The Pirates Who Dont Do Anything / Live-Action TV

• Willie Tanner in ALF is supposed to be a social worker. We almost never see him doing anything of the sort. This is lampshaded when another character arrives and has no idea that Willie is a social worker.
• The title character of Angel claims to be a private detective/in private security. When actual detective work is required, he has at least once hired a real private detective to do it for him. It's not like he has any interest in being a detective, he just tells people that because it's easier to explain than "I go around protecting people from monsters", which he does quite successfully. His actual job description is in Angel Investigations' tagline: We Help the Helpless.
• In theory, The A-Team are a band of mercenaries who lease their skills out for cash so they can stay on the run. However, they never seem to ever participate in a job that's even slightly shady and they rarely seem to get paid for whatever they do.
• The crew in Blake's 7 is supposed to be a notorious band of interstellar terrorists (or freedom fighters, depending on who you ask). They don't commit any memorable acts of terrorism that go anywhere. Real terrorists conduct hijackings, kidnap people, and bomb public places, hurting innocent civilians. They did none of these things and the only innocent people who got killed were those who were stupid enough to actually get involved with them. Their most memorable genuine terrorist scheme turned out to be a setup by Servalan and Travis, and they're never actually seen fighting for anyone's freedom. Mostly, they run into people who are perfectly capable of fighting for themselves. Under Avon, they spend all their time either on the run or participating in mostly get-rich-quick schemes that fail because they're always getting had. They are actually seen more as a nuisance than as an actual threat to the Federation and in the final season, even the Federation felt for the most part that they had bigger fish to fry. And even when they were involved, it turned out to be yet another setup, this time by a nobody officer that turned out to be a mole in Blake's non-organization, this time it caused a misunderstanding between Blake and Avon that got them all killed. Justified in that at the start only Blake and Cally were actually career terrorist/freedom fighters. Everyone else was convicted of crimes such as homicide, smuggling, theft, and white collar embezzlement. In the series itself they are on the run. So unsurprisingly, they mostly just commit more crimes of that type, making them simply ordinary petty crooks.
• The Book of Boba Fett: Boba Fett announces his intent to be a crime lord in Tattooine, but in practice he isn't actually seen doing anything beyond collecting protection money. Fennec does reference the spice smuggling aspect of Hutt's former criminal enterprise, but Fett decides to abandon it as well, stating he wants to be a different breed of crime lord, eschewing the more violent and sadistic aspects of the position. In the finale, he seems to be treated by the people of Mos Espa as an actual lord, not the criminal type.
• Apart from cooking (which isn't really a maid's job) and occasionally flicking a feather duster at a piece of already spotless furniture Alice on The Brady Bunch doesn't work like a real-life maid, especially one who would have to clean a kitchen and a bathroom that was used by nine people, six of whom are kids.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Giles often fell into this — he was the school librarian and in charge of a very large and nice-looking library that nobody ever seemed to use for non-occult reasons. Lampshaded when the occasional clueless kid wanders in looking for something decidedly library-related, and the Scooby Gang stares in shock and confusion. And when Xander points out it's fortunate no one ever wanted to check out the occult books the gang relies on for anti-demon research.
  • In "Hush", Willow tries to join a Wiccan coven who are more interested in holding bake sales and throwing bacchanals, talking about woman power and lunar cycles, and generally enjoying being "witches" than they are in doing actual magic or any meaningful religious practices related to those things. When Willow asks about casting spells, which is something even real-life Wiccans do in fact do, she's laughed at.
  • In "The Killer in Me", the aforementioned Wicca group turn out to have wised up a bit and gotten into White Magic such as the cleansing of auras. Possibly the attack of the Gentlemen in the same episode where they were introduced, or any of the subsequent disasters to hit Sunnydale, gave them a dose of reality. They're still naive enough to fall for Wicked Witch Amy's 'reformed' act, though.
• On Cheers, one of Carla's issues with Diane comes from the fact she seldom seems to do any real work around the bar.
  Janet Eldridge: (to Diane) Excuse me, miss. Do you work here?
  Carla: How come no one ever seems to know that?
  • Later on, Carla takes a similar axe against Rebecca, especially after Season 9, where Rebecca's function at Cheers supposedly is to be the bar's manager, and yet most of the time she's hardly ever seen doing any actual managing, and in the last two seasons is mention to barely do anything at all. However, Sam only took her on again as manager out of pity. We do see her idea of gaining revenue at one point, and rather than peddling drinks, it's selling lottery tickets.
    Sam: (after witnessing the latest Rebecca breakdown) Looks like I'm not gonna get any work out of her today.
    Carla: She doesn't do anything anyway! And she's doesn't start that until noon.
• The male police officers in Coppers End work harder at avoiding work than doing their jobs. They even go so far as to hire out their squad car for weddings, funerals, driving lessons, and stock car racing.
• Karen and Davis from Corner Gas are cops who rarely do police work unless either Oscar or the Mayor tell them to, and they're usually reluctant to.
• Daredevil (2015): In Season 1, one gets the impression that the three employees of Nelson & Murdock, Attorneys At Law spend a lot of time around their office instead of practicing law. This is justified, given that they're a fledgling startup law firm struggling to find clients. And their first two clients both turn out to be cases that are tied to Wilson Fisk. All of its employees are fully aware of this. Season 2 deconstructs this: the first episode shows Karen attending to a waiting room swamped with working-class clients from Hell's Kitchen who cannot pay for legal fees steeper than pastries and strawberry rhubarb pie. Once Matt pushes them into defending Frank Castle, Reyes starts trying to shut them down, and their perceived bungling of the case (or the fact that they took it at all) drives all remaining clients from their door. The firm is left in tatters by the Season 2 finale.
• Susan Meyer from Desperate Housewives is meant to be a children's book illustrator. Five seasons in, the episodes actually featuring her on the job are still in the single digits.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Fourth Doctor was elected President of Gallifrey halfway through his run (on a technicality: he declared his candidacy to take advantage of a Time Lord law that Presidential Candidates are immune from prosecution until after the election — he had been framed for murdering the previous president and needed to buy time to prove his innocence — and then the Master killed the other candidate). And then he almost immediately scarpered off and went back to wandering the space-time continuum, only ever returning to Gallifrey if he needed to use his rank to get something he needed for his current adventure. Nine seasons and two Doctors later, it was revealed that he'd eventually been impeached and removed from office in absentia because he never actually performed any of the responsibilities of his office unless given no other choice, but he hadn't stuck around long enough on any of his previous visits for anyone to tell him.
  • Jamie McCrimmon was ostensibly a piper, but never actually played the bagpipes onscreen. He finds a busted set in the TARDIS, claims he can repair them, and never gets around to it.
    Jamie: I could fix these easily!
    The Doctor: Yes, I was afraid of that.
• In Edgemont, a show based around teenagers in high school, the students are never shown actually in class (and rarely studying or doing homework). Of course, showing a scene in class would clash with the fact that There Are No Adults.
• Henry, Eureka's auto mechanic (and resident Omnidisciplinary Scientist), never seems to work on an actual car, after the first episode. Carter lampshades this at one point; Henry says he does, occasionally, "when it gets slow".
• In Father Ted, Fathers Dougal and Jack are, respectively, an idiotic manchild and a lazy, violent alcoholic, both of whom are completely incapable of doing any work that might reasonably be expected of a priest. Ted himself seems to have a One-Hour Work Week. Justified in the case of Jack, who seems to be retired and being nursed supplied with alcohol by the other two priests. As for Dougal, the one time he attempts to perform his priestly duties at a funeral, they somehow end up with more corpses than they started with. You'd make sure he didn't do anything either. Additional justification may be that the Craggy Island parish is something of a dumping ground for the church's immoral and incompetent priests.
• In Frasier, Daphne is ostensibly Martin's full-time physical therapist and she nags him about keeping up with his exercises and mentions needing new clients as Martin's mobility improves. However, she's only shown performing her duties as a physical therapist a handful of times across 11 seasons and spends more time acting as Frasier and Martin's housekeeper — a miscommunication in the pilot led her to believe that Martin needed live-in help and the Cranes went along with the arrangement because Martin liked her and Frasier was too kindhearted to turn her away. Even then, it's implied that housekeeping chores only take up a fraction of her day and she spends most of her time lounging around.
• In The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Vivian averts this for the first season because she is a teacher and is signed on to teach Will and Carlton's black history class; however her job is at best almost never mentioned after the first season. The second season episode "Hi-Ho Silver" confirms that she quit her job to spend more time at home.
• Lampshaded on an episode of Friends where the four characters with regular jobs talk about their bosses not liking them. Joey, who is normally an out of work actor points out that maybe it's because they are all hanging out at a coffee shop at 11:30am on a Wednesday.
• Will from Glee is a Spanish teacher who seems to spend very little time teaching Spanish (also, the few times he is seen speaking Spanish, his accent is very poor). It becomes kind of ridiculous in the first episode of Season 3, when Sue announces her intention of making sure all the high school arts programs are removed. Will becomes very upset, not only because he believes it's a mistake to take away the arts from the kids, but because his livelihood is at stake... conveniently forgetting that coaching the glee club is something he volunteered to do, and that he is first and foremost a Spanish teacher. Lampshaded in Season 3, Episode 12, titled "The Spanish Teacher." Will admits that he doesn't know much about Spanish and takes a night class in Spanish, taught by someone much more qualified at Spanish. He ends up becoming a History teacher and the other character becomes the new Spanish teacher. Not that we see Will teaching History very often either.
• Green Wing deliberately uses this: though set in a hospital, there are no medical storylines. Guy, Caroline and Mac do perform surgery from time to time but, naturally, the whole thing is played for laughs. On one occasion Dr. Statham burst in, had an argument with Mac about a parking space and attempted to eat the patient's gall bladder.
• In Grimm, Monroe is a clock-maker. Despite this, he only ever has anything to do with clocks in one episode. Lampshaded in said episode, where Monroe expresses surprise that Nick is calling him in order for Monroe to do his actual job for once.
• Robbie Ray Stewart is, as much of the dialogue suggests, the main in-universe writer of Hannah Montana's string of gold hits, but with few exceptions, such as the occasional special song, or something that carries the plot of the episode or a joke or resolve, you rarely saw or heard him in action.
• Nathan Petrelli of Heroes is appointed to the U.S. Senate in Season 3. He is never shown voting on any motions, amendments, or bills, attending any committee meetings, meeting with any constituents, or doing anything else that a U.S. Senator's job entails. He is instead able to focus all his time and efforts on running his own personal Government Conspiracy.
• The Honeymooners:
  • Ralph Kramden is a bus driver, but is never actually shown driving.
  • We never got to see Norton working either, but then, he works in the sewer, so who'd want to?
• Derek, Burger and Ash from I'm in the Band are in Iron Weasel. But in most episodes, they usually slack off in Tripp's apartment and don't do much, despite Tripp suggesting them do some rehearsing. Tripp puts emphasis on this in the Season 2 opener "I'm Out of the Band".
• The IT Crowd: Outside asking "have you tried turning it off and on again?", the main cast don't do much work, and when they do, they're usually faking. In one episode they're shown to have developed a machine that picks up the phone, delivers the lines and leaves them with even less work. Reynholm Industries itself just has "a lot of sexy people not doing much work and having affairs". How is this company still running?
• The Royal Family on The Kingdom Of Paramithi do little other than reward citizens, read stories and watch plays.
• According to the "You Are a Pirate" song from the "Rottenbeard" episode of LazyTown, nothing much is required of being a pirate. "Do what you want, 'cause a pirate is free... If you love to sail the sea, you are a pirate!"
• Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger: The titular Gokaigers are this for the most part, since they're more interested in adventure and finding the Greatest Treasure in the universe than doing any actual piracy. In fact, early on the Space Police reveals that all charges of piracy were made up by the Zangyack Empire just because they've been opposing them for a long time. Of course, their main gimmick is that they possess the means to turn into "pirated" versions of the previous 34 Super Sentai heroes. One could argue that to some of the veteran Rangers, the pirates are legit thieves given that said means are the very veterans' lost and scattered powers themselves, crystalized as Ranger Keys, so the Gokaigers have something that doesn't belong to them nor they refuse to give back, at least until the bad guys are all beaten.
• This is the basic plot of Maid Marian and Her Merry Men; Marian wants to believe that she's the leader of La Résistance, but she's more like den mother to a group of overgrown kids who spend their time inventing bizarre games and, in Robin's case, designing uniforms.
• Noser from The Middleman spends an awful lot of time not playing the guitar. He also has an incidental sideline in not riding a motorcycle, and an entire episode built around his not being a ventriloquist.
• This is the entire point of the Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch Non-Illegal Robbery. The head of the gang draws up plans that at first glance look like they're going to rob a bank and a jewelry store, when in truth they're withdrawing money from a savings account and buying something. Then he panics and orders his henchmen to flee the country when he realizes that they didn't put enough money in the parking meter and their getaway vehicle is in danger of being ticketed.
  Boss: Give us fifteen minutes then blow the building up. All right, make it fast.
  Larry: I can't blow the building up!
  Boss: Why not?
  Larry: It's illegal!
  Boss: Oh bloody hell.
• While the students in Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide do in fact go to class, Gordy The Janitor never seems to do any janitor-related. Like everything in this show, this gets lampshaded.
  "I'll get the night guy to do it!"
• Matthew on NewsRadio is a reporter, and on early episodes is actually seen doing his job, but for most of the show's run he's hardly ever seen doing anything but hang around the office and be The Ditz. In one episode he explicitly does nothing but play computer Solitaire.
• The Office (US) plays this as a plot point. Michael is constantly interrupting everyone's work with his various self-indulgent obsessions, causing employees to occasionally protest that they have too much work to be fooling around. Jim also seems to spend most of his time in the office planning and performing pranks because he's bored with his career. In spite of all this, work is getting done. We're frequently told that the Scranton branch is the highest-performing branch in the company, some episodes do show the cast hard at work. The implication is that the "documentary" simply doesn't show us the parts where nothing is happening except work.
• Our Miss Brooks: We almost never see (or in the radio version, hear) Miss Brooks actually teaching English, although she's said to be quite good at it. The rare glimpses seen of Miss Brooks actually teaching are usually played for laughs, such as her tutoring of Stretch Snodgrass in "The Yodar Kritch Award". The same goes for Mr. Boynton, whose canonical biology lectures consist of one about the skeletal structure of frogs in "Mr. Conklin's Wake Up Plan".
• In Person of Interest, when Reese and Finch hide in plain sight as a cop and a professor respectively, they still have a lot of time to pursue their extracurricular activities. Downplayed somewhat in that Reese investigates the numbers in his capacity as a cop whenever he can.
• Piet Piraat is a Belgian children's show about a good-natured pirate crew, which could be seen as an example of this trope.
• Power Rangers Turbo has Divatox and her crew. They're space pirates but we rarely see them loot or plunder anything (outside of the episode that debuted the Phantom Ranger). Divatox wants to conquer planets and that's WAY beyond her profession. Somewhat justified in that she does declare at the start of the series that their main goal from that point on will be to destroy the Power Rangers, in revenge for their destroying her intended groom Maligore.
• Completely averted in Profit where the plot revolves almost entirely around the eponymous character doing his job, albeit in a rather creative fashion.
• In Roots, slaves seem to have an awful lot of free time. Much is made of major outrages (rape, children being sold away, mutilation of runaways) but little emphasis on the horror of performing agricultural work 70 hours a week for no pay from age six till death.
• Sarah Jane Smith of The Sarah Jane Adventures is supposedly a reporter, but we never see her doing any actual reporting. She spends most of her time battling evil aliens, something she has explicitly vowed to not report on and in fact covers up. Lampshaded in that Sarah's standard excuse when she dashes off somewhere is "I have to go file a story!" This is never what she's actually going to do. However it's actually averted in the final episode when it's revealed that she is known as one of the country's top reporters - presumably, she has been working offscreen.
• Saturday Night Live
  • One of the recurring "Weekend Update" characters is their resident political comedian, Nicholas Fehn (played by Fred Armisen). Despite bearing the title "political comedian", he never actually does any comedy; he reads newspaper headlines and responds, "No wayyyy! No! Can't do that!", and spouts out a series of unformed thoughts and unfinished sentences till Seth interrupts him, telling him he's not really saying anything. Then Nicholas accuses Seth of not wanting to think or use his brain.
  • From the early days and done occasionally when he'd guest host, Bill Murray would be Weekend Update's movie reviewer and make Oscar picks, but had never seen any of the nominated films.
• The Janitor in Scrubs rarely, if ever, does his job. Normally, he only cleans if he really doesn't have anything better to do.
  • This is an acknowledged fact in-universe:
    Janitor: I'm sorry, Carla, I can't help you, I have work to do.
    (entire room bursts out laughing)
    Janitor: Ah, that one always kills.
  • At one stage, he bets JD that he can't memorize everyone's name. If JD loses, he'll do the Janitor's job for one day. If the Janitor loses, he'll do his own job for one day.
    JD: Do you remember how?
    Janitor: It's been a while.
• George's job as Assistant to the Traveling Secretary of the New York Yankees for several seasons of Seinfeld. "The Summer of George" provides a nice postmortem:
  Jerry: Ah, you had a good run. Took 'em to the World Series.
  George: ...I gotta give the players most of the credit for that.
  Jerry: Don't sell yourself short. You made all those flight arrangements, hotels, busses...
  George: Nah, I don't know who was doing that.
  Jerry: So when you actually did work, what is it that you did?
  George: (Beat) ...I'll tell ya, they had a pastry cart you wouldn't believe.
• Jadzia Dax on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is officially the station's chief science officer, but a vast number of her mentioned or onscreen jobs/contributions seem more fit for an engineer like Chief O'Brien, specialists like Dr. Bashir and Ezri, or command officers like Captain Sisko (i.e., repairing replicators, being the Defiant's helmsman, commanding the Defiant repeatedly when Sisko was out-of-action, and sometimes working as an equal with Bashir in medical affairs). In any given episode, she's very likely to be doing at least one task that normally wouldn't be performed by a general science officer, and instead assigned to a different crew member.
• Jackie Chen in Sze U Tonight. He has a role in the show's production team but rarely turns up to work, and yet somehow has the backing of TVB's executive chairman.
• Aside from the first few episodes, the kids from Twin Peaks are too busy solving mysteries to bother attending school. This only serves to emphasise the show's pervasive Dawson Casting.
• Played intentionally in Unhappily Ever After — Jack is firmly established as a used car salesman who frequently skips work and rarely sells a car when he does come in. In the finale, he finally starts taking the job seriously and makes enough commission in a week to fund Tiffany's entire Harvard tuition — then he goes back to being a slacker to save Mr. Floppy's life.
• In The Weird Al Show, Val Brentwood, Gal Spy doesn't actually perform any espionage or anything spy-like. Given the number of episodes where actual spy work would be useful to Al or his friends, it's surprising that she pretty much doesn't do anything but hang around at Al's house.
• Invoked in Weird Science when the guys want to become vampires to be cool but not actually suck blood. Lisa grants the wish, albeit replacing the lust for blood with lust for the chocolate beverage Yoo-hoo. So aside from the Yoo-hoo thing, being a vampire for them basically consists of being admitted to a night club that they were too nerdy for before.
• Once on The West Wing, the president is bedridden and watches a daytime soap opera. He asks, "Do any of these people have jobs?" His bodyguard answers, "One of them's a surgeon... I... think." Within the show itself, we see a lot of the staff doing their jobs. The President himself seems to mostly though be doing the PR side of his job and reacting to military situations that develop. We never really hear what his legislative priorities are or what kind of legacy he wants to leave. When Bartlett list his accomplishments late in the series (and well into his second term) he mentions a Supreme Court justice he appointed and “Economic Growth”... and that’s it.
• Captain Feathersword, Sixth Ranger of The Wiggles, sings pirate songs and causes mischief with his crew but doesn't actually do anything very piratey. Which is just as well, what with his... feather sword.
• Worzel Gummidge: Sergeant Beetroot is supposedly a sergeant but all he does is act bossy and use military jargon. Perhaps, as a scarecrow, he doesn't know how being a sergeant actually works.

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