Any law enforcement or military personnel getting killed the day before retirement
Was a good friend of mine. The stories he didn’t tell were the best… we have to assume anyway because he wouldn’t tell them. Rare for him to say a bad word about anyone, he turned down the offers to produce a tell-all.
Maybe as a subversion they should have the retiree survive that one last dangerous assignment, and then have an epilogue where it’s reported that a month later they died falling off a ladder while cleaning the gutters.
Turns up in Fallout 4 but is easy to miss if you don’t read a certain entry on a certain computer. Granted, there the bombs fell two days before.
The mostly forgotten Dabney Coleman movie Short Time subverted it. Coleman is a detective about to retire. During a routine check up he finds he has a rare disease and will die suddenly in the near future. He realizes his family will get a lot more money if he is killed in the line of duty than insurance will pay after he retires. He throws himself into increasingly more dangerous situations trying to get killed but only succeeds in becoming a hero. In the end he finds out the blood samples were mixed up and a bus driver is the one with the disease. He almost dies in one last act when he knows he wants to live. It’s a comedy.
This happened in an episode of Leave It to Beaver. For most of the half hour, everybody thought Beav was gifted, At the end, he was happy to find out he’s just “average.”
Ward and June must have been really disappointed, though. 
Also happens in a Simpsons episode when Bart, as a pre-schooler, somehow gets rated exceptionally well (maybe his rating got mixed up with Lisa’s? I don’t remember) and ends up in a pre-school for the gifted (where he totally fucks up, of course).
I think it was Martin’s rating that Bart’s got mixed up with.
Elroy Jetson had a similar mixup, I can’t remember who the smarter kid was.
Great episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia based on Flowers For Algernon with Charlie taking a drug to make him smarter. Of course he actually wasn’t.
Also happened on Dennis the Menace.
In most Nick and Disney cartoons, there is always one kid who is a genius but is a slacker or wants to be a regular kid who doesn’t want the extra work and attention. They always nerf the test and school work in the Disney series recess. They subverted this trope when the genius girl discovers the janitor matched her IQ but just wants to be a school janitor.
That’s awesome!
My high school gave us that test, with a twist; IIRC, we could skip any questions we pleased to get a solid result upon answering at least half of ‘em. After all, the ones you fielded easily were the ones where you strongly incline one way or another, right? Anything you’d need to really spend a while on — in order to waffle your way to a weak 51/49 conclusion — would probably just be small-detail icing on the big-picture cake.
So I took the test — with plenty of skipping — and soon got told that I had the makings of a lawyer or a judge or a writer; I then had plenty of time left, and so I went back and answered the remaining questions in hopes of wringing out more information.
And apparently I’m meant to be a sportscaster?
And there is an adult version in “Barney Miller”. Genius joins MENSA, hoping to have ordinary conversations (especially about women) but discovers they’re all boring.
When Columbo visits a MENSA club (to solve a murder) he tells the teen girl who is a member to find some friends who can admire more than her mind
Re: Having to get back a letter by mistake,
this appeared in “The Intern” (2015, Reobert DeNiro, Anne Hathaway) except they had to break into the house where mum’s computer was and delete an email sent by mistake
Reported just to fix the duplicate quotes
They’re stuck in a Groundhog Day trope.
How about this one: A guy wrongly convicted or suspected of murder escapes and drifts from town to town. The cops finally zero in on him, but he’s convinced the locals that he’s a good guy, so they harbor him and/or help him get away again.
I saw this once in an old John Garfield movie, and it was a regular thing on The Fugitive back in the '60s:
LOCAL GUY: (Aghast) You …you’re the man the police are looking for!
RICHARD KIMBLE: Yes. Yes I am. But I’m innocent.
LOCAL GUY: (After a pause) I believe you!
That was an early sixties trope: David Janssen in The Fugitive, Ben Gazara in Run For Your Life, Michael Parks in Then Came Bronson, Chuck Conner’s in Branded, George Maharis and Martin Milner in Route 66: hit the road for a lean purpose but that somehow makes you the clear-headed outsider to solve other people’s screwed-up lives along the way.
“Gee, I bought this beachfront house but my life seems so empty and my wife hates me. Lucky that itinerant surfer happened along and taught us the true meaning of life and love.” somehow there just isn’t the same audience for that message as there was sixty years ago.