Impoverished Patrician / Live-Action TV

• Belgravia: Maria's family, the Greys, the Earls of Templemore. According to Maria's brother Reggie, they haven't had anyone in the family with a head for money in hundreds of years. Because of this, their mother Lady Templemore is forcing Maria to marry the unpleasant John Bellasis, who is second-in-line to the wealthy Earl of Brockenhurst.
• The Beverly Hillbillies:
  • Mrs. Drysdale's backstory is that she came from a blue-blooded Bostonian family who lost their fortune, and the only reason she married Milburn is for his money.
  • In "His Royal Highness", an impoverished ex-king schemes to marry Elly-May for her money. His entire "fortune" is in "Glotny's", which, according to Miss Hathaway's book of world currencies and exchange rates, is "absolutely worthless." In fact, on two occasions in the episode, they're even used as table napkins!
• Blackadder: Several Blackadders are noblemen, but they're inevitably not that well off, and attempts to improve their station inevitably end in disaster or no net profit at all. Prince Edmund the Black Adder is the son of the king of England, yet apparently has no lands of his own, spending most of the series skulking around his father's castle. Lord Blackadder in Elizabethan times has a title and a place at court, but lives in a pretty modest house and is constantly losing money for ridiculous reasons. (He claims that his father blew the family fortune on "wine, women and amateur dramatics. At the end, he was eking out a living doing humourous impressions of Anne of Cleves".) In an extreme example, Prince George in the third series was such an Upper-Class Twit that he went bankrupt buying socks (although he also believed that the object of card games was to give away as much money as possible, which hardly helped matters). He is the regent of multiple countries.
• Lord Charley of Charley's Grants is an aristocrat reduced to trying to scrounge for arts grants due to a series of financial difficulties.
• Downton Abbey: A major theme of the show is how the English aristocracy is transitioning into the modern age, becoming less and less able to enjoy their previous lifestyle (namely as landlords living on massive estates with rent-paying tenants, and being attended to by small armies of servants). At one point, the titular estate is studied by a government official doing research on aristocratic bankruptcies.
  • As explained in the backstory, Robert Crawley’s father, the 6th Earl of Grantham, was running low on cash when Robert was young. Nonetheless, he was still culturally obligated to maintain the eponymous ancestral estate, which is why he arranged for Robert's marriage to Cora Levinson, the daughter of a Jewish dry-goods magnate from Ohio (can't get more American than that). He also insisted that her fortune be entailed to the Grantham estate; i.e. considered part of the estate’s overall value and extremely difficult to legally separate. This backfires and leads to the Succession Crisis that drives the first three series’ of the show.
  • In the third series, it’s revealed that Robert made a large and disastrous investment putting the whole fortune into the Grand Trunk Railway, which crashed and was nationalised by the Canadian government, leaving the Crawley's assets at almost nothing. The family gets ready to sell Downton Abbey and move to a smaller place (which was still a gracious home), but Robert's son-in-law (also third cousin once removed) and heir-presumptive Matthew unexpectedly inherits a large sum from his late ex-fiancée's father (yes), allowing him to invest in the estate and keep it in the family. Phew.
  • Additionally, numerous one-off characters, all peers and friends of Lord Grantham, are shown to suffer the fate that he narrowly avoided. The most prominently featured example is Robert’s cousin Hugh McClare: The loss of his family’s wealth and influence fractured the already tenuous relationship between Hugh and his wife, resulting in a scandalous divorce. Interestingly, their daughter Rose was able to maintain societal status by following Robert’s example; marrying into a nouveau riche Jewish family in what became a true love match.
• El Chavo del ocho: It's implied that Doña Florinda and Doña Clotilde were from richer origins, judging by the snobbish attitude of the former and the many references to married sisters who live abroad and send her gifts to the latter. Doña Florinda seems to have married beneath her class and when she was widowed her family denied her and Quico any monetary support, so she ended in the Vecindad, living solely off her widow pension. Doña Clotilde, on the other side, appears to suffer the sad destiny of the Old Maid who get stale; instead of play the "Old Spinster Aunt" role in her married siblings' homes, she preferred to live on her own.
• The Count of Monte Cristo (1998): Camille de la Richardais, following the death of her husband. Her financial situation is so dire that she can't repair her house's roof and has to eat substitutes. Cue the Count of Monte Cristo showing up at her house with caviar and other delicious and pricey things with the intent of seducing her.
• Elementary: The Holmes family are friends with an elderly king of a country that ceased to exist more than a century ago and is now divided among multiple democracies. The king's ancestors managed to keep the royal titles but had to earn their own living. The king himself avoided this trope because of excellent investment advice provided by Sherlock's father. However, the king's son has not been so good with money and decided to restore his finances through a royal adoption scheme. He legally adopted more than a dozen wealthy Americans in exchange for thousands of dollars in fees. The adoptees can now legally claim to be princes/princesses. When the king finds out about this scheme he is not amused and on Sherlock's advice, he disowns his son. This revokes any noble titles held by the son and his heirs and opens up the son to lawsuits from his disgruntled "offspring".
• Father Brown: In "The Flying Stars", the Adams family are revealed to be in such dire financial straits that they'd pawned the titular Stars off years ago to make ends meet.
• Game of Thrones: Viserys and Daenerys Targaryen have grown up as this after Robert's Rebellion, formerly members of the Royal Family, but now moving from city to city and benefactor to benefactor, always fearing betrayal and assassination. The stress of it may have contributed to Viserys' madness. It was to the point that the luxury Daenerys finds herself in, as Illyrio's honoured guest, at the start of the series is bewildering. It changes once she starts conquering and pillaging three cities and by the time of Season 7, one can assume that she's quite well-off and independently wealthy to the extent that she values money and currency.
• Hogan's Heroes: Colonel Klink is implied to be this trope. Though it is mentioned that he comes from an old Prussian family, it is also stated that he has money troubles.
  Klink: (Believing that he is going have a fortune in oil) After the war, I won't just have a 500-year-old aristocratic name, but for the first time, some money to go with it.
  • Old Prussian families being in money trouble is actually one of the stereotypes about them — one of the reasons so many of their members joined the army was that they needed the money.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): Louis de Pointe du Lac's family used to be fairly wealthy, with a sugar plantation, but his father mismanaged it, so they were four months shy of bankruptcy when he died. This has forced Louis to provide through various legal and illegal business dealings.
• In Your Dreams: The von Hasenbergs live in a castle but are constantly fighting bankruptcy.
• Kamen Rider Kabuto: Tsurugi (AKA Kamen Rider Sasword) is the last descendant of the proud Discabil family of England (though he's obviously at least part Japanese...). He's also completely broke, hence his freelance work for ZECT, though it takes some time for him to find this out because his faithful servant Jiya is going out of his way to keep it from him.
• Law & Order: Had a case involving a poor old money family having married a new money family. The bride in the arrangement was too strung out on pills to mind being used in such a way.
• Legend of the Seeker: A wealthy merchant who is an ally of the heroes arranges a marriage for his son to the daughter of a family that "has their name, but not much else". Neither the bride or the groom is excited about it, and the son pulls a Grand Theft Me on Richard to avoid the marriage, but they end up being surprisingly compatible.
• Mad Men: Pete Campbell comes, through his mother, from the Old Money New York WASP/Dutch Dyckman family that once owned half of Upper Manhattan.^note Real family, by the way, which really did own half of Upper Manhattan. They named a major street after them. The rest of the family history is made up, though. His family is shown early on to have fallen on hard times (his grandfather lost the property in the Crash of 1929 and his father apparently squandered the remaining fortune), which is why he's working as a mid-level ad exec and marries Trudy Vogel, whose father had worked his way to become a higher-up at Richardson-Vicks (makers of Clearasil and, well, Vicks. As in NyQuil and Vap-O-Rub).
• Meet The B*stards: Was a Channel 4 reality TV-show based around one impoverished noble family; the thing was (as the title implies) they were extremely rude, often blurring the lines between the perceived distinction between working-class and upper-class.
• Midsomer Murders: The Inkpen family in "Garden of Death", which had to sell the manor (which had been in the family since the reformation) 25 years earlier and could only buy it back 20 years later thanks to blackmail money.
• Monarch of the Glen: Largely about a family barely holding on to their ancestral holdings, largely by encouraging tourism. The expenses involved in just heating their ancestral home are a big part of the early seasons.
• Murdoch Mysteries: Featured the Newsomes, a family of Upper Class Twits who were for the most part Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense. Unfortunately, one of the relatives lost most of the family fortune on an investment in San Francisco that went pear-shaped after the 1906 earthquake...and embezzled the rest of the fortune to try and make up the loss. Ruth Newsome comes to terms with it, getting a job of her own to supplement her husband Henry's constable income, while Rupert Newsome becomes the Henpecked Husband to a domineering wealthy woman.
• Once Upon a Time: King George is flat-broke, trying his best to hide it, and willing to do any ruthless dog-kicking stunt to make sure he seals an alliance with the wealthy King Midas.
• Poldark: The Poldarks are a noble family from Cornwall in the late 18th Century, who have traditionally made their money from farming and mining copper. At this time, Wales was starting to produce more copper: driving down the price. At the same time, smaller farms are being bought to create massive industrial wool farms: wool being the other traditional product of Cornish estates. Combine this with the predatory (and highly discriminatory) judicial system of the time, and things get hairy pretty quickly. The story follows Ross Poldark, and many of his adventures revolve around getting money to pay loans.
• Power Rangers RPM: Summer's parents, who lost most of their vast holdings due to that whole robot apocalypse thing. They want Summer to give up her job and marry into a stately family that still has some cash; the fact that her job involves keeping the last city on Earth from being overrun by robots doesn't seem to factor into this demand.
• The Pruitts of Southampton: Starring Phyllis Diller, this short-lived sitcom where a rich family on the Hamptons is found, after an IRS audit, to be completely broke. However, revealing this would cause economic shockwaves, so the IRS, apparently considering them too big to fail, lets them live in their posh home keeping up appearances and taking in wacky boarders. Lasting one season before turning into The Phyllis Diller Show, it has recently surfaced from complete obscurity since its catchy theme song (by Vic "The Addams Family" Mizzy) was used as the basis for an outrageous Cold Open on Batman: The Brave and the Bold...
• Robin Hood: This is a common fate for Guy of Gisbourne in retellings of Robin Hood where the plot necessitates him as a guard, but they want to keep the "Sir Guy" title he picked up in the '30s.
  • Poverty with nobility was a constant source of angst for the Robin of Sherwood incarnation. He's fallen to a "lowly" steward, watching over other people's lands, compounded by his father's lack of acknowledgement.
  • It was a driving motivation for the 2006 version, in his opposition of Hood being that he wants to keep Locksley for himself to avoid such a shame.
• Schitt's Creek: The premise of the show is that the Rose family loses $500 million to their crooked financial adviser and must now live in the crappy little town of Schitt's Creek that the patriarch once bought as a joke and forgot about.
• Three Moons Over Milford: The main characters are a woman and her two children who were once the wealthiest family in town. But one near-doomsday cataclysmic event later, and her husband decides to abandon them to go on a spiritual journey of self-discovery. Leaving them completely broke and unemployed.
• To the Manor Born: Audrey fforbes-Hamilton.
• The Seacrofts from The Upper Crusts are a family of aristocrats used to the finer things in life, but after the death of Lord Seacroft Sr., they discover the family fortune is all gone, and they are forced to adapt to a lower-class life in a council house.

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