As a personal comment, my wife and I rarely watch such shows, because the characters themselves are usually dislikeable. Some of the comedies – Lucy, Bilko, Simpsons – are enjoyable because the main characters ARE likeable, despite their flaws. Shows like DEADWOOD or THE SOPRANOS or GAME OF THRONES just leave me cold, and we usually stop watching if there’s no one that we care about. If I want to watch drama about people that I don’t care about, I can go to the hardware store and watch the customers.
Fawlty Towers springs to mind. Basil Fawlty is a conniving swindler who regularly lies, but because he’s fundamentally incompetent it never works. He lies to his staff, his wife, his wife’s family, his guests, hotel inspectors, etc. This was taken to extremes in “Communication Problems” - the one where he bets on the horses, and wins, but it looks as if he’s never going to get his money - which is basically a chain of lies from start to finish.
It seems to be a characteristic of British sitcoms that the characters are often self-loathing slobbish layabouts, either likeable (Red Dwarf) or just horrible (Chalk, Steptoe & Son, The Office, I’m Alan Partridge, which are about a bunch of broken friendless simulacrums living horrible meaningless lives and being cruel to each other all the time). In America everyone is nice and the audience applauds when the characters make their entrance; in the UK no-one is nice and there is silence.
Burn Notice is a good current example of this, in the tradition of shows like Mission Impossible. Every episode they elaborately deceive a bad guy who is himself/herself dishonest.
The point of the show is that Jerrica and the rest of the band is lying to everyone else that Jem exists. Most pointedly, they’re lying to Jerrica’s boyfriend Rio, who has a crush on Jem, and apparently hates dishonesty. It’d be funny as hell, if it didn’t make me want to slap Rio and Jerrica.
Another one, The Joe Schmoe Show. Everyone is an actor but one guy who thinks he’s on a normal reality show. Fortunately he’s so charming and sweet that the show doesn’t make you want to hurt people.
Shucks, that opens up a whole bunch of other possibilities. SMALLVILLE, for example, was all about Clark Kent pretending to be a regular guy with no super powers; his family members – by which I mean “via the fake adoption papers”– and various other people routinely lied to help him keep up the act, all while yet other folks kept faking their deaths or hiding their secret identities behind disguises or voice scramblers or whatever.
(Obviously that wasn’t enough to sustain an ongoing series, and so young Lex Luthor got called on to do his soap-opera best in episode after episode: he’ll walk in on someone committing murder, and promptly lie to cover it up; he’ll blackmail a guy for a while, then kill him and lie to make it look like a suicide; he’ll discover his entirely-cured father has been faking blindness for quite some time, and he’ll eventually kill the old man before lying as usual to cover it up; he’ll get framed for some other murder, he’ll feign insanity, he’ll make sure a woman gets pumped full of synthetic hormones in time to fake a pregnancy, he’ll strongarm the Daily Planet into killing story after story – honestly, didn’t just saying “Lex Luthor” pretty much suffice?)
