Dont You Dare Pity Me / Live-Action TV

Gretchen: I feel so sorry for you, Walt.

Walt: Fuck you.

— Breaking Bad

Don't You Dare Pity Me! in Live-Action TV series.

---

• Andor: Ulaf gets angry at Cassian and the other workers at his table when they try to help and cover for him, as he is very close to the end of his sentence but is losing his physical and mental faculties due to old age.
• Bones: Hodgins does this majorly after he’s paralyzed in Season 11. His friends want to help and support him, but he just lashed out at them because he doesn’t think they can understand what he’s going through and feels they’re treating him differently because of his condition. He finally comes to his senses after asking Angela for a divorce which she won’t hear of.
• Shawn from Boy Meets World gets very touchy about anyone trying to help him or express sympathy for his horrible home life or poverty.
• Walt in Breaking Bad is so full of pride that when his once-friends, Gretchen and Elliot, who made a lot of money off his accomplishments that he didn't (because he severed their professional relationship when their company was just a start-up, and BTW we never learn exactly what those accomplishments were) offer to pay for his cancer treatment by letting him back into the company he co-founded, Walt refuses their offer (but still lies to his family about it because it would be a good cover story regarding his drug money). His lie is eventually exposed, and when Gretchen confronts him about his refusal and demands to know where he's making his money, Walt loses it and angrily unloads his resentment on to her. When she says she feels so sorry for the kind of man he's become, his response is a pointedly delivered Precision F-Strike.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • A variation in "Dead Things". Buffy tearfully reveals her mutually abusive sexual relationship with Spike to Tara. She begs Tara to not forgive her; not out of anger, but because she's so disgusted with herself that she doesn't think she deserves pity.
  • Played straight in "Doomed" with former badass Spike, who was rendered unable to hurt humans due to the chip in his head and was on the verge of suicide. When Willow and Xander bring him along to stop him from staking himself, Spike manages to cheer himself up by taunting and insulting them, stating that they are "even more useless than he is" and he doesn't want their pity.
• This is Saha's reaction in an episode of Bunheads when Boo defends her to Melanie and Ginny for being the Mean Girl.
• Subverted in an episode of Castle, when Castle has been feeling insecure about the fact that his daughter Alexis is no longer the little girl she used to be and is gradually moving away from reliance on him and into adulthood, as evidenced by her getting a boyfriend. At the end of the episode, Alexis 'happens' to casually suggest that they go out for a meal and hang out, the way they used to when she was little. Castle pegs immediately that she's been informed of his earlier insecurity and that he's essentially being offered a 'pity date', but he's willing to take it at that point.
• Is Played for Laughs on Chappelle's Show, when a handicapped man falls down and refuses help. He gets a round of applause after he gets back up and orders his meal.
• Det. Erin Lindsay on Chicago P.D. is incredibly secretive about her past (understandably so, as she grew up the child of a junkie mother and a father serving life in prison). The few who do know anything about her, Lindsay quickly turns her wrath against.
  • Likewise, Det. Hailey Upton is very guarded about her childhood, not wanting to disclose that witnessed her father being abusive towards her mother and it's implied that she was on the receiving end of this herself. She was also nearly raped by her mark during an undercover assignment and refuses to disclose this when the unit investigates the same guy years later; Halstead only finds out after calling in a favor to the officer who helped cover it up.
  • Not wanting to be seen as weak or The Load, Kim Burgess tends to soldier through a lot of the bad things that she undergoes, including being shot. However, she invokes this trope full-on in "Burden of Truth" when she finally lets out her grief at losing her and Ruzek's unborn child.
    Burgess: I wasn't supposed to be on the scene, I wasn't supposed to be at the motel, I wasn't supposed to lose the baby. Don’t you get that? I don’t want pity, and I don’t want support. I want you to be angry with me, as angry with me as I am.”
• Stephen Colbert to the cheering Studio Audience, after yet another flubbed line:
  No, no, I don't want your pity!
• Community:
  • After the study group learns that Jeff is living in his car, they attempt to offer him a place to stay. "The next person who offers me charity or pity gets mentioned by name in my suicide note," Jeff responds.
  • Pierce Hawthorne takes this trope to an extreme; he hates the idea of anyone pitying him for his age and his mostly lonely, miserable life, but he is nevertheless so desperate for attention that rather than accept their pity and sympathy he'll act out in more destructive and hurtful ways. This usually ends up with everyone being so sick of his abrasiveness and cruelty that pity's the last thing they end up feeling towards him for him... which inevitably ends up with him ultimately being even lonelier and more miserable.
    • At one point, he almost says this one verbatim; "How dare you pity me?!"
• Control Z: Isabela rebuffs Alex, a lesbian student, who intervened to defend her from some female bullies, who inappropriately tell her to change restrooms, about her gender identity. Subverted when Isabela later on apologizes to Alex for being so harsh on her and ends up befriending her, although Alex asserts that Isabela was right because at some point she had to stand up for herself. Guess what? She did.
• CSI: NY:
  • Invoked word for word by a triple-amputee former Navy seal who's a suspect in "DOA for a Day" when he sees Flack looking him up and down:
    Russ: Don't you *dare* pity me!
    Flack: It's not pity, Russ. I'm just wondering if you could've done it.
    Russ: [gesturing toward his prosthetic limbs and scoffing] With these? At least 20 different ways, Detective.
  • Mac Taylor started acting like this when his colleagues started picking up on his trauma-induced aphasia. His new girlfriend, Christine, finally broke through to him though.
• Downton Abbey: Thomas Barrow says this to Miss Baxter when she expresses concern that he is using a "cure" for homosexuality, essentially poisoning himself.
• Elementary: Hannah Gregson is furious when her father, Captain Gregson, punches her partner in front of their precinct. His actions made the fact that Hannah's partner, who she'd also been dating, had hit her public knowledge when she wanted to keep the issue private. She believes that people seeing her as a victim will affect her promotion prospects, although she's later promoted to sergeant suggesting it wasn't as big an issue as she feared.
• Aeryn from Farscape doesn't object to pity. At the start, she objects to every single emotion. In one episode, instead of talking things out with Crichton and letting him comfort her, she pounds a punching bag until it's stained with her own blood. Ow.
• Subverted in the first episode of Foyle's War: DCS Foyle approaches Sgt. Milner, who is recuperating after having his leg shot off in the Battle of Norway (and is consequently a little shell-shocked and shaken) and asks for his help in investigating the case. Milner bitterly replies that he doesn't want Foyle's pity. Foyle immediately and bluntly responds that he doesn't have time for pity; he's trying to solve a murder of an unpopular German woman with, thanks to World War II, a severely reduced staff in an atmosphere of fear and chaos, and is approaching Milner because he's a trained police officer and Foyle needs all the help he can get. So if Milner wants to lie around uselessly feeling sorry for himself, that's Milner's own problem. Milner eventually agrees to help.
• Game of Thrones: Rickard Karstark to Catelyn, after she frees Jaime who had just killed Karstark's son.
  Karstark: I don't want your grief. I want my vengeance. And you stole it from me!
• House of the Dragon: This is likely the unspoken motivation for Daemon Targaryen's Shoot the Messenger and subsequent Suicide Mission to finish the War for the Stepstones. As King Viserys acknowledges:
  Viserys I: I'm sending word to Daemon. Aid is sailing to the Stepstones.
  Rhaenyra: Did he make call for help?
  Viserys I: He would sooner die. But his king does not mean to allow that.
• In Gossip Girl, Dan runs out on his family and Vanessa after Georgina takes Milo away and just won't deal.
• Invoked on Have I Got News for You by guest host David Mitchell:
  [the Missing Words headline is "(Lack of item price) surprises many customers about bar codes"]
  David: [reading autocue] To be honest, it doesn't bother me that prices aren't included in bar codes, because over the years, I've come to know the prices of every single Ready Meal for One.
  Audience: Awww. [David looks mortified]
  Paul: Shall we start a collection?
  Andy Hamilton: Yeah!
  David: (waving his hands) The pity's worse!
• Homicide: Life on the Street:
  • After coming back to work following a stroke, Pembleton becomes increasingly angry that his friends and family are coddling him, feeling it simply adds to the humiliation of the stroke's side effects.
  • One culprit was a homeless man who had a pathological hatred of anyone helping him who murdered a Buddhist monk who was feeding him because the man had the gall to give him a spoon for his soup. Played for additional drama when the homeless man notices the detective's disgust at this revelation and this makes him angry enough to try to kill the detective, leading to the detective shooting him dead in self-defense.
• House:
  • The title character accuses Cameron of pitying rather than loving, and it's implied that it was the reason for her attraction to her husband (who was dying of cancer) and to House himself.
  • Effectively subverted on the recent episode "Emancipation." The patient, an emancipated minor and orphan, vehemently rejects any pity from the other characters. She maintains this stance when she later states that she lied about her parents' deaths and ran away from home because her father raped her. Ultimately, House realizes that the reason she's so adamantly against being pitied is that she doesn't think she's worthy of it. The real reason she ran away from home was that she (accidentally) killed her brother.
• House of Anubis — Joy went through a phase of this during the beginning of Season 3 when she was trying to get over Fabian and re-invent herself and found Mara and Willow's sympathy to be annoying.
• The Inspector Lynley Mysteries: DS Barbara Havers eats, lives, and breathes this trope. When we first meet her, everything she does is designed to make people give up on her before they can pity her. She gets better.
• Kamen Rider Ex-Aid:
  • Taiga Hanaya will bite back if someone tries to offer comfort after everything he went through. He actually wants attention and comfort, but his pride and damaged soul won't let him accept it without feeling horrible. Nico Saiba unknowingly gives him that when she decides to stick to him. Since she is a nasty, trolling Women Child, he doesn't feel too bad letting her get her way to a certain degree. Things get more complicated when they start to genuinely care about each other.
  • Hiiro Kagami won't bite back despite the similarities with Taiga but tries everything he can to deny he really needs a hug. It's interesting to watch them try pity each other.
• On the L.A. Law episode "The Mouse That Soared," Victor Sifuentes represents a number of businesses trying to get an injunction against a bar that features dwarf-tossing as an attraction. Of course, the bar in question hires a former adversary of Victor's, dwarf attorney Hamilton Schuyler (played by David Rappaport of Time Bandits fame) to defend against the injunction. Early in the case, Schuyler tells the jury, "You need not feel sorry for me, ladies and gentlemen; and you need not feel sorry for any dwarf who chooses to be tossed." But it's in Schuyler's closing argument that he really shines:
  Their whole case comes down to the premise that dwarf-tossing is cruel and depraved. This despite the fact that no tossed dwarf has ever come forward with a complaint. Rather, it is the tall, enlightened people who find it so offensive. And therein, ladies and gentlemen, lies my complaint. That prejudice can be found in the premise that little people need protection. That little people are not competent to make the choices. We don’t know what to do, so you’ll prescribe for us what we should do. I am an attorney. I became an attorney because I wanted to and because it is my right. It is also my right to become a human projectile if I wanted to. And if you limit that right in my “best interests,” you limit my freedom to make the choice. You erode my autonomy. You demean my individuality. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a far greater detriment to self-esteem than being thrown around in some bar. Now, whatever you do, when you go back into that jury room, don’t you dare feel sorry for us! Take it from me—we’ll take your ridicule over your pity anytime.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Miriel snaps at Elendil when he assures her that she's adjusting well after being blinded, threatening him with punishment if he continues "patronizing" her.
• Lost:
  • After Kate learns of Sawyer's backstory and self-loathing, he warns her never to feel sorry for him.
  • Locke almost epitomizes this trope. Especially in his first centric episode.
    Don't tell me what I can't do.
  • Said by Jack in the Season 3 finale, "Okay, I'll tell you what... you do this... you get my father down here. Get him down here right now and if I'm drunker than he is you can fire me. Don't you look at me like that. Don't you pity me."^note Since this scene is a Flash Forward rather than a flashback, Jack's father is actually dead.
• M*A*S*H: Margaret is incredibly torn up over the death of a small dog that had been wandering around camp, and when Hawkeye tries to comfort her, she has this reaction. It doesn't last, though, and the floodgates eventually open.
• Variation: In Madoff Bernie Madoff narrates that one of his motivations behind his eventual $50 billion swindle was his hatred of the looks of pity his family got when his father's store went out of business. In the end, he addresses the camera and says that he had a smirk on his face leaving court because he succeeded — no one will ever pity him again.
• The Mentalist:
  Patrick: "Don't look at each other like that."
  Lisbon: "Like what? You can't see!"
  Patrick: "I can feel. I can feel your pity."
• Motherland: Fort Salem: In "Up is Down", Abigail is very obviously suffering from PTSD, but she gets angry when Tally and Raelle try to talk to her about it.
• In Mr. Belvedere, Wesley runs for student body president, and a kid in a wheelchair runs against him. No matter how nasty his campaign is, Wesley refuses to say anything bad about him. He eventually gets mad at Wesley for being too nice to him and tells him to treat him the way he would treat any opponent.
• Joy's mother says this all the time in My Name Is Earl because she's in a wheelchair. She's not really disabled. She's just pretending.
• MythQuest: Cleo, who is wheelchair-bound from a climbing accident when she was younger, has this attitude. She will run over her brother's toes if he holds a door open for her, and one time she won a ski trip in a raffle. She accepted it, but afterwards, she complained about how she could feel the pity of everyone watching.
• On Newhart when maid Stephanie is afraid her wonderful temporary replacement will become permanent, and she tries to impress Dick by making his office “sparkle as never before.” Unfortunately, the replacement maid has made the place spotless and there is nothing for her to clean. Dick balls up a piece of paper so she can empty the trash, only to be told that she doesn’t want his charity.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "Valerie 23", a guy in a wheelchair who works at a robotics company is approached by his boss because they want him to test the new robotic companion they've built. He's incredibly pissed off at the suggestion and that his colleagues would think of him as "a loser who couldn't get a real girl". It takes a lot of time for him to be open to the suggestion, and even more time before he eventually relents to her advances.
• After Gus in Road to Avonlea is blinded, he lets Felicity think he is dead rather than to have her pity him.
• Averted in Seinfeld by none other than George, who actually enjoys getting pitied, often even using it to get things he wants out of people.
  George: (Discussing how he'd like to be in a mental hospital) You get to wear slippers all day... Friends come. They pity you. Pity's very underrated.
• Sisters: The four titular sisters have been tracked down by a heretofore unknown fifth sister, the result of their father's affair with her mother. However, she makes it clear that she doesn't want any kind of relationship with them and merely contacted them out of the need for a bone marrow donor (she has aplastic anemia). When the sisters try to connect with her anyway, saying, "I know you've had a rough life" (she was abandoned by her mother and bounced from one foster home to another), she angrily snaps, "I don't want your pity." Fed up with her abrasive attitude, one of the sisters snaps right back, "I wasn't offering it."
• In Smallville, Chloe sometimes has this attitude towards Clark when he just indulged in some Superdickery.
  Chloe: (to Clark) Why do you even care?
• Star Trek:
  • In the Star Trek: TOS episode "Is There In Truth No Beauty?", Dr. Miranda Jones considers pity to be the worst of all the human emotions, partially because of her blindness and partially because of her attachment to Medusan ambassador Kollos, whose people are said to be so hideous, they drive any humanoid who sees them to madness.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: In the episode "Skin of Evil," Armus rejects Troi and Picard's offers of pity and compassion.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • When Odo is suffering from a potentially fatal condition (wrought, as it turns out, by the Founders as a punishment for his siding against them), Garak is more effective at taking Odo's mind off of his troubles than the Deep Space Nine crew, by entertaining Odo with half-truths and tall tales of Garak's time with the Obsidian Order. Garak even invokes this trope, stating that sympathy was not what Odo wanted.
      Garak: Where you offer kindness, I offer mystery. Where you offer sympathy, I offer intrigue. Just give me a seat next to Odo's bed and I promise you I'll conjure up enough innuendos, half-truths, and bald-faced lies about my so-called career in the Obsidian Order to keep the constable distracted for days.
    • A variant: when Garak discovers Odo is suffering the effects of a devastating illness, he opens his mouth to say something, but Odo speaks first, telling him, "If I don't want pity from the woman I love, Garak, I certainly don't want it from you." Garak then smiles, turns, and leaves.
• Used repeatedly in Stella, most often by Michael Showalter. That he also frequently does it in a West Virginia coal miner a la "Coal Miner's Daughter" accent is deliberate.
• Super Sentai:
  • In Hyakujuu Sentai Gaoranger, this is initially Yellow's response to any overture at comradeship from Red, since Red had replaced Yellow as the leader of the Gaorangers.
  • In Doubutsu Sentai Zyuohger, when it's revealed that the Big Bad's body is actually made out of Moebas, the Mooks of that series, his right-hand lady affirms her loyalty to him despite this. His response is to kill her for pitying him.
• Scully of The X-Files reacts like this. The more upset she is, the more emphatically she insists that she's fine. Lucky for her, Mulder usually knows she's bluffing and will even call her on it—like in Season 2's "Irresistible."
• When he returns to work after being shot, Without a Trace's Martin Fitzgerald snaps at anyone he feels is coddling him.
• Yellowjackets: In "Burial" Taissa learns about her former girlfriend Van's terminal cancer. Van is upset at seeing the concerned face Taissa makes and even rejects an offer of a referral to a specialist Taissa knows.

---