Failure Is the Only Option/Live-Action TV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Failure Is the Only Option in Live-Action TV include:

  • 24: It gets tricky - Goal: stop the threat immediately (i.e. in less than 24 hrs). You know that the threat won't, in fact, be stopped by episode 7. But this is lampshaded in that, usually one threat is thwarted, but then the heroes are surprised with back-up plans or secondary plots; thus the show's love affair with the trope. Conversely, in the final episode of the season, you know that no matter how well they've planned, the Big Bad has to lose.
  • Averted on Alias, when SD6 is, surprisingly, defeated in the middle of the second season. They are, of course, replaced by a new series of goals, some of which are also resolved before the end of the series.
    • Played straight with Sloane himself, though. At least as straight as it can be when a Heel Face Revolving Door is involved.
  • Arrested Development embodies this trope from the very first scene in the pilot to the last scene of the finale. It ends with the two characters who moved in with the family in the pilot to help them out basically saying, "**** this," and running away to Mexico.
  • A twist on this trope is The A-Team, wherein one of the goals: to evade capture by government forces, was met continuously until the show was Uncanceled after four seasons with the fifth, in which they are captured and subsequently work for a covert federal agency headed by Robert Vaughn. (However, the underlying goal, clearing their name or at least getting a pardon, was never achieved.)
  • In the original Battlestar Galactica, the goal was to find the mythical planet Earth. In the followup series Galactica 1980, the Galactica did in fact find Earth. The resulting episodes were bad enough to guarantee that there would be no Galactica 1981.

    In the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, they find Earth before the end of the series...only to find the planet in an post-apocalyptic state, presumably from nuclear war. Later, they get a Deus Ex Machina trip to another habitable planet that they also call Earth, mingle with the locals, and 150,000 years later we develop Roombas. This could be said to be an aversion, as current humans are much more Genre Savvy about the danger of building machines that could turn against them. The earliest warning against this (the story of the golem) goes back several hundred years.
  • Between the Lions character Cliff Hanger. Goal: Rescue himself from hanging from the cliff.
  • Both 1960s/1970s TV Westerns The Big Valley and Bonanza had the same thing happening: every time a male character on the show got serious with a woman or got married, she got killed off in some gruesome fashion or died of some horrible disease, or in childbirth, on the same episode. (Exception: Hoss' mother on Bonanza lasted two episodes.) In fact, the Cartwright Curse is named for Bonanza's Cartwright family.
  • Blackadder. Series 1 -- to become heir to the throne, or at least get noticed by his father. He becomes King after murdering everyone in his way, then dies 30 seconds later. Series 2 -- not as clear as other seasons, but apparently to marry Queenie and become the richest and most powerful man in England. He seems on the cusp of doing so; when Prince Ludwig the Indestructible, self-proclaimed master of disguise, kills him and the entire court, and in disguise as Queenie assumes the throne. Series 3 -- To get rich and improve his station. He finally achieves this after Prince George is shot and Blackadder becomes the new Prince Regent thanks to the madness of King George.. Series 4 -- the clearest example of this, Captain Blackadder's endless attempts to get out of the trenches before he dies. He fails. Cue one of the most famous Tear Jerker Downer Endings in the history of, well, history.
  • Blakes Seven - The objective of Blake's Seven -- or at least of Blake himself -- was to destroy the Federation. Even with the most advanced ship in human hands, it's not very likely you're going to do that with a crew of seven. The first three seasons had several successes, but by season 4 the Liberator was destroyed and every single thing they tried failed. The ending was inevitable.
  • The Bob Newhart Show: Bob Hartley is a psychologist with a core group of dysfunctional regular patients; episodes may end with him making a minor breakthrough with them, but they never actually get better.
  • Burn Notice. Every time Michael thinks he's found out who and what's really behind his Burn, he discovers it's only another layer of obfuscation.

    As of the end of season two he's decided to finally forget about finding out who burned him and move on with his life--only for Big Bad Gilroy to come waltzing into the picture.
    • Michael is still looking into the mystery in Season 5.
  • On Castle, any time Beckett comes close to finding her mother's killer, she fails. First time, she finds her mother's shooter, only to have to kill him to get Castle out of a hostage situation. Second time, the guy she finds escapes during his trial, and later kills Montgomery.
  • Charlie Jade - Goal: Get back to his home dimension. Achieved, but soon he has to leave to stop the Big Bad's plot, which as far as he knows requires a Heroic Sacrifice. The series' last scene before cancellation reveals that he survived after all.
  • Chuck - Goal for the first two seasons: Get the Intersect out of Chuck's head, and/or find out how to build another one so the government doesn't need to depend on a bumbling flighty geek. Fully a quarter of the episodes of the first two seasons revolved around pursuing one of those goals, and failure was the only option for them. As of season three, the trope was finally averted and the show continues with a related premise.
  • Dollhouse. Viewers may empathise with Ballard's (ineptly pursued) goal of bringing Dollhouse down and freeing the Actives, but if he were successful, the show would be over. He, Echo and the others do manage that. In the penultimate episode. Though it turns out that doesn't totally fix things.

    They probably indirectly caused the bad things that would happen. If they had publicized both the technology and the vaccine people would have been ready, and no-one would have had a monopoly over the information, but instead they thought that blowing up a mainframe and covering up the rest was enough to foil the evil corporation's plans.
    • Of course, that's what the Big Bad (Boyd) told them - the genie is out of the bottle. They didn't believe him.
  • Farscape - Goal: Find a way back to Earth. Subverted magnificently in the middle of the third season (in a series with 4 seasons), where he manages to get back to Earth. Of course, Crichton then discovers That's Not What He Really Wanted, and the entire idea of his goal of "Finding A Way Back To Earth" is deconstructed to the moon and back (literally). The other goals that he amasses throughout the series don't really fit into the Failure Is the Only Option category... unless getting blown up by a hand-made nuke is considered a goal. And, of course, this being Farscape, Genre Savvy John Crichton lampshades this (referring to a couple of long-running TV series in the process), but by this point in the series has enough insight to manage to turn his Savvyness to his advantage.
  • Reversed in Hogan's Heroes, where Colonel Klink's actor only participated in the show under the condition that the Nazis would never, ever come out on top in anything. This being a comedy and Nazis being an Acceptable Target, it wasn't hard to pull off.
  • Father Ted - Goal for the priests - well Ted at least - get sent to a parish not on the island. For Ted this would require him to replace the money that was "just resting in [his] account".

    Goal achieved by subversion in The Passion of St. Tibulas then inverted in order to maintain the status quo. Charged with a task from Bishop Brennon, not only does Ted fail in the task he achieves the opposite effect. Thus the Bishop having had enough of them sends them to even worse parishes, where they won't be his problem. Inverted when they successfully blackmail the Bishop on his vows of celibacy.

    Also achieved in the first episode of the third season. Ted, possibly as a reward for his actions in the Christmas Special, is sent to a much nicer parish. But when his fellow priests notice some irregularities in the accounts, Ted is promptly sent back to Craggy Island ... where he discovers Mrs. Doyle bent almost double due to back trouble, Dougal's pet hamster riding around on a miniature bicycle, and Father Jack living in the chimney.

    The finale looks to be the eventual ending of this, with Ted being offered a place at a parish in Los Angeles by an american priest who was very impressed by Teds managing to talk a suicidal priest off a ledge. Subverted when he quits when the priest actually tells him its a Parish in a gang warfare zone. Lampshaded by Dougal, when he says Ted is stuck with them forever.
  • Firefly played with it, as at least twice the crew pulled off heists that, if successful, would let them live their lives in a significantly less impoverished state while still on the run. However, we find in the next episode that, for one reason or another, they are unable to capitalize on the gains. Arguably, in Serenity, it is the fact that the crew is actually able to pull off the heist at the beginning and then cash in on it in the next scene that makes all the forthcoming fighting-the-power action plausible.

    This is actually a long-running minor trope in Firefly, as mentioned by Mal Reynolds at least once: "It never goes smooth. Why does it never go smooth?" (In the Serenity RPG, "Things don't go smooth" is actually a character trait you can take. Mal has the major version of it.)
  • The Fugitive - Goal: Get the one-armed man jailed to clear your name. Resolved in the Grand Finale.
  • Gilligan's Island - Goal: Get off the island. The series was abruptly cancelled after Season Three, so they never did achieve this in the series. They did finally get rescued years later in a reunion movie, but in the second movie (when they met up again for a reunion trip in the first one after they were rescued, they got washed up right back on the same island; they were rescued for good in the second one) it turned out they hated life on the mainland so much that they returned. At least this time, they were no longer stranded, and set the island up as a resort.
  • Good Times - Goal: Get out of the projects. Resolved in the final episode by all (except Bookman). Michael moves into a dormitory. Thelma and Keith move into a duplex when his football career rebounds, only to have Florida move in with them. JJ gets his own place. Willona and Penny move to the same duplex.
  • The Greatest American Hero - Goal: to gain complete control of the supersuit.
  • How I Met Your Mother - Goal: Meet wife and mother of children.
    • Although, as opposed to most examples on this page, we know that it will succeed, thanks to the premise.
  • The Incredible Hulk - Goal: Find a cure to the Hulk transformation.
  • Kung Fu - Goal: Find Kwai-Chang Caine's long lost half-brother. Achieved in the four-part Series Finale.
  • Land of the Lost Escape the Land Of The Lost.
  • Lazarus Churchyard - Goal: Die
  • Life On Mars - Goal: Return to 2006. Achieved in the last episode, only to have the main character realize it was not what he wanted after all.

    Subverted in the American version when it's revealed that Sam isn't a cop from 2008 after all but an astronaut in 2035 caught up in a glitched virtual reality program
    • This trope also applies to spin-off Ashes to Ashes, with Alex's main goal always being to get back to 2008 and make it to her daughters birthday party. This appeared to have been achieved at the end of series 2, only for episode 1 of series 3 to reveal it was just a Dream Within a Dream. And unlike Sam Alex never even got a choice - the final episode revealed she never could have gotten back as she was Dead All Along!
  • Lost: With the premise of "people stranded on a deserted Island", it was pretty obvious to Genre Savvy viewers that any attempts to get off said Island were doomed to fail. It was the famously subverted when some characters left the Island and their goal became to get back there. And then totally inverted in the final season: the goal of the main characters becomes to stop the Big Bad from leaving the Island - something they have attempted themselves for so long early in the series.
    • The other goal for Lost is to figure out what the hell is going on. Characters and the viewers alike were fated to fail here.
  • Lost in Space - Goal: Find Earth Alpha Centauri.
  • Klinger of M*A*S*H fame attempting to get out of the army by acting crazy (getting a Section 8). This was of the every episode variety, at least until later seasons. In the last season, reasoning that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, Klinger is promoted to sergeant.
    • Inverted in the finale, when the war is officially over and everyone is being discharged. Klinger elects to stay in Korea to help his new wife find her missing family.

Klinger: I can't believe I'm saying this. I'm staying in Korea.
Hawkeye: You don't have to act crazy now. We're all getting out.

    • Also, Winchester trying to get out of the 4077th. Shown less often than Klinger's, he mostly tried to throw his weight around to get transferred back to Tokyo.
  • Monk - Goal: discover the truth surrounding Trudy's death (achieved in series finale). There's also Monk's OCD, which isn't exactly a problem that the characters actively attempt to solve, but it is an essential part of the series' premise. Monk is occasionally cured of this ailment, but it is always undone by means of the Reset Button because he doesn't have his crime-solving abilities without it (not to mention because Status Quo Is God).
  • The Monkees: Goal: get big break and reach success as a rock and roll band. Often when it seems as though they've finally found their chance at stardom, something always ends up getting in the way, causing chaos, and numerous epic fails.
  • Mystery Science Theater 3000 (especially the later seasons) - Goal: Escape the Satellite of Love and return to Earth. Achieved in the final episode.

    Also achieved by Joel in the middle of the 5th season (Mitchell), though ironically he had grown content with his life aboard the Satellite and was tricked into leaving by Gypsy because she thought the Mads were going to kill him. Later, Crow got Mike off the Satellite retroactively using Time Travel to convince him to stop temping. He returned to learn that he died pursuing his dream of being a rock star and his Jerkass older brother was launched into space in his stead, so he went back and undid the change.
  • Northern Exposure: Joel Fleischman's Character Development from being a stereotypical neurotic New Yorker to embracing the folksy wisdom of the inhabitants of Cicely, Alaska was the point of the show. They dragged this premise out for about five seasons until Joel's actor left the show, the character found enlightenment, and the show imploded on itself.
  • Only Fools and Horses. Goal: make a fortune ("This time next year, we'll be millionaires!"). Heartwarmingly achieved in the finale (with something that's been lying in their garage for years), then undone for a Christmas Special some years later, only to be slightly fixed by a dead relative's will.
  • Phil of the Future - The time machine being fixed so the Diffy's can return to the future. Slightly subverted in that Lloyd purposefully procrastinated/sabotaged the systems because the family enjoyed the 21st century so much. He really could've just fixed it at any time.
  • The Prisoner - Goal: Escape from the Village. Achieved at the series end. Or is it? Also, McGoohan's repeated return to the village is, arguably, one of the themes of the series.
  • Quantum Leap - Goal: Stop leaping and go home. In a twist, the series ended with Sam realizing he could go home if he wanted, but he chose to continue leaping.
    • Of course, that's because no one has bothered to remind him that he has a wife back home.
  • Red Dwarf - Goal: Get back to Earth, and several smaller themes such as Rimmer wanting a real body, the Cat wanting a mate, and Holly wanting his/her intelligence restored.
    • In the later seasons, many of the smaller themes have actually been achieved in some way - albeit happening in sometimes almost literal Deal with the Devil way of going horribly, horribly wrong. Rimmer, for example, got a body by getting a Hard Light drive for his holographic body, after which he left to become the next Ace Rimmer; later, in Series VIII, a new version of him was reincarnated in human form with no memories his death or his time as a hologram. Holly was done similarly, with a completely different Holly being restored alongside the crew in Series VIII, with his IQ back to the original 6000. Most of the minor goals searched for were technically achieved, just not the way we thought. Except the Cat, but that's more of a problem with a script being scrapped in Series VII.
    • Lister's desire to get back to Earth is so unachievable (its going to take at least 3 million years to get back to Earth) that the second episode Future Echos shows a 170-something Lister still on Red Dwarf.
  • Sliders - Goal: 'Slide' back to our dimension. This goal was actually achieved at the start of the fourth season, causing the show's Jump the Shark moment. There was also a much earlier instance where they were implied to get back to their own dimension... but did not realize it, and moved on to the next one.
  • Space: 1999: Goal: Find a planet to settle down on.
  • Stargate Atlantis - Goal: Secure enough ZPMs to fully power Atlantis. In the first season, there were concerns in the Fandom that Failure Would Be The Only Option for the expedition's attempts to contact Earth, thus turning it into the Stargate equivalent of Star Trek: Voyager, but these fears turned out to be unfounded. They do in fact end up getting three ZPMs after the Asurans temporarily take over and leave a set behind. However, Reality Ensues - in the Stargate Verse, people who are not main characters also need ZPMs, so Atlantis only gets to keep one anyway.

    In the last episode Todd supplies two ZPMs stolen from Asuras before it went kaboom. Though Earth was saved from invasion, it is very unlikely that the IOA will let Atlantis take off for Pegasus since with it floating conveniently in the Bay of San Francisco, they can mine the tech without danger from the Wraith.
  • Stargate Universe - In episode 7, there's a plan to get everybody back home. It's not much of a spoiler to point out that this is not a seven-episode series. (A couple of episodes earlier, everybody's worried that the ship may be destroyed outright. Well, everybody but the audience, anyway.)
  • Star Trek: Voyager - Goal: find a way home. They finally do it in the last episode, thanks to a time travel paradox.
  • Subverted painfully in Supernatural. The show starts off with the boys searching for their dad and what killed their mom and after some close calls, it looks like failure will only ever be their only option. Then they succeed by the ends of seasons 1 and 2. Of course their father dies and gets sent to Hell shortly after being reunited with them and the demon that killed their mom was a Magnificent Bastard who ended up winning anyway due to a Batman Gambit centred on Sam. After that Things Get Much Worse.

    Season 3's goal: Save Dean from his Deal with the Devil. Dean goes to Hell anyway. Though he did get better.

    Season 4's goals: Prevent Lucifer from rising and kill Lilith. Sam succeeds in killing Lilith, only for it to turn out that doing this broke the final seal, resulting in Lucifer being released anyway.

    Season 5's goal: For the boys to stop the apocalypse without saying "yes" to Michael and Lucifer, and hence preventing pushing the entire world beyond the Godzilla Threshold, which would happen if the angels made it their battlefield. Sam says yes to Lucifer in order to trap both him, Lucifer and Michael (along with Adam) in the Pit, and the world still gets worked over by Lucifer in the upcoming months, and then worked over by Mother in season 6. And that's ignoring all the psychological torment and torture both Sam and Dean went through in that period of time. Let's just say, you don't get many happy endings in Supernatural. If you do, there will be a catch.
  • The Trailer Park Boys are always coming up with various illegal schemes to make enough money to retire from crime. Most of their schemes fail for one reason or another, and the Boys quickly blow through the money they make for the schemes that actually succeed. This is subverted by the end of the seventh season, where the Boys make over $450,000 in a scheme that involves shipping marijuana to the United States and getting contraband cigarettes in exchange, which they sell at cut-rate prices in Canada.
    • Which they end up losing later, proving that this trope always takes precedence in this show. If that wasn't bad enough, virtually everyone ends up going to jail due to a well-crafted Plan by Mr. Lahey. The Grand Finale movie was more of the same.
  • WKRP in Cincinnati slowly moves away from this, with the goal of making the radio station truly successful after being dead last in the city. Their ratings do improve, but hardly to the degree that the lead character, program manager Andy Travis, is trying to reach. It was revealed in one episode that the station's original dead-last performance was in fact deliberate on the part of the owner, Carlson's mother, who had been using the cash-hemorrhaging station as a tax write-off.
  • The X-Files - Goal: Find the truth behind the conspiracy. Achieved by the last couple seasons of the series, opening the door to the far more insurmountable... Goal: Stop the conspiracy.
  • This Morning with Richard not Judy - In the weekly Nostrodamus routine the terms for success get two out of three predictions correct. So, the trope was played usually by having one obvious prediction and two laughable to think that they'd come true, thus always failing. One week, a laughable prediction was "A member of Boyzone will come out as being homosexual." Shock -- horror, within a week a member of Boyzone came out! This would have been a simple aversion, had it not been for the predictable prediction being a Lampshade Hanging: "Nostrodamus will fail to get two of his predictions correct." Consequently causing a Played Straight/Aversion feedback loop.
  • See All That and its running sketch of a gameshow, literally called "You Can't Win". Questions asked (if they're not skipped over entirely -- because who cares, they'll never get it right anyway) include such examples as "Who am I thinking of right now?" or simply "How many shoes?" There are also physical challenges, such as teaching a basset hound Spanish within ten seconds, or eating exactly 400 meatballs in 30 seconds (the contestant lost by eating the full amount given -- 404 meatballs).
  • The Wire is a perfect example of this. In a show with cops, drug dealers, politicians, union workers, and school students barely anyone really wins in the end. "The game is rigged, but you cannot lose if you do not play." Practically every major character on the show experiences this:
    • Detective McNulty's goal is to stop Marlo Stanfield by fabricating a series of murders to "juke the stats" and divert police resources to the Major Crimes Unit. While he does arrest Marlo and his crew, the victory is hollow: the fabricated murders are discovered, leading McNulty, Rhonda Pearlman and Commissioner Daniels to all fall on their swords. Marlo ends up getting off scot-free (with caveats), the reporter who covered the fake serial killer story (whom the Detective chewed out) wins a Pulitzer Prize for his stories, and McNulty realizes in the end that he can't change the system.
    • The kids introduced in the fourth season (and, by extension, the entire Baltimore school system). Roland Prezbylewski realizes that nothing he does can curb the school system's trend of cutting corners and mismanaging internal resources, even though he tries to give the kids a better education. Most of the main students end up becoming "hard" to the Baltimore street life and take up the roles of past main characters (Dukie becomes a drug user like Bubbles, Michael becomes a stick-up artist like Omar, and Randy becomes a thug in a group home).
  • The Babylon 5 sequel Crusade was meant to feature a subversion, with the supposed plot hook of finding a cure for the Drakh plague that will kill all humans in five years resolved in just one season. Then the means of finding the cure would lead to more story arcs involving corruption of the Earth government that were what J. Michael Straczynski really wanted the show to be about; the plague story had been forced on him by executives who wanted the show's core premise to be able to be summed up in a few words. Unfortunately, it was cancelled long before this could happen.
    • The problem was that the parent show has already established that the cure would be found. It was a Foregone Conclusion from the beginning. Unfortunately, JMS didn't get a chance to explain it to the fans, who had decided that Crusade wasn't worth it.
  • Peep Show is built on this trope, because it's a Crapsack World and Status Quo Is God. Likewise, Armstrong and Bain's sitcom The Old Guys.
  • Sir Arthur Conan Doyles the Lost World -- Goal: find a way out of the Plateau.
  • LazyTown. It makes sense that Robbie Rotten's schemes always fail. If they succeeded, there would be no more show.
  • Saturday Night Live's "Celebrity Jeopardy!" -- Goal: Make the game easy enough for the celebrities to win.

[shows picture of Batman]
Trebek: Is this Batman or Robin? Chris Tucker.
Chris Tucker: Yo I know this, man. That's Robin!
Trebek: No. So since it's not Robin, that leaves only one correct answer. Anne Heche.
Anne Heche: Who is Robin?
Trebek: Amazing. Sean Connery.
Sean Connery: What is Robin?

  • Sesame Street: When Mr. Snuffleuppagus was first introduced, all attempts by Big Bird to get anyone else to see him, or to believe in his existence were destined to fail. This drove Big Bird crazy, along with a number of young viewers. Eventually, the producers relented and allowed others to see and interact with him, starting with small children.
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