Felony Misdemeanor / Live-Action TV

• In an episode of the Narmtastic show 7th Heaven, a Totally Radical wigger calls Lucy a bitch. For the rest of the episode, using the B-word is likened to raping someone. But, since this is 7th Heaven we're talking about, it turns out that the bully was just hiding behind a "jerk act", pretending to be mean to fit in with the cool kids. Cue the Anvilicious Aesop about not giving in to peer pressure.
• On 30 Rock, Kenneth becomes addicted to caffeine and starts acting... out of the ordinary.
  Tracy: So you had a little bender!
  Kenneth: It's not just the coffee. I also went to a PG-13 movie. I bought a pair of sunglasses. I tried a Jewish doughnut! I'd always been told that New York was the 21st-century city of Sodom, and looks what's happened... I've become one of them! I've been sodomized!
• The Addams Family uses type 3 on multiple occasions. Many times, the "offense" really isn't offensive at all (reading fairy tales, wanting to join the scouts, playing with puppies, looking like a normal adorable baby)... it's just that, to the Addams' strange beliefs and values, these are actually sickening and wrong.
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: When Lance Hunter is forced to defend Phil Coulson from a splinter of S.H.I.E.L.D. that wants to depose him as director, he admits that Coulson sometimes chews with his mouth open and hogs the mic at karaoke night.
• Both contestants and fans of The Amazing Race are guilty of this. It's understandable for a team to overreact when they're Yielded or U-Turned (though calling a team "Dirty Pirate Hookers" was probably going too far), but there are those who are willing to vilify a team simply for copying another team's flight arrangements or, even worse, having a "bad attitude".
• Andor: The trumped-up charges ("Anti-Imperial speech", "Fleeing from the scene of anti-imperial activity", etc.) that Cassian is accused of in "Announcement" are still hardly heinous crimes by any standards, but carry a sentence of six years in Hellhole Prison. This obviously backfires badly on the Empire, given that there's a good chance Cassian would have continued to lay low if left undisturbed. Ordinarily however they would only carry six months.
• In Angel:
  Angel: I'm not perfect, Faith. Even with a soul, I've done things I wished a thousand times I could take back.
  Angelus: Yeah, like those Manilow concerts, you son of a bitch!
• Type 3 happens in several episodes of Are You Being Served?, including an instance of Mr. Humphries was once detained for having a "suspicious-looking bulge" from an orange in his pocket.
• As Time Goes By: Lionel is detained while trying to find Jean. Jean, who is angry at him, refuses to vouch.
• A minor example played for laughs in Band of Brothers: Webster is berating himself after getting shot. Not for getting shot, which he couldn't have avoided, but for in the heat of the moment shouting out "They got me!", which he finds horribly cliched.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Mayor Wilkins makes a platitude-rich commencement speech right before Ascending (metamorphosing into a giant demon who means to eat the town).
    Buffy: My god! He’s going to do the entire speech!
    Willow: Man just ascend already!
    Buffy: Evil.
  • More straightforwardly, the characters in Buffy had a tendency to get incredibly lecture-y whenever one of them had a little too much to drink.
• Castle:
  • When Demming, Beckett's new love interest, is suspected by the others of being a dirty cop planted into their recent investigation to sabotage it from within, they voice their suspicions of him from a distance. However, whereas the cops comment on things such as his suspicious reasons for requesting to be part of the case and his too-good-to-be-true dedication to the case, Castle's reasons for suspecting him — based largely on his insecurity over suddenly having a competitor for Beckett's attention — stem from his suspicion that "he probably goes to yoga classes just to pick up women" and "he probably subscribes to The New Yorker without even reading it".
  • There's also the episode "Hedgefund Homeboys" where Castle tells his daughter Alexis to tell him if she's ever in trouble or does anything wrong after he works on a case involving a bunch of teenagers and a shooting. She later comes to him in tears and reveals that she once jumped a turnstile at the train station late one night, inciting this trope with complete honesty. Castle responds with relief and amusement but Alexis grounds herself for her heinous actions.
  • Another time Castle and Beckett find out that Ryan's fiancée slept with another man while she was already dating Ryan. They fear that this information will destroy the relationship and angst over whether to tell him. When they finally tell him, he reveals that he already knew and didn't think that it was a problem, since they were only dating for a month at the time and were not yet exclusive. In fact, the scene where they finally decide to carefully approach the subject with Ryan, they mention the guy's diary of all the women he slept with, only for Ryan to eagerly ask if his fiancée is in there too.
• Charmed:
  • The series reconstructed this in the episode "Morality Bites". The sisters use their powers to punish a man who lets his dog pee in their garden and Phoebe then sees a premonition of her own death in the future and the sisters travel there to find out that Phoebe used her powers to kill a man, got caught and was being burned at the stake while modern day witch trials were going on. When the sisters come back to their time, they discover that the man they punished at the start of the episode is the same man who was leading the witch trials in the future. Phoebe then suggests that them using their powers to punish the man starts them off using them for personal gain.
    Piper: But this is just a little thing.
    Phoebe: Once you break the small rules, it's only a matter of time before the big rules follow
  • A later episode involving parallel worlds does it again when their world becomes "too good" so any act that can be seen as criminal in any way is punished to the highest degree. Phoebe gets shot in the stomach by a police officer for parking in front of her neighbor's driveway and a hospital orderly had his hand cut off for using his cellphone in the building.
• The Colbert Report:
  • Played for Laughs in a series of segments called Nailed 'Em where Colbert viciously attacks people who have got in trouble for doing something completely innocent. One segment features a high school student who was almost expelled because she was caught using drugs on school grounds. Said drugs were her birth control pills.
  • He also once presented us with the story of a girl who got taken from school by the cops because she had the audacity to bring pills to school. The pills? Ibuprofen.
• An interesting subversion in an episode of Cold Case: The victim was in prison for seven years for stealing a pair of shoes. He only got six months for the actual theft. The rest were added on for his repeated escape attempts. It may have been a Shout-Out to the Les Misérables example above.
• Community:
  • Abed's methods of teaching the study group to respect and fear him in the episode Contemporary American Poultry. This involves cutting up a backpack, releasing a monkey from a cage, putting gum in hair, unplugging a TV, and feeding chicken fingers to a guy.
  • In "Basic Lupine Urology", a spoof of Law & Order, a ruined science experiment is treated with all the seriousness of a homicide. By contrast, Star-Burns is revealed to be stealing, selling drugs and running a meth lab from the trunk of his car, all of which are dismissed as irrelevant to the investigation.
  • In "Economics of Marine Biology", the Dean goes to absurd lengths to convince a rich kid to enroll at Greendale: he retools all the classes around the kid's interests, transforms much of the campus into a wild party, and hires prostitutes for entertainment. But what convinces the Dean he's gone too far? When he forbids Living Prop Magnitude from saying his Catchphrase "Pop Pop!" because the rich kid wants that to be his catchphrase now. After Magnitude stays up all night, struggling and suffering to come up with a new catchphrase, the Dean actually says, "My God, what have we done?"
• The opening sequence of Dexter is a borderline case, as the montage shows us the protagonist accomplishing mundane acts of his morning routine (shaving, cooking eggs and bacon, lacing his shoes) in a way suggesting his psychopathic nature. In one of the DVD commentaries, it is explicitly stated that the title sequence is set up to show the violence in everyday life.
• Doctor Who: "The Happiness Patrol" features a Type 2. On Terra Alpha, being a 'Killjoy' (i.e. being unhappy) is punishable by death.
• From the Firefly episode "Our Mrs. Reynolds" when Shepherd Book and Mal are discussing Mal's new wife.
  Shepherd Book: If you take sexual advantage of her, you're going to burn in a very special level of Hell. A level they reserve for child molesters... and people who talk at the theater.
• The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: The b-plot of "It’s Better to Have Loved and Lost It" deals with Phil being investigated by an ethics committee as part of his campaign for the judicial seat. Geoffrey then decides to come clean about a deep, dark secret that he is keeping and which he fears could ruin Phil's campaign. What is this secret that could tarnish the Banks' by association? It turns out that before he became the family butler, Geoffrey participated in the long-distance race of 1976 Olympics. Geoffrey cheated by taking a cab to the Olympic Stadium parking lot which allowed him to get ahead of the other runners. Unfortunately, this act was caught on camera by a Japanese tourist. Geoffrey was stripped of his gold medal and declared "The Shame of a Nation" for his cheating. Rather than being angry at him, the Banks just laugh it off and assure him that the committee won't care about it at all.
• Friends: Joey has little interest in a second date with one of Phoebe's friends because she took fries from Joey's plate (complete with horrified slo-mo and evil musical strings from Joey's retelling of the story). Turns into Hypocritical Humor when Joey eats her food while she's in the bathroom.
  Joey: JOEY DOESN'T SHARE FOOD!
• Glee:
  • Rachel and Finn were caught using the Cheerios' photocopier without Sue Sylvester's permission. Her response is to haul them to the principal's office and have them hobbled. He makes them pay the dollar or so for the paper and ink.
    Sue: Lady Justice wept today.
  • Sue seems to think everything the Glee Club does is heinous. When they performed "Push It" at the school assembly (admittedly, with school-inappropriate choreography), Sue's "first reaction was that all the children should be put into foster care."
  • Jesse's reaction to Rachel's triplecasting him in "Bad Reputation."
  • "Bad Reputation" also brings us Kurt's master plan to become badass — have the Glee Club perform Can't Touch This. In the library. Needless to say, it backfired when the elderly librarian told them it was "cute" and asking them to perform it at her church.
• The Good Place:
  • Every single action in a person's life is judged and scored to see whether it had a positive or a negative effect on the universe, which then determines if they get into the Good Place. Positive effects include eating a sandwich, donating to charity, being a vegan, and ending slavery (that's how Lincoln got in). Negative effects include rape, murder, genocide, microwaving fish in an office microwave, being emotionally invested in The Bachelor, or taking off shoes and socks on a commercial airline.
    Eleanor: Shoes and socks? What? No! Who would do that?
    Michael: People who go to the Bad Place, Eleanor! And if you don't pass this test, you're going to be down there with them! With rapists, murderers, and people who take off their shoes and socks on a commercial airline!
  • As it turns out, due to a glitch in the system, every action ends up giving you negative points. Globalization means that the world is so connected that everyone is connected to everyone else. Michael checks the action of a man giving his grandmother flowers before and after globalization. Before, a man bought some flowers, his grandmother loved them, plus sixty points. After, a man bought the flowers from a shop that abuses its workers, who bought them from a farm that uses pesticides, owned by a CEO who cheats on his wife—resulting in a net loss of four points. No one has gotten into the Good Place (including Lincoln, as it turns out) in hundreds of years because of this.
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • Ted flashbacks to a date he had with a girl who had "the Crazy Eyes". As she and Ted are about to cross the street, a car screeches to a halt in front of them. The driver is apologetic, and Ted gestures that it's okay, but his date grabs a post and starts beating the car with it shouting "WATCH! WHERE! YOU'RE! GOING!"
  • When Barney discovered that Ted has an ex who was once a porn star.
    Barney: You dumped a PORN STAR?! Friendship over. FRIENDSHIP! OVER!
  • Barney hates Gary Blauman because one time at McLaren's, he took four of Barney's french fries, one of which was a curly fry that was accidentally added to the batch. Ted and Marshall agree with him.
    Marshall: You take another man's wife before you take his accidental curly!
• iCarly:
  • The most notable example is the "iMeet Fred" episode, where Freddie says that he doesn't think Fred's videos are all that funny, and Fred announces he's not going to make videos anymore. Freddie then suffers a Humiliation Conga courtesy of everyone at school and his aunt. And later, Sam beats him with a tennis racket. And then throws him out of a treehouse and jumps on him.
  • Another notable example is in "iEnrage Gibby", when Freddie trips on Gibby's girlfriend Tasha, causing Gibby to think he tried to kiss her. Gibby then becomes a borderline Faux Affably Evil to Freddie and Tasha.
• Parodied in an episode of The IT Crowd with an anti-piracy PSA which compared pirating films to stealing a handbag, stealing a baby, and shooting a policeman, stealing his helmet, pooping in it, sending it to his grieving wife, and stealing it again.
• The Jews Are Coming: A group of covert post-WWII Nazis plot the ruination of Israel… by making it lose the Eurovision Song Contest year after year. This is a dig at the Israeli tendency to ascribe defeats in international competitions to political motives and/or anti-Semitism.
• Kamen Rider Build uses this as a plot point. When directly attacking Seito's forces becomes diplomatically too complicated, Sento and Prime Minister Himuro decide to have Build branded as a traitor and fired from Touto's forces to let him act freely. The crime? Sento borrowed a dolk from the Prime Minister and never returned it. Even Banjo can't believe how silly the whole thing is, after he and Kazumi are sent to Build's location under the pretense of getting a single buck back.
• The League of Gentlemen: Pop disowns his son Richie because he allowed a couple of kids to rob his newsstand. Of nine Maverick bars.
• Leverage features a Type 2 when Nate is sent to prison. He finds that the warden is making backdoor deals to send innocent men to prison to increase his population and thus profits as it is a for-profit prison. Cue jailbreak with new mark thrown in for free.
  • A similar case is shown in an episode of The Good Wife, where a judge deliberately ignores plea bargains and sends people who have just plead guilty to jail for the maximum possible sentence. Specifically, he sends them to a private prison owned by a friend of his, who gives him a cut of the profits. Once Will finds out, he has the judge (an old friend) exposed.
• Lucifer: Azrael's blade amplifies the rage in any human who handles it, causing them to commit murder for the slightest offenses. The team stumbles upon a scene where a dozen people were murdered because every time someone tried to get the knife from the person wielding it they started killing too. At the end of the episode, Dan nearly kills Lucifer over stolen yogurt.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus did the fourth kind quite a few times, satirizing the way British culture used to encourage the first kind. The page quote comes from their restaurant sketch, combining this with My Greatest Failure.
• In an episode of The Nanny, a man that mugs Fran agrees to do community service and walks. Angered, Fran shouts out, "Meanwhile, I eat a couple of Bing cherries at the A&P, and I'm wrestled to the ground like Squeaky Fromme!"
• In Nogizaka Skits, Insurance Police Sayaka hunts and arrests those who employ "insurance" in social interactions (that is, playing it safe through vague statements, false modesty, Self-Deprecation, Compliment Fishing, etc.; the Japanese expression is 保険をかける hoken wo kakeru).
• In one of the most famous sketches from Not the Nine O'Clock News , Constable Savage is reprimanded for making arrests for "Looking At Me In A Funny Way", "Walking On The Cracks In The Pavement", "Smelling Of Foreign Food" and "Possession Of An Offensive Wife", among many, many other charges he has brought... against the same man. Said man is, at the time of the reprimand, being held on a charge of "Possession Of Curly Black Hair And Thick Lips".
• Played straight and averted in the same scene in Once Upon a Time between Belle and Rumplestiltskin. While Rumple is explaining her duties as his servant, Belle drops and chips a small cup. Clearly terrified that he's going to be furious, she stammers an apology but he just shrugs it off, saying "it's just a cup." Of course, that chipped cup later becomes one of his most precious possessions and even touching it means you'll be lucky if he just breaks all your bones...
• In The Orville episode "Majority Rule", the people of Sargus 4 use social media to determine everything, from what is true to whether someone is guilty. If someone does something extremely minor and a video of that goes viral, then that person can quickly accumulate a million downvotes, which automatically makes him a criminal (most businesses won't even service someone with half that many downvotes). What follows is an "apology tour", with the accused attending several talk shows, where he must convince the public of his redemption. During the "tour", if the criminal accumulates 10 million downvotes, he undergoes the local equivalent to a lobotomy, becoming a perpetually-happy vegetable. Yes, that's right, you can get lobotomized for saying or doing the wrong thing if someone with a smartphone is nearby.
• Graham Chapman's and Douglas Adams' Out of the Trees features the Peony Severance Sketch, where a man and his girlfriend are stopped by the police for picking a flower off somebody else's bush. It escalates quickly.
• In Psych, there is mention of a program meant to replace cops with robots. Apparently, it didn't work out, as a robot ended up strangling a jaywalker. This may just be a reference to RoboCop.
• In the Quantum Leap episode "Memphis Melody," Sam's actions accidentally cause Elvis not to get discovered. Al checks the changes to history and says that "Heartbreak Hotel" gets recorded by The Monkees and "Blue Suede Shoes" by Tony Orlando and Dawn, to which he responds by miming throwing up.
• In the Red Dwarf episode "D.N.A.", Lister confesses his darkest secret to Kryten: once, many years ago, he went into a wine bar.
• In Ressha Sentai ToQger, Akira Nijino, formerly the Shadow Kaijin Zaram, could not forgive himself for interrupting sunny days with rain^note His power was literally the ability to make it rain wherever he went.. This made him a Death Seeker, constantly starting his battles by saying, "So this is where I'll die.''
• In Saturday Night Live's parody of Countdown With Keith Olbermann, Olbermann's "special comment" was on a co-op board refusing to make an exception to its "no pets" policy for his cat, Miss Precious Perfect:
  Olbermann: And there it was. All perfectly legal. Like the 1942 internment of more than 100,000 Japanese-American citizens or the forced relocation of the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears or the monstrous injustice of our nation's Jim Crow laws. It was all perfectly legal and EVERY BIT AS WRONG if not, indeed, MORE SO!! Mr. Lieberstein, you speak of considerations of the rights of others! How DARE you, sir?! How DARE you?! Where, sir, in any of this, were the rights of Miss Precious Perfect considered? DAMN YOU, Mr. Lieberstein!! DAMN YOU TO HELL!!!
• The Slammer uses Type 3. When Sammy Sparkle admits that he is not really an entertainer, but is actually just a wannabe, Grimble is so horrified that he faints.
• On a couple of episodes of Sports Night, Bobbi Bernstein substitutes for Casey as anchor, which Dan has a problem with, since she claims he slept with her in Spain, and then never called. He swears not only has he never slept with her, he never even knew her back then, he's never been to Spain, and he wouldn't treat a woman like that. Whoever he tells this story to has the same response; "Oh, Dan. You never called?"
• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Justice", the crew visits a pleasantly peaceful colony called Edo. While playing ball with the local kids, Wesley accidentally breaks a cheap gardening implement and discovers why the colony is so peaceful: every day a new area is randomly and secretly selected as a "punishment zone" and within it, all crime is punishable by death. The idea being that no one commits crime anywhere, just in case they're unknowingly in the punishment zone. Of course, that's exactly where Wesley is when he has his accident. And since his accident is treated as vandalism, the crew then has to negotiate their way out of having Wesley be put to death for tripping.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
  • Captain Sisko hunts down a traitor from his own chain of command. Traitor as in joining the Maquis, a group that attempts to harm only war-mongering Cardassians as policy. Said traitor believes that Sisko is blowing everything out of proportion, and references Les Misérables a lot. It's left up to the viewers to decide whether Sisko is truly upholding Federation values as he states, or is just secretly pissed that someone would dare "leave paradise" (The Federation), as the traitor claims.
  • This is played for laughs in all of its Deliberate Values Dissonance glory in the episode "Bar Association": Rom is tired of his brother Quark's cutting the pay of his employees using a recurring slump in business as an excuse and forms a union. Several of the Ferengi employees are so disturbed at the mere thought that they feel faint and Rom can barely bring himself to say the word.
  • Quark was even exiled from Ferengi society for a time for the unforgivable sin of... breaking a contract to sell his remains when he thought he was dying in "Body Parts" (this was going to be "enforced" with him being killed, no less). This was played as the responsible enforcer acting out a grudge, and against Ferengi norms.
  • Then there's Quark's mother, who liked to wear clothing! Ferengi who saw her in clothing invariably reacted the same way a human would who accidentally walked in on someone who was undressing. Even worse than wearing clothing was her most heinous crime: deliberately earning money. This later attitude starts to slowly change, though, when someone points out that women earning money means they can now buy things (i.e. more profit for merchants).
• A non-comedic example occurs in an episode of Touched by an Angel which features a girl whose angelic voice moved God Himself... but her life is marred by a tragic addiction to chewing gum. Even earthly human society seemed to consider this a terrible moral failing. Perhaps Roald Dahl could have written for that show! It's supposed to be an "anything can be bad if taken to extremes" moral, but it falls on its face pretty badly. And once you consider that Monica has a caffeine addiction that's always played for laughs, it's quite hypocritical of the writers to play an addiction to chewing gum for drama.
• Marvin in Weeds claims to have once brought back the wrong order from 7-11 for U-turn. He now has an artificial patella.
• Wizards of Waverly Place: Stevie incites an insurrection in order to overturn the Council's "one wizard per family" rule. Irresponsible rabble-rousing, or much-needed social reform? You be the judge.
• Yellowjackets: Laura Lee, who's a deeply devout Christian, is convinced that the crash is God's punishment for thinking (not saying) her piano teacher's a "cunt" while frustrated during a lesson. The other girls all just stare at her a moment and then burst out laughing over this. They then start sharing their own misdeeds - for example, one of theirs habit of stealing awful clothes from T.J. Maxx, then returning them all for credit she never uses. "I have thousands of dollars in T.J. bucks."

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