DnD game and DnD cartoon

The activities I performed this week was listening in on a D&D 2e group session, read a web comic, and watched about four episodes of the old cartoon Dungeons and Dragons.
All of them revolve around some sort of party or group adventuring. They could be heading towards caves, dungeons, or temples. The T.V. show always starts off their adventure with the Dungeon Master giving a specific task to the group, often giving a clue in the beginning such as a riddle. When listening in on the session, instead of the dungeon master telling the group outright what they were doing, they were led via NPC's. Death in the show never happens (as is expected in a children's show), yet lots of people had died during the session.
The challenges were the same though. In both the TV show and session, the tasks were incredibly hard and required teamwork. Teamwork wasn't exactly a key strength of the group members, hence their deaths. Unlike other games, however, the challenges are as hard as how situationally manipulative the players are. For example, in a normal game one must destroy a boss by getting their health (or equivalent stat) to 0. In DnD, the players stunned a boss, walked up to him, and stabbed him in the eye. So, a player's skill is bast mostly on how well they deal with the situations and using what they have rather than using a set amount of skills. D&D is truly a creative and open-minded setting that current games do not have.
The web comic was just standard humor that revolved around players who take their roles too seriously. The basis was a character who just debated about life and existence to himself while the others were waiting for him to use an attack. I haven't run into this, but I am sure it is a possibility that role playing can be taken too seriously.