Straw Man Has a Point/Live-Action TV

Examples of Straw Man Has a Point in Live-Action TV include:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

• The Knights of Byzantium in season 5 are pretty harsh: they plan on killing Buffy's younger sister, "The Key", to prevent a Hellgod from another dimension from using her to open a portal back to her dimension that would plunge this world into chaos. As hard as it is to blame Buffy for defending her sister and going against this, the fact remains that in doing so she is risking the fate of six billion people merely to try and save one person. What the Knights are trying to do may be cold-blooded murder but it is not the act of irrational fanatics—it is based on a very pragmatic system of logic. In fact, Buffy later comes to agree with that point of view after few years of Character Development, telling Giles in season 7 that if given the choice again she would sacrifice Dawn for the good of the world.
• The Social Worker from the episode "Gone". We're meant to hate her for making Buffy's life harder and cheer Buffy on when she's invisible and gets revenge, but really, Buffy's in no state to look after a teenage girl with issues, even if she is her sister, especially considering the way she handled that was by making the social worker look like she was insane to her boss. Way to make sure that other children are being looked after, Buffy.
  • Of course, this mostly means she got a taste of her own medicine (don't presume to judge, and all that), and the first point here kind of nukes the second - it's somewhat safer to keep the potential end-of-the-world before the eyes of people specializing in such problems rather than shuffled wherever an overconfident bureaucrat deems acceptable this week.
• A strange example where both sides fall into this trope revolves around Spike in season 7. Robin wanted to kill Spike as he considered him a threat to the group, but while he was primarily driven by revenge for Spike killing his mother and didn't consider that the person who killed her didn't actually exist anymore, the point remains that Spike had spent centuries being a mass-murdering monster and had just recently gone on another killing spree under the influence of the current Big Bad. Meanwhile, Buffy wanted to keep Spike alive because she considered him no longer dangerous to them and a valuable asset, but while she was clearly being influenced by her feelings for him and didn't actually have any guarantee whatsoever he was free from the control of the First, the point remains that the First had much worse at its disposal and they needed literally every advantage they could get against it.
• Xander is portrayed as a Strawman after the initial shock and dismay of Angel being back from hell has worn off on the Scoobies. The audience is supposed to feel that Xander is just being jealous and can't understand the love that Buffy and Angel share. Except that he is totally correct in that Angel is a huge threat, which he proved in the previous season when he lost his soul. Everyone eventually gets over the fact that they were tortured or attacked except for Xander and brings up that Buffy should slay or at the very least not be in contact with him several times over the next few episodes, for which Willow and Buffy admonish him. Buffy assures them that she is keeping things professional, but every time we see them they are making out. This wouldn't be a problem if she knew exactly how far she could go before he would lose his soul, but the terms of his curse are vague at best and it can be broken by other means.
  • In addition, Angel eventually comes to realize that he is jeopardizing the safety of all those around him because of his own personal desires trumping reason, and breaks up with Buffy and moves to L.A.. Where he informs his new support crew there that they have his specific permission to kill him in cold blood if that is necessary to prevent Angelus from returning and causing further harm. Even the franchise agreed with Xander here.
• Ironically, Buffy and Xander end up on the opposite side of the argument when it turns out that Anya, Xander's vengeance demon ex-fiance, is responsible for several deaths. Buffy instantly decides she's a danger and needs to be killed, Xander disagrees because... well, Anya's their friend and they're kind of used to them turning evil by now. In the end, Willow Takes a Third Option.
  • Although he did not think to make the argument, Xander also had a legitimate point for his side in that everyone involved in that argument -- including Buffy and himself -- had taken innocent human life at least once, making Buffy an even larger hypocrite. (Buffy is equally as guilty of the manslaughter of Deputy Mayor Finch as Faith is because she was not only Faith's accomplice for the entire fight but had specifically knocked Finch down to set him up for Faith's stake attack before realizing too late that he wasn't a vampire, and Xander likewise is guilty of manslaughter re: the casualties of the Sweet incident in season 6. And if we count attempted murders, Buffy's also guilty of trying to kill Faith in cold blood both during the Buffy season 3 finale and the first season of Angel.)

Doctor Who

• In the serial "The Invasion", aspiring glamor photographer Isobel suggests getting proof of the Cybermen's presence in the sewers by going down to take pictures. The Brigadier agrees, but intends to use his own men instead, on the basis that such a situation is no place for a lady. Isobel blows up at how backward and sexist he's being, but the Brig refuses, and both girls gang up on Jamie for agreeing with him (despite the fact he's from the 18th century and has a legitimate excuse for being old fashioned) and both she and Zoe walk away in a huff to get the pics themselves with Jamie worriedly tagging along, which ends up getting a police officer and one of the UNIT troops sent to rescue them killed. While it could easily be argued that the Brig was in the wrong to assume they couldn't handle themselves for being women, it might have been better to let trained and experienced soldiers do the dangerous work, and neither of the girls are called out for their reckless actions getting two men killed.
• The Tenth Doctor is terrible with this, as he is The Hero and therefore Always Right, but his thought processes are... a bit suspect at times, the worst examples being in the episodes "The Christmas Invasion" and "Journey's End". In the former, the Doctor forces the Sycorax to retreat from Earth, until Harriet Jones orders their destruction with captured alien technology, and the Doctor is furious, berating Jones for attacking someone that was retreating while Jones replies that she was acting in self-defense, quite reasonable considering the Sycorax intended to kill hundreds of millions of people and demonstrated that they could easily not honour their promise not to return, with the Doctor winning because... somehow. In the latter, the Doctor's half-human clone (long story) kills the Daleks, a literally Exclusively Evil species with no redeeming characteristics - deliberately engineered to be that way, and proud of it! - yet the Doctor berates him for genocide and dumps him in an Alternate Universe because... because.
  • In the Sycorax example, the Doctor is entirely correct when he points out that killing people immediately after agreeing to a truce with them is a very bad idea in addition to being unethical, and that furthermore Prime Minister Jones has a bit of gall in criticizing exactly how the Doctor chose to handle the situation immediately after having openly begged for the Doctor to come in and handle the situation for her, because she didn't know what to do. Where the Doctor then fails is how he chooses to respond to this provocation.
• The Eleventh Doctor seems to have finally snapped out of this "holier than thou" phase, not shying away from properly punishing those who are an active menace.

Glee

• Kurt relentlessly pursues Finn, knowing full well that Finn is straight. He orchestrates their parents into getting together to get closer to Finn. When they move in together, they end up sharing a room. Kurt redecorates it romantically and Finn, fed up with Kurt's advances, gets angry and ends up using the word "fag." Kurt's father Burt hears that and throws Finn out of the house for it. While it's obvious Finn should not have used that word, Kurt's behavior bordered on sexual harassment. While the writers intended the scene to make Finn the wrong one, over the hiatus, they heard fans' reactions to the scene and in season two wrote in a scene where Burt calls Kurt out for it, telling him that if Finn pursued a girl that way he would, indeed, be called out for sexual harassment.
• Bryan Ryan, a guest character played by Neil Patrick Harris, is an ex-glee-clubber who goes on a crusade against school arts programs out of his own frustration that his singing and acting career didn't exactly pan out. While the point is lost in how far he takes it - basically encouraging kids to give up on their dreams - he's not wrong that most of them will not end up in Broadway or Hollywood and that they should have back-up plans. The show doesn't help by having background characters like Tina be the ones to argue for their arts dreams.
• Upon his return, Jesse St. James is painted as a massive Jerkass for pointing out things like being talented isn't an excuse not to practice and rehearse. More than a few people in fandom agreed, and some even went so far as to say they were hoping New Directions didn't win at Nationals, since the fact that they weren't preparing any songs, weren't prepared to practice, and really didn't care showed they didn't deserve to win that year, and agreed with the decision in the finale.
• In another episode, Will wants Emma to embrace that she has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder by wearing it printed on a tee shirt in front of the club. She chickens out and instead says her flaw is that she is a ginger. When Will confronts her, she says that she did not confess she has a serious mental disorder because as a staff member, it is highly inappropriate to talk about such things with students. And while she does later admit that that was just an excuse and goes out in the ending number with a shirt reading OCD, she was initially quite right that her personal psychiatric health is not a subject she should discuss with her students.

Law and Order franchise

• Law and Order:
  • Prejudice had a double-version; a lawyer for a guy who killed a Black man based the Insanity Defense on his client's racism being so strong that he had to be insane. Except when the defendant gets on the stand to rant against Blacks, his complaints weren't the rants of an insane nutcase; rather, he made nuisance complaints about talking during movies and other stereotypical differences between Whites and Blacks that numerous Black comedians have pointed out as part of their routines. He only "had a point" inasmuch as whomever he was presumably plagiarizing and the sensibility of his arguments undercut his defense as well; he was supposed to be an irrational madman but he came across as a guy who watched too many Chris Rock films.
  • Serena Southerlyn was an in-universe version; anytime a defendant had a liberal-leaning defense, she'd jump to their side (i.e. a homeless man claims homelessness made him kill, she'd go "You don't think his lawyer has a point about homelessness being a problem?" She oscillated between just playing the Devil's Advocate and outright missing the point that, in this case, not everyone who is homeless goes off and murders someone.
• Law and Order SVU:
  • For example, there's an episode where a boy has raped a celebrity, allegedly due to the influence of listening to and idolizing a radio shock jock. The shock jock is portrayed as a complete asshole who cares more about freedom of speech than his point—at one point, he refuses to testify that the perpetrator admitted he'd raped the girl while he was on his show. Of course, the only reason that he even has to testify to this fact is because the censors took his show off the air in mid-broadcast, before the boy made the confession. Meaning if not for the rampant desire to censor him (Which the protagonists of the show shared) there would be a taped, nationally broadcast confession. He is a complete asshole, but he does have a good point.
    • ... wouldn't there still be a tape of it anyway, even if the broadcast feed was pulled? For that matter, wouldn't everybody else in the studio, such as the broadcast engineer, have also heard the confession? Great, Anvilicious and poorly written.
  • SVU also has plenty of in-universe invocations where the validity of the criminal's ridiculous excuse-du-jour (alcoholism, porn, etc.) gets debated with the members of SVU stopping what they're doing for a minute or two to turn the squad room into an Internet forum of sorts, talking about the issue at hand. Munch was usually the guy in the defendant's corner, and could be counted on to work the issue into one of his various anti-government/anti-corporation rants.
  • Benson is effectively Munch's misandrist foil, often turning her back on an argument if it implies that a man did not rape someone he is accused of raping despite a lack of evidence or motive. One particularly egregious example is an episode where a man's DNA is found in a dead victim (but with no visible sign of sexual trauma). She says his DNA will tell everything. This is fairly shocking considering two episodes earlier she was framed for murder with a technique that removes DNA from blood samples and replaces it with someone else's. "Looks like your free ride's over." No. No it's not.
  • One episode had the detectives interrogating a man whom they suspected of raping a disabled woman. The man insists that the sex was consensual. When the detectives scoff at this, the man chides them for assuming that just because someone is in a wheelchair, he/she is incapable of sexual desires or feelings. While his point is undermined by the fact that he's guilty, it's a valid point just the same.
  • Another episode has a woman allegedly raped by her policeman husband. While the squad is very clear that, uniform or no uniform, rape is rape, the marital-rape issues cause more squad-room debate. At the end, when the case has devolved into he-said-she-said and the defendant (who waived a jury trial) has been acquitted, Benson complains that this means that a woman claiming her husband raped her had better be battered too. Well, maybe not battered, but-since one's mate's DNA in/on one's person is hardly evidence of rape-yeah, some physical evidence would be helpful.
  • One episode has a boy who has a psychotic episode and shoots two of his classmates, and so the SVU team blames the pharmaceutical company that produced the pills he was on at the time. When confronted, the representative from the company makes some very valid points: the medication was sent only to people who had already been prescribed it previously, it was sent completely free of charge, the instructions were very clear that it wasn't meant to be taken by children, and it was prescribed to the boy's mother and not the boy himself. The fact that the boy's school demanded he be medicated or he would be expelled doesn't matter. The fact that the mother's HMO refused to cover regular therapy (with a doctor who didn't think the boy needed to be medicated at all) doesn't matter. The fact that the boy's mother, who gave him the pills without reading the instructions or consulting a doctor, continued giving them to him after he developed severe insomnia and paranoid schizophrenia doesn't matter. All that matters is that Big Pharm is bad, and that's why the CEO is arrested. Granted, the CEO was morally shady (he had pills sent directly to patients through doctors' lists) and he's not charged with murder - only for reckless endangerment and misuse of the mail - but the audience is still expected to think of him as directly, morally culpable for the killings. For extra fun, consider that the doctor who gave his patient list to the pharmaceutical company did it specifically so that his patients could get, free of charge, the medications they needed but couldn't afford!

Star Trek franchise

• Star Trek: Voyager:
  • A great many episodes have situations in which they have an opportunity to do something that would be very advantageous for the crew, only to have Captain Janeway refuse for reasons typically related to the Prime Directive. Some character inevitably complains about her decision and points out that her moral arguments for why they can't take advantage of the opportunity don't actually make any sense, but they're always portrayed as being wrong, while Janeway is right.
    • Note that this situation is not nearly as common as Memetic Mutation from the Janeway Hate Dumb makes it sound like. "Voyager could get home" plots really aren't all that common anyway, and when they do come around there's usually a more blatant moral conundrum than the Prime Directive. (Of course, considering that the Hate Dumb has variously demanded that Janeway use sentient beings as fuel or prostitute herself and give up the resulting child in order to get her crew home or else be declared a Complete Monster...)
  • In "Prime Factors" the crew discover an alien race with the technology to cut 40,000 light years from their journey. They have a strict policy of not trading technology with outsiders, which Janeway decides to obey. When a few crewmen do the trade behind her back and attempt to understand the technology, it proves to be completely incompatible with their systems and nearly destroys their ship. They were treated as being wrong for going behind Janeway's back, but if it worked they would be home the next day.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • Back when the Federation forcibly relocating a people was considered a bad thing, Picard had to relocate some people descended from Native Americans from a planet that was about to become Cardassian property. The problem for the aesop was that they were trying to do this for the colonists' own protection... and not in some thinly-veiled excuse, as the episode tried to imply by historical comparison, but because the Cardassians were brutal to the inhabitants of planets they occupy. Leaving the colonists on the planet would basically be selling Federation citizens into slavery or leaving them all to be killed, which would not only be bad in itself but also possibly shatter the fragile peace the border redraw had been done to maintain. In this case, historical bad taste or no, the relocation (forced or not) was in fact for their own good. The Federation citizens in question opted to join the Cardassians so they wouldn't have to relocate, but had acknowledged the dangers involved.
    • Events in DS9 would support the Federation case, as colonists who remained in Cardassian space were brutally oppressed by the Cardassians, causing them to form the Maquis resistance. Eventually, when the Cardassians allied with the Dominion, the colonists would be massacred by the Jem'Hadar.
  • "I, Borg" has the crew find a living borg drone and seek to understand a way to use it to implant a self-destructive signal to destroy the entire collective. While everyone was on board at first, they grow attached to studying it and it eventually develops a personality, creating a new individual calling himself Hugh. Starting with Geordi and Crusher, the rest of the crew decide their plan to use it as a living weapon was immoral and the holdouts, Picard and Guinan (who have more personal issues with the Borg) are portrayed as allowing irrational feelings to cloud their moral judgement. Eventually they agree in the independence of the drone and let it return to the collective peacefully. Although the events are later continued in "Descent" Picard admits the moral decision may not have been the correct decision in the long run.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The official guidebook to the series refers to editor Donald Pabst as the villain of the episode "Far Beyond the Stars" because of his reluctance to publish Benny Russell's stories about a black space captain on the grounds they would be considered controversial. This ignores the fact that Pabst was actually pretty progressive, employing Benny, a black man in 1950s Manhattan, as a writer at a time when most employers wouldn't have offered him anything higher than a janitor, and that, when he compromises and agrees to the story being rewritten as a black boy's dream of the future rather than objective reality, he is proven completely right and the publishers pulp the issue and fire Benny. Apparently Pabst should have stood up to the publisher, even though doing so would likely have cost him his job and made no difference to Benny's situation.
  • Even the characters that aren't willing to shout down Pabst angrily are essentially shamed, treated as if they're spineless jerks who don't really care about Benny. This is an unfortunate trait of any media dealing retroactively with racial issues... any character who doesn't hold a thoroughly modern (read: "enlightened") view on race is often treated as if they were little better than a raving Klan member, as opposed to simply accepting the way the world currently works even if they don't necessarily like it.

Other shows

• Stevie from Wizards of Waverly Place. Her grand and "evil" plan is to overload some whatchabajigger and allow all wizards to keep their magical powers (as opposed to losing them if they lose a competition. Said competition is between siblings, almost invariably breaking families apart.) While she she may be rather extreme in her measures, she made a good point. But Alex and co. ignore her and proceed to kill her accidentally.
• Stargate Atlantis:
  • Bates, Kavanaugh, and Ellis usually have legitimate concerns or complaints, but because these are against the main cast of characters (Bates seeing Teyla as a security risk, Kavanaugh complaining to Weir about Weir degrading him in public, Ellis wanting McKay to cut the exposition and get to the point), the characters are presented as reactionary jerkasses. There is also a trend of portraying Kavanaugh, in his few appearances, as a coward even though every time he is up against a situation in which his fear is perfectly understandable.
  • There's also Senator Kinsey in Stargate SG-1. While his character very quickly evolves into a Jerkass, the episode that introduced him had him find out about the Stargate program and shut it down. Why? Because it's a big drain on the defense budget with few or no returns. At that point in the show, the main method of interplanetary travel is via the stargate, so shutting it down and burying it seems like a good enough plan to prevent further alien incursions. Yes, Kinsey is unaware that the Goa'uld are fully capable of reaching Earth in starships (with a single Ha'tak enough to suppress all Earth resistance), and Daniel's story of parallel dimensions doesn't even sound believable to his own teammates. Incidentally, SG-1 turns out to be right. Earth barely survives the attack, and the team is hailed as heroes, while Kinsey is forced to back off. Later on, he Jumps Off The Slippery Slope, losing any likability. Additionally, later on, the program does indeed start paying for itself (figuratively speaking).
• NCIS:
  • Why is Abby right about her colleague's familial relationships? Because... well. Why is she right when she decides they should all reconcile with their fathers? Understandable with Gibbs, since it's just old resentments, sort of understandable with Tony considering that his father really does care about him behind the dismissiveness and manipulativeness. Not even a little bit understandable with Ziva, whose father left her to be tortured to death, without going to help or diverting a single piece of his considerable resources towards helping her. Though he had no problem trying to get her arrested for murder afterwards, even though she was innocent. Yes, Abby? Why should Ziva try to fix their relationship? Yes? WHY?
  • Abby has another one in the episode Dog Tags, where a "drug sniffing" dog is believed to have killed his handler. The same dog attacks and hurts McGee in the beginning of the episode, yet he's treated like crap for not trusting the dog that attacked him. Not only that, the evidence throughout most of the episode points to the dog as the killer, so McGee has even more reason not to trust the dog. What's Abby's counter-argument? Animals Are Innocent and dogs are man's best friend. And yes, she really does use the "dogs are man's best friend" line as a reason why the dog should be trusted. Of course, Abby forces McGee to take care of an animal that he not only clearly dislikes, but also attacked him. And then she yells at him for having shot the dog when it was trying to kill him. A German Shepherd is attempting to maul him and he was supposed to... what? Pet it?
  • In general Abby was just a Lisa Simpson level Creator's Pet so a good number of strawmen trying to argue with her "quirky" high-handed moralizing tended to wind up having points just by dint of using basic reasoning rather than her childlike worldview.
• Fan-hated Sam Bosco on The Mentalist actually has a pretty good point when he says Jane has damaged the team by persuading them to resort to illegal tactics repeatedly in the pursuit of justice. Once, when Rigsby and Cho are trying to convince him to let Jane off for bugging his office, he asks in return if they'd be willing to do borderline illegal things for him in return. When their immediate answer is yes, he reveals that it was a Secret Test of Character which they absolutely failed since as cops they shouldn't be so willing to break the law. He's absolutely right.
• 24:
  • On at least one occasion, the audience is supposed to support Jack in his hatred of the 'wishy washy liberal human rights lawyer' who (quite correctly) calls Jack on his tendency to illegally hold people with no firm evidence and then torture them into giving him information. In Season 4, Jack even yells "How can you sleep at night!" at a human rights lawyer brought in to defend one of Jack's prisoners who has every right to have an attorney. Season 7 attempts to address this tendency with a few scenes of introspection but ultimately still cheers Jack on as he runs around shooting and kidnapping people. Jack has had torture fail before, and at least on one occasion tortured someone who really didn't know anything, but the writers didn't do more more than have Jack angst instead of showing real consequences of using torture that have been around since Medieval Europe—not that it can make people tell you the truth, but that it can make people tell you anything you want, even if they're not actually guilty of anything.
  • In Season 5, Lynn McGill is portrayed as being mentally unstable for accusing almost every single member of CTU of conspiring against him. However, since many of them, from Buchanan down is seen to be conspiring against McGill, or at least keeping vital information from him, he does have something of a point.
• All in The Family regularly used Archie as a comic foil to promote Mike and Gloria's liberal views. However, watched across the gap of almost four decades, Mike and Gloria can sound dreadfully naive, while Archie, notwithstanding the small-minded bigot that he was, actually scores a good number of points off them. This was entirely deliberate on the part of both the writers and Carroll O'Connor, the actor who played Archie. O'Connor was an old-school socialist (he was much further to the left than even Mike) but he disliked naive, idealistic "limousine liberals" (known as "latte liberals" today) almost as much as he loathed conservatives, whom he regarded as selfish, amoral, and manipulative. His Archie was meant to be a victim, not a strawman of any kind. O'Connor played him as an example of how in his opinion conservatism deliberately and callously abused the working classes, leaving them uneducated, barely literate, bitter, angry, and self-destructive - but still willing to vote against their own interests because they've been convinced that the other side is immoral and treasonous.
• On The Daily Show:
  • March 18, 2010 episode, while making fun of Glenn Beck making fun of progressives, Jon Stewart Lampshades this when he says "Hmm... Strawman-Slippery-Slope-Dumb-Guy might have a point." Does Jon read TV Tropes?
  • A rather unfortunate real life example of this involved The Daily Show in 2009. Comic Jason Jones went to Iran and recorded a parody news segment, posing as a stereotypical "ignorant American" convinced that Iran was a tyrannical and evil country. He interviewed Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari, who calmly explained that simply wasn't true. The next day, Bahari was arrested by the Iranian government, imprisoned for six months, beaten, and forced to sign a confession that he was a spy.
• Speaking of faux-news programs on Comedy Central, the humour of The Colbert Report is primarily based on this trope - Colbert plays the role of a Straw Conservative pundit who unwittingly argues the progressive side, and as such tends to really nail home out there arguments when interviewing a guest. Sometimes, however, he'll end up making a really good point if the person he's interviewing isn't fully prepared. Most famously on display during the White House Correspondents' Dinner speech, where Colbert, in character, suggests that the President's dissatisfaction rating is based in 'reality', but it's okay because reality 'has a liberal bias'. Sometimes the strawman Colbert does make sense, leading some to think he's intended as a parody of the left and their strawmen, not the right.
• In True Blood:
  • The struggle of the vampires to "come out of the coffin" and fight for civil rights is intentionally analogous to the civil rights struggles of gays and minorities. Standing against the vampires is a religious sect sworn that is clearly supposed to be seen as a bunch of corrupt, bigoted fanatics. However, the show also pulls no punches in showing how vampire society is still built around killing humans and treating them like cattle. Even the lovable Bill is no stickler for due process when Sookie is involved, gleefully killing the Ratrays and Sookie's incestuous uncle. The religious sect brings up a number of valid points against allowing vampires to live in human society. Most really are a threat to public safety. The intended aesop was probably that the best way to handle the vampires was to integrate them into normal society since they'd be less likely to kill humans that way, but it wasn't handled well.
  • And of course, none of this deals with the fact that most of the vampires that everyone wants to 'integrate' are probably legally guilty of more than a few felonies. Even if they've never killed anyone, we can go down a list: Malicious wounding, assault and battery, potentially attempted murder, stealing precious bodily fluids, etc. Assuming that the 'next generation' of vampires are, in fact, interested in integration, then that's one thing, but it's hard not to see the 'older' vampires as, for the most part, criminals. Not only that, all of the vampires still have a readily available source for blood that costs nothing and which is easily accessible. Integrating them has all the feeling of letting a fox into the henhouse.
  • Furthermore, new, inexperienced vampires tend to get carried away when draining their first humans, killing them even when they aren't trying to. Bill admits he did this "a couple" of times when he first started out, and we see Jessica do this at the end of Season 2. Which makes it highly likely that every single vampire we meet, even the "nicer" ones, are guilty of at least one count of manslaughter.
• This review of the Made for TV Movie The Beast points how the characterization in the film suffers badly from this trope. We are meant to cheer for the Designated Hero Whip Dalton and boo the Designated Villain Schuyler Graves. Unfortunately, practically the only sign we're given that Graves is evil is when he's criticizing Whip for destroying a raft that Graves was trying to claim as his property—perfectly legitimately in accordance with maritime law.
• On ER, Kerry Weaver was seen as a villain for wanting people to follow rules and policy.
• In Roseanne, Leon is portrayed as wrong for wanting to fire Roseanne, even though she really is a lazy and sometimes intimidating employee who backtalks him almost every time he asks her to do something, even if that thing is something completely reasonable for an employer to ask of an employee. Of course, Leon is often a bit of a jerk in his own right.
• Similar to Roseanne, Everybody Loves Raymond had Ray often act as a straw-misogynist to prove Debra's superiority, even in occasions when he was justified or right in doing what he did.
• On The Gruen Transfer in "The Pitch" segments, some topics, while unsellable, do get mighty-convincing ads. This is naturally intentional, since the whole point is to demonstrate exactly how effective advertising can be.
• Any time anyone doubts the legitimacy of offender profiling in Criminal Minds, particularly when it's the only evidence for an arrest (Third-Act Stupidity ensures the unsub always greets the arresting officers with enough evidence for a conviction; things rarely go well when they don't). Profiling IRL has never been proved to be effective and tests show "experts" have no more success with it than laymen.
  • In the episode Tabula Rosa there is an especially egregious example where Hotchner is testifying at a criminal trial. When the defense lawyer claims that all the FBI's profilers are doing is simply cold reading ^{[dead link]} , Hotchner responds by cold reading the defense lawyer. This of course defeats this lawyer despite actually proving his point. Even though Hotchner was correct in his predictions, this doesn't prove anything of value. If that was a real defense lawyer that had been inteligent, he should have called a fake psychic to do the exact same thing as a rebuttal witness. Of course at the end of the episode, as always, they end up proving themselves correct with other evidence.
    • Of course, if 'cold reading' can consistently produce accurate results, then it... can consistently produce accurate results, which is the only thing an expert witness' testimony needs to do. The reason what carnival psychics do is wrong is because they are making a false claim about how they do it, while the FBI agents obviously aren't.
• Lois and Clark: When Tempus mind-controls the entire city into turning against Supes, a lot of what happens seems like Reality Ensues. For example, he catches a couple of bank robbers and drops them off at the feet of an unassuming cop, who turns around and lets them go, insisting that it's Superman's word against their's that they were robbing a bank (although at the very least the cop would have held them on suspicion until they sorted the whole matter out). Later, a bunch of bureaucrats demand to see his license to fly as well as asking questions involving taxes. Technically, Superman pays taxes as Clark Kent, but the public at large isn't supposed to know he has a Secret Identity, making it more a question of why some non-mind controlled Jerkass bureaucrat hasn't at least asked this question of the IRS.
• Merlin:
  • This is played with (usually consciously) with King Uther. The man hates magic due to the fact that it killed his wife, and his genocide of all those who practice magic, no matter how benevolent, is seen as terrible. And yet, most the time the threats against Camelot are entirely magical in nature (though in turn, many of Camelot's magical enemies are striking against Uther out of vengeance of what he's done to them). It's a vicious circle.
  • Other times, Uther has to make tough decisions about how to rule, and though he's often portrayed to be in the wrong, it's not difficult to see his point when he refuses to help a small village in a neighbouring kingdom because sending armed knights in to help might be construed as an act of war, or when he cuts off supplies from the lower towns during a famine because he needs what little food is left to feed the knights and thus maintain Camelot's safety.
• On Babylon 5:
  • Garibaldi gets brainwashed into developing an irrational hatred of Captain Sheridan. Thing is, while his accusation that Sheridan has bought into his own hype is completely bogus, his comparison of the station to a military dictatorship is not. That's actually precisely what it is: its "government" consists entirely of Sheridan giving orders and his troops carrying them out.
  • He also points out that Sheridan's demands that he censor himself are somewhat in contradiction with a belief in free speech.
  • Writer/Producer Joe Michael Straczynski has claimed that it was intentional that Garibaldi had a valid point. Jerkass Has a Point might be the case here.
• Played with in Wire in The Blood. Penny Burgess, a manipulative journalist who has sex with a police officer for inside information, points out that it is wrong to arrest a suspect on purely circumstantial evidence and release his name to the public. Because she is a villain, the audience isn't encouraged to take what she says seriously and none of the other characters agree with her, but she is proven right when the man they arrested commits suicide in prison and is later proven to be innocent.
• Due to Values Dissonance, it is jarring when Blakey in On the Buses is depicted as an uptight bully for getting angry at Stan and Jack for groping the female staff and being lazy.
• On Smallville, a number of characters have tried to force Clark/The Blur out of hiding and into the spotlight of the public eye. Since the series as a whole was building to Clark eventually coming out as Superman, the arguments for Clark staying hidden became less credible over time. The evil reporter from Season 2 who tried to forcibly expose Clark's secret argued that the public had a right to know about a powerful alien living in their backyard, which makes sense from a purely ethical standpoint of journalist ethics (as well as the aforementioned fact that the public would eventually find out about him) even if Clark does indeed have a right to a private life. There was also the corrupt DA from Season 9 who wanted The Blur to show his face and answer for a series of screwups that were blamed on him that were really the fault of the Wonder Twins trying to impersonate their favorite hero; his corruption was revealed last-minute as a means to give the Wonder Twins a heroic gesture and kill any debate on whether or not the Blur should have to reveal himself to clear his name.
• In Carrusel, Jorge tells on Bibi, since Bibi was cheating on a test. The audience is supposed to take Bibi's side, since Jorge is such an abominable character overall. But cheating is wrong. It is unfair for Bibi to cheat and get away with it. And at age 9, nobody will be faulted for saying it loud and immediately instead of waiting till later and telling the teacher in private.
• In Memphis Beat, Dwight and the other cops are issued smartphones. They prefer their regular phones, and treat them with contempt. Dwight even quips "there's an app for that" just before he uses his to break a window. Problem is, smartphones can actually increase productivity and effectiveness, with proper training, which Dwight and Co. admittedly had not received (yet). Also, Dwight was risking damage to an expensive phone and associated services on the Memphis taxpayers' dime.
• In the unaired 2011 Wonder Woman pilot, Diana has dinner with a Senator who expresses concerns about the way she does things - namely, using Cold-Blooded Torture to get information from criminals, giving the metaphorical finger to Reasonable Authority Figures, and outright committing slander by holding a press conference to accuse Liz Hurley's character of being a murderous Corrupt Corporate Executive and admitting that she doesn't have any proof besides gut instinct. In fact, the only reason she's meeting the Senator is to get justification so she can go after Hurley. Of course, since Wondy-In Name Only is the hero of this story, she's ultimately presented as right.
  • It's really difficult to say. Though everything consistently turns up roses for "Wonder Woman" in most of her endeavors, the end of the episode shows her alone and fairly miserable. It's difficult to say whether the characters she opposes were meant to be the strawmen, or if the protagonist herself was being made into a strawman, who presumably would have been "redeemed" as the series went on.

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