Engineered Heroics in Live-Action TV series.
- 30 Rock:
- Dennis became the Subway Hero after pushing a woman in front of a subway car then saving her.
- Parodied a second time when Tracy has Kenneth kill a "Hero Cat" who saved his owner's life by dialing 911. When Tracy forgets the whole thing, Jenna ends up "rescuing" the cat (who then dials 911 to save Kenneth).
- Batman (1966) had this when the Penguin was running for mayor of Gotham City. He'd send his mooks out to commit crimes so he could thwart them and come off as a hero.
- Sheldon tries to set this up in The Big Bang Theory. He pretends to be unable to open a jar in order to make Leonard seem like an alpha male. It then fails because Leonard can't open it, despite Sheldon having loosened the lid.
- 9-1-1 uses this in the aptly titled "Hero Complex." Suspicious over a patient dying under the care of new paramedic Jonah, Hen and Chimney discover a pattern of Jonah's patients near death and saved. It seems as a kid, Jonah saved the life of his school bus driver and was hailed for the heroism which pushed him to become a paramedic. But Jonah took the wrong lessons as rather than do this to help people, he gets off on the accolades of others. The paramedics realize that Jonah is now deliberately putting patients at risk just so he can look better "saving" them. Sadly, he overestimates his skills with several of these victims dying when they didn't need to.
- The Boys (2019):
- Homelander gave Compound V to terrorist groups around the world to deliberately invoke the Superhero Paradox and give himself villains to fight. This ends up backfiring on him after he temporarily loses his Villain with Good Publicity status when a video of him inadvertently killing a bystander goes viral.
- Stormfront slaughters some bystanders both because she's a racist sociopath, and to put the blame on that in her next victim, with a "public story" that she killed a super terrorist who had just attacked the building.
- Burn Notice pulls this in almost every single episode. With some exceptions, Mike's plans generally follow the same structure: First, Mike causes a problem (or exacerbates an existing problem, or creates the illusion of a problem) for the target. Second, he poses as someone who can solve that problem. Third, he uses this problem-solving persona to get closer to the target, usually while covertly making the problem worse the whole time, so that the target becomes more desperate for Mike's help. Finally, Mike uses his position to get what he wants, which is almost invariably either destroying the target's operation, making the target look like a traitor to their boss, stealing something, or blackmailing the target into doing something Mike needs.
- An episode of Chicago Fire has a man finding an infant thrown from a car in a crash. But when he pops up at another scene, they realize the guy wants to look like a hero and risked injuring the kid to place him in that place. He later throws a rock into a highway just to cause a crash and has the audacity to "help" the paramedics whose car was just hit by the rock and is arrested.
- Criminal Minds:
- A sniper from season one episode "L.D.S.K" who shoots people non-lethally turns out to be an ER nurse who wounds people so that he can care for them. Gideon refers to it as "Hero Homicide" even though the one person actually died was killed for being a suspect.
- Season three "Lucky" ends with Penelope being shot by her date. In the next episode "Penelope" the shooter turns out a sheriff's deputy who shot people so he could be the first one to respond and tried to kill Penelope because he thought she was on to him.
- An episode of CSI: Miami is eventually revealed to have started out this way, with the brother of a repressed family man hiring a company to set up a real-life game for his brother involving defending an attractive waitress from a jerk in a club. He's then supposed to discover said jerk dead in the men's room and have a brief adventure, complete with running away from the cops and making him think he slept with the waitress. Somehow, though, the "waitress" ends up dead for real, and the guy is freaking out, thinking that everyone is out to get him. Then it turns out that the guy's suspicious wife showed up to the hotel room, saw him passed on in bed and, naturally, assumed he cheated. She forced her way into the room, accidentally pushing the "waitress" to fall and hit her head on the coffee table, killing her.
- NCIS: New Orleans uses a medical variant when a doctor from a pharmaceutical company uses Y. pestis bacteria (aka plague) to start an epidemic that his company can create vaccines for, largely to generate some profit to keep them from bankruptcy.
- In one episode of Diagnosis: Murder, the Villain of the Week is a mentally unstable former Air Force pilot who was given a dishonorable discharge for disobeying orders and has been trying to find work as a commercial airline pilot. He drugs the flight crew of a plane he's traveling on, knowing that as the only passenger with cockpit experience, he'll be chosen to land the plane safely.
- The classic Doctor Who serial "The Enemy of the World" played this straight not once, but twice.
- To infiltrate Salamander's security, Jamie stages an attempt on Salamander's life so that he can save the man at the last minute, earning jobs for both himself and Victoria.
- Salamander's whole plan to sway public opinion in his favor hinges on causing natural disasters so that he can "predict" them and save people by warning them and evacuating affected areas.
- In the Dollhouse episode "Haunted," a character describes how her childhood nanny once baked cookies with ground-up glass in them so that she could discover them and be the big hero. Unfortunately, the character sneaked her dessert early and had to go to the hospital.
- Subverted in an episode of Drake & Josh. Drake accidentally let it slip that a girl he was dating was part of a competition between him and his brother...only he actually liked her. One of his several attempts to show her that he's "honest" involves two nerd "friends" that he constantly takes advantage of to make it seem like he found one of their wallets and returned it to them. The girl clearly sees through this and walks off...and then one of the nerds come back and asks Drake if he stole his mom's credit card from the wallet. He did.
- Father Brown: In "The Theatre of the Invisible", Jeremy Mayhew-Bowman's engineered heroics result in Accidental Murder. He arranges a house fire while the boarding house is empty, so he can dash in and save some kittens and impress Bunty. However, the landlady had returned home early as was caught in the trap and killed.
- In an episode of Flight of the Conchords, Bret is trying to woo a lady who works at a pet store and convinces Jermaine to pretend to mug them so he can impress her. Jermaine has his friend John, an actual mugger, help out, but he doesn't get the concept and actually steals her purse.
- In Frasier, Daphne's dad had a money-making scam that involved him making crude passes at women in Manchester pubs, then getting pretend beaten up by their dates.
- The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air:
- Subverted when Will has his friend hire a thug to 'rob' a store, and he'd beat the robber to impress his girlfriend. But then a REAL robber holds up the store, and Will nearly gets himself killed hamming it up before he does take down the robber. His girlfriend ends up pissed that he stood up to a man with a gun. When Jazz explains the guy Will took down was a crook with a real gun, Will instantly faints.
- Another episode had Will have a friend go to a girl and act like a total sleaze before he came in and dismiss him to impress said girl.
- Hercules: The Legendary Journeys: In "The Mother of All Monsters", Demetrius rescues Alcmene from a mugging arranged by his men so that she'll fall for him and he can lure her and Hercules into a trap.
- Journey to the West (1996): The second season have the story of the Bear Demon and the Monk Jin-chi, where the Demon will attack villages and civilians, leading to Jin-Chi coming to the rescue and using his divine Buddhist powers to defeat the Demon. It turns out they're in cahoots with each other; the Bear Demon is a reformed villain who wants to seek enlightenment from the way of Buddha, only to have Jin-Chi taking advantage of him and using the Demon as servant to extort alms and offerings.
- Kamen Rider:
- Kamen Rider Wizard: The White Wizard is an unusual case in that he's not engineering his own heroics, but rather he's both the one providing Wizard with his powers and creating the Phantoms that he fights against, all for the purpose of gathering four wizards and training their magic to the point where he'll be able to use them for his master plan.
- Kamen Rider Build: The entire first arc of the show is the heroes dealing with problems which were caused by the same alien responsible for giving them their powers, for the specific purpose of training those powers in service of his evil scheme. Even after the heroes become aware of the ruse, Evolt continues to engineer situations which will require them to improve themselves in ways that advance his goals. In the end, Build points out the irony of Evolt being Hoist by His Own Petard when he finally loses control of the situation and ends up being killed by the fake heroes he spent so much time creating.
- Kamen Rider Zero-One: This is the entire shtick of Arc Villain Kamen Rider Thouser, a ripoff of Zero-One developed by a rival company who paints himself as being able to do 1000% of what Zero-One can do. By the end of the arc it turns out that he's been directly responsible for the creation of all the killer cyborgs that the heroes have been fighting against during the arc, all for the purpose of marketing the same product which creates those cyborgs as a self-defense tool.
- Kamen Rider Geats: Morio Koganeya/Kamen Rider Mary is a nice guy on the surface, but the first sign that he's actually an opportunistic Bitch in Sheep's Clothing is when he starts deliberately drawing monsters towards civilians in the middle of battle so that he can then earn points for rescuing them.
- Lie to Me did this once with an ambulance driver who changed traffic lights to cause car crashes in order to be the first on the scene; she wants to make up for accidentally causing a car crash that killed her mother and left her brother brain damaged by saving the new victims instead. It turns out her brother was the one causing the accidents; she saved his victims out of guilt for what he did, and what she did to him and their mother, and he enjoyed controlling her through that guilt because he wanted revenge on her.
- In Men Behaving Badly Gary hides behind a paper when his girlfriend is being threatened while driving and spends the whole episode worried about his reputation. So he rings up an agency to send over a big bloke in a leather jacket to his local pub for him to beat up. He finds a big bloke in a leather jacket who he quickly beats up. Then a much smaller, skinnier guy in a leather jacket appears wanting to fight Gary. He runs away shortly after.
- Monk: In "Mr. Monk Visits a Farm," Monk does this to raise Randy's spirits after he loses confidence in himself. After solving the case, Monk uses Randy's Sleep Learning routine to subconsciously tell him how his uncle was killed. This works and Randy miraculously solves the case, regaining his confidence and returning home to rejoin the force.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Loves of Hercules. When the riffers reach the scene where Hercules rescues Queen Deianira from a rampaging bull, they speculate that Herc and the bull arranged this beforehand to impress Deianira.Jonah: (as Hercules, to the bull) Good job, Elmer. She bought it. We'll split the money later.
- Neighbours, in 2008, had the firefighter/arsonist variant in a character named Jay Duncan, who reflects the Truth in Television of this trope - not only has he done this multiple times, ending up on the front page of newspapers, but he reflects the attitude that while not outright trying to kill people (and showing remorse when confronted), it's clear he enjoys the hero worship too much to stop on his own. After his fire at the park in Erinsborough kills at least one person (Marco Silvani) and hospitalises others, he's eventually caught whilst in the process of threatening Steph (demonstrating his mental instability - all photos of him on newspapers depicted him having rescued single, blonde-haired mothers with a child). However, he's pitiful at best and pathetic at worse - Kirsten Gannon (herself having shown selfish traits in the past) sympathises with the fact that "he must feel lonely" despite being angry that he hospitalised her; Carmella Cammeniti, whose husband died, makes it clear that she views him as little more than a pathetic waste of life before leaving the room, reducing him to a sobbing wreck.
- Prodigal Son: In the episode "Q&A", another inmate at Martin's asylum stabs a guard and Ainsley's boyfriend/cameraman, causing a lockdown while both Ainsley and Malcolm are visiting Martin. Martin uses his surgical skills to save Jin, which impresses Ainsley, but as Malcolm figures out by the episode's end, Martin goaded the inmate into doing it in the first place during one of their group sessions, all so that he could present himself as the hero.
- This is the plan of the United States government in the second season of Revolution. Their initial step started with Randall's actions at the end of the first season. After that they pulled the same gambit on a smaller scale: put people in danger through an intermediary, then ride in at the last minute to save the day.
- Cyrus Beene of Scandal is a master of this, either for others or occasionally himself.
- Thinking Frankie Vargas might be a good president, Cyrus gives the low-level governor a boost by arranging for a troubled man to attack the state government building and Vargas is seen on video confronting the man, offering himself up before the attacker is killed by security. Just as Cyrus had planned, Vargas' name is instantly all over the news, giving him a push for his campaign.
- Cyrus is forced on a trip on Air Force Two when it's hacked and soon headed toward Washington. Cyrus gives a big speech to the passengers on how they might be shot down and that's a sacrifice he's willing to make. A reporter on board records it and manages to get it out online, supposedly on her own. But in the final scene of the episode, Liv confronts Cyrus who admits he was behind the whole thing to make himself look Presidential.
- In the series 2 finale of Sherlock, Moriarty does a very good job of framing Sherlock Holmes as one of these, playing on the suspicions that Scotland Yard officers had already voiced in previous episodes, with the masterstroke being Moriarty himself posing as an actor paid by Sherlock to pose as "master criminal James Moriarty".
- In the Smallville episode "Splinter", Clark Kent gets infected by silver kryptonite and suffers from hallucinations and paranoia. When he is about to murder Lana for "cheating on him," Brainiac shows up, stops him, and cures him. Later, it is revealed to the audience that Brainiac sent the kryptonite so that he could save Clark and gain his trust.
- On Stargate Atlantis, Lucius Lavin goes into the engineered heroics business after his Mind Control empire falls through. Then he tries to haggle on the payment after the hired villains did their part... When the protagonists show up, the hired villains, as their sworn enemies, perform some actual villainy.
- Supergirl (2015):
- In "Mr. and Mrs. Mxyzptlk", Mxyzptlk tries to woo Supergirl by summoning Parasite, having him rampage through downtown, then showing up in a Superman costume to defeat him. Supergirl is not impressed, especially since he freely confesses what he was doing.
- This is Lex Luthor's big Evil Plan in Season 4 — he helps Kaznia train the Supergirl clone Red Daughter and prepare to invade America, just so that he can swoop in and defeat them, thus presenting himself as a national hero.
- Attempted in Ted Lasso, Rebecca Welton's fundraising gala is thrown off-track when the main entertainment, Robbie Williams, cancels unexpectedly. Her anxieties only worsen when her sleazy ex-husband Rupert shows up to upstage her and virtually takes over the event himself. In an attempt to show his sincerity to Ted, Rupert tells him that Robbie is a personal friend of his and offers to convince him to return just in time to save the event. Ted, however, has caught onto Rupert's true nature by this point.Ted: Hey Rupert, something just occurred to me. If you could've texted Robbie Williams asking him to come tonight... you could've probably just as easily asked him not to come.
- Some from the Ultra Series:
- The series finale of Ultraman Taro has an Alien Valky who brought along a rampaging monster called a Samekujira, which he unleashed in the middle of the city to capture and prove himself as a powerful hunter. But Ultraman Taro got in the way.
- Gregorl-Man from Ultraman Dyna is an alien posing as Ultraman Dyna, who wanted fame and glory for himself, which he does so by unleashing the supposedly-deceased kaiju, Monsarger, into the middle of the city, and then single-handedly defeating Monsarger while pretending to be Dyna before basking in the glory of the cheering crowd. The Defense team, Super GUTS is able to realize something isn't right because the real Ultraman Dyna wouldn't gloat about his victory in public.
- Ultraman Mebius has Alien Mefilas, one of the Arc Villain before the series finale, who after brainwashing the population of the city into thinking he's the true hero and saviour instead of Ultraman Mebius, then revives the monster Gromite to attack the city, before destroying Gromite in front of the civilians to prove his heroism.
