Amazingly Embarrassing Parents on live-action television.
- When Rita asks Michael Bluth about his family in Arrested Development, the "previous girlfriends" montage reveals the depths of embarrassment his family has caused him, so he simply blurts out the lie "I have no family."Michael: (to himself) Why didn't I think of this before?
- It only got worse when they found out about Rita anyway. They end up kidnapping her, knocking her out, and abandoning her on a bench by the road when they think they accidentally killed her.
- Austin & Ally: Austin's parents constantly dot on him to be the "prince" of their mattress company. It's bad enough they gave him his Embarrassing Middle Name "Monica".
- Better Things: How Sam's daughters often see her. They're often justified in thinking that way (e.g. she talks about Frankie having her period in front of a whole auditorium). Sam's mom Phyllis also embarrasses her often, while also doing so a lot when growing up (by not shaving her armpits or legs, for instance).
- Blark and Son: Blark tries to bond with his son and be emotionally supportive of whatever he does. The problem is that he's a bit too enthusiastic about it and often barges in to provide support at the most inconvenient times. Blark is actually aware of this but struggles and typically fails to properly restrain himself from doing something embarrassing at a really bad time.
- Most of the main characters of The Big Bang Theory have embarrassing parents, Howard's mother being featured most prominently. Sometimes it's the case of Parents as People. Or the guys feel they would like to swap families because the grass is greener...
- Howard has a typical overbearing Jewish Mother with raspy voice who treats him as a young teenager. She treats the guys as kids who came to play etc., but to be fair, Howard clearly depends on her to take care of him as though he's a child; this and his complaining amounts to a lot of mixed signals.
- Bernadette's mother is supposed to be overbearing (that's how she and Howard bonded), but when she was later actually on-screen, she was quite normal, except she wasn't much of a talker and Howard didn't feel welcome in their home.
- Leonard's mother is an iceberg of a woman. However, Penny manages to get her drunk once, and boy, is she embarrassing! She even attempts to make out with Sheldon.
- Sheldon's mom has shades of this trope, but she's generally the favorite parent of the group. She comes from rural Texas and tends to make racially insensitive remarks; when the guys get uncomfortable, she thinks it's Political Overcorrectness. Sheldon considers her a religious nut.
- Raj's parents embarrass him through Skype sometimes. Their emphasis on traditions is perplexing and their opinions on romantic and sexual life are extremely dated. Though once, when they wanted to berate Rajesh, they told him to take his laptop somewhere private.
- Alan and Amy Matthews on Boy Meets World were usually just Good Parents however they delved into this on occasion. For example, in one episode Amy decides to take a creative writing class at the local university and happens to enroll in Eric's class. She proceeds to write artsy short stories about her and Alan's wedding night and Eric's birth.
- In the Broad City episode "Abbi's Mom," Abbi's mom gets drunk at a restaurant, stands on a table, and shouts, "My daughter fucked thirty-two men!"
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
- "Nightmares", where everyone's worst nightmares were coming true had a typical tough-guy/juvenile delinquent student visited by his babying, over demonstrative mother in front of his friends.
- Buffy's mum slept with Giles in "Band Candy". On the hood of a police car. Twice.
- Cheers: Esther Clavin has no problem embarrassing her son Cliff, a man in his thirties, in front of everyone he knows, regaling them with Little Known Facts, or sharing stories about how she had difficulty giving birth to Cliff in the first place. That's when she's not being genuinely emotionally abusive towards him. Strangely enough, most of the Cheers gang still seem to prefer her to Cliff.Frasier: (having seen Esther for the first time) Suddenly I'm having this vision of Cliff being heroically well-adjusted!
- A recurring sketch in the Scottish comedy show Chewin' the Fat involved a teenager with his parents, who cheerfully announce to anyone they meet that their son has just started masturbating.
- Duncan's mom in The Class (2006) joins him at Yonk and Nicole's house for Thanksgiving, and as she leaves to look at Yonk's trophies, Duncan has to tell Yonk that "I know she's my mom and all, but, uh, she steals." Plus the phone calls.
- The Closer. Brenda's parents are good people, but they embarrass her by being so stereotypically Southern and so unaccustomed to the Los Angeles environment where she works.
- During the series premiere of Cougar Town, Travis's mother becomes the town's official MILF and his father takes a job mowing the high school's lawns (shirtless!), setting him up for plenty of parental embarrassment in episodes to come.
- In Cranford, Miss Mary Smith's stepmother is a matchmaker from hell who desperately tries to marry her off to anybody would make an offer. She comments on her appearance (why didn't she curl her hair?) and forces her to hold a baby in order to make Mary appear more feminine and domestic, even though Mary clearly doesn't want to.
- CSI Sara to Grissom, via Skype. "Your mother is talking about our sex life."
- ER's Abby Lockhart's bipolar mother shows up uninvited, unannounced, and in the beginning stages of a manic phase and proceeds to run through the ER screaming, looking for her. She cranks it up in the final episode of her arc by walking into a store, demanding a job, trying to steal an expensive scarf, and eventually running through a glass window. When she's brought to the hospital for treatment, she repeats the "running and screaming" bit from before. Even worse, Abby's detached attitude throughout the entire segment indicates that this is the umpteenth time she's had to deal with incidents like this.
- Everybody Loves Raymond has Marie and Frank continuing to torment Ray and Robert into their adulthood.
- Everything Now: Mia's mom repeatedly embarrasses her by doing things like noting a boy she likes once took a bath with Mia while they were three year olds, and giving her The Talk right before her date with him. She doesn't stop even when it becomes clear that Mia is mortified and asks her not to repeatedly.
- The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: Uncle Phil's mother is like this. Bonus point for the fact that Phil is middle-aged, and she manages to humiliate him in front of his children. They all think it's hilarious. The kids all love Grandma Banks because she's a Cool Old Lady; embarrassing the stew out of Phil (whom she still calls "Zeke", and gleefully recounts stories of his childhood on the farm) is just the icing on the cake.
- Friends has it from time to time:
- Ross and Monica's father Jack has sex-related comments (e.g. asking his daughter's husband if he's able to give her an orgasm). When Jack tries to get Ross and Joey to listen to a couple having sex in a hotel janitor's closet (unaware that it's Monica and Chandler), Ross is squicked out and replies "I don't like you without mom".
- Chandler's folks: his mother is a gorgeous sex-driven blonde writer of erotic novels who even kisses one of his best friends, and his father's a gay transgender Las Vegas cabaret entertainer. At one point, Chandler was worried that he was turning into his parents. Ross asks him:Ross: Chandler, have you ever put on a black cocktail dress and asked me up to your hotel room?
Chandler: No!
Ross: Then you are neither of your parents! - The worst example would have to be Mrs Bing proving how good a mother she is by revealing she bought Chandler his first condoms. On the Jay Leno show.Chandler: (watching)...And then he burst into flames.
- Rachel's parents. Her father is an overbearing man who isn't a smooth tipper and is very easily irritable, but her mum takes the cake. She's like a girl who never grew up, asks Rachel and girls what's new in sex, and is unable to accept a sincere apology.
- Fringe's Walter Bishop is clinically insane from having part of his brain cut out, and frequently goes off on tangents about how the shaved head of the corpse that they are experimenting on looks just like Peter's bare bottom when he was a baby.Walter: Uh oh.
Olivia: What?
Walter: I just got an erection. Oh, fear not, it's nothing to do with your state of undress. I think I simply need to urinate. - General Hospital's Karen's mother is already like this, being a tramp and an alcoholic. It's driven home when Karen attends a party at her boyfriend's house and her mother shows up in a tacky dress and proceeds to get drunk. When Karen blasts her for her behavior, her mother tries to guilt-trip her, asking, "Are you saying you're ashamed of your own mother?" Karen refuses to back down, flat-out telling her, "Yes, I am. Look at you. You've got too much makeup on, you're hanging out the top of your dress, you've had too much to drink. . .". Unfortunately, she doesn't learn much from this speech and proceeds to fawn over how rich her boyfriend is every time he's around, making Karen fear that he'll think she's a Gold Digger.
- It is a rare episode of The Goldbergs that doesn't deal with this trope. The mother (or "Smother" as she is called by her children) is a constant source of overwhelming embarrassment.
- Good Luck Charlie:
- Bob and Amy Duncan are often considered embarrassing by their kids. And there are some moments that show they do it intentionally.
- Ivy's parents are even worse. Their idea of "fun" includes playing a jigsaw puzzle, eating liver and onions, and playing on the piano "Row Row Your Boat" in German. Ivy even admits that her parents' antics are the reason she's always hanging out at Teddy's house.
- Hannah Montana:
- Robbie Ray has moments like this, sometimes unintentionally such as when he brought an embarrassing kitty sweater for Miley's birthday, and sometimes intentionally such as announcing to all of her classmates that she failed her driving licenses and needed daddy to drop her off as punishment for lying and ending up in jail.
- Trey's parents from an early episode qualify. They're amazingly snooty rich people who spend their entire episode looking down their long, snobbish noses at Miley for being 'a bumpkin' until Trey finally tells them that he's ashamed of them.
- Taken to a near abusive level in The Hard Times of RJ Berger. In just one example, his mother shouts encouragement to him from the next room as he makes out with his girlfriend, and then ENTERS THE ROOM to remove said girlfriend's bra for him.
- Henry Danger: Henry's mother has no problem talking to him about his underwear in front of his friends.
- While Freddie's mother is also a smotherer on iCarly, Mrs. Bensoin becomes extremely embarrassing in "iMoveOut". First, she interrupts an iCarly webcast to bring Freddie the asparagus he didn't eat for supper, making him eat it while singing her childish vegetable song. This is done on camera in front of the iCarly audience. She later shows students at school his baby pictures.
- All four main characters in The Inbetweeners have one. Will's mum treats him like a child and is lusted after by all his friends, Jay's dad constantly belittles him in front of his friends and has extremely irritable bowels, Simon's dad won't shut up about his sex life, and Neil's dad is Mistaken for Gay by pretty much everyone.
- In Just Roll With It, Owen and Blair feel Rachel and Byron are this. The latter's attempts to prove they're not just make it worse.
- Paul's father in Mad About You is another example of a parent who is so embarrassing that he can torment his son even after he's grown up. He at one point published naked baby pictures of Paul in the newspaper. At another point, he told a theater audience about the time he caught teenage Paul masturbating. Patricide would have been perfectly justifiable. And when on one occasion he called his father out on it, it made its way into the newspapers turning all of New York City against Paul, to the point that random bystanders would spit on him on sight.
- There was a recurring sketch on MADtv that used this, except the parents weren't embarrassing but the girl acted like they were.
- Lois and Hal in Malcolm in the Middle.
- In one episode, it's revealed that Lois accidentally (or simply unconcernedly) humiliating him in front of other people all his life with her wisecracks, rants, and aggressive confrontations has caused Francis to become totally immune to hazing.
- In another, when Malcolm is driven home by the parents of the children he babysits, arriving while Hal and Lois are having a half-naked screaming match in the front yard while Dewey and Reese root around in the mud like animals, Malcolm tries to claim he actually lives on the next street over.
- In the pilot, Lois answers the door topless, not minding at all that she's showing everything... to Malcolm's teacher.
- In the first episode of Season Five, it emerges that Malcolm didn't tell Hal and Lois about an awards ceremony (and a ceremony that was apparently a big enough deal for the mayor, news crews, and every single person at his school to attend, at that) because he was afraid Lois would embarrass him as he received his prize. Instead of being played for laughs, the episode treats the matter seriously. Lois is emotionally devastated by this, and Malcolm spends the rest of the episode trying to make it up to her.
- Married... with Children: Kelly would rather people think Sticky the Clown is her father instead of Al; Peggy prefers telling people her husband is dead. Also, Bud and Kelly are both excited when they think Al's going to prison.
- My Parents Are Aliens has this happen quite a lot (partly because they're both Fish out of Water and don't quite understand human society). When Brian wanted to be a magician, he decided to take his magic show straight into the kids high school, despite not actually knowing how to perform any magic tricks in the first place.
- The point of the Australian kids' show Mortified. Given her father styles himself as the Underpants King (he runs an underwear store named this) and drives around in a van with this painted on the side, Taylor Fry may actually have a case.
- Nicky, Ricky, Dicky, and Dawn:
- The worst the parents were in was in "Quad for Teacher". Tom, subbing for their injured gym teacher, has the quads show off a game called "Meow Meow" they played when they were preschoolers. Even worse is when he had their classmates play it as well.
- In "Quad with a Blog", one of the reasons the quads' friends stopped hanging out at Get Sporty Cafe was because their parents were too intrusive and wouldn't just leave the kids alone.
- Even Snow White and Prince Charming are not above mortifying
their daughter on Once Upon a Time, especially when said daughter's relationship with a pirate is involved. - Dan from One Tree Hill is seen practicing dancing with his iPod in his ears, much to the embarrassment of Nathan who catches him.
- Subverted in Orange Is the New Black, where it turns out that Crazy-Eyes is embarrassed by her very normal, upper-middle-class adoptive parents. She acts like a sulky teenager when they visit.
- Our Miss Brooks: Harriet Conklin's father Osgood is the unpopular principal of Madison High School. While Harriet loves her father, he does on occasion do things that she finds extremely embarrassing:
- "Lulu The Pinup Boat" sees Mr. Conklin force Harriet to wear an old dress of her mother to school, in "solemn observance of Education Week". Harriet states all the other students are laughing at her.
- In "Parlour Game", Mr. Conklin wants to show the family photos to the company (including not only Miss Brooks and Mr. Boynton, but Harriet's boyfriend Walter Denton). Harriet states she'll die of embarrassment if anyone sees her baby photo - naked on a bearskin rug.
- "Cat Burglars", a radio episode, sees Mr. Conklin force Harriet to have a babysitter. Harriet states if the other kids find out, she'll be laughed out of Madison. Mr. Conklin retorts that if that happens, he'll "giggle her back in".
- In "Home Cooked Meal", Harriet is again embarrassed at Mr. Conklin abusing his privileges as principal to store his family's frozen meat in the school cafeteria.
- The Power (2023): Jos is embarrassed to see her mom put up a video of her in a hat that she hated for Christmas, which she took off, as it's publicly viewed by so many people. Later she tells her mom about how being seen that way made her feel, who apologizes.
- ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.? features embarrassing parents AND grandparents. At one point, they try playing matchmaker for Carmen, resulting in three boys showing up to meet her while she is still in her bathrobe and hair bonnet. The bilingual Carmen is so upset that she ends up screaming in Spanish at the top of her lungs that she has never been so ''pregnant'' note .
- Chelsea and Raven from Raven's Home usually aren't embarrassing. Sometimes, however, they embarrass their kids. In one episode, while unloading the laundry Raven and Chelsea began cooing over Nia's training bra in front of her.
- Rizzoli & Isles: Jane Rizzoli's mother Angela has a noted tendency to show up at her daughter's work.Angela: I promise I won't embarrass you.
Jane: Thirty years of experience says otherwise. - Roseanne:
- An early episode played with this trope, when an uptight Becky prepares to go meet her first boyfriend Chip in public, and her parents Roseanne and Dan jokingly threaten to come along, all the while picking their noses, turning their hats around backwards, etc. The outtakes from that scene are particularly funny, as John Goodman was hamming it up so much that Roseanne repeatedly blew the take by laughing.
- Roseanne once invoked this as punishment for her kids. She dropped little DJ off at school in the most embarrassing manner possible, by wearing a set of hideous patchwork dungarees, a huge floppy hat with a flower, and slowly, deliberately, applying bright red lipstick in front of him so she could send him off with a biiig sloppy kiss...Roseanne: Now hurry up. I don't want to be late to surprise your sister [at college]. I'm going to dance for them.
- Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace: Yanwan's mother makes a spectacle of herself everywhere she goes, including by calling Hongli, the emperor, "my precious son-in-law". To his face.
- In this Saturday Night Live sketch, a recruit in the US Army is mortified when his colonel father shows up, as he genuinely does not want any special or preferential treatment. His father has other ideas.
- Frank and Estelle Costanza in Seinfeld. Another example of parents so bad that they still embarrass their grown-up son.
- Subverted in Sherlock, where both Sherlock and Mycroft act like their parents are mortally embarrassing, yet they're actually quite mundane. The boys are so eccentric that their normal parents are on a completely different wavelength. The third season does, however, reveal that their mother was quite brilliant in her day. She chose family over the career of a brilliant mathematician. Mary also guesses that Sherlock's father is also secretly intelligent, who immediately reciprocates.
- Played with a twist on The Sifl and Olly Show. Olly had Sifl's mom call their show and tried to get her to tell embarrassing childhood stories about Sifl. She did... except the stories all actually ended up being about something Olly did.
- Sisters. Second-oldest sister Teddy falls Off the Wagon (she's grappling with her husband's murder) the day she's to have dinner with her daughter, her daughter's boyfriend, and his parents—and shows up at the restaurant so drunk she can barely walk. Her daughter blasts her for humiliating her and her attitude indicates that this isn't the first time Teddy has done something like this.
- So Awkward: Lily certainly feels this way about her mother. Given her mother has a habit of knitting her jumpers with Lily's own face on them, and shows Lily's boyfriend her naked baby photos, she may have a point. Everyone except Jas thinks of her father as one, due to him being The Klutz. Jas (who is also The Klutz) has never noticed anything odd or embarrassing about his behavior.
- Vala's Con Man father makes an appearance in a late episode of Stargate SG-1, showing up on Earth requesting asylum. Vala is the only one not taken in by his claims that he's trying to reform while running embarrassingly bad scams around the clock and eventually leaving Earth aboard a stolen cargo ship supposedly full of Naquadah. Thankfully, the team was convinced in time to help Vala double-cross him and keep the Naquadah.
- Star Trek: The Original Series: In "Journey to Babel", Amanda is scolded by Sarek for embarrassing their son by describing his childhood pet as a "fat teddy-bear". McCoy is gleeful until Spock calmly informs him that the "teddy-bears" on Vulcan are "alive and have six-inch fangs".
- Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Another case of a parent who never ceases to embarrass her daughter is Lwaxana Troi, whose flirtatious and forceful personality causes endless grief for her daughter Deanna. Whenever she comes on board the ship, she's likely to condescend to Deanna every chance she gets, butt into other people's affairs, and try to score with an equally-irritated Captain Picard. She's supposed to be a telepath who reads thoughts and emotions.
- Worf's adoptive parents embarrass him too, but they're not as bad as other examples on this page. It has more to do with Worf's uptight nature than their behavior. They are actually rather sweet.
- Even Data has an embarrassing mother: Juliana Tainer from "Inheritance", a scientist who helps the Enterprise crew jump-start a planet's core.note She mistakes a therapy session with Deanna for a romantic rendezvous, and later tells Geordi a story about Data's early days: they had to program in a modesty subroutine because Data, who didn't suffer from the elements, saw no reason to wear clothing, which, given that he was anatomically correct, upset the other colonists. There's a reason his parents purged Data's earliest memories. Unlike most examples, however, Data lacks the ability to be embarassed, so he doesn't really mind and even finds the whole idea interesting.
- In "Family", Chief O'Brien recounted an event where he found his visiting father chasing a nurse around a bio bed in sickbay.
- Beverly at one point wondered if her presence on the ship had a negative impact on her son Wesley's social life. However, she was by and far an aversion to this trope.
- Subverted by Bashir's parents in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Dr Bashir, I Presume?" While this initially seems to be the case upon their arrival, the second half reveals he has genuine problems with them that go far beyond simple embarrassment. Namely, that he is the product of illegal genetic manipulation, which his parents were responsible for.
- Stella in Sugar Rush. Childish, self-absorbed, caught banging the decorator on the kitchen table, later entices her husband to a swinger's club, only to be caught by her daughter... You don't know whether to laugh or cry, she's so horrifying.
- Carrie Martin from The Suite Life of Zack & Cody has no problem being constantly affectionate to the boys in public and generally tries to get involved in their social lives, ignoring their embarrassment of her.
- This carries onto the spinoff The Suite Life on Deck where Zack and Cody desperately try to prevent their parents from living on the ship with them in fear of being embarrassed all over the world.
- The Summer I Turned Pretty: Belly is annoyed when her mom does things like relate cute things she'd done as a kid with a boy she likes nearby.
- Swarm: Rashida's parents tell her girlfriend where she was conceived when they come over, which she chides the two over.
- True Lies (2023): Helen teases her teenage kids by acting like she'll show people photos with them and a teen they know as little children bathing in a tub together.
- MTV's True Life:
- "True Life: I Have Embarrassing Parents" has featured a wannabe rocker dad, a couple of nudists, and a Star Wars fanboy dad. The tale of Star Wars Dad and his son is quite touching: Dad is a staunch believer in The Force while his son is an avid hunter, something dad doesn't really approve of. The son grudgingly agrees to go to a Star Wars 'con (possibly the 'con, "Celebration"). In the end, father and son are seen walking together in understanding, with dad in his Jedi robes and son... in Stormtrooper armor.
- Another True Life episode, "True Life: I Have a Hot Mom" followed two teenage girls dealing with a specific form of this trope.
- Twenties: Hattie is visibly uncomfortable when her estranged dad, a stand-up comic, talks in his set of how if she's at all like him she'll have been with many women.
- Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt:
- Kimmy's stepfather is a slack-jawed moron, which is all the more alarming given that he's a law enforcement officer.
- Subverted by Jacqueline's parents, who are perfectly normal people, but she's ashamed of them simply because they're Lakota Indians.
- Victorious: While his parents don't appear, Andre does live with his grandmother, who appears to be going senile and has No Indoor Voice. This leads to several awkward moments when she's around Andre and his friends.
- We Are Lady Parts: In the opening scene, Amina's parents bumble their way through a suitor meeting, hastily putting down Amina and embarrassing her by mentioning her bad stage fright.
- We Are Who We Are: Sarah embarrasses Fraser greatly when Caitlin comes over for dinner, telling her he liked to dress up in turbans by using towels as a child, despite her wife Maggie's objections. He flies into a rage about it afterward.
- Wellington Paranormal: O'Leary's mother turns up in "Mobots" and pulls out just about every trick in the unintentionally embarrassing playbook: including using cringey childhood nicknames, bringing out old toys and possessions, asking why she doesn't want to spend time with her (it's because she's at work), and comparing her teenaged love life to her daughter's.
- In the drama Wizards of Waverly Place, Alex seems to think this about her parents (and Justin has gone there himself, but not without cause).
- Happens at least once, and more likely multiple times, to Kevin in The Wonder Years. Most memorably, his mother took him to the mall shopping for clothes and had him try on a new pair of jeans, right as some kids he knew from school happened to be walking by. After he steps out of the dressing room, Kevin's mom conducts an up close and personal inspection. trumpeting for all to hear that the jeans "need more room in the crotch". In his embarrassment, he imagines hearing that announced over the store's PA.
- You Me Her: Izzy's mom tells a funny story of her as a girl which involved her pooping, mortifying her.
- Young Sheldon: In one episode, Mary goes to the comic book store to confront the owner about the "inappropriate content" of the comics that Sheldon is reading.Sheldon: Mom, you're embarrassing me.
