Covers Always Lie / Live-Action TV

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• The cast photo and back cover of 24 season five prominently features Tony Almeida. Although he is technically a member of the main cast it feels weird seeing him up there with the other cast members even though he barely has any relevance to the overall arc. Tony doesn't even wear the suit he has on in the photo at any point.
• The info guide synopses for the first season of Angie Tribeca contain a running thread of the Lieutenant being sick (apparently suffering from bacterial meningitis), with the finale's synopsis claiming that he's "inches away from death". None of this is true in the show.
• Happens in-universe in As Time Goes By to Lionel's book, My Life In Kenya. The cover shows Lionel in a pith helmet in front of a luxurious jungle, with a busty blonde woman showing considerable cleavage draping herself over him.
  • Lionel even complains during the photo shoot that there weren't even any such luxurious jungles in Kenya and that no one in Kenya wore pith helmets or even the khaki outfit Alistair had him wearing for the cover. Oh, and the story itself was about Lionel's life as a coffee plantation owner, and the woman he was married to was even described as being a thin, angular, severe-looking woman, not a "busty blonde woman", to add one more absurdity to the cover.
• The cover for the Babylon 5 DVD set "The Movie Collection", containing the last three Made-For-TV Movies, prominently features Londo, who appears in none of them.
  • The US release does have all five movies, thus Londo does make sense. When they chopped the two previously released movies from the UK (or wherever you are?) release, they obviously didn't think to change the artwork.
  • The actual discs for the five movie collection uses the pictures from the season 5 DVDs, which are images from the fifth season itself.
  • In the insert for the 1st Season box set, one of the pictures for the episode Soul Hunter shows the Soul Hunter from the movie River of Souls, who does not appear in the episode. It was likely included because Martin Sheen is a more recognizable actor than either of the Soul Hunters in the episode.
• The British TV movie Blunt, The Fourth Man was made in 1985. The video was released much later, at least several years after The Silence of the Lambs (film) came out. Anthony Hopkins's head and upper torso were prominent on the cover, along with his name in large letters. However, the eponymous Blunt is played by Ian Richardson. Hopkins plays Guy Burgess—the love interest. But then Ian Richardson never played Hannibal Lecter.
• The UK VHS release of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Three had Spike and Drusilla on the spine of one of the tape boxes. Spike appears in one out of twenty-two episodes, and Dru doesn't at all.
  • The original DVD set (before they were replaced with the slim cases) also featured an image of Spike and Dru among the other major characters. Spike is even prominently featured on one of the six discs.
• Doctor Who:
  • The VHS release of "Frontier in Space" prominently features a Dalek, even though the Daleks only appear for about two minutes in the last episode.
    • This would also qualify as a Spoiler Cover since it's supposed to be a surprise to set up the next serial.
  • The novelisation of "The Space Museum" went one better by including a Dalek (albeit small and in the corner) even though, since the novelisation omits the cliffhanger ending, the only Dalek that appears is an empty casing as an exhibit in the museum.
  • Most of the time, Doctor Who's novelization covers were fairly accurate...with exceptions. "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", for example, featured a Dalek spaceship and a Roboman, both of whom were taken from Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D., the Peter Cushing movie.
  • The biggest howler comes from Pinnacle Books' reprint◊ of "Day of the Daleks", which features a (very cool) huge spaceship that wouldn't look out of place in Star Wars, proudly bearing the word UNIT on its hull, a Dalek with pink hemispheres and two gunsticks, and a menacing, gorilla-like thing that's supposed to be an Ogron.
  • The Japanese cover◊ of "The Daleks". Not only is it ugly, it's hideously inaccurate. The Daleks couldn't look less like Daleks, it's anyone's guess who that woman is supposed to be or why she's dressed like an air hostess, the artist clearly heard "British Police Telephone box" and assumed it was the same as a British telephone box, and what's Darth Vader doing there?
  • The French novelisation of it went for cheap populism — it shows a poorly drawn but accurate First Doctor with some clearly recognisable Daleks, but also gives him the Fourth Doctor's scarf which he most certainly never wore.
• The cover for the Season 1 DVD set of Family Matters features a huge portrait of Steve Urkel alongside a much smaller-sized image of the Winslow family. In actuality, Steve only appears in a handful of episodes as a side character and doesn't even make his first appearance until midway through the season.
  • Valerie Jones, the actress who played Judy Winslow only in the pilot, is featured on the DVD cover for season 1, instead of Jaimee Foxworth, who played Judy from the second episode onwards.
• Farscape:
  • One version of the Season 4 box set features Rygel, Scorpius, Stark and Crais on the front. Stark is only in about five episodes in the whole season, and Crais died a season earlier.^note  Crais does appear twice, but both times are fantasy sequences and his actor is under heavy makeup for one of them. On the other hand, since his actor Lani Tupu also voices Pilot, he does technically star in that season, albeit not as the pictured character. It's particularly bizarre because of the large amount of characters they had to pick from, nearly all of whom would be better.
  • Another cover for season four just has Crichton surrounded by the attractive female aliens. No sign of D'Argo and Rygel. In fact it can even serve as a false Late-Arrival Spoiler suggesting they both die by the end of Season three (in reality Rygel survives the whole series and D'Argo dies near the very end of The Peacekeeper Wars.
• For the second season DVD set of Fraggle Rock, released by HIT Entertainment (and later reissued by Lionsgate), Mokey is not featured on the front cover.
  • Lionsgate's 2010 DVD of the episode "Scared Silly" has a cover◊ more reminiscent of Scooby-Doo that Fraggle Rock, with the Fraggle Five standing in front of the Gorgs Castle edited to look like a haunted house as bats fly overhead and spiders crawl about everywhere. The actual episode has nothing of this sort, being about Wembley and Boober doing escalating scary pranks on each other. It doesn't apply to any of the other episodes on the DVD as well, which are similarly spooky, but don't involve anything resembling the cover.
• A light but rather strange example of this is the Friends Season 6 DVD set: the insert contains a group photo of the gang at Central Perk that was clearly taken during Season 4. Even more bizarrely, head shots were later cropped from this photo and then used on the Season 8 DVD cover.
• The poster for season 1 of Game of Thrones shows Ned Stark sitting on the Iron Throne, gripping his sword with a dark, brooding look on his face. It implies he's a driven Villain Protagonist who kills anyone who stands in his way to become king, when really he's one of the few protagonists not concerned with their own power or glory.
• HBO's Girls Season 1 poster made Hannah look very different from how she appears on the show. Hannah has been digitally altered to look thin and her hair was tampered with supposedly to make her look more attractive/appealing.
• Some early Highlander promotional posters used Christopher Lambert, who was Connor in the films, on them and despite listing series star Adrian Paul’s name, he isn’t shown anywhere. Casual fans wouldn’t realize by looking that the series was focused on a new character rather than Connor.
• Lexx: The Echo Bridge DVD covers not only feature CGI landscapes that don't appear anywhere in the show itself^* though to be fair, given the show's deliberate cheese factor, they make it look much better than it actually does, but the first season cover has Xenia Seeberg on it, an actress who doesn't even appear until season two.
  • The Echo Bridge DVD covers features the surface of the planet Brunnis-1, which did appear in the show (in the 2nd of the 4 original TV movies), but features armored warriors with big guns fighting cybernetic robo-insects, which might tie into the show's "Insect Wars" backstory, but was never depicted in any episode. Also, this Brunnis-1 imagery appears on the cover of Season 4, despite never appearing in Season 4. The cover for the discs with the movies and earlier seasons feature a bunch of spaceships totally unfamiliar to any viewer, and prominently has one of the main characters, Kai, wearing a brown leather duster and carrying a very large sword, but Kai never wears a duster and never carries a sword, he has a special wrist-mounted assassin's weapon.
• For The Mandalorian Season 3, Disney+ updated the show's thumbnail to an image of Din Djarin wielding the Darksaber, which he won at the end of Season 2, while striking an adventurous pose. This failed to prepare viewers for a three-episode span in which he doesn't draw the sword at all, followed by an episode in which he gives it to Bo-Katan Kryze without a fight.
• The Season 1 set of The Middle shows the aunts' dog Doris on the front cover with the main characters, implying that she belongs to the Heck family.
• In-Universe example in Murder, She Wrote with some of the covers for Jessica's books. For instance, in "A Lady in the Lake", one rather brash and obnoxious character says he bought one of her books because there was "some babe in a sexy nightgown" on the cover, but he never found "the good stuff".
• Most of the British merchandise for The Noddy Shop featured artwork of various characters from the live action segments on the packaging, but the only merchandise those characters got were a brief page in the 2000 Noddy Annual, stickers and this puzzle set.
• The DVD of Police Squad! has police tape reading "Police Line - Do Nut Cross" on the front cover, and Frank Drebin holding a giant donut on the back. While the police tape is reminiscent of the visual puns the show used, there are no donut jokes in the series.
• The cover◊ for the VHS release of the Psycho Rangers arc in Power Rangers in Space is only titled by the season name, and it claims to be "An All-New Feature-Length Movie!", when in reality they're just 5 individual episodes that cover one story arc. Nowhere else is it advertised as a movie.
• One of the DVD covers for Robin Hood Season One has the outlaws lined up at the bottom of the cover, including Roy and Djaq. In actuality, Roy was dead before Djaq appeared on the show.
• The front cover of Sesame Street: Sing Yourself Sillier at the Movies features Cookie Monster, who does not appear in the video.
• Shaka Zulu: Several DVD covers actually put Shaka's father King Senzangakhona on the cover, who is a secondary character, not the series' namesake.
• The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine DVDs feature images of ships and characters on the discs themselves. However, they don't match the episodes on that disc.
• Stranger Things: The teaser poster for Season 2 shows all four of the boys coming face-to-face with the Mind Flayer. In the show, Will is the only one in the group who actually sees it.
• Tales from the Crypt: The pictures of the Cryptkeeper on each cover are actually taken from an episode from a completely different season than the one the cover is for. For example, the Season 6 cover (Cryptkeeper in bed with a skeleton) is taken from the host segments of the Season 4 episode "None But the Lonely Heart".
• The DVD of the Mini Series To the Ends of the Earth features Sam Neill's face largest and in the forefront, and his name and profile on the case spine, even though he plays a very minor character. The real star, Benedict Cumberbatch, is barely noted.
• Walking with Beasts was only ever released in Hungary on a pair of VHS tapes. These featured images and story descriptions for the first two episodes (one tape centered around the episode New Dawn, the second was all about Whale Killer^note  although the episode titles printed onto the cases and the cassettes were inconsistent with each other). In reality, the first VHS contained episodes one to three and the first bonus feature, while the second had episodes four to six, as well as the second bonus.
• The Season 9 set of The X-Files prominently features David Duchovny's face, despite the fact that he was in only one episode that season. Or two if you count the brief, imaginary reflection of him in another character's eyeball. Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish, who were the actual leads that year, are marginalized.
  • Speaking of The X-Files, various Rolling Stones and other magazines had amusing 'shipper' covers of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson in bed or otherwise in suggestive poses, which their agent counterparts were never seen in.

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