Characters giving up too soon in Live-Action TV.
- Disney Channel shows Austin & Ally and Shake it Up both had a treasure hunt episode where the protagonists search for buried treasure only to later find out that the map was a fake, thus driving them to give up the hunt, only for the treasure to be found after they leave.
- The Atlanta episode "Value" revolves around Van smoking pot for the first time in years, then going to extreme lengths to pass a mandatory drug test the next day to keep her job. After her final attempt fails, she confesses to her boss, who informs Van that the quarterly tests are a sham — they can only afford to test each employee once, when they start. She also doesn't really care if employees get high when they're outside of work. However, Van lost her Plausible Deniability by admitting to taking illegal drugs, so she's being fired anyway. The only benefit confession gave her was a few extra days to get her things together.
- Part of the backstory of Walter White in Breaking Bad. He was one of the 3 founders of the tech company called Gray Matter. Convinced that their venture was a mistake, as well as envying one of the other two for contributing most of the capital, Walt sold his share for 5000 dollars and left the group. He can only watch with fury and envy as he saw the company soon grow into a billion-dollar enterprise, which Walt still regards as his greatest failure. After his cancer diagnosis his old friends were courteous enough to give him a high-ranking position in the company, but Walt was so prideful that he saw being anything less than CEO as an insult.
- Doctor Who:
- "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead": Donna Noble lives a highly compressed life in a virtual reality system, meeting "the perfect man", falling in love with him, and having children with him, all in the space of a few real-time minutes. Once she leaves the system, she hangs around to see if he really existed or if he was just a computer illusion. She gives up and leaves, just as he shows up. It doesn't help that the man has a stutter (which he'd been able to work out in the simulation but not in real life) that prevented him from calling out to her, or that the name he was given in the simulation wasn't his real one.
- Zig-Zagged in the prequel to "The Bells of Saint John". The Doctor is sitting in a swing set, despondent because he has been unable to locate Clara Oswald. A little girl approaches him and offers advice, which convinces him to keep at it. Subverted because this is what prevents him from giving up, but played straight because if he'd thought to ask her name, his search would be at an end.
- Subverted in one episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air where Will accidentally sets off a car alarm when he walks to close to a vehicle and a cop comes up to him getting the wrong idea. Will tries to set off the car alarm by actually touching the vehicle, which naturally it doesn't. Will resigns to his fate and goes off with the cop, only for the warning to go off as they leave. When Will is returned home he's apparently on good terms with the cop implying he did in fact hear the warning from the car, vindicating Will.
- Friends: Joey spends an entire episode looking for a hot girl he saw across Monica's window but is unable to find her apartment. He finally reaches her apartment towards the end of the episode, but when Ross (who met the hot girl and was invited over to her apartment) opened the door, Joey thinks he got the wrong apartment again and runs off.
- In the "Subway" episode of Homicide: Life on the Street, a man (played by Vincent D'Onofrio) falls in front of a subway train and gets pinned between the train and the platform. When told he will most likely die within an hour, he asks them to find his girlfriend, who's out jogging. They don't find her and at the end of the episode when the paramedics were taking him away, she's shown jogging by.
- How I Met Your Mother has the "Curse of the Blitz". Anyone who holds the curse will hold the nickname "The Blitz" and forever (or at least until they pass it on to someone else) miss exciting and once-in-a-lifetime events due to leaving too early.
- iCarly: In "iSpy a Mean Teacher", Carly comes up with the idea to do a webcast on what mean teachers do when they're not in school, so the gang uses a camera shaped like a pie to record Sadist Teacher Ms. Briggs at home. When recording, all Carly and Freddie get are two hours of Ms. Briggs vacuuming her living room and possibly taking out her trash, so they turn off the camera before a bee chases them inside; that is when they start to witness Ms. Briggs doing more outlandish activities such as wild exercising routines and playing the bagpipes, as well as discovering she has an obsessive crush on Randy Jackson.
- In one episode of I Love Lucy, the Ricardos and the Mertzes purchase an oil well from a Texas millionaire. However, when the well's oil doesn't come in, Lucy believes they had been swindled and used a crazy Engineered Public Confession method to force him to buy it back from them. Afterwards, the Ricardos and the Mertzes are congratulating Lucy on getting them out of the scam when a man who just happened to buy the well they just gave back used their phone to call his wife and tell her that the well finally came in as a gusher. The episode ends with Ricky, Fred, and Ethel silently and menacingly surrounding Lucy and leering down at her.
- Season 2 of Jeremiah; Mr. Smith convinces Jeremiah, Kurdy, and Markus that God is going to finally, overtly, come to Earth and grant one wish to each person in a selected place. Each character discusses what their wish would be; Mr. Smith says only to have his broken arm, which the doctor's said had little chance of healing, repaired ("That's it?" shrug -"I travel light"). Long story short, they all wander off except Mr. Smith—then the next morning, they are throwing a baseball around, and Mr. Smith appears and catches it—with his theretofore broken arm, saying sadly, "You guys shoulda stayed..."
- The Murdoch Mysteries episode "Murdoch and the Temple of Death" includes a hunt for the Holy Grail. After much effort, including defeating several traps in the titular building and pursuing a man who killed for it, Murdoch and Dr. Iris Bajali retrieve a ceramic cup. Murdoch and Brackenreid consult a local museum expert about the find, and there's a bit of disappointment when it is shown to have a hidden Christian symbol, making it too new to be the actual Grail. Constable Crabtree suggests the apparent first-century pottery exterior conceals the real Holy Grail, and Murdoch dismisses the idea of breaking so ancient an artifact just to test Crabtree's theory. The cup is donated to the museum, and later a staffer is shown accidentally knocking it to the floor, breaking the clay exterior to reveal a metal cup inside. The episode closes with the metal cup back on a shelf suggestively bathed in a shaft of light.
- Zigzagged in one Night Court episode, where the courtroom is dealing with an infestation of roaches, due to a construction project on an adjoining floor. Art the janitor tries everything, but even breaking out the extra-extra-professional-strength "Roach Nuke" fails to work, and he's sobbing at his own incompetence. Then Harry reads the label on the stuff and notices that it has a four-hour incubation. Seems the stuff did work when he used it, and now it seems Art will need a broom and a lot of overtime.
- In one episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Sabrina is invited to Josh's book club the same night as Harvey's football game, so Sabrina gives Dreama a pager to let her know when Harvey will be in the game so she can zap herself there to see it. After a few false alarms with the team losing and only thirty seconds left on the clock, Sabrina decides to turn off the pager. Harvey is then put in the game so the team can save face. Not only does Sabrina miss Harvey's touchdown, but he breaks up with her when he finds out she was with Josh.
- Seinfeld:
- The quartet spends the entire episode waiting for their table to be available at a Chinese restaurant. Just after they leave... "Seinfeld, 4?"
- One episode involves Jerry and George buying some stock on a tip from an acquaintance of George's. Throughout the episode, the stock continued to drop until Jerry decided to sell it before it was too late while George 'decided to go down with the ship'. The next day, Jerry finds out that the stock had risen dramatically and George ended up making $8,000.
- In an episode of Sliders, the characters only have a few seconds to decide whether or not to stay on the latest parallel Earth they've landed on. To see if it's their home or not, Quinn tries a fence, knowing it is always squeaky (something he does in the pilot), and it doesn't squeak. After they leave, a gardener with an oil can comes into view.
- The Twilight Zone (1959)
- The series had a rather disturbing example of this trope. In the episode "Mr. Garrity and the Graves", a con artist scams an entire village into believing he can raise their dead. After being paid not to (the villagers having different reasons for not wanting them to come back), the con artist apologizes to the graveyard for not being able to do what he claimed before leaving with his partner for the next village to con. The moment they're gone, the dead start rising.
- The episode "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" involved a space ship crashing onto what the astronauts think is a distant desert planet. One Jerkass member of the crew, determined to survive, kills the rest of the crew one by one so he can steal their water canteens. Shortly after killing the captain, the crew member finds out they were on Earth All Along, not far from a freeway leading to Reno, Nevada.
- An ambiguous case in an episode of The Twilight Zone (2002): a group of college students travel through a forest and discover a cave of an ancient tribe. They disturb a large chalice containing blood and the sun unexpectedly goes dark, much to the confusion of scientists on the radio. Realizing that the blood was an offering to a sun god by an ancient culture, the group believes that in order to bring back the sun, they must replace the offering so they kill one of their group for her blood. Immediately afterwards, the sun returns, but then they hear over the radio that scientists believe that the event was caused by a natural occurrence, leaving them to wonder if they killed their friend for no reason.
- Twin Peaks: When Ben Horne is being falsely held for the murder of Laura Palmer, Catherine (who he was with at the time of Laura's death) reveals to him that she was Faking the Dead and promises to exonerate him if he signs the mill back over to her. Ben does so immediately, which was actually unhelpful (Catherine brags that she can withhold her testimony anyway) and unnecessary (Ben's blood does not match that present on the scene of the murder; the cops were just holding him longer as part of a Batman Gambit to catch Leland/Bob).
- The X-Files: The episode "Quagmire" is about the deaths of several people around a lake where a lake monster is purported to live. The killer turns out to be an alligator that Mulder shoots. Right after he and Scully leave, the real lake monster surfaces.
