Starter Villain / Live-Action TV

• 21 Jump Street: Tyrell "Waxer" Thompson, a drug dealer harassing a client to pay overdue fees. He never returns after his arrest, but his Dragon Reggie does.
• The Adventures of Sinbad: Eblus, a Djinn prince who manipulates kingdoms into outlawing magic and descending into decadence so he can rule. He also assisted Turok, who doesn't qualify due to returning in the season 1 finale, in his scheme to kidnap a princess and take over a kingdom. He's killed with a spear to the face soon after the reveal of his true nature.
• Angel has Russell Winters in its pilot, who in turn is a client of the overall main villains of the series.
• Babylon 5: Season 1 featured the Raiders and the Home Guard as the primary recurring villains. The Raiders got almost completely wiped out as part of The Reveal of The Shadows, the show's primary villains. The Home Guard dropped off the radar and became irrelevant after President Clark came into power (since they had essentially won), and never turned up again.
• Season 1 Better Call Saul has Craig and Betsy Kettleman, white-collar criminals who embezzled money from the county treasury.
• Breaking Bad has Tuco, the first real threat after Krazy-8's Warm-Up Boss, but still not quite on the same threat level as Gustavo "Gus" Fring.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • The show had one-shot villains for the first episode of each season; an enemy who was reasonably threatening, but who was ultimately defeated by Buffy before the credits roll: Luke in season 1, Absalom in season 2, Ken in season 3, Sunday in season 4, Dracula in season 5, and Razor in season 6. The Season 7 opener is a somewhat confusing beast, with Buffy fighting a group of malevolent spirits who are indeed defeated by the end but the true mastermind who summoned them...is never actually identified (although the episode's tag scene does set up new Big Bad the First so possibly it can be deduced that way).
  • Lothos, the main villain from the movie and The Origin, although the Buffyverse backstory establishes that he is a menace on the same level as season one big bad The Master.
• In Burn Notice, Michael had to secure his loft by getting rid of the drug dealer who lives next door. The guy returns as a recurring ally a few season later.
• Cobra Kai has Kyler Park, Miguel's bully and the very reason why he decides to take up karate from Johnny after the latter kicks Kyler's ass. Once Miguel beats up the bastard, the rest of the series becomes a karetka vs. karateka conflict, first with the renewed rivalry between Johnny Lawrence and Daniel LaRusso, then the return of past The Karate Kid villains: John Kreese and Terry Silver.
• Criminal Minds: Timothy "Tim" Vogel AKA the Seattle Strangler. A prison guard turned serial killer and rapist, he's the first criminal the BAU team had to deal with and ends up shot to death by Elle after he tried and failed to kill Gideon at the end of the episode.
• Doctor Who generally begins each Doctor's era with a minor threat or C-list member of the Rogues Gallery. The exceptions are the Second, Fifth and Eighth Doctors, who need to deal with the Daleks and the Master (twice) respectively, justified as the Fourth and Seventh Doctors regenerated because of the Master's efforts and the producers wanted the Second (as the first regeneration) to face a familiar threat to assure fans that the show hadn't changed.
  • Torchwood: The first spin-off of Doctor Who had its starter villain be Suzie, a member of the team who had a Face–Heel Turn and shot Jack in the head, before committing suicide after having ran out of ways to escape. Suzie is later resurrected, as it turns out that she had a backup plan in case she died.
  • The Sarah Jane Adventures: The second spin-off had The Bane appear as the starter villain in the pilot story. There's also The Slitheen for the first real episode of series 1.
• Farscape had Bialar Crais, a Peacekeeper captain whose brother accidentally died in the pilot episode when his ship ricocheted off Crichton's, which had accidentally gone through a wormhole and emerged in the middle of a space battle. Crais went into Captain Ahab mode and spent the rest of the first season chasing Crichton and his new friends. At the end of the season, Crais is replaced as by Scorpius, a Peacekeeper scientist intent on getting information about wormhole technology that had been implanted in Crichton's brain. Scorpius went on to be the show's Big Bad, while Crais underwent a Heel–Face Turn.
  • And then Scorpius is also replaced by an even bigger baddie in the form of Grayza and the Scarrans (led by the Scarran Emperor).
• Firefly had an undercover Alliance agent as the villain of the pilot episode. Although he seems to be built up as a potentially recurring villain, the ending of the episode subverts multiple tropes when, during a Put Down Your Gun and Step Away / We Will Meet Again moment, Mal simply walks up and shoots him in the head. Word of God is that had the show continued past the first season, he would have turned out to have survived the shooting and would have come back (with a cybernetic eye!) to seek revenge on the crew. In fact, this is exactly what happens in the Serenity: Those Left Behind comic book set between the series and the movie.
• Fringe: David Robert Jones from the first season.
• Game of Thrones: Viserys Targaryen, the elder brother of Daenerys, serves as the main antagonist of the first act in her storyline to progress from a timid teenage girl into The High Queen, as well as one of the main antagonists in the first half of Season 1. He is then killed by Khal Drogo and replaced with villains that serve greater threats in the TV show and last more seasons, such as Joffrey Baratheon and Littlefinger.
  • House of the Dragon has Craghas Drahar aka the Crabfeeder, a pirate who disturbs merchant fleets in the Stepstones off the coasts of Westeros and the first major antagonist faced by the Targaryen crown a few years before the Succession Crisis starts. He's defeated and killed by Daemon Targaryen in the third episode.
• Kamen Rider has Kumo Otoko, the very first monster beaten by Kamen Rider 1 and effectively the starter villain for the whole franchise. Each individual series usually has one as well, whose main purpose is to stir the main character into picking up the belt and transforming for the first time. There's also a variation on this, seen more commonly in shows made after 2010, who are major villains are usually beaten somewhere around a quarter of the way in to showcase the power of the main Rider's first Mid-Season Upgrade, or sometimes shortly before they acquire it.
  • Kamen Rider Build features a special case in that the Night Rogue and Blood Stalk suits were made to invoke this trope In-Universe, as they were made by the same scientist who made the Build Driver to serve as the user's initial sparring partners. Although both their users are major villains who ended up using the suits as alter-egos instead.
• Leverage: Victor Dubenich who assembles the team to do a job for him, before betraying them and becoming the mark of the pilot. He later returns to be the Big Bad of Season 4.
• MacGyver: Carl Steubens is responsible for the explosion that drives the pilot's plot.
• Merlin: Nimueh, the titular character's main adversary in the first season, before she's Killed Off for Real in that same season's finale.
• Millennium: The first Serial Killer to be investigated by Frank in the pilot is only known as "The Frenchman" and is shot dead by the end of the episode. Although not the worst killer to be encountered by Frank, the Frenchman has the dubious distinction of being one of the craziest ones, clearly hallucinating at several points and convinced he was personally sending all his victims to Hell.
• Slab is the main villain of the pilot of Mr. Young, whom Adam "tames" at the end. The series doesn't really have a Big Bad, though the closest thing is Principal Tater.
• Detective Stills from Person of Interest was the first enemy that Team Machine faced. He is a member of the ring of corrupt cops called HR.
• Resurrection: Ertuğrul: Master Simon, the owner of the Hanli Bazaar plays this role in season 3, being set up as a worthy opponent of the Kayi clan up until he dies about a third of the way in, allowing Vasilius to replace him for the remainder of said season.
  • Trader Simko in season 4 also counts as this, albeit not portrayed as a Big Bad in any way. He merely captures Ertugrul and numerous other people to become his slaves, only to be slain by Tekfur Ares after Ertugrul and several of the other hirelings escape.
• Revolution:
  • Captain, later Major, Tom Neville of the Monroe Republic is the first militia threat the protagonists go up against ("Pilot"). Neville turns out to be subordinate to Big Bad General Sebastian "Bass" Monroe. Neville ends up leaving Monroe in "The Song Remains the Same", joins up with the Georgia Federation to fight Monroe ("Home"), and then takes Bass's place as the Big Bad in the first season finale ("The Dark Tower").
  • The real Big Bad appears to be a rump U.S. government operating out of Cuba, for which Randall was working when he launched nukes on Philadelphia and Atlanta. It's hinted that the heroes may end up teaming with Neville in an Enemy Mine situation to prevent everyone from being conquered.
• Stargate SG-1: The first Big Bad faced by the Stargate team is Apophis, who managed to last all the way to the 5th season before he was finally Killed Off for Real. Of course, the Big Bads that replaced him, such as Anubis, the Replicators, and the Ori all turned out to be even more dangerous. Although technically, Apophis himself was the second villain faced by Jack and Daniel if you want to include Ra from the film.
• In Stargirl (2020), the first villain Courtney has to deal with is Brainwave, who is an incredibly powerful telepath and telekinetic, who participated in the destruction of the original JSA, but who gets taken down at the end of the second episode. Then he returns in the back half of the season and becomes one of the main threats that needs to be taken down.
• Star Trek: Enterprise: The Suliban, genetically augmented Gecko-Men, initially filled this role. A lukewarm reception had them soon replaced with the much more credible Xindi as the series' main enemy race.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • The parasites in the episode "Conspiracy" were intended to return, but weren't for budget reasons. They were "replaced" by the Borg as the Big Bad. The Borg proved to be "too powerful" to write many episodes about... indeed, after the events of Best of Both Worlds, the only Borg encountered are small splinter groups and individuals separated from the Collective. The writers eventually settled on the Romulans and Cardassians as the preferred bad guys.
  • More to the point, the Ferengi were initially conceived as TNG's Big Bad, getting a Name Drop in the pilot as a race with a terrifying reputation (complete with the suggestion that they eat the people they conquer). Then they showed up and turned out to fall far short of the hype. So they were abandoned as the archnemesis of the series, eventually resurfacing as occasional comic antagonists, and getting a more sympathetic portrayal on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The rumors referenced in the pilot were later retconned as having been planted by the Ferengi leader, who having heard about the Federation and its economic policies concluded they must be utterly insane and hoped to intimidate them.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine itself opened up with the Cardassians, Klingons, Romulans, and even some Bajorans (especially Kai Winn) switching off as the "bad" of the week, in keeping with the series' Grey-and-Gray Morality. Then the Dominion comes knocking...
• Star Trek: Voyager, in an inversion to The Next Generation, started with a new race called the Kazon, who were essentially slightly modified Klingon expies, but eventually replaced them with the Borg... although the Borg eventually suffered from the Villain Decay that the Next Generation writers hoped to avoid. Again, several episodes focused on individual Borg separated from the Collective, for the same reasons as above.
• Supernatural has Constance Welch, AKA the Woman in White, a spirit Sam and Dean encounter before they even begin their hunt for the Yellow Eyed Demon.
• In Super Sentai, the very first Monster of the Week in each show fights usually functions as one, serving as first enemy the team needs to work together to fight against. There are some notable variations on it however.
  • The very first enemy the titular team in Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger have to fight is Geildon, the Evolian messenger leading their attack on Earth. Although he's defeated within the first two episodes, later episodes reveal he was a much more important character than he seemed, having been a good friend to Asuka and the brother of his fiancee Mahoro who, like him, was brainwashed to become a member of the Evolians.
  • Similarly, Jagged in Doubutsu Sentai Zyuohger was actually one of the team leaders in the Deathgalien. He takes to the Earth himself to fight the Zyuohgers, rather than send out a monster to do it, and is destroyed in the very first episode. This becomes lampshaded when he's revived in The Movie and none of his fellow team leaders remember who he is.
• The Flash (2014) The first metahuman is some guy who eludes the police by making fog. He seems imposing at the time, but isn't even cool enough to get a codename, and once Flash gets going he has no trouble taking him down, after which he's gunned down by the police and is only ever mentioned again in relation to his brother Weather Wizard, a more serious and recurring villain.
• The Wire does it in season 2 with Frank Sobotka. Major Valchek, who has a feud with Sobotka over a stained glass window, designates Sobotka as the primary target and wants a police detail to dig up dirt on him specifically. But as the case progresses, real criminals who are guilty of much worse crimes are discovered and Frank's importance in the investigation is diminished. This is even shown graphically: his picture ends trimmed down and put in a corner of the corkboard. In the end his criminal acts are so mild that even the FBI (who were specifically brought into the case by Valchek to bust Sobotka and his union) thinks he's just a small fish and want to go after bigger targets.
• The Ultra Series has been doing this since the very beginning. Gomess, the first monster fought by humans in Ultra Q, and Bemular, the first monster ever fought by an Ultra on-screen in the original Ultraman are the most obvious examples, but plenty of other franchise favourites such as Verokron (Ultraman Ace), Alien Magma (Ultraman Leo), Golza (Ultraman Tiga) and Demaaga (Ultraman X) have been introduced to the Ultra Series as this sort of antagonist.
• Al Capone serves as this in the early-'60s series The Untouchables, as the pilot movie was about his arrest. The face of his organization in the series proper was his enforcer, Frank Nitti, and the organization was involved in only about a quarter of the episodes.
• The Unusuals: Leon Wu, a juvenile drug dealer-turned-Cop Killer out of a misplaced sense of revenge. He's killed by the end of the first episode.
• Witchblade: Tommy Gallo, a legendary mafia hitman, was the first true villain that Sara Pezzini faced, being responsible for both the murder of her partner Danny and as he later reveals, the murder of her father many years ago. He's caught and locked up at the end of the two-episode pilot, with Pezzini facing a number of other threats from thereon out. Due to a Reset Button as a result of time travel at the end of the season, Sara doesn't face down Gallo and basically ignores him since she has bigger enemies to deal with.
• In Xena: Warrior Princess, her first villain is Draco who is also a warlord. He tried to redeem himself in the past but he failed and just went on become a recurring villain.

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