Fictional depictions of plagiarism in Live-Action TV series.
- 227 had an episode where Barry has his students (including Brenda) write an essay on immigration and the top five would get to appear in a music video by Bobby Brown. Brenda wastes the time she was given and ends up plagiarizing an essay her mom Mary had written on the subject which had earned an A. However, Brenda only gets a C and Mary is doubly mad, both that Brenda ripped her off and that it had only gotten a C. (It turns out that was because it didn't cover immigration over the previous twenty years because it was written twenty-five years earlier.)
- When Erica Strange had to hurry to write a poem for an English composition class in Being Erica, she plagiarizes "...Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears. It was a big hit and as she was time travelling (long story) at the time, no one caught it.
- A plot point in the 10th series of Birds of a Feather was that Dorien was being accused of plagiarizing Fifty Shades of Grey for her book, resulting in her finances being frozen. The case is eventually resolved in her favour after the memoirs of a man she had a steamy relationship with (and whose exploits are mentioned in her book) are released and mention her.
- A major plot arc in Californication is when the young woman Hank slept with in the first episode is revealed to be Mia, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Hank's ex-wife's new fiancé, who goes on to steal the manuscript for his new book and threaten to reveal that they had sex (which would get him charged with statutory rape) if he tells.
- An episode of Castle has the main character, a mystery novelist, reveal that when he was a kid, he once paid another student to write a paper for him, which went on to receive acclaim from his teacher when he submitted it. The guilt and shame of receiving praise for work that wasn't his and the resulting feeling of being a fraud affected him so much that he claims his entire career since has been an attempt to make up for it.
- In one episode of Cheers, Diane was having no luck trying to sell her writing to a magazine, and was considering giving up. Then she was shocked to read that Sam had submitted a work that was accepted by the same magazine. She was almost certain that he had plagiarized it, and spent days trying to find the actual source, but could not. Eventually, Sam told her that it wasn't his work — it was hers. He had taken one of her old manuscripts and submitted it to tell her You Are Better Than You Think You Are.
- Columbo: In "Mind over Mayhem", the Victim of the Week has discovered that an award-winning scientist had plagiarized all of his work from a recently-deceased man, and the scientist's father murders the victim to try to cover this up.
- CSI: This was the big twist regarding the motive of the killer on "A Space Oddity" (the episode with the Affectionate Parody of Star Trek: The Original Series): the executive producer of a revival project of an In-Universe Expy of Trek, "Astro Quest", had stolen the idea of a university literature professor on how to make the show Darker and Edgier ("deconstructing the idol", so she called it) and used it to create his pilot. The trouble is that he applied the philosophy that her treatise was trying to expose incorrectly, and the resulting demo reel was a "Nothing Is the Same Anymore" Wangst-fest that actually enraged the show's fans into nearly causing a riot (and to further the gag, no less a man than Ronald D. Moore called out the executive on the reel's awfulness). The professor confronted the executive on the theft and him twisting around the message she wanted to deliver, and he accidentally slipped and hit a part of the show's set hard enough to die on the spot.
- Death in Paradise:
- Academic plagiarism was motive for murder in the episode "A Stormy Occurence". In this episode, the killer plagiarized the work of one of his students and passed it off as his latest book. The victim found out and wanted to turn the killer in for plagiarism, which got him killed in the end. This is lampshaded throughout the episode, as the killer (who's supposed to be an expert) makes a faulty prediction about a hurricane passing over Saint Marie, while the victim (the actual genius) was spot on with his prediction.
- Comes up in the episode "The Secret of the Flame Tree." It turns out Sylvie Baptiste did not, in fact, write The Flame Tree; it was her mentally ill sister, Lizzie. Sylvie stole the manuscript knowing Lizzie was too sick to ever pursue publishing.
- Degrassi Junior High has an episode where Arthur helps Yick plagiarise Stephanie's work, as part of an experiment he is doing on Raditch (mainly to get Raditch to stop pigeonholing Yick). Raditch eventually sees through it, and Yick ends up writing some of his best work.
- Degrassi: The Next Generation has at least one incident concerning Paige. She's overworked and suffering panic attacks (and isn't helped by a teacher who mispronounces her surname), so she downloads a paper. Unfortunately for her, it's a common method of cheating.
- In Drop Dead Diva, a friend of Kim’s had her erotic novel ripped off by a major publisher, the novel was in fact based on her and her husband’s own experiences.
- The Facts of Life: When she has to hurry to write a poem for an English composition class, Blair hastily plagiarizes an Emily Dickinson poem about beauty. After the headmaster submits it to a competition and it wins, Blair is forced to admit the truth.
- In the Father Ted episode "A Song for Europe", when working on an entry for the Eurosong competition, Ted steals the melody from the B-side of a Norwegian entry in the same contest in a previous year. He aborts the plan when he discovers that the original wasn't nearly as obscure as he'd thought.
- A Running Gag in Goodnight Sweetheart is that Gary has developed a reputation as a songwriter in 1944 based on the works of The Beatles. He has to keep coming up with excuses not to take them any further than playing them at the pub, lest he completely alter musical history.
- iCarly: The episode "iTake on Dingo" has the iCarly crew discovering that the Dingo Channel has been stealing ideas from their webshow to use in their their television show Totally Teri. They then go to Hollywood to confront the writers and convince them to stop stealing their ideas.
- JAG: In the season nine episode "Secret Agent Man", one of Mikey Roberts's classmates at the U.S. Naval Academy is accused of plagiarism.
- Julie and the Phantoms: Luke, Alex and Reggie are outraged to discover that after their deaths their bandmate, Bobby, released the songs they wrote together but didn't credit any of them (even though one song was called "My Name Is Luke"). Julie notes that his music hasn't been as good in recent years, implying that he's run out of material to steal from his dead friends. When they learn how rich and famous Bobby became off their work the ghosts immediately decide to haunt him as payback.
- In "The Poetry Contest" from The Kids Are Alright Timmy swipes a poem his mother wrote and they enter into a battle of wills over whether he will confess, going so far as to enter the poem into a local contest, which it wins. It turns out that Mom had herself plagiarized the poem decades earlier so she can't bust Timmy without acknowledging her own wrongdoing.
- Kingdom Hospital: Dr. Stegman gets his biggest comeuppance toward the end of the series, when it's discovered that he put his own name on a young, female doctor's thesis (he credited her as "with assistance from"). He did it because he thought his name would give it some level of prestige. Thus begins his Villainous Breakdown.
- Lou Grant: One of the episodes, season 3's "Lou," dealt with a young reporter plagiarizing from a college newspaper; predictably, Lou finds out and it isn't long before the reporter is searching for another job.
- The pilot episode of Murder, She Wrote featured this as a joke. Jessica Fletcher gets accused of this by a woman named Agnes Peabody during a disastrous trip to New York, and gets served a subpoena. Jessica later finds out from her new publishing agent that Agnes Peabody's actually a con artist who does that shit on every new author who comes to the city.
- Mudpit: The first episode has the titular band managing to pass Muzika's audition round with Geneva’s song "Power Player". Immediately after that, rival band the Spoilers play the exact same song, much to Geneva’s outrage as she asks if it is even legal to do that. Turns out it isn't, as there is a rule against playing songs in the audition round that have already been performed, with Slime cutting the Spoilers' act short while expressing his disgust towards them.
- In Murphy Brown, Corky's husband was accused of plagiarism of the childrens' book he was writing. The issue is eventually resolved in his favor when Corky's diary is read in court and expresses her bleeping frustration with her husband's work as it was going on.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000:
- In the episode The Wild World of Batwoman, Mike and the bots watch a short educational film simply entitled "Cheating". They have a field day with it.Crow: A Centron production. Although we got the idea from a different company. 'Cuz we're cheating.
- Afterwards, Mike assigns the robots to write essays on cheating. Gypsy's essay is: "Cheating is bad. Richard Baseheart is good." Crow T. Robot's essay is copied verbatim from Gypsy's. The remaining host segments for the episode involve the rest of the cast trying to decide how Crow should be punished, with Tom Servo and Gypsy pushing for extreme violence.
- In the first episode with TV's Frank (Rocketship X-M), Frank plagiarizes Joel's invention (didn't changed a single thing, not even the name) and presents it in the exchange. Dr. Clayton Forrester gets angry at this, because plagiarism is the only vile act even he won't condone.
- However, Clayton's daughter Kinga Forrester has no such reservations about stealing ideas. Starting with the episode Cry Wilderness, all of her inventions are just adaptations of in-theater riffs from Jonah and the 'bots. For example, in one episode Jonah jokes that a ghost character's amulet must be an "Afterlife Alert", so in the next episode Kinga invents the Afterlife Alert for real. In The Land that Time Forgot Jonah finally figures out what's happening and calls Kinga out for the intellectual theft.
- In the episode The Wild World of Batwoman, Mike and the bots watch a short educational film simply entitled "Cheating". They have a field day with it.
- The Mystery Woman TV movie Game Time has this as a plot point - The murder victim hired a graphic designer/con artist to design his website. While working on it, he stole a prototype murder mystery game from the victim and passed it off as his own game. The con artist became a suspect when the author confronted him before his murder.
- One episode of Poker Face finds a band who kill their drummer so they can steal the credit for the song he wrote, only to lose everything when it turns out he had also stolen the song, the lyrics from random snippets of text he saw lying around and the melody from the theme song to Benson.
- One episode of Roseanne has slacker Darlene buying a paper from Becky. When she gets a B, Roseanne is thrilled, until Darlene tells the truth.
- On Schitt's Creek, Jocelyn accuses a shocked Alexis of plagiarizing her economics paper, and Alexis quickly realizes that she did not write it and figures out that Johnny had done so without her knowledge. She confronts Johnny who is holding the Idiot Ball and is surprised to learn that taking something one's dad wrote and claiming it as your own is plagiarism. Alexis writes a new paper and gets a C, and Jocelyn tells the Roses that they should be proud of Alexis because she wrote her paper herself.
- In Sex Education, Maeve runs a side hustle writing essays for her classmates. She's a little too good at them, and gets in hot water when Adam enters the one she wrote for him into an essay contest and wins. Her teacher, Ms. Sands, decides that her being expelled would be a waste of her intellect, and decides to mentor her, eventually convincing her to join the school quiz team, which she excels at.
- Used in an episode of The Sleepover Club. One of the girls is tempted to pay for a premade homework assignment to pass off as her own, but she ends up backing away, but both the Alpha Bitch and one of the male antagonists paid for his services. And they exposed each other when one of them read their report out loud...
- Star Trek: The Original Series plays this briefly as a joke. After Garth takes over the asylum in "Whom Gods Destroy", he has the other patients put on a show. Another patient, Marta, agrees to perform a sonnet she claims to have written that morning. A minute into her performance, Garth jumps out of his chair yelling "You wrote that?" He points out that it was actually written by William Shakespeare. She admits that he wrote it and says she wrote it again that morning. Later in the episode, she recites another poem; although nobody bothers to point it out this time, it's equally unoriginal, being the first stanza of one of A. E. Housman's Last Poems.
- The Suite Life of Zack & Cody: London steals a short story from Maddie for a class assignment and turns it in as her own. Not only does the story get London an A, but it also leads to her getting a book deal worth a lot of money. As it turns out, neither Maddie nor London is the story's true creator; Maddie based it on another story by another writer she had subconsciously remembered. When the original writer hears of it, she sues London for plagiarism.
- The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Take My Life...Please!", America's "hottest comic" Billy Diamond stole a routine about a gorilla eating a banana peel from a struggling young comedian named Dave, who approached him for advice. He performs it on the Talk Show Larry Gibbon's Hollywood, unaware that Dave is in the studio audience. As he drives away from the studio after the show, Dave pulls a gun on him from the back seat. He is desperate as he has no money and his wife is pregnant. The two men struggle with the gun and both are killed when the car crashes. Diamond finds himself in an Ironic Hell where he is forced to tell an extremely amused audience about all of the terrible things that he has done, including stealing Dave's routine.
- Victorious had an episode where Tori and Andre were working together to write a new song they wanted to show off to a music producer. The two had a falling out and Tori auditioned by herself, using music that Andre had written originally. She claims that she didn't mean to do it and that the music had simply gotten stuck in her subconscious. The two make up and work together to refine the song for the producer.
- The Waltons episode "The Chicken Thief" had a subplot where Ben won a magazine poetry contest, but was guilt ridden since he got the idea for from an old poem John-Boy wrote. After much trepidation, he confesses to John-Boy and learns that his older brother doesn't consider it plagiarism since what Ben did is perfectly acceptable for creative writing.
- The West Wing, "20 Hours in America, Part 2":Sam Seaborn: Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.
- Which itself is a pre-existing saying.
- Season 1 of Westworld shows one of the sequences in this tourist town of androids is robbing a local saloon/gambling hall. In season 2, when several of the Westworld hosts reach the feudal Japan-themed Shogun World, they're shocked to see a total replay of that same sequence, down to the dialogue. Programmer Sizemore defends himself on "you try writing 300 storylines in three weeks!" Then, Season 4 has a 1920's themed world called Temperance that uses the exact same scenario with gangsters.
- WKRP in Cincinnati has the episode, "Dear Liar" where Bailey wrote a story of a young patient was a partially fictional amalgamation of the patients she visited at a children's hospital. Before she could reconsider airing it, Les jealously decides to read on air as his own work and thus puts the radio station's broadcast license in jeopardy. When Andy confronts him about his plagiarism during the crisis by challenging him to look up the word in the dictionary, Les does so and reads "The act of plagiarizing" while completely missing the point of the definition.
- In The X-Files, "Ghost in the Machine", Mulder's old partner from Violent Crimes steals his profile on the killer and presents it himself. Laser-Guided Karma drops his elevator down the shaft.
