Values Dissonance/Live-Action TV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Doctor Who

  • A Justified Trope in the Doctor Who episodes "Human Nature" and "The Family of Blood", set in 1913, deliberately use the mores of the time. Thus we have kind, sensible, eminently likable Joan Redfern matter-of-factly telling Martha that black women will never be doctors.
    • Not to mention that the Doctor in his human form thinks that allowing a bothersome student to be beaten by his classmates is an acceptable form of punishment.
  • Classic Doctor Who has a few notable examples, particularly in its older episodes.
    • The serial The Talons of Weng Chiang features a Fu Manchu-like Chinese villain played by a Caucasian actor in Yellowface with a campy Chinese accent. While this was still acceptable practice in the UK in 1977, television stations in America, Canada, and elsewhere which imported the programme found this problematic enough to refrain from transmitting the serial.
    • In the very first episode, 1963's An Unearthly Child, the Doctor explains the humans' disbelief of the TARDIS to his granddaughter thusly: "Remember the Red Indian. When he saw the first steam train, his savage mind thought it an illusion too." As though the "savage mind" business wasn't enough, "Red Indian" is generally considered a seriously racist epithet these days.

Star Trek

  • In the original Star Trek series, the treatment of women can feel sexist to the modern viewer, despite the fact that the show was usually pushing standards of equality that were radical for the time. ("But there was prejudice on Earth once! I remember reading about it in a history book!") In fact, the only reason there wasn't more obvious gender equity on the original Enterprise was Executive Meddling by nervous suits who thought the very presence of females would imply rampant promiscuity among the crew. Though according to producers who worked on the series, even though Gene Roddenberry did want more female characters, it was less in the name of real, honest gender equity and more in the name of skirts and tops that exemplified the Theiss Titillation Theory (there's a reason a Trek girl is that trope's image). But hey, at least they were there and (sometimes) involved in the plot.
    • Also, the miniskirts come across today as making female officers seem less professional than the male officers and more like sex symbols. While they were Fan Service, the miniskirt was also a symbol of female empowerment and liberation.
  • An in-universe example applies to the Cardassians in some episodes. While they're often portrayed as an entire race of Card Carrying Villains who are Exclusively Evil, some episodes show a more nuanced view. The episode where Picard is captured and one of Cardassia's best torturers works him over, the torturer speaks of his own high position in society, brags about some of his other work, and even allows his small daughter to visit him while he's working. But rather than being used bluntly to confirm what a dastardly villain he is, it's more used to show that to him, and to his society, what he's doing is perfectly acceptable, and simply the way things are done and should be done, and he has nothing to be ashamed of by his daughter seeing him trying to break a fellow sentient.
    • Another in-universe Cardassian example was in Deep Space 9, when Chief O'Brian was acting "overtly agitated" toward a female Cardassian (because she wasn't letting him assist in upgrading the station, itself a Values Dissonance because Cardassian men "aren't good at" sciences and repairs), she took this as him flirting with her.
  • Original Trek and Next Gen are an excellent case study in Values Dissonance. One big example: whereas Kirk and company could interfere in the affairs of other planets and use force with impunity, Picard is far more of a diplomat and the Prime Directive is much more enforced. In fact, within the show and its sequels, Kirk is called out for being a "cowboy" and a "maverick". This shift mirrors the changes in America's military and police forces where this kind of loose-cannon behavior is likewise frowned upon.
    • This leads to further Values Dissonance as Picard's Prime Directive-driven refusal to save populations threatened with natural disaster in such episodes as "Homeward" and "Pen Pals" is considered by some to be equivalent to refusing to help the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.
  • In a DS9 episode that takes place on the Ferengi homeworld, Quark's livelihood is threatened by his mother's profit-earning behavior. In addition he is scandalized by the fact that she wears clothes and still resents that when he and his brother were children, she refused to chew their food for them.
    • In "Body Parts" Quark is accused of acting too "Starfleet" for actions we'd consider stingy.
      • The original series also has McCoy constantly insulting Spock's Vulcan heritage by calling him such things as "you green-blooded Vulcan" or "you pointed-eared hobgoblin". In real world terms, this is essentially the same thing as racial insults and shouldn't HR be doing something about that? Within the show, it's considered a harmless part of Spock and McCoy's Vitriolic Best Buds relationship.
        • The episode "A Matter of Honor" in Next Gen has an in-universe example. Mendon, a Benzite participating in an Officer Exchange Program, discovers a patch of strange material on a Klingon ship, but does not bring it to Captain Picard's attention. When a similar patch is discovered on the Enterprise hull, he reveals that he knew of it, and when asked why he didn't mention this before, explains that Benzite regulations prohibit him from reporting a problem until he has a full analysis and a resolution. Picard chastises him for withholding the information, and tells him that aboard Starfleet vessels a problem must be reported the minute it occurs.

Other Series

  • On the Buses has an episode where the main characters Stan and Jack notice that their homemade beer makes Stan's sister and brother-in-law so out of their mind that they want to have sex with each other, even though they normally don't. So they decide to make some more and get the women at their work so out of their mind that they will have sex with them, not really knowing what they are doing. This is treated as harmless fun rather than rape.
  • At about the same time, (early 1970s), British TV screened a jolly sit-com for all the family called Love Thy Neighbour. The premise for this laugh-fest was that a West Indian couple moved in next door to a white couple, the male half of whom was somewhat intolerant of black people and who expressed his tolerance in throwaway epithetic one-word descriptions of his darker-skinned neighbour. The West Indian had an equally colourful set of words for his white neighbour, and much hilarity ensued as the odd couple were generally thrown together in comedic and instructional situations where they each realised they needed the other's help to get out of deep doodoo. Meanwhile the two wives just got on with it and were friends over the back fence. While not completely as horrendous as it's been painted and in some respects wickedly funny, it could never, ever, be commissioned or broadcast today... examples exist on YouTube if you want to judge for yourself.
  • After creating the incomparable Dad's Army, Jimmy Perry and Dave Croft went on to make 'Allo 'Allo! and It Ain't Half Hot Mum. 'Allo 'Allo! is full of English stereotypes of Frenchmen (although Frenchmen are considered Acceptable Targets to Englishmen and vice-versa), where languages are represented by English with a stupid accent. It Ain't Half Hot Mum, however, is today seen as "unfortunate" at best and downright offensive at worst.
  • An interesting example showing change over the lifetime of the show is JAG. In early seasons, the presence of female pilots (or women in general) on warships was controversial; it was the subject of the pilot movie. Not only would this seem dated a decade later to the current audience, but female pilots and ship's crew eventually became totally unremarkable within the show itself.
  • A more general example, using the "death penalty" issue mentioned above: In American TV, someone who advocates the use of the death penalty may be a little more cynical and pragmatic than the other characters, but is usually credible and well-adjusted. In British TV, anyone who wants to "bring back hanging" is at best ridiculously behind the times. Most likely, they'll want to reinstate corporal punishment in schools as well, along with other supposedly Victorian institutions. At worst, they'll be draconian and narrow-minded in the extreme. British police dramas sometimes see a few exceptions, with the investigators of a particularly horrific crime resenting the fact that even if he's jailed, the killer still keeps his life. Sometimes, in the case of clearly insane serial killers, Karmic Death is employed if the writers honestly can't find a way to justify the murderer staying alive. Generally, though, capital punishment is viewed as a "step too far".
  • On British TV in the 1960s, ethnic slurs were commonplace and seen as normal, while swearing of any kind was banned. These days, nobody thinks twice about swearing (after the watershed, anyway), but racial insults have completely vanished, except when used to show how unpleasant a character the speaker is.
  • Are You Being Served has many, many examples through the 1970s of poking fun at the culture or speech patterns of foreigners that today seem shocking in their prejudice.
  • A quasi-real life example from Iron Chef: In episode 284 (Potato Battle), Canadian challenger Michael Noble created an appetizing lamb-and-potato dish and started to lay it out, casserole-style. To this American viewer's eyes, this was completely normal (and the dish looked awesome). The Japanese panel, on the other hand, reacted with dismay at the presentation, as if none of them had ever even seen a casserole before. (Noble lost, leading many to believe it was that moment of dissonance that cost him the battle).
    • Another sort of values dissonance could be seen between the way the original Iron Chef is judged versus the judging on Iron Chef America. Apparently in Japan, watching celebrities eat is a big entertainment deal, and a lot of TV focuses around this, so naturally the judges on the original show are almost always celebrities, with the very occasional actual food critic thrown in. The American version seemed to think that maybe, y'know, food critics should judge a cooking competition, and the ratio of critics to celebrities is usually flipped. And when ICA has more than one celebrity judge, one of them will usually have some gourmet cred (Ex. Jeri Ryan and Lou Diamond Phillips are both restaurateurs).
    • Similarly, the Iron Chefs seemed to get the benefit of the doubt on the original, leading to some absurd win percentages (including Kishi outright rigging battles to avoid OT by awarding an extra point wherever possible). This went away in the American version, and the IC's winning percentages dropped since fairness trumped deference. It makes the Japan-esque winning percentages of Batali and Symon all the more impressive.
    • In a couple more Iron Chef examples, when Iron Chef is shown in Australia it sometimes has a "contains scenes that may disturb some viewers". This is because the people on the show have no qualms about doing things like chopping up a live octopus that is still crawling around on the cutting board and trying to escape. Also, French actress Julie Dreyfus flatly refused to taste a challenger's dish because it contained whale meat. In episode 73 (Stingray Battle), Chef Noboru Inoue -- boss and mentor to challenger Yoshihide Koga -- spent almost the entire show standing on the sideline, getting drunk on red wine. The camera even catches him punching assistants on two separate occasions. On an American production, any one of those examples would've seen Inoue quietly hustled backstage -- at a minimum. And most of the footage would probably never make the airwaves. Here, the attitude of the commentators was "mildly scolding". The loss of dignity seemed more important than the fact that there's a drunk guy on the floor punching people.
  • On that note, compare American and Japanese game shows. Popular American game shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (American Edition) and American Idol offer a massively valuable prize to the winner (valued at $1 million in both of those examples) as an incentive for someone to win. The former even rewards you for only making it to a certain point and giving up before reaching total victory. Now look at popular Japanese game shows like Iron Chef and Sasuke, which have little to no reward, but are still treated as Serious Business by the contenders and viewers, who consider the glory of victory and the shame of defeat to be far greater motivators than cash.
  • Another example of the American and Japanese gap, tokusatsu. Because of Japan's cute culture, Super Sentai works better when it's being lighthearted. In Japan, more comedic seasons (Carranger, Go-Onger) are more successful, while darker, more serious seasons don't (Thanks to a dark storyline and Real Life Writes the Plot, Ohranger nearly got the series cancelled.) The American adaptation, Power Rangers, works best when it's being serious, so the exact opposite happens. Ohranger's adaptation, Zeo, was a fan favorite, while Carranger's adaptation, Turbo, nearly sank the franchise. In fact, part of what made Go-Onger's adaptation, RPM, work so well is that they dropped most of the silly and produced the most serious, dark season ever.
    • On the other hand, RPM also succeeded because of the careful application of humor where needed and appropriate, so instead of silliness that the characters try to take seriously you have very serious situations dealt with properly (albeit with very witty writing) and silly situations promptly lampshaded an mercilessly made fun of.
    • There can be other problems, too, depending on just how faithful Rangers is to Sentai. Power Rangers Samurai is essentially a Shot for Shot Remake of Samurai Sentai Shinkenger; Samurai tends to be viewed critically because it uses Shinkenger's social mores which sometimes clash with American culture. Sexism specifically is a recurring problem here; Japan encourages women to be nurturing and ladylike, while the West thinks that too much of that reeks of Stay in the Kitchen.
      • In one early episode, the Monster of the Week uses insults as a weapon -- literally. In Shinkenger, the heroes are able to fight it because Yellow Ranger Kotoha was bullied a lot as a child and just got used to it, developing something of a low self-esteem in the process. In Samurai, Yellow Ranger Emily fights it for the exact same reason, despite the fact that most Americans wouldn't deal with bullying in such a passive manner; at the very least, the expectation is that she'd adopt a "Sticks and Stones" attitude rather than just saying "Oh well, I guess I am kind of clumsy and dumb."
      • Not always, rather than thicken your skin and ignore it, some people to start teasing themselves, often in a "make fun of myself before anyone else can do it" way. Had Emily been written as something of a self-deprecating jokester, it might have worked (emphasis on might, there would need to be some decent writing to keep it from getting too bad), but since she isn't, she just sounds like she's dealing with very low self-worth.
      • Samurai also gives its heroines more stereotypical traits that Shinkenger didn't have, such as both female Rangers enthusiastically agreeing that every girl wants to get married (whereas only one character in Shinkenger expressed a desire to get married) or wanting to go shoe shopping on their day off.
  • Michelle's character arc in Degrassi High no longer plays remotely like it did in 1990. She moves out of her house at age 16 to escape a reactionary father who doesn't want her to go out with friends after school, or to date (especially not a black boy). She has mixed feelings about him -- he's a bully, but he means well and he has trouble changing his old-fashioned ways. Eighteen years later, when the standards of what's acceptable for American and Canadian teens have changed, he seems utterly evil, and his attempts to make peace seem like a Manipulative Bastard softening her up for the kill.
  • The Premiere episode of Bones has several characters question main character Brennan about how she is dealing with her parents' murder, and admonish her for not sharing her feelings about it. In other countries where more emphasis is culturally placed on privacy, even asking such personal questions would be considered incredibly rude behavior.
  • Even Monty Python's Flying Circus is not immune. Watch the Erizabeth L episode, where Italian director Luchino Visconti is revealed to be a Japanese imposter with a drawn-out Japanese Ranguage joke and Terry Jones in Yellowface; he then does it again in blackface, when he plays an African impersonating another Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni.
  • The Kids in The Hall had Mississippi Gary, a black blues singer from the American South played by a white Canadian. The character is Lampshaded in this sketch.
  • Skins has a somewhat... casual attitude toward teenage sex, which significantly freaks out the leftpondian audience; British viewers, on the other hand, view it as merely as an over-the-top if, at heart, accurate depiction.
    • Particularly, the U.S. version of Skins had to change the resolution of the Hot for Student relationship in the first season. While the British don't exactly look kindly upon student-teacher romances, in America the cultural taboo against it is so strong that even a neutral portrayal (as the original British version gave) would be seen as irresponsible. So in the American version, we see Chris and Tina's relationship get found out, and Tina arrested and fired with a promise never to contact Chris again. In the original, Chris simply realized that Jal was better for him than Angie (the character on which Tina was based), and they both moved on.
  • Values Dissonance is humorously referred to in a Not Only But Also sketch as a reason why Peter Cook can't see the joke in Leonardo's Da Vinci 'cartoon': "It's a different culture, Pete, it's Italianate. For example, The Mousetrap did terribly in Pakistan".
  • Barney Miller has an episode where a woman comes into the police station distraught and says she's been raped. When it turns out that it was her husband, it's treated as a big joke and she learns her lesson that she should put out. Words cannot describe how cringeworthy this is now.
    • Barney Miller also had recurring characters Marty and Darryl, an older gay couple complete with effeminate mannerisms (although Darryl was not as flamboyant as Marty) and "hand-crocheted sweaters". They were overdone even for the 70s, but to the show's credit, they were never ridiculed outright or treated any worse than any of the other "eccentric" characters in the station.
    • In direct contrast to Marty and Darryl, later seasons introduced the recurring character of Officer Zatelli, a Invisible to Gaydar uniform accidentally outed by Wojo. Tellingly, even the malevolent Internal Affairs detective lamely denies any wish to punish gay cops. Viewers can see little signs of social progress as the show goes on.
    • The second season episode "Heat Wave" is made of values dissonance from start to finish. The main plot mines its "comedy" from Wojo almost being raped while dressed in drag to catch muggers, and Detective Wentworth being offended that the would-be rapist pushed her aside. The main subplot, meanwhile, involves a battered wife deciding whether or not to sign a complaint against her husband, lots of jokes from Fish about how a relationship involving an abusive husband and a wife who just takes it "works," and a studio audience clearly rooting for her to drop the charges.
  • The latest Values Dissonance scandal regarding Australia has been due to a sketch on Hey Hey, It's Saturday, their Expy of The Gong Show, where a group of performers did a blackface Jackson Five routine called the Jackson Jive. Two of the judges were Australian, and were longtime members of the judge panel. The third judge was Harry Connick Jr. While the two Australian judges had no problems with the skit (blackface has little stigma in Australia compared to America due to a lack of history surrounding the performance), Connick was not so happy with the act, to the point where if he knew that act was going to be on, he never would've been on the show in the first place.
  • Values Dissonance is frequently called out and Lampshaded on Mystery Science Theater 3000, where Joel / Mike and the 'bots will riff on a movie for the horribly dated or inappropriate attitudes it displays. This is particularly prevalent in their riffs on informational short films from the '50s, where the crew will mercilessly mock the film for its outdated attitudes to family life, gender politics, racism, social behavior and so forth.
    • This reached an apotheosis with the short film Catching Trouble (episode 315). Filmed in 1936, it presents a lighthearted look at Ross Allen, who captured animals for his zoo - with his bare hands. This involved poking them with sticks, knocking them out of tall trees - by cutting the trees down - and trapping them in a bag, with the help of "his faithful Seminole". On one occasion he starts a small forest fire in order to drive out a snake, and eventually he grabs two bear cubs who scream in a particularly pitiful way (their mother is strangely absent). Joel and The Bots became audibly upset over the course of the film, culminating in Joel apologising on behalf of humanity.
    • A second apotheosis came with A Date With Your Family, a short film from 1950 which was intended to teach kids how to have dinner with their parents. The film's portrait of family life circa 1950 - in which everything has to be arranged so that the father will not be upset when he returns from a hard day at the office - exactly fits the modern stereotype of that era. The narration, which was delivered by Hugh Beaumont, gave such as advice as "pleasant, unemotional conversation helps the digestion", and observed that "these boys greet their Dad as though they were genuinely glad to see him, as though they really missed him". The narrator further points out how the mother and sister of the family "owe it" to their menfolk to be attractive and charming, and encourages the son to complement the ladies' cooking as "this will make them want to continue pleasing you."
    • While not quite as jarring as the above two, the Union Pacific safety film "Days of Our Years" features a segment where a husband drops his wife in labor off at the hospital, and is then encouraged by the doctors to go on ahead to work while they take care of business. (This was during a time when women were kept sedated during childbirth, so it's not like the husband's presence would have meant much to the wife either way.)
  • When the legendary miniseries The Thorn Birds aired in 1983, a great many viewers were upset at its depiction of a Catholic priest falling in love with a woman and eventually consummating his relationship with her. Other viewers lauded said depiction. Oddly, all of these people seemed to overlook the Unfortunate Implications of the fact that said priest had known this woman since she was a child and had a hand in raising her.
  • The J-Drama Great Teacher Onizuka features a scene were Onizuka, in its classic episode-climax speech style, tells his coworker Fuyutsuki essentially that it's her fault that another coworker drugged her and tried to rape her because she was leading him on. Fuyutsuki comes to school the next day in slacks instead of her usual business skirt. The Unfortunate Implications are toned down a bit by Onizuka telling her she looked cuter in a skirt, but still...
  • When Lucy was pregnant with Little Ricky on I Love Lucy, not only did they not use the word "pregnant", but in the episode where Lucy's trying to get the message across to Desi that they're having a baby, she looks to be about 5 minutes away from going into labor, which makes it all the weirder that it takes him so long to get it. To go a step farther, in one episode Lucy intentionally gets sunburned so that Ricky will be less likely to hit her when he finds out about her latest clusterfuck.
    • Ricky would also frequently make somewhat casual threats to punch Lucy in the nose (Similar to Ralph Kramden's "One of these days, Alice..." rants.) He never did it, and it was usually just a lot of bluster, but nowadays, even jokingly threatening to punch your wife just doesn't happen.
    • Furthermore, any scene set in Lucy and Ricky's bedroom would have two beds, making Little Ricky's conception...interesting, to say the least. In more current times, a married couple with separate beds would be seen as "on the rocks" (very occasionally, couples might sleep in separate beds, such as one person endlessly tossing and turning or needing a special mattress for, say, back problems, that the other finds terribly uncomfortable, but even then it's usually two smaller beds pushed together into one larger bed, not separated far enough to walk between.) while in the 50s this was considered appropriate an Acceptable Break From Reality due to TV censorship.
      • This was an odd form of censorship when you consider that most families at the time had a mother and father sharing a bed together.
        • Yes and no-- consider how often you hear curse words in daily life, vs. how many are allowed on network television. Or the fact that you see yourself (and possibly others) naked every day-- yet you don't expect to see nudity on network television. Censors and audiences likely had the same perspective on using the word "pregnant" or actually showing a man and a woman in the same bed. Realistic, but distasteful and/or a bit shocking to the sensibilities.
    • Ricky and Lucy also had a bathroom with no toilet.
  • Much of the interaction between Sam and the other cops in the American Life On Mars was driven by the dissonance between the police methods of the 70s vs. those of the present.
    • Same in the original. The creators openly admitted they wanted to do a show like The Sweeney but couldn't do that in a modern setting, didn't want to do a straight period piece, and didn't want to seem to approve of overly violent policing, which resulted in the Fish Out of Water cop from the 2000s in 70s Britain.
    • Ashes to Ashes puts a slightly different slant on it: while Gene, Ray and Chris are, by even the standards of the time, politically incorrect, the fact that they're slowly becoming the minority is explored.
  • Master Mind is a popular UK quiz show, where people really have to study to be able to answer questions. Only the person who makes it through the first round, the semi-finals and wins the finals gets a prize: an engraved glass. Little time is spend on the candidate itself. In the Netherlands, not far from the UK, the format completely flopped. The public was upset non-winners didn't get anything, and they wanted more details of the candidates personal lives.
  • A first season episode of The Andy Griffith Show had Ellie trying to make over a tomboy farm girl. Her not wearing makeup or dresses is treated like Serious Business, but can still be somewhat forgiven since wants to try those things out. The real Values Dissonance hits in the ending. Her father complains that she can't help with the chores dressed like that, until the farmhands start hitting on her. Andy then tells him that, since she's a girl, she isn't any good at hard labor (despite the opposite being shown about ten minutes earlier), but now that she's been made over, she can be used to land him a son-in law.
  • More fun with Latin American Values Dissonance! The National Geographic Channel show "Patrulla Fronteriza: Prohibido Pasar". A reality show about the patrols of the USA/Mexico border and their heroic fight against the evils from the outside. Currently on air in National Geographic Channel Latin America. If you don't get it, just ask how many Latin Americans have relatives living illegally in the USA
  • In The A-Team ethnic stereotypes were mainly found in the form of the bad guys (usually either loud, raucous, stupid Hispanic bandits in Latin America or New York-ish gangsters in L. A.) and some of the A-Team's disguises. Hannibal's most referenced comic disguise is a Chinese Launderer and Murdock once had to disguise himself as a Native American warrior, complete with whooping. While ethnic stereotypes may not be eliminated from media, such blatant examples would never show up on TV today, except in parody.
    • Today, Hannibal probably couldn't constantly refer to the Girl of the Week as "lady" and Face probably couldn't get away with statement like, "You know these co-eds--lost without a man to guide them."
    • Hannibal dressed in blackface and Face telling Murdock "Now I'm about to chauffeur a spoilt heiress to some sandlot of a country so she can marry some guy with a towel wrapped around his head" wouldn't fly these days.
  • The Dick Van Dyke Show has Sally Rogers, who spends virtually the entire series trying to catch a husband, but failing because she is too forward and funny. An early episode, when she is talking brashly to Laura's meek cousin, has Rob opining that "any normal man would have punched her in the face." Yeesh.
  • Little House On the Prairie ran in the 1970s and early 1980s. The show's aesops are a hybrid of good country living and 1970s values. In the show, it was not polite to make fun of poor people, but it was okay to punch a girl in the face if she said or did something you didn't like -- and there was no consequence for doing so.
  • Invoked by Tina Fey in her acceptance speech for the Mark Twain prize.

"I hope that, like Mark Twain, people one day look back at my work and say, 'Wow, that is actually pretty racist.'"

  • In one episode of Columbo, the title character, in using deductive reasoning to re-enact the scene of a crime, describes the socially acceptable way for a man to hit a woman: he doesn't punch her the way he would a man, he just slaps her across the face.
  • There was an episode of Gunsmoke in which Quint and Festus have to go to the next town over to buy supplies while playing a game of one-upsmanship on one another. While having a drinking contest at a saloon, and the inevitable Bar Brawl that followed, they meet a lovely young saloon girl who promptly (and separately) seduces both of them, telling them of an evil man chasing her and convinces them to take her with them back to Dodge. Along the way, the man catches up to them; he is apparently domestically abusive, saying the longer she resists coming back with him the more he'll "whoop" on her. Quint and Festus stand up to him, and despite normally being portrayed as decent fighters, get their asses handed to them. Eventually the girl turns on them(saying that two on one is cheating) and gleefully goes back into the arms of her lover, telling the two "It's not so bad; I really do love him! And he doesn't whoop on me too bad!" This was Played for Laughs.
  • Inspector Rex, an Austrian cop show with a Heroic Dog and a massive amount of Mood Swings, and some relatively harsh crimes (murder, sexual violence, even child porn in once instance). Not to mention a certain amount of swearing (German translations of "shit" and "asshole", for example). Guess among whom the show was very popular, at least in Austria? Elementary school children. To be fair, though, the violence wasn't very graphic (it aired a couple of years before CSI).
    • Believe you me, by Austrian standards, it's pretty tame. Also, kids tend to just watch the dog.
  • The original British cop soap, Z Cars, a serial which ran in the 1960s-70s and which by today's cop-show standards is exceedingly tame, once ran an episode where the cops had to bust a child-porn ring engaged in making dubious home movies. The series screened in the early evening, just after teatime. In the 1970's, long before the emergence of the modern frenzied hysteria about paedophilia, this passed by a British TV audience without undue comment.
  • The original UK version of The Office includes a striking amount of drinking when viewed through American eyes. One episode involves the boss David Brent taking all of his new employees out for quite a few beers in the middle of the workday, which wouldn't fly in most American companies. By contrast, nearly every time alcohol is introduced to the American office, there are serious consequences: Pam throws herself at Jim despite being engaged, Roy smashes up a bar, Michael and Jan get in a fight where the cops get called, and Meredith sets her hair on fire.
  • Buffy had Willow snap after Warren killed her girlfriend. She reacts by researching dark magic, healing Buffy (who was also shot), taking the bullet that was used and hunting down and torturing Warren, before he was flayed alive. The show treats it as Willow falling to evil, but for many viewers it was hard to see what exactly she did that was so wrong. There's maybe two viewers who actually give a damn that Warren died slowly and painfully, and several zillion of them who are glad that Warren died slowly and painfully. The main concern is over the part where planning and executing the torture had very bad psychological effects on Willow. Not even in universe people tought that what she did was actually a wrong thing, at least not until the point she started trying to destroy the world, anywas.
    • Even on the show, the cast's main concern over Warren's death was that they were afraid it would mentally backlash on Willow. Heck, Xander and Dawn -- who are usually two of the whiter hats on the Scooby Gang -- were openly in favor of Warren's death, they just didn't want Willow mainlining black magic to do it.
      • There's also that Willow also intended to do the same to Andrew and Jonathan. And while they were legitimately accessories to some of Warren's other crimes (the non-death-penalty offense ones, like grand larceny), neither of them had the slightest thing to do with Tara's death. They'd already been arrested and put in jail the episode before, and Warren planned and executed that attack entirely on his own.
    • The idea that torture is morally acceptable against bad people is definitely a modern issue of values dissonance, as some people think that makes perfect sense but others are absolutely horrified.
    • Then there's the whole way the sexual coercion and assault of male characters is treated. When Faith switches bodies with Buffy and has sex with Riley, it's Buffy (not Riley) who is supposedly the victim. And while it would be really difficult whether or not Spike and Buffy's sexual relationship had been entirely consensual, she does continue "playing with him" after he asks her to stop and another time (when she is invisible) she starts undressing him and having forcing him to have sex with her. He seems to be happy enough to go along with this all, but it's still pretty creepy. And the whole thing seems to be presented as "female empowerment"...
      • In the body-switch scene, Buffy has literally had all control of her own body forcibly taken away from her; its hard to get more raped than that. Riley, on the other hand, is a victim of rape by impersonation, which while still bad is still way less on the Body Horror scale. The show's error in forgetting to make any mention that Riley is also a victim is a legitimate error, but it is not an error to portray Buffy as the person who is by far getting the worst end of the deal here.
    • Also, the Buffy/Angel relationship in the early seasons. She's sixteen and he's a few centuries old. On that basis alone, it can seem manipulative rather than romantic. This problem is pretty much universal in the "supernatural romance" genre. Their relationship also has Values Dissonance on an in-setting level as well; by the standards of 18th-century Ireland, the culture in which Angel was born and raised, 16-to-17-year-old Buffy is not only over the age of consent but is also at marriageable age. By late 20th-century California standards... not so much. (For that matter, the age of consent in the modern-day United Kingdom is sixteen... but in California, it's eighteen.)
  • In the show How I Met Your Mother, the premise is that the episodes are stories that one of the characters is telling to his future children. It's assumed the children are young, because all profanity and drug use are edited out (smoking weed, for example becomes "eating sandwiches"). However, sex is openly and casually discussed.
    • The children aren't that young, they're likely only in their early teens, and most have already had at least some sexual education. And there really isn't a lot being censored by Future!Ted, most of it relating to his past drug use and more extreme sexual situations.
  • Lewbert the doorman, in iCarly, yelling at a woman for having a dog in his lobby is considered pretty bad by American standards and on the show itself, but in places like England they have people wonder why, because that behaviour is something a doorman and most people would take exception to.
    • It would actually depend on where you are in America, as well. Some areas are very used to no-dogs rules in buildings/lobbies, etc, and would also raise their eyebrows at the show's presentation of the issue (though Lewbert's behavior was very over the top).
  • In Modern Family, Gloria takes Lilly to get clothes and "hairings". Mitch agrees to this, not understanding that Gloria intended to pierce his child's ears. Gloria, being Colombian born, cannot understand Mitch's shock when his daughter returns with earrings.
  • In Carrusel, David gives up his pet turtle so that a turtle soup can be made in order to cure Fermin from his illness. Carrusel took place in Mexico in 1989-1990. Not only sacrificing a pet turtle would have been unacceptable in the USA back then (and in the present day), but someone suggesting turtle soup as a cure to an illness would have at the very least raised a lot of eyebrows.
    • Also, all but one of the female characters in Carrusel were afraid of mice. The girl who was not, Valeria, was seen as gutsy and adventurous overall. In the USA, by 1989-1990, it would have been likelier to just have one individual female be murophobic, and the murophobia being seen as an irrational sign of weakness.
  • An episode of British panel show QI discussed a man from Japan who survived both bombings - a man who took a train from Hiroshima to Nagasaki just in time for the second blast. Most Brits wouldn't have thought twice about it. Interesting figures from even the grisliest chapters of history are routinely discussed, lampooned, and milked for laughs on the show, all in the name of being interesting. To us, it's actually quite cosy comedy, and the clip no more harmful than anything else they've broadcast. Some Japanese media networks, however, disagreed, and the very existence of such a conversation - not broadcast in Japan, incidentally - was reported as an abomination, as it broke a cultural taboo. To some of the people of Japan, the subject's off-limits to the whole universe. To the UK, it's just quite interesting. It should, however, be pointed out that there are plenty of people from Japan commenting on that video that they don't see what the fuss is about.
  • Similarly, the late-night show Banzai, a spoof on Japanese TV gameshows and the East Asian tendency to bet on just about anything, was cult viewing in Britain. Funny turned-up-to-eleven Japanese presenters presided over escalatingly ridiculous bets in a show deliberately filmed to evoke the worst excesses of Japanese TV, and it was viewed as light-hearted fun in the UK. Not so on export. Canadian TV was forced to pull the show on "racism" grounds after sustained protest from Far Asian ethnic minority groups, and Japanese-American protest killed both the original show and a local remake in the USA.
    • The ur-show behind Banzai would have been a show called Clive James on TV, where the laconic Australian TV critic presented an hour of the very worst of other people's television, culled from no shortage of worldwide examples. Excessively sexual French and German adverts rubbed shoulders with American televangelists and especially James' bete-noir, Japanese game shows. Game shows where Japanese contestants were humiliated, psychologically assaulted and even physically tormented in search of a handful of yen. Clive James, a man whose father had been murdered by the Japanese in a WW II death camp, stopped short of any explicit statement of personal disdain. But a programme designed to reinforce the conceit of the British that they had the best TV in the world, and everyone else's was to varying degrees crap, or just plain weird... it is interesting that some of the examples held up as other people's crap in the 1980s, depths which British broadcasting would never ever plumb, such as Jerry Springer-type trashfests or all-night cheap quizzes that give up any pretence of broadcasting quality or excellence, are now[when?] staples of British broadcasting.
  • This [dead link] host's behavior on a Canadian game show may have been acceptable in the '70s, maybe up to the mid '80s when the show was produced, but to present-day viewers, it seems incredibly creepy.
  • Invoked in Community when Troy and Abed, hosting a housewarming party in their new apartment, discuss a 1940s guidebook which they consulted for hints on how to act like appropriate hosts. The first piece of advice was "dress to impress." The second was "avoid touchy subjects like the Negro problem."
  • Inverted on Merlin - by modern standards, Uther is a ruthless tyrant. By general medieval standards, he would be considered rather benevolent.
  • A very minor example compared to others on this list, but viewer and player attitudes towards manipulative and cutthroat tactics on competitive Reality TV shows such as Survivor and The Amazing Race have changed drastically over a relatively short period of time. Richard Hatch and "Team Guido" by today's standards used completely acceptable strategies for winning, but at the time(2000-2001) they were vilified as being unethical.
    • There are also cultural differences here. While the Canadian version of the show tends to have the contestants working together more, the American version has more independent work. This troper (who's Canadian) remembers a professor a few years ago having a minor rant (nonetheless related to the lesson) about all the back-stabbing on the American Survivor.
  • A major part of the appeal of Mad Men is the quite deliberate Values Dissonance between the period when it is set and its modern audience.
  • On The Golden Girls, one episode has Rose receiving a request from her hometown, the Minnesota farm town of Saint Olaf, that all those born there remain celibate to combat a local drought that is killing the crops. It's weird, but Rose believes in it, and resolves not to have sex until the ban is lifted. Her boyfriend asks, but fearing judgment, she doesn't explain why she's suddenly refusing to spend the night with him, and he breaks up with her: not for being evasive or not trusting him, but for not putting out. Nowadays we know that a woman doesn't owe any man a reason for not wanting to have sex, and Miles looks like a shallow, self-interested slimeball with no respect for women. It can be cringe-worthy to see Rose go running back to him, but at the time (and back in Rose and Miles' day), attending to a man's sexual needs was one of his lover's duties to the relationship.
  • This trope applies to the title of the '80s sitcom Who's The Boss?, as it would never even occur to most viewers nowadays to question whether a live-in housekeeper could presume to be the head-of-household's "boss", merely because the employee happens to be male and the employer happens to be female. Indeed, few of the show's once-groundbreaking role reversals would raise an eyebrow today.
  • On SCTV Dave Thomas did at least two characters in yellowface. Thomas played Lin Ye Tang in multiple episodes, while playing Tim Ishimuni in 3.
  • Bat Masterson, a 1950 TV Show that is set in 1870s, had scenes where prisoners were subjected to corporal punishment for non-homicidal crimes. For the time in both eras, this was acceptable. Today, it can lead to a lawsuit due the fact prisoners have rights too; there is a cause against corporal punishment. Given the fact in one episode, the title character is punishing a female criminal for the crime of thief, which won’t go well with Women’s Right Groups today.
  • Children's television. What's considered 'acceptable' varies on different sides of the Pond.
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