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The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You / Live-Action TV

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  • In the Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode "The Tale of the Midnight Madness", the vampire escapes the movie and haunts the protagonists in the "real" world.
  • The Basil Brush Show featured a narrator known as the Voice Over Man in the first few seasons. He would frequently interact with characters, and annoy them by breaking tension or interrupting conversations. He was also shown to be able to move around in the episode 'Big Bother', in which Stephen's flat becomes the set of reality show-within-a-show Big Bother (a shameless parody of Big Brother). When the show becomes long and boring, the Voice over man is heard narrating a cafe scene, and is asked by the characters why he isn't still in the Big Bother house with Stephen and Basil, who have been there for weeks, to which he responds, "Oh, I left that place ages ago!"
  • In the end of the Halloween Episode of The Chica Show, Chica's dad turns around shouting "RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! A GIANT PUMPKIN!!! at the camera while having a terrible Freak Out.
  • The main gimmick of the CW series Cult, about a CW series named Cult which is not quite as fictional as it appears.
  • In the 1970s TV show Dawson's Electric Cinema, the audience at the cinema in question are watching a silent film culminating in an all-out pie fight, when the principal character on the screen becomes aware of their laughter and throws his pie out of the film into the auditorium, hitting several cinemagoers. The pie fight rapidly escalates to encompass the entire audience.
  • Doctor Who:
    • "Blink" ends with the Weeping Angels having been defeated and everything back to normal... except then there's a creepy montage of statues, implying that every single one of them is out to get you. Even more fourth-wall breaking is that the angels which can only move when no humans can see them never move when the viewer can see them, even if no on-screen characters are looking... until one of those characters passes between them and the camera.
      • Taken to epically scary levels in "The Time of Angels", when it's revealed that Angels can project themselves through pictures of themselves.
      • Doctor Who Live at the Wembley Arena exaggerated this by seeming to interrupt the show for a police team "investigating an emergency". That provides the distraction needed for the JumboTron image of an Angel to become, itself, an Angel. Two, actually, which then proceed (with the aid of some well-timed pyrotechnics) to do in the cops. Fiction it may be, but it's brilliantly done, and in such a way that it's spectacularly scary.
    • The Master pulls an In-Universe version of this trope in "The Sound of Drums" to make sure the Doctor knows he's always watching.
      The Master: Tomorrow we take our place in the universe. Every man, woman and child. Every teacher and chemist and lorry driver and farmer. I dunno, every [looks directly at camera] ... medical student?
      [The Doctor, Martha and Jack look shocked; the Doctor looks behind the TV and finds an Incredibly Obvious Bomb]
    • "Journey's End": Davros' Reality Bomb, which will destroy "every universe", literally every single thing in all of reality, excluding the Daleks. Hey, don't we live within a universe somewhere? Good thing the Doctor got there in time.
    • "The Impossible Astronaut" introduces an enemy called the Silence. Every time you lose sight of one, you forget it was ever there. Now whilst the next episode "Day of the Moon" shows the Doctor providing us with a defense to defeat them ourselves, some may have escaped. And now you will always be looking around you. Except you won't, because you won't be aware of their existence.
    • "Sleep No More", done in the style of a found-footage film, somehow manages to top this. The Doctor and his allies spend the entire episode fighting against the Sandmen, monsters created from those exposed to the Morpheus signal. However, the end of the episode has the villain reveal that he encoded the signal into the episode itself, and that by watching it, the viewer is now infected.
  • The BBC production Ghostwatch. The implication is that the program was acting as a national séance and that watching it has let the ghost loose in your home.
  • The Goodies. Towards the end of "The Movies", there's a series of visual gags involving the Goodies attacking each other from the cinema screen. Which turns out to be a movie on a cinema screen being watched by another member of the Goodies, enabling the gag to be repeated with them.
  • Played for laughs in The Kids in the Hall: a best-selling book's entire text is "There's a spider on your back!".
  • In one of the carpool karaoke segments from The Late Late Show featuring Ariana Grande and Seth MacFarlane, the two sing "Suddenly Seymour" from Little Shop of Horrors complete with a gradually growing Audrey II in the backseat. When they finish the song, Twoey LUNGES at the camera and takes a chomp out of it.
  • In one episode of Season 3 of FX's Legion (2017), mucking around with the timestream unleashes Clock Roaches that bedevil the cast by screwing with their timelines. At one point, the series comes back from commercial break to briefly show footage from The Shield — one of FX's first primetime dramas — before cutting back to the main action.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe
    • A huge chunk of the horror in WandaVision comes from how the series turns the very medium of television into the means of conveying it. Everything from bad jump cuts to interview segments is twisted and corrupted until the viewer is as uneasy as the people of Westview themselves.
    • A rare inversion occurs in the fifth episode, as SWORD manages to send a first generation drone from the 1980s into the 80s setting of the in-universe WandaVision show. It appears briefly in the shownote  before a pissed-off Wanda cuts the signal and confronts SWORD directly.
    • Played straight in the season finale of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law when Jen becomes visibly confused at where the writing in her show went for the last episode and decides to break out of the Disney+ menu screen and go directly into a behind the scenes showcase where she breaks into the Marvel Studios and has a showdown with the AI behind all it's decisions named, of course, K.E.V.I.N., to get things done her way.
  • The Masters of Horror episode "Cigarette Burns". When La Fin Absolue du Monde is shown at the end, Kirby's dead girlfriend Annie emerges from the screen covered in blood and hungry for human flesh. Subverted when it turns out to be another hallucination.
  • An in-universe example occurs on the Sketch Comedy No Soap, Radio. One episode opens with a commercial for "Raisin Flakes" cereal, where a hand reaches out of the box, grabs the eater, and drags him into the box. Cut to the protagonist watching the commercial while reaching into a box of "Raisin Flakes", whereupon he pulls out the slipper of the just-captured victim...
  • Heroic example in Power Rangers Samurai's "Trickster Treat". Trickster has trapped the Rangers in a Dream Within a Dream TV Land and is watching on a movie screen. But in the outer dream, the Rangers figure it out, and the Claw Armor Megazord's finisher not only hits the dream projection of Trickster but also comes out of the screen and kills the real one. Hard enough to end both his lives, too.
  • On Discovery Kids' Channel, there was a show called Truth or Scare. One episode was about vampires, and the final few minutes were devoted to the story of Dracula. The host, Michelle Trachtenberg, mentions it's a bit odd that a simple bowie-knife killed Dracula, and perhaps he was meant to come back. She then suddenly stares directly at the camera, leaning forward with a creepy look on her face, and monotones "Harker, You Fool!..."
  • Apparently, Rod Serling isn't immune to this trope either. In the end of the episode "A World of His Own" in The Twilight Zone (1959), which featured a writer's dictation machine that would summon whatever had its description recorded and make it disappear when the corresponding tape was destroyed, Rod assured us that the episode was entirely fictional and stuff like that wouldn't happen, but the writer looks at him and says, "Rod, you shouldn't!" Then he takes out another envelope out of the safe, containing the film Rod was described on. Saying that "[Rod] shouldn't say such things as 'nonsense' and 'ridiculous,'" he tosses it into the fire. Rod says, "Well, that's the way it goes," and vanishes.
  • The X-Files gave first-time viewers of "War of the Coprophages" a unique Real Life Jump Scare: partway through the episode's story about menacing cockroaches, the life-sized image of one such insect moves through the foreground, as if a real roach just skittered across the TV screen.

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