Older Than They Look/Live-Action TV

Examples of characters that are Older Than They Look in Live-Action TV include:

• An episode of Law and Order Special Victims Unit features a girl named Janie Spear with Turner's Syndrome, so even though she is seventeen years old, physically, she looks like a 12-year old child. The episode focuses on her relationship with a 30-year old employee of her father's; since she's seventeen it isn't statutory rape, but none of the detectives are comfortable with what this says about her boyfriend's taste in girls.
  • And in another episode, a girl in her late to mid-twenties not only poses as a 16-year old, but is under the delusion that she is, despite having a complete memory of all the years she has spent going from one foster home to another and creating false identities. Based in the real case of Treva Thornberry.
  • In another episode, there was a young rookie cop who took down a suspected rapist until it was found out that the cop was really a 16-year old wannabe.
• An episode of Law and Order revolves around a teenager who is arrested for the murder of one of her teachers, followed up by another teacher arrested for sleeping with her. In actuality the "teen" is a con-artist who is in her thirties, and killed the teacher to prevent her from revealing her real age.
  • A very similar plot forms one episode of Psych.
• In one episode of CSI New York, there is a subplot where one of the suspects was actually raped by a fellow "student" who was really a wanted sex offender. Compare to the examples above.
• The 1980s hit 21 Jump Street was entirely based around the premise of cops who looked young enough that they could go undercover as high school students.
• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Rascals", Keiko O'Brien is temporarily turned into an adorable 12-year old. The fact that she still wants to be treated like a wife squicks Miles out a bit. Three other crewmembers - Picard, Guinan, and Ro - are similarly altered, but none of them are in relationships at the time, though they all happily exploited this trope to retake the ship from a hostile Ferengi takeover.
  • The O'Briens seem to get more than their fair share of this trope. There's another Deep Space 9 episode, "Hard Time", where an alien race sentences O'Brien to a 21-years-long virtual prison sentence. He experiences all 21 years of his brutal, tortuous prison term in only a few days, making him mentally 21 years older; 21 really, really crappy years older. And even their daughter gets a Overnight Age-Up treatment due to a Negative Space Wedgie.
• In Firefly, Malcolm Reynolds looks like he is, at most, in his mid-thirties. However, a comparison of the dates of his birth and the dates of the "present" indicates he is in his late forties to early fifties, which is supported by Mal referring to himself as a "mean old man." This can be justified by the advanced medical technology of the setting, however, or perhaps by Joss Whedon originally envisoning the character as being played by an older actor.]
  • The screenshot that gives us Mal's year of birth might well be a mistake caused by a goof switcharound of the last two digits of his year of birth from 2486 to 2468, which means he ends up eighteen years older than he looks. This makes sense considering everyone else on the show, including Mal's second-in-command, Zoe (whom he is closest to) seems to be aging at relatively normal human rates.
    • Also Mal, as someone who wasn't brought up or living near the Core planets, probably wouldn't have access to advanced anti-aging technology - which points at there being a goof somewhere along the way.
• Jesse Travis of Diagnosis: Murder got this on occasion. How gracefully he reacted depended on how snotty the other person acted.
• Nearly all the regular vampire characters in Buffy and Angel are a century or more old but look the same age as when they became vampires. This trope applies to vampires in general, really, though very few in the Buffyverse seem to make it past their first hundred years without getting staked.
• In the future dystopia of Dollhouse, "Iris" seems to be a 10-year old girl but actually has the imprinted mind of a grown woman—first a woman who pretends to be a girl before pulling a gun on Zone, and later Caroline, whom Zone and Mag upload into the girl to find the way to Safe Haven to avoid the mass mindwiping that has thrown civilization into chaos.
• Babylon 5 novels reveal that Alfred Bester is in his seventies by the time we first see him.
• In 30 Rock, it's implied that head page Kenneth is lots older than his callow youthful appearance would suggest.

Tracy: Ken, you don't want to be a page forever?
Kenneth: (alarmed) Who said I've been alive forever?

• During Degrassi's first Big Damn Movie, while Paige is living up the diva socialite lifestyle, she has herself an 18th birthday party. Which could be chalked up as Blatant Lies. The actress is in her mid twenties and the character is in her early twenties. It also can be counted as a casual jab at Dawson Casting.
  • Clare's schoolgirl attire and hairstyle does a good job of dropping her apparent age from 14 to a tween. Probably as a means to play up her innocence. Her pink outfit in Causing a Commotion has a similar effect, as this before her wardrobe upgrade.
• An episode of Glee had one character stating that Kurt (who was about 16 at the time) couldn't have purchased alcohol with a fake i.d. because he looked "like a 12-year old milkmaid." She's exaggerating, but not by much. Chris Colfer himself was 19 at the time of filming.
• In the original performance of Cinderella, 30-yearold Edie Adams portrayed the centuries-old Fairy Godmother.
• Omar on The Wire: Carries a sawed-off shotgun, dresses in a Badass Longcoat with an impressive physique underneath, makes a living through professional armed robbery of drug dealers, escapes from several deadly firefights like a damned ghost in the night, and is an overall smooth operator. Looks to be in his mid 30s, but a card on his body bag reveals he was 48 years old at the time. The actor playing Omar is actually not much younger than the character.
• Used in Lost in Oz as a plot point. Princess Ozma is said to be in her 20s, but was enchanted to be an 8-year old forever.
• Juken Sentai Gekiranger's Gou Fukami looks like he is in his mid to late 20s, but in flashbacks to his brother's childhood looks exactly the same age as he does now, and dialogue implies that he is or should be around the age of the 40-something Miki. It can possibly be implied that he stopped aging physically after turning into a werewolf.
  • A similar example is Masato Jin in Tokumei Sentai Gobusters, who spent 13 years in the subspace and didn't age during that time.
• In one episode of Boy Meets World when Eric goes to Hollywood to work on a sitcom he meets an actress who plays a little girl on the show but is actually 42 years old. She then hits on him by grabbing his ass.
• In one episode of Smallville, Lana Lang is haunted by the ghost of a childhood friend, Emily. Emily was stated to be 10 years old, but she looks and acts much younger, with handwriting that looks more like a 2nd grader and interests and speech patterns more typical of a 4 or 5 year old. In flashbacks, Lana appears to have been an improbably immature 10 year old as well, since she didn't act very differently from Emily.
• One of the Running Gags in Mr. Young points to how old Mrs. Byrne is. It's suggested that she is older than time itself for she remembers when the sun was born (which was The Big Bang) and survived two crusades. Unfortunately she randomly forgets anything and uses old contraptions that are useless, the only lesson she ever teaches is The War of 1812 and she repeats it because of her amnesia.

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