Divided We Fall in Live-Action TV series.
- Virtually all crime dramas portraying city-level police portray Federal authorities as authority wielding Men in Black who are all too willing to let a horrific crime go unpunished to further what they see as a bigger picture.
- This happens frequently in 24, usually in the form of an Obstructive Bureaucrat who doesn't understand that Jack Bauer is always right. Jack is often arrested or otherwise delayed by a new CTU director who generally gets in the way for the first few episodes after his introduction.
- This is the greatest fear of Luthen in Andor. The show takes place in the Star Wars universe several years before A New Hope, when the rebels have not yet coalesced into a single group fighting the Empire, and instead are mostly small, under supplied, and isolated fringe cells that are resisting the Empire for very different reasons and have very different goals in mind for the galaxy. Luthen is all too aware of how ineffective the different rebel cells are in their current form, and fears that while they continue being inconsequential threats who cannot truly damage the Empire, the Empire will keep getting stronger and stronger until it's impossible to defeat and destroys all the various rebel groups one by one. Best demonstrated when Luthen tries to get Saw Gerrera to work with a different rebel cell, led by a man named Kreegyr.Luthen: We need to pull together, Saw! Whatever our final version of success looks like, there's no chance any of us can make it real on our own.
Saw: Kreegyr's a separatist. Maya Pei's a neo-Republican. The Ghorman front. The Partisan alliance? Sectorists. Human cultists. Galaxy partitionists. They're lost! All of them, lost! [Beat] What are you, Luthen? I've never really known. What are you?
Luthen: [sighs] I'm a coward. I'm a man who's terrified that the Empire's power will grow beyond the point where we can do anything to stop it. I'm the one who says we'll die with nothing if we don't put aside our petty differences.
Saw: Petty?!! I am the only one with clarity of purpose. ...[chuckles] No sale today, Luthen. Good luck with Anto Kreegyr. - Spike drove a wedge between the Scoobies in season 4 of Buffy. His plan was fatally flawed, but it made for a hell of a falling out between the gang, if only a temporary one.
- Dead Set uses this trope effectively:
- The only reason that the virus reaches the inside of the Big Brother house is because the housemates refused to believe Kelly. They soon changed their minds.
- Grayson refuses to kill an infected Angel. He regrets it.
- Patrick and Jonty open the gates holding the undead out in an escape bid, against the wishes of the rest of the group. The result? Everybody dies.
- Doctor Who:
- In Revenge Of The Cybermen, one set of Vogans risks them all in an attempt to escape their hiding. Conflict ensues.
- In Warriors Of The Deep the spies for the other human bloc use the alien attack to cover up their own activities.
- Game of Thrones:
- Robb, Stannis, and Renly are all enemies of the Lannisters, but they cannot cooperate. In "You Win or You Die", Robert's death and Joffrey's ascent to the throne causes Renly, who's more or less on Ned's side, to become exasperated with Ned's support of Stannis and leave King's Landing. When he declares himself King, Robb Stark refuses to support him because he sees Renly as threatening the line of succession and his bannerman insist that he become the King in the North instead. As a result, all of them lost the War of the Five Kings.
- This trope is what holds the Lannister-Tyrell alliance together despite the Tyrells obvious Dragon with an Agenda role. And when Tywin Lannister died, Cersei is so focused in destroying the Tyrells that she seemed to forget the threats outside King's Landing. By the time she destroyed her enemies, the Starks are finally back at the North after crushing the Boltons, the Freys lost control of Riverlands after their patriarch was assassinated and Daenerys Targaryen finally arrives at Westeros to reclaim the crown.
- The War of Five Kings is seriously weakening Westeros and distracting it from the coming invasions by the White Walkers.
- The Hexer: This is the ultimate reason why witcher's guild was simply disbanded - all the constant infighting between witchers, council and druids eventually imploded, first making them disfunctional and then simply unable to keep up even a rudimentry school and all the infrastructure needed for making new witchers.
- Happens a lot on Law & Order and its spin-offs. Typically, it comes when a case happens involves multiple jurisdictions for various reasons.
- New Jersey officers are portrayed as competing with New York ones for the chance to get the 'collar' (arresting a suspect). In one episode, a DA even remarks that New Jersey has an 'inferiority complex' about the NYPD getting in their affairs.
- Police departments in parts of New York north of New York City ('upstate') and east of it (Long Island) as being at the best laid-back local sheriffs who don't like city-slicker interference and at worst in on the crime.
- At various times, the Brooklyn and Bronx DA's are portrayed as headline-seeking opportunists more interested in padding conviction rates than actually ensuring the guilty are convicted.
- On Lost, Jack Shepherd's statement that "Either we live together or we die alone" qualifies. Subverted in the Fourth Season Finale when Jack started to say it, only to have Rose interrupt to notify him that if he did so, she would punch him in the face.
- Stargate SG-1:
- Maybourne and the NID do this a little in the first few seasons. Particularly the episode "Politics," in which Daniel knows that the Goa'uld will attack Earth, and no one outside of the main characters believes him.
- In the later season episode "Ethon", both the Rand Protectorate and their political and military rival, Calledonia, would rather nuke each other into the stone age than unite to oppose the impending Ori invasion. Even when a peaceful solution to their rivalry is offered, they still launched nuclear missiles against each other...
- From Torchwood: Children of Earth. Say you're the British government. Say you have an alien problem. You also happen to know of an organisation which fights hostile aliens. It is willing to work with you. What are you going to do? That's right, put a bomb inside their leader's stomach.
- The Wire runs on this trope. The office politics and rivalries within the police department and city management is Inherent in the System, causing investigations that would actually do something about the rampant crime rate or projects that would reverse the hollowing out of the schools (or the city in general) to be scuttled by those higher up in the chain for the sake of their own careers, which depend on immediate results. And since juking of the stats is much easier and quicker than reforming the system (which may not even work or show results that can be easily quantified), everyone opts to simply manipulate stats and nothing gets fixed.
