To him, it was accidental. For the first few seasons at least.
The original example of this trope: Rip Van Winkle
In the original story he slept through the war of independence, he fell asleep in the US colonies and woke up in the independent USA
The novel The Unincorporated Man by Dani Collin is an interesting variant: a billionaire with an incurable deadly disease elects to be put in deep hibernation until a cure for his condition can be found. While he’s in suspension society collapses, and a completely new social order is built. Centuries later he’s finally revived just as this new social order has passed its peak and is beginning to show cracks. IOW, he slept through the social development cycle to the next collapse.
The German film Good Bye, Lenin uses this trope – the protagonist’s mother falls into a coma in the former East Germany, and awakens after the fall of the wall during the beginning of the German reunification process.
Until I read @griffin1977’s post above, I hadn’t realized just how similar that was to Rip Van Winkle.
Earth Abides, in both the novel and the TV series, the main protagonist gets bit by a snake and recovers in a cabin in the woods, drifting in and out of consciousness, when he finally is well enough to head to civilization for help, the collapse has already transpired.
You forgot to say “I’m surprised no one’s mentioned…”
First, I originally thought this was a painfully evocative P&E thread title, so I am very glad to find it’s a Cafe thread. Very.
So, the central trope (someone was going to link it!):
And the more specific sub-trope:
But without the tropes above, the one that came to mind first (probably due to my initial politics slant) was Idiocracy.
See also
Ah, I haven’t seen that thread, or rather, when it comes up I always conflate it with the Misread thread titles. Glad to see I’m not alone in where my brain takes me!
I bookmarked both of those mis-whatevered threads so I can publicly 
whenever it occurs. Which is often.
I’m writing one of these right now, as part of an alternate-universe version of my urban fantasy series. Does that count? 
A slight hijack if I may… that episode always bothered me (I know… it’s really not important): did compound interest really outpace inflation that much?!
If I had to fanwank a justification, I’d say that the bank was the nth-generation inheritor of a chain of laws governing financial obligations over one or more collapses. (At different points dollars got converted into Bitcoin, which got converted into bearskins, then into plutonium nuggets, etc.) Possibly Fry’s account slipped through the cracks and never got written off as devalued to picobucks, and the bank was legally obligated to honor its face value rather than fight an expensive court battle.
Jeff Winger slept through the start of paintball
In The Godwhale the protagonist goes into cryogenic suspension twice, and each time the world is worse than when he was awake. Especially the second time.
Larry awakens again in a nightmare future. Far from the highly advanced past, now an enormous human population – 3.5 trillion – covers every inch of the planet in underground shaft cities. Technology and science have degraded, and all freely breeding species have been exterminated except for the five-toed neolithic humans, which are classified as a garden varmint. The ‘Hive’ or human population of Nebishes – four-toed humans – within its computer-supported subterranean culture ruthlessly hunts, kills, and recycles anyone who consumes their crops, the Benthic Beasts, which are five-toed humans that have formed a precarious niche in abandoned underwater rec domes.
In the sitcom Red Dwarf, Lister is kept in stasis for 3 million years after there is a radiation leak from the deep space mining ship’s engines. The ship’s 3,000 IQ computer, which has since gone senile, wakes him once the radiation levels are safe. He’s the last remaining member of the human race.
I can’t believe no one’s mentioned the Seven Sleepers. The trope originator. “Older than feudalism.”
There’s the manga/anime 7 Seeds that follows the trope, though I’m of many minds about it. It has some arcs with great storytelling (the fate of the hidden cities, certain triumphs of hope and despair in the effort to survive), but the majority is a little too much in the realm of traditional shojo manga for me to embrace. Didn’t stope me from reading the whole thing though.
Though the sleepers are only part of what’s going on, and kind of like VaultTec in Fallout (which also meets this OP) there are groups assembled and organized by some pretty foul means as well.
‘Earth Abides’ by George R. Stewart is one of my favorite novels, first read during the Golden Age of Science Fiction - ie, when I was 14 or so. Earth Abides - Wikipedia