Times where The Elites Jump Ship — or attempt to, anyway — in Live-Action TV.
- The 100: The Mountain Men survivor group are descended from the American president and his cabinet, who fled there when a rogue AI -- one that they weren't responsible for creating -- set off the world's weapons and are an antagonistic faction as a whole (albeit with many sympathetic members).
- A major plot point in American Horror Story: Apocalypse. When it came to the nuclear war that would kill all but a tiny majority of the world's population, the extremely wealthy had rented out rooms for themselves in fallout shelters. Coco St. Pierre Vanderbilt's entire family had one (but her parents and brother weren't able to get to the flight in time), as did Oprah Winfrey expy Diana and her son. Coco also insists on her hairdresser and her personal assistant, Mallory (who are not elite) coming along because she is so sheltered that she can't do anything without them. However, zigzagged in that Coco, Mallory, and Diana are actually all witches, and their survival was to ensure they could find the Antichrist Michael Langdon and reverse time to stop him, so they weren't really jumping ship but were actually just trying to avert the crisis. However, Coco and Mallory weren't aware of this due to identity spells put on them.
- Subverted in The Ark (2023). With Earth falling apart, those launched into space appear to quite sensibly be people with the skills necessary to survive on a new world, though one could argue Cat is an edge case, being more of a celebrity influencer than an actual therapist. Played straight with William Trust (founder of the ark program) and his wife, who hid themselves on Ark 1 in stasis despite the public front that they stayed behind so that Trust could perfect FTL for the later arks.
- Blake's 7. In "Games", the Terran Federation has abandoned a colony after the planetary resources have all been mined, evacuating the essential personnel but leaving everyone else to die of starvation (though an industrial accident kills them off instead).
- Castle: Briefly Played for Laughs when one episode mentions that both the Victim of the Week (a lottery winner) and Castle have bought land on the moon, largely for the novelty. It never comes up again due to not being the kind of show where there is some society-destroying disaster.Castle: You know what, laugh it up. When the earth is a desiccated husk, you will be begging to come live with me in the Nectaris Basin.
- Defiance: In the backstory, the residents of the Votanis System discovered that a stellar collision would destroy their homeworlds in 500 years and used those 500 years to prepare for a massive Homeworld Evacuation, which still wasn't enough to save everyone. The selection process varied between the seven species, but some of this was in play. The Indogenes stoically sent their best and brightest scientists while leaving behind the less intelligent, while the Castithans played this trope completely straight, with almost all of their refugees being the people with status and/or money.
- Datak Tarr is a lower-caste Castithan who won a ticket gambling and is a crime boss on Earth.
- Doctor Who. In "Orphan 55", we're told this happens a lot in humanity's history. Once a planet has been devastated by war or ecological destruction, those who can afford it leave and abandon those who can't to die on what's then called an orphan planet. What really shocks the Doctor and her companions is that Orphan 55 isn't just another alien planet that now looks like a BBC Quarry, but Earth All Along.
- In the Elementary episode "Ready Or Not", Sherlock and Joan investigate the death of a doomsday prepper and discover a luxury bunker, prepared to receive the rich who have paid to reserve a space there when everything collapses. The bunker is a fake; it's all just a con trick to extract money from wealthy paranoids. Sherlock pours scorn on prepping in general and wealthy preppers in particular.Sherlock: Along with the myriad doomsday scenarios that haunt ordinary preppers - global pandemic, nuclear holocaust, socialist zombies coming to eat their guns - the wealthy ones also worry that the poor are going to rise up with torches and pitchforks. Which, one could argue, wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
- The Season Two finale of Foyle's War, "The Funk Hole", takes its name from the rural hotels and guest houses during World War II which allowed wealthy civilians to stay in them for extended periods, since they preferred not to risk German bombs in London (or to shelter with the common folk in the Underground during air raids). Just such a guest house near Hastings is the primary crime scene.Samantha Stewart: Friendly lot, aren't they?
Det. Sgt. Milner: Just get me out of here, Sam.
Sam: Gladly. - Jeremiah: Raven Rock Bunker contains the leaders of the government, who hid there during the plague (caused by their malfunctioning bioweapon) that killed anyone who'd reached puberty and want to re-establish domain over what's left.
- Kingdom (2019): In literal terms, they invert this trope by getting on a ship to escape the zombie hordes. Of course, one elderly noble smuggles her zombified son's body on board, and everyone on the ship gets a Karmic Death.
- In the Leverage episode "The Three Days Of The Hunter Job" this trope is invoked as part of a con job in order to discredit sleazy reporter Monica Hunter. The Crew tricks Hunter into believing that the world's water supply has been poisoned and that this trope is in play as the political elite of America are planning to ride it out in bunkers with self-sustaining water supplies. One scene has Hunter trying to get in on it by telling a military official who she thinks is in on the scheme that a public figure like her could help comfort the people if they let her inside the (nonexistent) bunkers.
- Loki (2021): In the episode "Lamentis", Loki and Sylvie end up on the titular planet, which is about to be destroyed by colliding with its moon. Trying to escape, they learn that the world's wealthy are gathering on an ark ship to flee to safety offworld, leaving everyone else behind to die; Loki expresses clear disgust at this. Unfortunately for the upper-classes, the Ark is destroyed by one of the meteors.
- Tragically presented in The Outer Limits (1995) episode "The Human Factor", where the Sole Survivor of the first-ever colony on Ganymede receives a message from Earth that World War III broke out, and nukes have wiped out a lot of the planet (including the survivor's family). A shuttle carrying the President and other officials is heading for Ganymede and will arrive in a few months. In despair, the survivor re-rigs the place to explode before they arrive.
- Just like in the movie, Snowpiercer depicts the rich of the world buying their way onto the titular ark train in order to survive the artificially-induced new Ice Age. They live in comfort, while the poorer passengers who managed to earn tickets do all the menial labor, and the poor who didn't get tickets but managed to break onto the train as it departed are kept locked up in the tail cabins like cattle. The fourth episode also mentions that most of the super-rich who didn't get on the train chose to retreat to bunkers or try to upload their consciousness into computers.
- Attempted in the TV-movie Threads. Sheffield town council evacuate themselves to a fully-stocked bunker as soon as the alarm goes off (although the fact that they don't bring their families and try to coordinate with the outside indicates it is a genuine attempt at continuity of government). This in fact just shows how completely unprepared they are, because while they mostly survive the initial blast, they are trapped in a shelter with limited food and water, all their orders are useless, and they're eventually found dead a few weeks later anyway.
- Done again in The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Quarantine", a man named Matthew Forman cryogenically frozen during the early 21st Century due to a terminal illness is revived 300 years later by Perfect Pacifist People with Psychic Powers living in an Arcadia based on an agrarian lifestyle supplemented by Organic Technology. They need his help, supposedly to reactivate orbital particle beam cannons from his time to deflect an incoming asteroid. Questioning their motives, he discovers that they are an After the End society, a mere 200,000 people descended from survivors of World War III. The "asteroid" is actually a U.S. spacecraft loaded with elite politicians and military personnel that fled Earth just as the war began in a bid to survive by using a relativistic orbit that would take advantage of Time Dilation to return them to Earth and take over once the aftereffects of the war had passed. Turns out the future people want Matt to destroy the spacecraft so human warfare will not return to Earth.
- The Walking Dead (2010): When a horde of variant walkers manage to get over the Commonwealth's walls, Governor Milton retreats to the gated community inhabited by herself and her elite allies, ordering the Commonwealth army to abandon the rest of the city and solely defend that area. In fact, she orders that the horde be redirected towards the poorer districts, and also that anyone trying to take refuge inside the gates be shot on sight. This eventually causes her soldiers to turn on her in favor of Mercer's mutiny and arrest her, before working with Mercer and the Coalition to abandon the gated community, lure the horde in, and then blow it all up.
- The West Wing: Referenced in an early episode where Josh (the deputy Chief of Staff to the President) is told that he's on the list of people to be evacuated to a bunker in the event of nuclear war and agonizes over how people like his secretary and officemates wouldn't be evacuated with him and the other top cabinet members, causing him to say that if there ever is a catastrophe he doesn't want to be included in the evacuation plan.
- Z Nation: The beginning of Season 4 features a Crapsaccharine World called ZONA that the richest people in the world fled to during the Zombie Apocalypse. They are willing to sacrifice everyone else left in the world to preserve their own survival and prosperity.
