Drunk Driver



What happens when the Hard-Drinking Party Girl, Lady Drunk, Life of the Party, Lampshade Wearer, Drunken Master, personality-shifting drunk, et al. get behind the wheel of their car.

Prior to The Eighties, this trope was often a source for comedy, even in a by-the-book Cop Show like Adam12 when the cops pull them over. However, a greater awareness of the deadly menace of motorists driving under the influence have now made it a source of An Aesop for a Very Special Episode. As a result, impaired drivers gonna hit someone and have a car accident, or be chased down by heroes and/or the police to prevent it. If it's a near miss, it's a Scare'Em Straight. Also happens after a non-boozehound character has been Drowning My Sorrows.

In television, tends to be a shortcut for declaring a character The Alcoholic, or that The Alcoholic is heading Off the Wagon. Also happens frequently after a Wild Teen Party as An Aesop.

Sub-Trope of Alcohol-Induced Idiocy. Also, compare Drives Like Crazy, except this one tends not to be Played for Laughs.

Anime and Manga

 * In Macross: Do You Remember Love? Roy Fokker takes his Valkyrie out to rescue Hikaru after some serious drinking.
 * Roy sorties drunk again in Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden.

Film

 * In North by Northwest, bad guys force-feed Cary Grant's character a quart of whiskey and put him behind the wheel of a car, sending him on his way. He somehow manages to avoid killing himself or anyone else, but gets thrown in jail. His mother and lawyer bail him out, taking these events to be his usual carousing hijinks over his frustrated explanation.
 * In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Andy's first potential sex partner is a serial drunk driver who needs Andy to blow into the Breathalyzer attached to her ignition. She swerves all over the road and nearly gets them both killed many times on the way home.
 * Jack Rafferty in Sin City drives drunk. He dies that night but it had nothing to do with his state, surprisingly.
 * In the beginning sequence of the second Final Destination movie, the driver of a beer truck is seen taking a pull from a bottle of beer shortly before everything goes to hell. It was not the triggering factor in the huge pileup, but it may have been a contributing factor.
 * A variation occurs in Iron Man 2, in which Tony Stark, dying of palladium pointing, is at a party, smashed out of his gourd, and wearing his Powered Armor, which of course contains a number of dangerous weapons, to show how close to hitting bottom he is.

Literature

 * Mad Magazine editors and writers had a special Berserk Button about this dating back to the early sixties.
 * Honor Harrington features a character killed in an accident with a drunk driver. This causes problems for those still alive because the character in question was the subject of an investigation and the previous government was found of Make It Look Like an Accident-style murders to remove political opponents. So even though the accident was legitimate, no one would ever believe it.

Live-Action TV

 * Growing Pains: The episode "Second Chance," where Carol's goofy boyfriend Sandy (Matthew Perry in an early appearance) is once again the butt of Mike and Ben's silly jokes when he's late for his date ... until they learn (from a phone call) the reason why: He was in a major car accident the previous evening. Viewers later learn that Sandy and Carol had been drinking heavily the night before, and after leaving Carol off, had crashed his car. Sandy appears to be OK, and Carol is thankful that he was just slightly hurt ... but only later do viewers learn the truth: When they get home, Mike has some somber news: Sandy just died from internal bleeding due to his injuries. Carol refuses to believe this at first, but it soon becomes apparent Mike's "cruel joke" (to her) was anything but.
 * The Dukes of Hazzard: In at least one episode, Cletus' bumbling is immediately turned serious when he stops chronic drunk Hobie (unknown last name) in at least one episode. The no-nonsense attitude Cletus takes toward drunk driving was likely to send a stern message about one of the consequences of drunk driving — that you might get arrested.
 * The Jack Webb-produced Adam 12 and Emergency both had episodes where the main characters dealt with drivers under the influence and drunk drivers who had caused car wrecks.
 * My Two Dads: Teased in one 1989 episode, where Nicole and her friends come home drunk. When Michael and Joey learn that the driver of Nicole's car was drunk and Nicole scoffs at the notion that she was in jeopardy of being involved in a serious accident, they decide to teach her a lesson by getting drunk and threaten to go out for a drive. They stop short when Nicole realizes the consequences of her actions.
 * Dallas: A recurring storyline was Sue Ellen's alcoholism, and this plays into her decision to drive drunk in a 1983 episode; this will lead to her causing a crash that seriously injures brother-in-law (and Ray Krebbs' nephew) Mickey Trotter.
 * Grace Hanadarko in Saving Grace thinks she's hit and killed a guy in her car while drunk driving, but it's really a setup from "last chance angel" Earl to get her to give up her life to God. Turns out that the guy she "hit" is in prison...originally for his own drunk driving.
 * The Hogan Family: Midway through the 1987-1988 season (the first one without Valerie Harper as the mother), David hosts a house party while his father Mike and aunt Sandy are gone; his best friend and one of the guests, Rich, gets very drunk and wants to take a stunning co-ed out for a ride. David—having just lost his mother months earlier, purportedly in an accident caused by a drunk driver—puts his foot down and gets into a huge fight with Rich. David, motivated at an earlier admonition to "do whatever you have to do" to keep someone from driving drunk, locks Rich in the closet overnight. When David lets a somewhat sobered-up Rich out the next morning, Rich remembers vividly what happened ... and is an ungrateful jerk! (He yells at David for not letting him consummate that long, sought-after relationship with the supermodel of his senior class. David then reminds him that his mother died in a drunk driving accident, and he couldn't stand the thought of now losing his best friend (not to mention the prettiest girl in high school). Rich eventually comes to his senses and realizes that nothing — not a hot night of sex in bed awaiting a hotel — was worth driving drunk and possibly killing himself or anyone else.
 * Full House: In an episode that focused more on Kimmie getting drunk at a college sorority party and an embarrassed D.J. (and equally embarrassed sorority officers) dealing with her drunken behavior, though Kimmie believes that D.J. was just jealous because in her mind she was the life of the party. a tearful D.J. tells Kimmie that her mother had died in an accident caused by a drunk driver (the death happening sometime during the summer of 1987, two months before the first episode was set). Kimmie realizes what could become of her and agrees to straighten up.
 * Leticia on Dirty Sexy Money hit Wrenn with her car while drunk driving.
 * In Real Life, pretty much every cast member on Lost who has been arrested for drunk driving has "coincidentally" died on the show. Hmmmmmmmmmm.
 * Happens to Wheels in the Degrassi High: School's Out movie Series Finale, with the resulting crash killing an infant. He spent the interval between that series and Degrassi the Next Generation in prison for it.
 * Cops in The Wire are regularly shown driving to an out-of-the-way spot to chat and get plastered on beer, then driving home. Major Rawls at one point attempts to get revenge on Detective McNulty by pressuring Detective Santangelo to catch him driving under the influence: Santangelo is dismayed; it is implicit that freedom to drive drunk is an unwritten sacred right for Baltimore police.
 * In one of the show's Crowning Moments of Funny, McNulty is driving home drunk, takes a turn too wide and scrapes the side of his car against a freeway support. He stops, gets out, surveys the damage and the scene, and then gets back into the car and reverses around the corner. He then tries to take the turn again and hits the support again.
 * There's a non-Anvilicious example in Misfits, where Hard-Drinking Party Girl Alisha was a constant drunk driver prior to the show, and continued to drive intoxicated even after getting caught and having her license taken away. She hasn't killed anyone or caused any accidents, but she did eventually get caught by the police (again) and, despite performing oral sex on the breathalyser in an attempt to charm the cop (it didn't work - leading her to surmise that he was "gay"), she was sentenced to community service. Even after this, she's shown driving yet again (not drunk this time though) on at least one occasion, but she doesn't get caught.
 * The first season of Boom Town ends with David McNorris entering rehab for his alcoholism after he hears about a man killed in a hit and run accident. Since he was driving drunk at the time, he believes he was responsible. It turns out the victim was actually killed by an Alzheimer's sufferer and David had hit a dog.
 * The rather Anvilicious CHiPs episode "Wheels of Justice" had a drunk driver pretend his (sober) wife was driving at the time of his drunk driving accident. He was exonerated when it couldn't be proven he was and she wasn't. He later drives drunk with her again and gets into another accident. This time, she dies.
 * Played with in That Mitchell and Webb Look were in the sketch they were MI 6 planning the assassination of Princess Diana on the order of Prince Philip (a popular theory, especially in certain tabloids) by getting the driver "slightly tipsy", as it's a well known fact that getting somebody a little bit drunk results in an 100% death rate.
 * Mad Men had shown this several times, mostly to illustrate the much more casual attitude to drunk driving in The Sixties.
 * After a drinking a few drinks at a party in Saved by the Bell, Zack and his friends drove drunk and ended up in an accident. Oddly enough, the sober one, Screech, offered to drive but Lisa refused to let him touch the car because he might get into an accident.
 * Drunk driving and killing a kid is what got Tobias Beecher sent to Prison in Oz .Given what happens to him there,It may be the most horrifying Don't Drink and Drive Ad ever.
 * Played for laughs (sort of) in the Yes Minister Christmas special "Party Games". The Home Office declares a "don't drink and drive at Christmas" campaign, whose advice a besotted Jim Hacker elects to ignore (despite his wife being sober and willing to drive), leading to a police stop on account of his extremely slow driving and a writeup in the next day's Express describing Hacker as "overwrought as a newt". This turns out to be small potatoes, however, after
 * On Person of Interest a woman drives while drunk and hits a pedestrian. A ruthless gang of criminals takes drastic action to make sure that she does not go to jail.
 * The deaths of the main characters' parents because of a Drunk Driver is the event that starts of Party of Five's plot.
 * In the first My Name Is Earl Christmas Episode, Earl and Randy got drunk on Christmas Eve years ago. They determined (after Randy mistook the cat for an RC car) that they weren't safe to drive... but they figured they were OK to bike to the liquor store for more beer. They rode (and totally destroyed) the bikes that were meant for Dodge and Earl Jr. Joy was not pleased.
 * Drunk driving acts as the impetus for Uncle Saul to come out on Brothers and Sisters. He had grown depressed over his closeted life and running into a tree while driving drunk was the last straw.
 * One of the first people we see Dexter hunt is a serial Drunk Driver who is constantly able to get out of his vehicular manslaughter charges by moving to a new location and changing his name so they cannot connect him to his previous arrests.

Newspaper Comics

 * Funky Winkerbean: One of the major changes in the strip's history led to Wally Winkerbean's decision to join the Army. In a 1996 storyline, Wally and teen-aged girlfriend Becky Blackburn go to a party, get very drunk and Wally drives her home; along the way, the two get into a romantic mood and begin to French kiss. Just as the steamy kiss is causing them to have a near-orgasm, Wally forgets that he is driving and the car completely misses a curve. The car turns over in a ditch, and while Wally is only slightly injured, Becky is pinned underneath the car and nearly dies. Although Becky's life is ultimately saved, her arm is too severely broken to be saved and it is amputated. (To add insult to injury, this was right after she'd been accepted into Julliard on a flute scholarship.) In the aftermath, Wally (unable to accept the consequences of his actions) decides to join the Army—which will take him to Afghanistan, lead a mission to ban land mines and ultimately be taken prisoner, held for 10 years—while Becky remains a one-armed woman to this day. Amazingly, she forgave Wally and was married to him for several years ... until the day an Army officer informed her that Wally was dead after the helicopter he was riding in was shot down (he had actually survived the crash but was taken prisoner); she later remarried to John Howard, the comic book store owner.

Professional Wrestling

 * Stone Cold Steve Austin would often be shown riding an ATV after drinking 8 or so Miller Lights. This lead up to Coach in the ring challenging Stone Cold to wrestle him only to learn he had been in an accident.

Video Games

 * Grand Theft Auto Vice City has a mission where Tommy has to drive Phil Cassidy to the hospital after a boomshine explosion. Problem is, Tommy is drunk as a result of merely smelling the boomshine. The screen gets blurry and the car randomly swerves to simulate the effects. It's pretty easy to adapt to, though.

Western Animation

 * In The Simpsons, Homer and his buddies go drinking, and drive into the school, thus destroying part of it, which leads to a curfew being put on the children and teens of Springfield (because the police assume it was the work of young vandals).