As a Death Trope, all spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.
Murder by Inaction in Live-Action TV series.
- On 24, President David Palmer asks his ex-wife to deal with a powerful supporter who is blackmailing him. She goes to his house to speak with his wife, and gets in an altercation with him. The argument triggers a heart attack, and Sherry convinces the wife to withhold his heart medication, and the two watch him fall over dead.
- Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: In the episode "Nothing Personal", Deathlok threatens to torture Agent Ward to death if Skye won't decrypt the secret files for him. Since Ward has been revealed as a HYDRA mole, Skye resolves to let him die. She can't go through with it.
- Andor: When the heist goes sideways, Skeen kills Taramyn by claiming he'll provide cover fire then not doing so, letting Taramyn run straight into a killbox where he takes a bolt to the back. Whether he did so deliberately or not is unsaid, but given how he reveals his true colors after the heist, the implication seems very much that he was hoping to have "one less share" of the heist money.
- Babylon 5: J. Michael Straczynski must like this trope, since it appears multiple times in the series.
- In "Conviction", when an explosion leaves Londo and G'Kar stranded in an elevator, G'Kar cheerfully invokes and attempts to follow through with this trope, much to Londo's displeasure. He doesn't mind dying himself, if it means that Londo dies under circumstances that won't trigger Centauri reprisals against other Narns. However, G'Kar winds up as the one displeased when the elevator car is rescued at the end of the episode.
- In "Objects at Rest", out of jealousy, Lennier leaves Sheridan behind a locked door, in a room being flooded with toxic gas. Subverted, in that A.) he has a change of heart and goes back to correct the mistake, and B.) he returns to find that others have arrived to save the day and is forced to go on the run.
- In The Boys (2019), Homelander's decision to abandon the hijacked Flight 37 is treated as a Moral Event Horizon for the guy, and justifiably so, but his reasoning for writing it off as a loss is pretty sensible. The pilots are dead, so the plane is going to crash unassisted, he isn't trained to fly a plane, and even if he was, the controls were destroyed in the scuffle (admittedly, by him), he doesn't have the Required Secondary Powers to use his Super-Strength to right the plane manually without ripping it apart, and he can't evacuate over 120 passengers in a matter of minutes. What pushes it into "irredeemable" territory is that he refuses to save anyone, under the logic that if word gets out that he failed here, his career as a superhero is over, and furthermore, he is completely unbothered at the idea of leaving them to die.
- Breaking Bad: Walt watches Jesse's girlfriend, Jane, choke to death on her own vomit (she'd shot up with heroin). Jane had earlier demanded Walt fork over some drug money and threatened to rat him out. Made worse in that Walt had inadvertently moved Jane on to her back when he tried to wake Jesse up, and thus indirectly caused her death as well as refusing to prevent it. He later makes a deliberate point to tell Jesse this, something that is widely viewed as one of his worst deeds due to the sheer pointless cruelty.
- A villainous example can be found in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The ancient vampire Kakistos fights against the two slayers Buffy and Faith. And while a vampire of his age is capable of defeating a slayer, two slayers are too strong for him. Mr. Trick, his chief subordinate who also happened to be frustrated trying to the boss to embrace modern society and conveniences, sees that his master will probably lose the fight if he and some of the other minions don't jump in to help... and declares it a damn shame the boss wasn't more open to his ideas as he casually turns away from the fight, leading the others with him.
- On Chicago Fire, Firefighter Cruz tries to get his brother Leon out of a gang led by the ruthless Flaco. At first, Flaco seems okay with it, but it ends with Leon being beaten. In a later episode, Flaco is caught in an apartment fire. Cruz finds him, Flaco begs him to save him, but Cruz leaves the room and leaves Flaco to his fate.
- Criminal Minds: In the season 13 premiere Wheels Up, Luke Alvez gets into a firefight with Peter Lewis, aka Mr. Scratch, the B.A.U's nemesis for multiple seasons, that ends with Lewis dangling from a collapsing fire escape. After all he's done, Lewis has the gall to beg Alvez to pull him to safety: Alvez just gives him a look of disgust and lets Lewis plunge to his death.
- CSI: Crime Scene Investigation had an episode where a suicidal man jumped in front of a car and was embedded in the windshield. The driver, wanting to avoid charges for driving drunk, left him to slowly bleed out. The final insult to the driver as he's being charged is that if he'd saved the man's life, no charges would have been pressed due to the suicide note.
- ER: Dr. Greene once found himself alone in an elevator with the abusive father of children that he (Greene) had helped get removed from their father's custody, and the father had gone on a shooting rampage, intending to kill Mark's wife and daughter. The patient went into cardiac arrest, and Mark allowed him to die while setting off the defibrillator to make it seem like he was attempting to save him.
- Game of Thrones: Halfway through the first season, Viserys barges into a "whore's feast" completely drunk, and threatens to cut out his sister Daenerys's baby from her womb if Khal Drogo doesn't "give him his crown". After Drogo seemingly agrees, with Dany saying that Viserys will have "a golden crown that men shall tremble to behold", he has Viserys seized and melts his gold belt in a pot to "crown" Viserys. Viserys tries to plead with Dany, but she stands by and says nothing when Drogo returns, says, "A crown for a king!", and "crowns" Viserys by pouring the now-molten gold over his head, killing him.
- Resoundingly defied by Jim Gordon in one of the turning points of his characters and Gotham as a whole. He can just hand big-time criminal Theo Galavan over to the Penguin and let him have his way with him and never see his face again while neither witnessing anything or incriminating himself. Does he do that? No, true to himself, he determines that by violating his code of conduct as a cop he would be as guilty as the Penguin and chooses to take as always the responsibility upon him to make sure both that Theo is executed and that his torture won't be prolonged as it would surely otherwise be.
- One episode of The Guest Book has Jenna Fischer as a therapist who rents Froggy Cottage as part of an experiment. She takes an Alzheimer's patient there to see if recreating his past life will help him regain his memories. It works, but he then starts to revert to his life as a Klansman. Later, she discovers he once burned down a church and killed a black man in the process just before he starts an old pickup truck in the garage and asks her to go with him to church. When she and her assistant realize the garage is slowly filling with exhaust fumes, they leave him to gas himself.
- Law & Order: UK: In the episode "Samaritan", based on the original Law & Order episode "Manhood"note , a homophobic policeman is discovered to have essentially killed his (gay) colleague by not getting him any help when he was shot (the courtroom section of the episode is mostly based around proving he was there and deliberately didn't do anything).
- Luther: The biggest source of blackmail against Luther comes from the opening scene in the pilot when a child molester nearly falls to his death while fleeing capture. Instead of helping the molester back on his feet, Luther lets the man fall to his death.
- Medium: In one episode, a young Allison has visions about one of her friends. She sees that, by knocking on his door, she will stop him from killing himself, and many years later he will rape and murder teenage girls. So a few days later, she decides to not interrupt his suicide.
- Midsomer Murders:
- In "Death in Disguise", a death initially assumed to be natural causes turns out to be this. The victim suffered a heart attack and was calling for his medication, while the other present refused to give it to him, and stood by and watched him die.
- "Birds of Prey": one Asshole Victim is a middle-aged man who lives with and horribly abuses his Maiden Aunts. So, when he comes home bruised after being hit by a car, one aunt realizes he's much more badly injured than he thinks, but puts him to bed and leaves him to die in his sleep.
- In "Hidden Depths" a snobby wine lover is tied to his lawn while the murderer is catapulting wine bottles at him. His wife is brought to the window and sees the whole thing (though the murderer remains unidentified). When she sees the bottle miss, she calls out corrections to the murderer. The next morning, the police arrive but she of course didn't see anything. Downplayed in that the wife probably couldn't have saved her husband if she'd wanted to (she was wheelchair-bound, and her wheelchair had been disabled), but she certainly had the mindset of this trope.
- In "The Made-to-Measure Murders", Mrs. Woodley's good friend Wendy Minchin tells Barnaby and Jones that she was likely conflicted over the death of her husband as it was obvious to her that she had delayed calling for an ambulance when her husband died some two years before. She also reveals that Gerald Woodley was a brute of a man and cannot understand why Sonia was conflicted about anything.
- Monk: In "Mr. Monk Meets His Dad", Ben Glaser starts to cut Kenneth Woods' tie loose when it gets caught in a running semi engine, then stops. (The two were co-owners of the same trucking company, and had just found evidence that Ben was defrauding the company by buying used parts and pocketing the difference.) However, Ben ultimately kicks Kenneth's feet out from under him, just to be on the safe side.
- Nashville: Teddy watches as Lamar Wyatt has a heart attack. He begins to step forward to help, then stops, not even calling 911. Lamar dies.
- Orphan Black: Suspecting Aynsley to be her monitor (erroneously), Alison does nothing to prevent Aynsley from accidentally strangling herself with a scarf and a drain grinder.
- Person of Interest: At the end of the episode "Reasonable Doubt", John decides that the POI and her husband just aren't worth saving, and leaves a gun for the husband to even the odds in allowing them to kill each other.
- Primeval shows Oliver Leek. He is gathering an army of Future Predators and controlling them with technology from the future. Nick Cutter annihilates this technology and simply leaves Leek to the predators without helping him.
- In Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Court Martial", Kirk is accused that while Finney was in the ion pod, Kirk failed to signal the red alert, which would have informed Finney he needed to leave the ion pod, prior to ejecting it to save the ship, resulting in Finney's death. Subverted, in that it turns out Finney had changed the computer records in order to get Kirk in trouble.
- In the first episode of the Vendetta season of Strike Back, Colonel Alexander Coltrane allows a henchman to bleed to death, having recognized him as a war criminal he clashed with when he was a lieutenant.
- Vera: In "Changing Tides", the killer allows the Victim of the Week to go to sleep in an unoccupied chalet and then locks the door from the outside, knowing that she will asphyxiate due to a gas leak from a faulty water heater.
- In The Walking Dead (2010), several characters end up killed this way by being left to the walkers.
- In the Korean Drama Who Are You?, Jang Yeon-hee's prospective mother-in-law really, really did not approve of the impending marriage between Yeon-hee and her son Park Woong-joon. So much so that when Yeon-hee goes into an asthma attack after a nasty argument with Mama Park, Mama Park holds onto Yeon-hee's asthma medication and watches her die.
- Why Women Kill: After finding out that her husband Rob caused their daughter to be killed and lied to her about it for years in addition to cheating on her and planning to leave her, Beth Ann creates a plan to murder him and help her friend Mary be rid of her abusive husband Ralph at the same time. They make it look like Rob and Mary have been having an affair and plan to elope. A furiously jealous Ralph arrives at the house and fights Rob, gun in hand. Beth Ann throws Rob his own gun, but when he tries to shoot Ralph in self-defense, he finds it empty. Cut to the bullets stored away in Beth Ann's drawer. Ralph shoots Rob, who dies, but not before Beth Ann whispers to him that she knows the role he played in their daughter's death.
- In Xena: Warrior Princess, this is how Xena originally kills Callisto; they tumble down a hill, Callisto lands in quicksand and Xena simply lets her sink. She gets better, though — multiple times.
- The X-Files: The episode "Arcadia" shows the wealthy owner of a settlement that terrorizes its inhabitants with a tulpa. When Agent Mulder arrests him and ties him up so he cannot escape, the tulpa comes up to him. He asks his neighbors to help him, but the woman says that he now gets what he deserves and goes away with her husband.
- Yellowjackets: In "It Chooses", the team has been stranded for months. To fend off starvation, they hold a Lottery of Doom and end up picking Natalie as the one who will be sacrificed and eaten. She gets away. Javi tries to help her hide but as they are chased down, he ends up crashing through thin ice. Misty points out to Natalie that if she saves him, the group would just kill them both. The girls allow him to drown and he ends up being the sacrifice.
