Examples of Bystander Syndrome depicted in Live-Action TV series.
- Jack Bauer of 24, Season 2 premiere. He's still haunted by his wife's murder, his daughter wants nothing to do with him, and he's on the verge of suicide. The reason he leaves is to warn Kim to get out of LA. Later, when seeing a mother with her child, Jack decides to do something about it:Mason: There's a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles. We believe it's going to go off today.
Jack: How good's your intel?
Mason: Very.
[Jack walks out] - Black Mirror: "White Bear" follows an amnesiac woman who is being chased by a man with a shotgun, and, with 90% of people having been brainwashed, most everyone is too busy filming the chaos on their phones to actually help. Subverted, however, when we find out they're not brainwashed at all and that this is all part of some voyeuristic theme park.
- This is how most citizens of Sunnydale react to the rampant supernatural activity in their town on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
- This must be the reason Burn Notice's Michael Westen gets away with so very many illegal acts in the middle of downtown Miami. Unless he wants the police to show up, people will safely ignore him when he sets off explosives, gets involved in car chases, and generally makes a mess of the local real estate. At least, until we find out that he's being specifically protected by various organizations, purposefully making it so the police don't link him to his activities.
- In Series 23 of CASUAL+Y, Tess Bateman is impaled on a metal pole after an accident at a building site. A teenager nearby who witnesses the accident proceeds to take a photo of her as she struggles for consciousness, then just walks away. She does eventually get rescued, and gets better.
- Typically averted on Criminal Minds. Most of the times an abduction or assault has happened in a public area, someone has at least attempted to intervene. Where it shows up tends to be more indirect. For instance, a serial killer is targeting one specific college and, while the staff and police are taking it seriously, the students seem more bothered by the curfew than concerned about being alert.JJ: Three girls are missing, and someone doesn't notice an abandoned car.
- Doctor Who: In "Smith and Jones", after the Judoon execute the plasmavore, they claim their jurisdiction is over and leave without doing anything about an MRI rigged to overload as a deadly weapon, to Martha's considerable ire.
- Family Matters: The first-season episode "In a Jam," where a bully – appropriately, named Bull – is about to make good on a threat to punch Urkel out after he refuses to hand over his lunch money. A group of students, all classmates of Urkel's (including Laura, who was part of that show's main family, the Winslows), all stand by and don't make so much as a move to stop Bull as he grabs Urkel by the collar and cocks his fist, this even though they know Bull is easily capable of crushing the skull of, if not killing the much smaller Urkel if he lands even a single punch. Eddie, whom Urkel considers a "best bud," walks in Just in Time to stop Bull and eventually send him running off.
- A man in Fargo is dragged out of his office by a kidnapper, in front of a cubical row's worth of coworkers who stick their heads out to watch and offer their rueful condolences when his body is found the next day.
- Game of Thrones: Robert brushes off Ned pleading for him to spare his daughter's direwolf because his wife would be a pain to him if he intervened.
- In Highlander, Methos has survived for millennia mostly by not getting mixed up in other people's problems.Duncan: Don't you want to see Robert and Gina live happily ever after?
Methos: Yeah, but I want to see me live happily ever after even more. - Played for Laughs in the episode "Lucky Penny" from How I Met Your Mother. Barney has run the New York City Marathon without training and enjoys his free ride on the subway, showing off his medal. However, his legs stop working and he can't get off. Barney gets insulted for not giving up his seat for other people (an old woman, a pregnant woman and a boy with crutches). He calls Ted to come to pick him up, but Ted doesn't manage it on time so Barney is trapped there and is riding from end to end over and over. In The Tag, he's seen still riding on the empty subway. Nobody would help him.
- Law & Order - The season 6 episode "Remand" and the Law & Order: SVU season 17 episode "41 Witnesses" are both based on Genovese's murder. Law and Order's Season 1 episode "The Violence of Summer" has Logan complaining he can't get witnesses to a rape, "It's the post-Kitty Genovese era, nobody wants to look, they think they'll get involved."
- Discussed in one episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit dealing with a kidnapping of a young boy. One of the people that was at the scene at the time even gives the normal explanation of "I thought someone else would do something."
- A first season episode, Contact, had the cold open show this. A woman gets raped on the subway and none of the other passengers get up or go near the attack to stop it. We then learn that this man is a serial rapist and has been able to get away with his attacks because no one on the subway ever stops him because none of the other commuters want to get involved.
- Lost: In "Greatest Hits", we see a flashback to Charlie playing his guitar on the streets for money. When the show's over, he hears a woman (Nadia) screaming for help as a man tried to rob her purse. He chases him away by repeatedly hitting him with his guitar case. When she thanks him, Charlie says he did what anyone else would've done, to which Nadia replies that at least three people passes by before him and none of them even tried to help her.
- Mimpi Metropolitan: In episode 45, two men see Alan and Bobby are chasing a pickpocket. They decide to record Alan and Bobby for social media instead of helping them. Alan proceeds to give a speech to those men and the audience about this trope before the victim reminds him to hurry up and chase the pickpocket.
- In the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode featuring Avalanche Jonah and the Bots jeer a camera crew busy filming a rescue crew trying to rescue survivors of the titular disaster and not aiding them.
- Played for laughs in the first episode of New Tricks, wherein the climactic arrest takes place at a dinner held in honour of the main villain, an ex-gangster recently released from prison, as the main characters arrive to inform him that he's been officially exonerated of the murder he was imprisoned for all those years ago... and is now about to be arrested for a murder they can now prove he actually did do all those years ago instead. And that his wife actually killed the woman he was originally imprisoned for murdering. This, not entirely surprisingly, causes a fight between the villain, the villain's assembled friends, and the police... except for Brian, Jack and Gerry, the retired officers who caused the fight in the first place, who decide that discretion's the better part of valour and decide to stand back and offer a commentary on the fight instead. And it turns out they're not alone; as all the villain's friends and family are being dragged out yelling and screaming, it's revealed that one guy, who presumably wasn't that fond of the villain, just decided to sit and finish his meal with the chaos going on all around him.
- A number of television series took this to heart at the time and created episodes based on Kitty Genovese's story and the "get involved" quote. The Perry Mason episode "The Case of the Silent Six" (November 21, 1965), portrays the brutal beating of a young woman whose screams for help are ignored by the six residents of her small apartment building, who later say — yep — they didn't want to get involved (although only Paul Drake uses those exact words).
- The four main characters of Seinfeld are incarcerated in the finale for the many, many times they do this (as well as just being horrible), the breaking point being the four watching a man get mugged and laughing about it, breaking a "Good Samaritan" law in full view of a cop. Ironically, the final example of this would have been the one time it was somewhat of a good thing, as they had taped it and thus had video evidence of the crime, meaning they did something that can help the mugger be caught, and the mugger was wielding a weapon (and the cop deciding to prioritize arresting them over running after the mugger makes this a case of The Lopsided Arm of the Law or Selective Enforcement). Of course, that's not how the show had it turn out.
- In the infamous episode "That's My Dog" from Six Feet Under, David gets carjacked. He suffers terribly and actually doesn't have many opportunities to ask for help because that might get him killed. However, when the psycho lets him go, he's seen going along a road, badly beaten and looking awful. He tries to stop somebody, but all cars just ignore him and keep going. Luckily, a police car appears at the end.
- The Prime Directive in Star Trek can be considered something like this.
- Explicitly interpreted this way in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Hunted". Picard's complaints about the way a candidate new member of the Federation had treated the supersoldiers it created after the war ended is brushed off by the planet's government asserting that the Prime Directive meant Picard had no standing to interfere. When said supersoldiers then occupy the capital building and have the government at gunpoint to demand they be treated fairly, Picard responds for the demand for help by the same government officials by citing the Prime Directive as not allowing him to interfere and it's not his problem, and then beams the hell out of Dodge.
- Invoked in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where Sisko and Bashir are transported back in time to 2024. In one scene, Bashir tries to tell a Sanctuary District employee (a low-level receptionist who really had no control over the situation, and who truly had been doing her best to help people within her limited abilities) that the situation in the District isn't her fault. She replies, "Everybody tells themselves that. And nothing ever changes."
- Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It calls this trope NoMFuP: "Not My Fucking Problem".
- The Twilight Zone (1985): "A Little Peace and Quiet" is the story of Penny, who finds an amulet that can stop and start time. Penny embodies the trope as she uses the amulet to avoid situations she doesn't care about and continually ignores news reports about dramatically rising tensions between the United States and Soviet Union and even uses the amulet to bypass having to deal with protesters. In the final moments of the story, the USSR unleashes a nuclear missile strike on the U.S. which forces her to stop time and, presumably, live out the rest of her life in that frozen moment before impact.
- The whole premise of the ABC's What Would You Do? is take a current hot-button issue, have actors play it out in public, and see if anyone steps in to help. Some topics covered in the show for example include racial or religious discrimination and seeing whether or not any bystanders step in and help speak out against such injustice. A few bystanders play this trope straight, others outright defy it.
- The Wire: when Bubbles starts getting robbed daily by an agressive junkie, everyone just looks on and does nothing, which Bubbles even lambasts.
- In one episode of The Young Ones, the characters have stumbled across a time warp and now have a horde of medieval peasants out to kill them. They are terrified, and wonder aloud how they are going to get out of this predicament, when Vyvyan says "Who cares?", and the housemates instantly lose interest in their own mortal peril. End of episode. Considering they die on a near-daily basis...
