The 100: There are a lot of extras dying in this series. If there are any new characters in a scene, do not expect them to last, especially if they have no or little dialogue.
24: Any CTU field agent who isn't Jack Bauer or the season's Hero of Another Story is a red shirt. In season 4 and part of season 5, CTU HQ's security officers actually wore red shirts — that is, until they were all killed at once in a nerve gas attack.
The Adventures of Sinbad : It's pretty usual to see a poor unnamed crewman falling off the ship during a storm scene.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: From Season 2 onward, any SHIELD agent not part of the main or recurring cast (and even some who were) doesn't have a very long life expectancy. Even a Mauve Shirt whose survivability is a Running Gag finally bites it in Season 6!
Babylon 5: Played straight with the homeless bums in Downbelow, the outer space equivalent of The City Narrows where it's easy to wind up dead. Security personnel and, less often, Starfury fighter pilots, were also prone to being killed off to establish a threat in an episode.
Incidentally, the station chief of security, Michael Garibaldi, was named in reference to Giuseppe Garibaldi, who, if you read the description at the top of this page, you may recall was the leader of the Redshirts, making his name a bit of a pun.
The Barrier: This gets defied. A baby for which some of the protagonists briefly had to care for becomes a case of Improbable Infant Survival. When one of the temporary caretakers gets the news that the baby survived the event, she's less enthusiastic about it than the giver of the news expects her to be. She points out that while the baby survived, there are still ten people who died.
Played straight and averted in one notable example: Helo was originally supposed to die during the miniseries; after he abandons his seat to save someone important, he would never be seen again, with the implication being that he was Killed Offscreen. But the fans took a liking to him, so the writers brought him back. Thereafter he survived straight through to the series finale, became central to the show's Myth Arc via his relationship with Athena and their daughter Hera, and became one of the most respected members of the Colonial survivors due to his strong moral code.
The Big Bang Theory: Referenced. Sheldon is telling Leonard how he needs to keep dating Dr. Stephanie Barnett because she'll round out their "landing party". Leonard is Captain Kirk, Sheldon is Mr. Spock, Wolowitz is Scotty, Raj is the nameless Ensign who always gets killed, and Dr. Barnett is Bones.
In "The Bon Voyage Reaction", Sheldon again references this trope when Leonard is offered the possibility to go on an expedition, suggesting to Leonard: You know Star Trek. Should a guy with no name in a red shirt go on an expedition?
Blake's 7: Having been designed in response to Star Trek, it features a character announcing, "I am not expendable, I am not stupid, and I am not going."
And parodied in "Older and Far Away", where the one character who got hurt in the fight against the demon was a one-episode character wearing a red polo shirt. Given the amount of Trek references made in the series, this can't be a coincidence.
Combat! (1962): They aren't so much red shirts as Redemption Equals Death shirts. In fact, a good way to tell if someone will die is if they are given a name.
Garcia: Oh, my god, she was doomed. Like, Emily Brontë doomed. Like, Shakespeare doomed. Like, red-shirted ensign in Star Trek doomed.
The season four episode, "Brothers In Arms", dealt with a serial killer who targeted cops. The BAU is called in to assist the beleaguered police department, leading to a killer who is actually targetting those trying to catch him.
Though, typically, episode-specific characters who help the BAU, like detectives and medical examiners, survive the episode, there are times such as in "Zoe's Reprise" and "A Rite of Passage" where these characters are used to spark the BAU into action.
Random military types often are used as cannon fodder. UNIT personnel are frequent victims and in the New Series, red berets are part of the uniform. This has been a Subverted Trope a few times too. At least twice the Redshirt Army has beaten aliens the Doctor claimed they couldn't.
"The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit": We are introduced to Jefferson, a 'Head of Security' who jokes that there is not much to keep secure due to the remote nature of their mission. This makes it all the more blatant that his staff of two armed security guards are there for no reason other than to die horribly. They have no names, no lines, are never directly acknowledged by any characters other than Jefferson, and are not even named in the list of the dead that the episode ends with, again especially blatant due to the inclusion of the Slave Race Ood, normally not even considered people, in the roll call.
"Blink": Kathy Nightingale wears a red shirt when she accompanies Sally Sparrow to go knocking around an abandoned house. She doesn't get killed directly, though, but displaced backwards in time.
"Planet of the Dead": The bus driver. The Doctor simply telling the others that they can't go back through the wormhole unprotected wouldn't have the same impact without someone dying to demonstrate it.
Soldiers, guardsmen, and warriors on all sides are all either this or Mooks depending on Sympathetic P.O.V.. When Tyrion blows up Davos' crew, are they redshirts or mooks?
Torrhen Karstark gets no characterization before being killed.
The poor wildling warriors who head out with Jon Snow, Tormund Giantsbane, Lord Beric Dondarrion, Thoros of Myr, Jorah Mormont, and Sandor 'The Hound' Clegane. One of them is killed by a wight Bear, the others torn to shreds by undead soldiers.
Get Smart: Boy howdy but CONTROL has terrible turnover rates. So many episodes get started with an agent or two getting offed by whatever the current evil scheme's about.
Human Target: The season 1 episode "Rewind" has Laura, an antagonist assassin posing as a flight attendant, take the time to put on a stylish red jacket before getting into a fight with Chris Chance in the fuselage that leads to her falling out of an open hatch somewhere above Portland.
Kamen Rider Kabuto: The ZECTroopers are the cannon fodder of the Worm-fighting organization ZECT, which also developed the powers of the various Riders and is at least nominally on their side. Given adult Worms have Super-Speed, the most a team of ZECTroopers is good for is holding them off for an extra minute or two so an actual Rider can show up on the scene and have the real fight.
Kamen Rider Ex-Aid: The Ride Players, introduced in the back half of the series, are Goomba-themed mooks made from regular people who've been conned into playing a deadly video game. In a twist, only a Ride Player can actually progress the game to shut it down, so one of the supporting protagonists willingly becomes a Mauve Shirt so that the Riders can spend the rest of the series performing an Escort Mission.
Kamen Rider Revice: The Kamen Rider Demons Troopers introduced late in the series are a mass-production version of the original Demons. Embarrassingly, they're regularly shown up in battle by said original despite him having lost his powers and having suffered crippling internal injuries as a result that left him with the body functions of an 80-year-old man. He still racks up a higher kill count than any redshirt using nothing but an ordinary bow and arrow.
Kamen Rider Geats: In the final act, the Desire Grand Prix's management decides to fully shift gears into making it a Sadist Show, and as a result, the new players forcibly recruited into the final game are given totally blank belts and costumes with no identifying features. They exist only to slaughter the remaining named Riders and then each other, on penalty of exploding if they refuse, making the last act a rush by the named Riders to shut down the game and save as many of the redshirts as possible.
It should perhaps be considered that along with the copious amounts of very predictable redshirt deaths, a lot of main characters bite it.
During a conversation with Locke, Boone was tying red shirts to trees while Lampshade Hanging the trope. Eight episodes later, he died (and was the first main character to do so.) This scene is even more ironic because the actor who played Locke had been in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which he wore, you guessed it, a red shirt. He didn't die in the episode. Being that his Star Trek character got court martialed and imprisoned for his poor decisions as Captain which resulted in the deaths of his almost his entire crew and loss of his ship, he definitely doesn't have the right to call Kirk "a piss-poor Captain". (Although Kirk had his fair share of court martials as well, he only got a few redshirts killed at a time, not an entire crew in one go).
The show itself performs many a Lampshade Hanging on its actual red shirts. The characters Scott and Steve, for instance, are always confused by important characters, even after one of them dies (Hurley's eulogy for him boils down to "Sorry I could never remember your name.") The character Dr. Arzt is introduced near the end of season 1 and complains about how everyone (i.e., the main characters) acts like a high school clique. What happens to Arzt? He gets blown up an episode later.
A final point of irony in this quote comes from the fact that J. J. Abrams (the show's co-creator) went on to direct and produce Star Trek (2009) (see above).
It's taken to pretty much the ultimate level in a Season 4 episode where one Red Shirt after another comes running out of a house during a huge gun battle, and each one is immediately mowed down. What makes it gold is that Sawyer screams at each one to go back in the house, and none of them listen.
So in conclusion, hopefully any background castaways have learned to duck and cover if one of their fellows starts to do anything more but help out quietly.
They haven't learned: in the second episode of season 5, Neil "Frogurt" gets hit by a flaming arrow while wearing a red shirt. Sure enough, several more redshirts get killed while the main characters successfully escape into the jungle.
Mr. Robot: On their trip to China, Dom and Santiago are accompanied by two other FBI agents, played by Jordan Gelber and Olivia Washington. They're unnamed but have appeared before and have some characterization. Both are gunned down in a surprise Dark Army attack meant to throw Dom off the scent.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: Du-Ho, a South Korean Ace Pilot who's old friends with Lee, is introduced in "Secrets and Lies" as an ally to the main cast, flying them to the crash site in Alaska. He dies at the end of the same episode, a victim of the Frost Vark's absolute heat absorption. In the following episode, which picks up where episode 3 leaves off with the rest of the cast stranded, Lee burns Du-Ho's body and reminisces on their past.
Mystery Science Theater 3000: There was a guy named Joel...Just another face in a red jumpsuit...They shot him into space! Something of a Subverted Trope, of course, since he's the main character.
The Orville: As it's a Spiritual Adaptation of Star Trek (if not a Trek show with Serial Numbers Filed Off), this trope shows up. The Security and Engineering departments wear red, and the first on-screen crewman fatality is one of the engineers. However, the show plays with the trope by actually showing the crewman's funeral, having a scene where The Captain is trying to figure out what to say in the letter to the man's next of kin, and the Security Chief is so shaken by her failure to save him that she purposefully puts herself through a Nightmare Fuel scenario so that she will be better able to save others later; this after making several references to the fact the character had family who were grieving him.
The Canaries in Red Dwarf are meant to fulfill this role, though they wear yellow in homage to their name (a reference to canaries carried down into mines who died if the air grew too foul). They are prisoners sent onto abandoned spaceships so if any of them get killed, the captain will know it's too dangerous to send anyone else. Fortunately the protagonists Got Volunteered for the Canaries, passing on their Plot Armor by default.
Revolution: A number of unnamed Rebels in the show get killed off in the episodes "Kashmir", "The Stand", and "The Song Remains The Same". The sad thing is that a number of Rebels in those same episodes actually did have names, but it didn't prevent them from being killed off anyway.
The Prospects in Sons of Anarchy. Prospects are the bottom of the food chain in Real Life in the hierarchy of Motor Clubs as they are not really members and just a little bit over non-members, but in the show they fulfill more or less the Redshirt function (in an already violent show) as very few of them survive a season. None of them survive the show.
Space: 1999 has expendable crew characters in the stories, but the Fridge Horror of the fact that there will be no replacements gives each loss a terrible impact.
Several other SG teams were this, particularly SG-11 who were wiped out at least twice.
This was lampshaded in an episode where a couple of Mauve Shirts are trying to rescue SG-1, and one of them says they might as well be wearing red shirts.
Lt/Capt Laurence Conner is a mixture of this and a Doom Magnet. Whilst serving in SG-9, his commanding officer went insane, proclaimed himself a God and executed the rest of his team for "heresy". After becoming the leader of SG-11, he was captured along with the rest of his team by the shape-shifting aliens protecting the Salish tribe, while his second mission ended with his entire team being executed by Apophis.
Stargate Atlantis: Any character who makes their first appearance just as something is discovered is destined to meet a quick demise. The Red shirt du jour is introduced that episode, often by name. As the series' regulars investigate new technology or a recent discovery the newly introduced Red shirts keeping watch get toasted/Wraith-ed/introduced to the Monster of the Week.
Averted in "Duet", where Cadman at first looks like she's going to be set up for this when she gets beamed up by a Wraith along with Rodney. Luckily for her, they manage to shoot the Dart down before it escape through the Stargate. Unluckily for her, their attempt to rematerialise her from the damaged Dart leaves her consciousness ends up trapped inside of Rodney for most of the episode, before they manage to separate them.
Done for shock value when recurring gate-technician Peter Grodin unexpectedly dies at the end of season one, performing a Heroic Sacrifice by remaining behind on the Ancient satellite weapon and taking down a Wraith Hive Ship as his final act.
Star Trek: Despite it being the Trope Namer, quite a few of the characters that die in Star Trek: The Original Series are blue shirts or gold shirts. The first broadcast episode of the original series ("The Man Trap") has a body count of four minor crewmen, most of whom of course become monster chow shortly after beaming down to the planet. Ironically, the casualties are two blues, a gold and one unknown wearing a hazmat suit. In fact, no red shirt deaths occur until the seventh episode. The dubious honor goes to Crewman Mathews, who is pushed into a bottomless pit in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?". In addition, this trope is completely averted in "A Taste of Armageddon": Kirk, Spock, and three redshirts beam down to Eminiar VII where, upon landing, they are sent to be killed. All of them survive.
Scotty wears a red shirt in the original series, (other than the second pilot). He survives into The Next Generation. He does get killed once, but he gets better.
As Nichelle Nichols points out in one of her MeTV promos, she wore red all the way through the series — "guess I just wore it better!"
According to this set of statistics about Star Trek deaths, red shirt deaths actually only make up 58% of the deaths. However, since there are so many red shirts, their mortality rate is actually lower than the yellow shirts' (25 of 239 (about 10.5%) compared to 10 of 55 (about 18%)). In fact, even if you go by 43 being the number of red shirt deaths, the yellow shirts still have a slightly higher mortality rate.
One of the reasons a sense of red shirts constantly dying began to accumulate came from certain faces reappearing as extras in the landing parties and seemingly dying over and over again, the most famous for this being Eddie Paskey (Lt. Leslie). The page image itself is a classic example: In the episode, Leslie is among the slaughtered redshirts, and then is later seen on the Enterprise like nothing ever happened, in the same episode.note Allegedly there was going to be a scene where Leslie and the other redshirts get resurrected, but it was never filmed.
The trope gets Deconstructed in a Next Generation "The Bonding." It begins standardly for a Trek episode, with an away team exploring mysterious alien ruins, when a booby-trap goes and kills an officer who had just been introduced that episode....then spends most of the remainder of the episode exploring the reactions of the people who knew her, particularly her now orphaned son, and Worf, who led the mission and thus feels responsible. We even get a fascinating bit of philosophy from Data, who questions why people grieve more strongly for those they were close to than those they weren't, pointing out how nobody is grieving as strongly as when Tasha died. It borders on fourth-wall breaking.
Subverted in the episode "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad" in Star Trek: Discovery when Harry Mudd once again takes control of the Discovery, and shows off some experimental weaponized dark matter while he lists his demands. He warns no one to attempt to become a hero, as an unnamed officer attempts to tackle him. Harry sees it coming however and talks him down, calling him "random communications officer man". While Mudd was about to demonstrate the dark matter on this officer, he instead demonstrates it on Lieutenant Tyler.
The Suite Life on Deck: Parodies this in the episode "Starship Tipton". Marcus says something along the lines of "Why do we have to wear these outfits? And the guys in red always get killed." Then a guy in a red shirt opens a hatch and gets sucked into space. Marcus replies "See?"
Supergirl (2015): In "Supergirl Lives", one of the main characters, Winn, is on the Moon, and he beats an alien with a rock and exclaims "I'm not the red shirt! I'm not the red shirt! You're the red shirt!" This references Winn's love for Sci-Fi.
The Season 5 episode "Good God, Y'All" has a whole town full of them divided into thinking that the other side are demons so that Sam and Dean can figure it out and meet War, the Apocalyptic Horseman.
In season 6, Sam is called out for using the sheriff who fitted the monsters M.O. as bait to lure out the monster, and lead it back to its nest. In fact the trope was called by name.
Most episodes start with an until-then-unseen character being killed by the Monster of the Week.
Todd and the Book of Pure Evil: The student body of Crowley High frequently serves as victims of the user of the Book of Pure Evil (often another Crowley student). Lampshaded when the bodies of three students flayed alive are identified using the school's own set of dental records (created for such an occasion).
Tremors: In the TV adaptation, nearly every episode starts off with some random construction worker/tourist/passer by getting brutally killed by some monster.
In Ultraman Leo, defense team MAC is this. Whereas most Ultra Series maintain the members of defense teams introduced in the first episode for the entirety of the series, the MAC crew is pretty much nameless and mostly serves to get killed by the Monster of the Week. Instead, the series focus is placed almost entirely on Gen, Dan, and Tohru.
The Vampire Diaries: Introduces many characters only for them to be killed off by vampires. Often overlaps with Black Dude Dies First, especially in the case of the black boy introduced to Bonnie as a crush, who is promptly killed off.
Walking with Dinosaurs often has large, uninteresting herbivores who get eaten by the main predator of the episode in order to establish how dangerous it is.
, making his name a bit of a pun.