History ImpoverishedPatrician / LiveActionTV

* ''Series/FatherBrown'': In "[[Recap/FatherBrownS1E2 The Flying Stars]]", the Adams family are revealed to be in such dire financial straits that they'd pawned the titular Stars off years ago to make ends meet.

* ''Series/LawAndOrder'': Had a case involving a poor old money family having married a new money family.

* ''Series/GameOfThrones'': Viserys and Daenerys Targaryen have grown up as this after Robert's Rebellion, formerly members of the Royal Family, but now moving from city to city and benefactor to benefactor, always fearing betrayal and assassination. The stress of it may have contributed to Viserys' madness. It was to the point that the luxury Daenerys finds herself in, as Illyrio's honoured guest, at the start of the series is bewildering. It changes once she starts conquering and pillaging three cities and by the time of Season 7, one can assume that she's quite well-off and independently wealthy to the extent that she values money and currency.

* ''Series/FawltyTowers'': The Major may be an example. Though he comes across as an officer and a gentleman, not only is he reduced to living in a hotel, he's reduced to living in one run by ''Basil Fawlty''.

* ''Series/GameOfThrones'':
** Viserys and Daenerys Targaryen have grown up as this after Robert's Rebellion, formerly members of the Royal Family, but now moving from city to city and benefactor to benefactor, always fearing betrayal and assassination. The stress of it may have contributed to Viserys' madness. It was to the point that the luxury Daenerys finds herself in, as Illyrio's honoured guest, at the start of the series is bewildering. It changes once she starts conquering and pillaging three cities and by the time of Season 7, one can assume that she's quite well-off and independently wealthy to the extent that she values money and currency.
** The Lannisters slide into this in Series 4. Tywin reveals that the family’s gold mines - the primary source of their wealth for centuries - have run dry, and that allying with House Tyrell (their only true financial rivals) is the best way to pay off the massive debt they incurred fighting in the War of the Five Kings.
*** Cersei has a very different view of the situation. Her distrust of the Tyrells and her manic determination to preserve her family’s power at all costs leads her to assassinate the entire house and plunder their lands to pay off the debt. In the long run, however, this does not ensure the Lannister legacy, and their whole world comes crashing down in the end.

* ''Myth/RobinHood'': This is a common fate for Guy of Gisbourne in retellings of RobinHood where the plot necessitates him as a guard, but they want to keep the "Sir Guy" title he picked up in the '30s.

* ''Series/InterviewWithTheVampire2022'': Louis' family used to be fairly wealthy, with a sugar plantation, but his father mismanaged it, so they were four months shy of bankruptcy when he died. This has forced Louis to provide through various legal and illegal business dealings.

* ''Series/InterviewWithTheVampire2022'': Louis' family used to be fairly wealthy, with a sugar plantation, but his father mismanaged it so they got into debt. This has forced him to provide through various legal and illegal business dealings.

* ''Series/ArrestedDevelopment'': The Bluth family was once a wealthy

* ''Series/ArrestedDevelopment'': The Bluth family was once a wealthy
* ''Series/GameOfThrones'': Viserys and Daenerys Targaryen have grown up as this after Robert's Rebellion, formerly members of the Royal Family, but now moving from city to city and benefactor to benefactor, always fearing betrayal and assassination. The stress of it may have contributed to Viserys' madness. It was to the point that the luxury Daenerys finds herself in, as Illyrio's honoured guest, at the start of the series is bewildering. It changes once she starts conquering and pillaging three cities and by the time of Season 7, one can assume that she's quite well-off and independently wealthy to the extent that she values money and currency.
* ''Series/LawAndOrder'' had a case involving a poor old money family having married a new money family.
* ''Series/{{Blackadder}}''. Several [[IdenticalGrandson Blackadders]] are noblemen, but they're inevitably not that well off, and [[ASimplePlan attempts to improve their station inevitably end in disaster or no net profit at all]]. Prince Edmund the Black Adder is the son of the king of England, yet apparently has no lands of his own, spending most of the series skulking around his father's castle. Lord Blackadder in Elizabethan times has a title and a place at court, but lives in a pretty modest house and is constantly losing money for ridiculous reasons. (He claims that his father blew the family fortune on "wine, women and amateur dramatics. At the end, he was eking out a living doing humourous impressions of Anne of Cleves".) In an extreme example, Prince George in the third series was such an UpperClassTwit that he went bankrupt buying socks (although he also believed that the object of card games was to give away as much money as possible, which hardly helped matters). He is the regent of ''multiple countries''.
* In ''Series/ElChavoDelOcho'' it's implied that Doña Florinda and Doña Clotilde were from richer origins, judging by the snobbish attitude of the former and the many references to married sisters who live abroad and send her gifts to the latter. Doña Florinda seems to [[UptownGirl have married beneath her class]] and when she was widowed her family denied her and Quico any monetary support, so she ended in the Vecindad, living solely off her widow pension. Doña Clotilde, on the other side, appears to suffer the sad destiny of the OldMaid who get stale; instead of play the "Old Spinster Aunt" role in her married siblings' homes, she preferred to live on her own.
* ''Series/MonarchOfTheGlen'' is largely about a family barely holding on to their ancestral holdings, largely by encouraging tourism. The expenses involved in just heating their ancestral home are a big part of the early seasons.
* Pete Campbell of ''Series/MadMen'' comes, through his mother, from the [[BlueBlood Old Money]] New York [[WhiteAngloSaxonProtestant WASP]][=/=]Dutch Dyckman family that once owned half of Upper Manhattan.[[note]]Real family, by the way, which really did own half of Upper Manhattan. They [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyckman_Street named a major street after them]]. The rest of the family history is made up, though.[[/note]] His family is shown early on to have fallen on hard times (his grandfather lost the property in the [[TheGreatDepression Crash of 1929]] and his father apparently squandered the remaining fortune), which is why he's working as a mid-level ad exec and marries Trudy Vogel, whose father had worked his way to become a higher-up at Richardson-Vicks (makers of Clearasil and, well, Vicks. As in [=NyQuil=] and Vap-O-Rub).
* Audrey fforbes-Hamilton in ''Series/ToTheManorBorn''.
* Colonel Klink of ''Series/HogansHeroes'' is implied to be this trope. Though it is mentioned that he comes from an old Prussian family, it is also stated that he has money troubles.
-->'''Klink''': (''Believing that he is going have a fortune in oil'') After the war, I won't just have a 500-year-old aristocratic name, but for the first time, some money to go with it.
** Old Prussian families being in money trouble is actually one of the stereotypes about them -- one of the reasons so many of their members joined the army was that they needed the money.
* The Major in ''Series/FawltyTowers'' may be an example. Though he comes across as an officer and a gentleman, not only is he reduced to living in a hotel, he's reduced to living in one run by ''Basil Fawlty''.
* ''Series/PowerRangersRPM'' has Summer's parents, who lost most of their vast holdings due to that whole robot apocalypse thing. They want Summer to give up her job and marry into a stately family that still has some cash; the fact that her job involves keeping the last city on Earth from being overrun by robots doesn't seem to factor into this demand.
* ''Series/KamenRiderKabuto'' has Tsurugi (AKA Kamen Rider Sasword), the last descendant of the proud Discabil family of England ([[ButNotTooForeign though he's obviously at least part Japanese...]]). He's also completely broke, hence his freelance work for ZECT, though it takes some time for him to find this out because his faithful servant [[OldRetainer Jiya]] is going out of his way to keep it from him.
* In the short-lived ABC family series ''Three Moons Over Milford'', the main characters are a woman and her two children who were once the wealthiest family in town. But one near-doomsday cataclysmic event later, and her husband decides to abandon them to go on a spiritual journey of self-discovery. Leaving them completely broke and unemployed.
* ''The Pruitts of Southampton'', starring Creator/PhyllisDiller, was a short-lived sitcom where a rich family on the Hamptons is found, after an IRS audit, to be completely broke. However, revealing this would cause economic shockwaves, so the IRS, apparently considering them [[DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything too big to fail,]] lets them live in their posh home keeping up appearances and taking in wacky boarders. Lasting one season before turning into ''The Phyllis Diller Show,'' it has recently surfaced from complete obscurity since its [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--fk7HzTipI catchy theme song]] (by Vic "''Series/TheAddamsFamily''" Mizzy) was used as the basis for an ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MixXnzefsBA outrageous]]'' ColdOpen on ''WesternAnimation/BatmanTheBraveAndTheBold''...
* ''Myth/RobinHood'': This is a common fate for Guy of Gisbourne in retellings of RobinHood where the plot necessitates him as a guard, but they want to keep the "Sir Guy" title he picked up in the '30s.
** Poverty with nobility was a constant source of angst for the ''Series/RobinOfSherwood'' incarnation. He's fallen to a "lowly" steward, watching over other people's lands, compounded by his father's lack of acknowledgement.
** It was a driving motivation for the [[Series/RobinHood 2006 version]], in his opposition of Hood being that he wants to keep Locksley for himself to avoid such a shame.
* King George in ''Series/OnceUponATime'' is flat-broke, trying his best to hide it, and willing to do ''any'' ruthless dog-kicking stunt to make sure he seals an alliance with the wealthy King Midas.

* ''Meet The B*stards'' was a Creator/Channel4 reality TV-show based around one impoverished noble family; the thing was (as the title implies) they were extremely rude, often blurring the lines between the perceived distinction between working-class and upper-class.

* ''Series/SchittsCreek'': The premise of the show is that the Rose family loses $500 million to their crooked financial adviser and must now live in the crappy little town of Schitt's Creek that the patriarch once bought as a joke and forgot about.

* On ''Series/{{Elementary}}'' the Holmes family are friends with an elderly king of a country that ceased to exist more than a century ago and is now divided among multiple democracies. The king's ancestors managed to keep the royal titles but had to earn their own living. The king himself avoided this trope because of excellent investment advice provided by Sherlock's father. However, the king's son has not been so good with money and decided to restore his finances through a royal adoption scheme. He legally adopted more than a dozen wealthy Americans in exchange for thousands of dollars in fees. The adoptees can now legally claim to be princes/princesses. When the king finds out about this scheme he is not amused and on Sherlock's advice, he disowns his son. This revokes any noble titles held by the son and his heirs and opens up the son to lawsuits from his disgruntled "offspring".
* ''Series/MurdochMysteries'' featured the Newsomes, a family of {{Upper Class Twit}}s who were for the most part RichInDollarsPoorInSense. Unfortunately, one of the relatives lost most of the family fortune on an investment in San Francisco that went pear-shaped after the 1906 earthquake...and embezzled the rest of the fortune to try and make up the loss. Ruth Newsome comes to terms with it, getting a job of her own to supplement her husband Henry's constable income, while Rupert Newsome becomes the HenpeckedHusband to a domineering wealthy woman.