An episode of The Mentalist featured a young Wiccan, who naturally came under suspicion when one of her peers was killed in a ritualistic fashion. Wiccans criticized the episode, saying half the facts spouted about Wicca were blatantly wrong.
- House:
- A sixth season episode used bloggers as the Sick Sad Subculture. Since the episode first aired at the height of blogging's popularity, seeing it portrayed as a crazy new subculture was odd. The show wasn't explicit that all bloggers were exhibitionist freaks, but it was pretty clear that the particular patient was taking it too far, compulsively documenting literally everything except her bowel movements and even leaving her medical decisions up to popular polling among her readers.
- Renaissance Faire playacting was held up to the light in another episode from the same season. The POTW was a jousting knight who took the Medieval code too seriously, not taking into account the "king" he pledged fealty to was just a garden variety yuppie douche in real life. The implication was that this extreme attitude is common.
- The late-60's revival of Dragnet used the hippie counterculture as a recurring subculture-of-the-week in a number of episodes. The most infamous of these is the "Blue Boy" episode
, for its take on LSD. Joe Friday references in dialogue the notorious urban myth about teenagers tripping on acid blinding themselves by staring at the sun.
- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
- One episode had the detectives practically declare an adult had to be a pedophile... because he collected Transformers. Some TransFans weren't amused with the episode.
- In one episode, several of them express incredulity over the theory cited by a colleague that a man might be gay even though he has a wife.
- In another episode, the idea that someone could be bisexual rather than straight-out gay seems to be bizarrely unheard of, sparking more astonishment from the characters.
- There was a Ripped from the Headlines episode inspired by Gamergate called "Intimidation Game". It depicted the movement as a group of insane male gamers who are unable to tell the difference between video games and real life, and also depicted Gamergaters as routinely kidnapping, torturing, and raping women (though given some of the extremely disturbing things said by members of the movement online, especially towards marginalized individuals, one can hardly blame their opponents for not finding that depiction too far-fetched). The episode received some positive reviews, but, unsurprisingly, Gamergaters did not like it, though more surprising is some of the movement's opposers also disliked it because of how the female creator was treated and the Downer Ending.
- In Nip/Tuck the client/patient of the week was often part of some strange subculture.
- The whole point of the MTV reality show True Life seems to be to subvert this, as they visit the lives of people involved in various subcultures regularly. More often than not, though, it winds up as a double-subversion.
- The Wiccans featured in True Blood's fourth season are presented this way. First, it seemed everything the writers knew about Wicca came from browsing an occult shop for twenty minutes. Second, everyone in Marnie's coven except Holly and Jesus (who were both introduced in the previous season and were actually good examples of normal witches) were either sociopaths like Marnie and Roy or idiot teenagers who were only there to piss off their parents. And then there's the rather painful mispronunciation of "Samhain".
- Castle has largely subverted the "horrifically stereotyped" part. Probably due in part to Nathan Fillion being a fan of several of the subcultures that have appeared so far. And him having a sizeable chunk of fans who are in one or more of those subcultures. The show actually tends to go the other direction with it, such as when Beckett was suspiciously knowledgeable about the BDSM scene, or Castle's fanboying over the whole concept of Steampunk.
- Monk has episodes where Monk investigates murders committed in different subcultures: "Mr. Monk Goes to a Rock Concert" has the music industry, "Mr. Monk and the Rapper" involves rappers, "Mr. Monk and the Naked Man" has nudists, "Mr. Monk Takes a Punch" involves a hit put out on a professional boxer, "Mr. Monk and the Garbage Strike" and "Mr. Monk and the Candidate" involve city politics, "Mr. Monk Goes to Vegas" involves casinos, and so-on.
- In two Hawaii Five-O episodes, the subculture was astrology. Stereotyping was largely avoided, as the astrology was portrayed accurately (a prominent local astrologer is said to have been advisor), and they were non-committal on the "validity" of astrology. (In the first episode, the killer turns out to be trying to make facts fit the theory.)
- Pretty much every episode in the Dutch reality TV show Valerio Duikt Onder. The premise of the show is after all that the presentator Valerio Zeno would go towards members of a particular subculture and engage in their activities so that he and all the people who were watching could understand what the subculture was about. Unlike most other examples however most members of the subcultures he talks about seem to enjoy it. Probably because he only acts out on the people in front of him and not on media stereotypes.
- Criminal Minds has a lot of examples for their serial killer rampage targets: swingers, spring breakers, religious fundamentalists, those with an obsession for First Person Shooters, Jackass-style dares, BDSM, the music industry, Horrible Hollywood, Fight Clubbing, Stepford Suburbia (and how far it's willing to go to keep being such), hobos, gambling addicts, absurdly corrupt politicians, ConspiracyTheorists, the comic book industry... the Gothic culture (or at least the "Hollywood" emo, "life sucks so bad I may as well kill myself and wearing dark clothes is how I am screaming for help" kind) has been either the target or the Red Herring of at least three cases and toxic school environments (of the "you guys know that being bullied and ostracized like this is one of the leading reasons for Columbine copy-cats, right?" type) was an important factor in the snapping of two killers so far.
- Elementary frequently has cases where the victim has an unusual hobby or interest (maker subculture, superhero copycat, and math hunts, to name but three). Generally, the subculture in question is portrayed fairly positively (Sherlock himself having a variety of weird interests and being disinclined to judge others if they aren't hurting anyone), and is very rarely the direct motive for the murder, with the point being made that these people do have other things going on in their lives.
- The My Crazy Ex episode "Sexed, Perplexed, and Unfortunate Texts" had a woman and her boyfriend end up at the wrong address and winding up at a (rather stereotypically-portrayed) furry party. The boyfriend ends up becoming a (stereotypical) furry.
- Bosch: A season 7 subplot has a couple of sexist cops involved in the incel subculture trying to sabotage Billets' career since she's a woman and they resent her high rank.
- Workaholics pulls a Double Subversion with the Juggalo culture. The boys go to The Gathering of Juggalos after setting Jillian up with a blind date who turns out to be a Juggalo, and find themselves quite taken by the loving and raucous atmosphere of the event, but also at the end, realize that Adam's new love interest Juggalette can get violent when confronted.
- This Is England: The original film follows a group of young Skinheads, dealing with the new political split as old gang leader Combo returns from jail, having become radicalized and joining the National Front. The following mini-series follow the same group over years, where in 1986, most have gotten into the Mod Revival movement, and in 1990, they have been swept up by the rave subculture.
Web Original
- A background detail regarding Fenspace involved an In-Universe episode of CSI that had the Las Vegas Police investigating a crime involving the titular group of "Handwavium"-using Otakus, with all of the poorly-researched ham-fistedness that they (and many other crime shows, as you can see on the Live-Action TV folder above) have shown to other subcultures. The results were predictable.
- Your Scene Sucks used to cover various new social scenes in the 2010's with a snarky attitude, illustrated with a protrait of a typical member of the scene.
- Youtube channel VERY APE does Man On The Street interview videos of various American subcultural events ranging from the Gathering of the Juggalos to Black Bike Week.
Western Animation
- An episode of Bob's Burgers revolves around Tina and the rest of the family attending a Fan Convention for a stand-in of the My Little Pony (Generation 4) franchise, only to be unsettled by its adult, male fanbase.
- Toyed with in the Futurama episode, "Where No Fan Has Gone Before"; the antagonist Melllvar is an obsessive Trekkie, and the episode goes on to explain that in the past, Trekkies became their own religion and started a devastating war that forced the show itself to be banned.
- Frequently on King of the Hill, Bobby would get involved with a strange new crowd, much to Hank's dismay. Even when the group is harmless and Bobby picks up a constructive hobby, Hank will still stop at nothing to pull his son out of it in favor of something "normal."
- One of many examples is the episode where Bobby falls in with a group of Collectible Card Game players who are also seemly Neopagans (especially model after Wiccans and Hellenists (Neo-Greek Pagans)) due to their group name "The Coven of Artemis", style of group are so happens they were purple robes and have seemly worshiped Greek deities (Pan and Artemis) with Occult rituals. It casts both subcultures in a negative light and portrays them as one and the same.
- Not even Bobby finding an honest and well-paying job that he actually enjoyed doing (and could do even if he was underage) was safe; because this job happened to be for-hire picking up of dog feces for rich guys who didn't care to do it themselves. Hank saw it as denigrating work, he said so to Bobby's boss Peter Sterling, and he eventually managed to guilt-talk the man into showcasing said denigration (by pointing out that Sterling can take the bullying and probably does not gets bullied much because he is a gorgeous man with lots of charisma while Bobby is… Bobby) and convince Bobby to quit... by way of hiring some thugs to pretend to be bullies that mocked and then brutalized him by tossing him into a port-a-potty and send it rolling down a hill (Sterling only wanted them to mock him, but he had the bad luck of asking Jimmy Pritchard to do it).
- Another episode showcased many people on Arlen (including Hank's boss Mr. Strickland) going through an "ecological" phase (Bobby got into it to try to impress a girl he liked at school). While Hank started the episode hating it, he eventually saw that it was a good thing and convinced Bobby to keep at it while all the other characters ditched it because it had stopped being "cool".
- In "Reborn Again to be Wild", Bobby joins a youth group that consists of a Christian skater punk gang with a radical young priest as a leader. The group suddenly becomes big in their area and Bobby starts listening to Christian Rock and is even seen playing a Bible video game, but Hank quickly comes to detest the group because (as he eventually explains to Bobby at the end of the episode when the poor kid goes all "you wanted me to love God more and here I am loving God more and you're still pulling the same crap on me as usual, so what gives?") he dislikes the idea of Christianity being treated so irreverently and is afraid that Bobby will eventually come to see religion as yet another fad that he will just drop when he becomes bored of it. Hank even tells the priest "You aren't making Christianity better — you're only making rock 'n' and roll worse!"
- Hank also shows Bobby a box filled with knick knacks from his many previous brief interests, and says he doesn't want religion to be just one of them, and hitching your wagon to a Totally Radical subculture would make it likely for him to get bored of it after a while.
- South Park has parodied and paid homage to various subcultures throughout its run ranging from Pokémon fandom, Bikers, World of Warcraft, paintball and even Yaoi Fangirls.
