Daddy Had A Good Reason For Abandoning You / Live-Action TV

Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You in Live-Action TV.

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• Soaps are rife with this. Knowing that viewers aren't interested in seeing their characters parenting children, writers either keep them off-screen, rapidly age them, or invent reasons to send them out of town to live with relatives — a classic scenario is the kid being shipped off to boarding school or to living with a character's ex-spouse. Occasionally the teenaged or grown-up child returns to town with complex and often conflicted feelings about the absentee parent.
  • On All My Children, Erica gave her daughter Kendall up for adoption in an effort to give Kendall a better life as she was too young to raise her properly at 14 and felt adult parents would provide a better home. Kendall is devastated to learn she was given up and the circumstances surrounding her conception, which Erica tried to shield her from^note Erica was raped at 14 years old and too young to raise her daughter so she and her mother surrender Kendall for adoption. Kendall feels unwanted and abandoned, yearning for Erica's love while lashing out against her mother, paralleling aspects of Erica yearning for her absentee father's love and having lashed out at her mother over it. However, Erica and Kendall ultimately reconcile and rebuild their relationship.
    • Erica also loses custody of daughter Bianca due to her infidelity.
  • On General Hospital, Bobbie must give up her daughter Carly for adoption as Bobbie is unable to give her daughter a good life as an 18-year old prostitute. Carly is deeply hurt to learn she was given up and acts out against her mother due to her feeling abandoned. As the series goes on, Bobbie and Carly reconcile.
  • Victor with Adam on The Young and the Restless. Here, Adam's mother specifically asks that Victor have no part in Adam's life, but charged Victor to take care of Adam on her deathbed. Not really sure why — it's a Soap Opera so her reasons for this were probably explained like, ten or twenty years ago.
  • Same with Paul and Heather. He is asked to stay out of Heather's life completely at her mother's request. Paul also sent his and Isabella's son Ricky to live with her parents after she was arrested.
• In Alias, Sydney has a rocky relationship with her father, Jack. It's implied he wasn't around much while she was growing up. Turns out he's a CIA agent fighting to save the country. And he was also in prison for part of time. Her mother, Irina, wasn't around because she faked her death and defected back to Russia.
• Angel: Holtz is perfectly plain about Connor's origins — almost sinisterly so. Although Connor has been drilled to think of his parents as monsters, he is, at heart, angry at them for abandoning him. Angel is obviously torn up about it, and makes a final attempt to reason with him, but Connor is too far gone to hear it.
• Annika (2021): Morgan doesn't know who her father is, though Annika does and has a standing offer to tell her if she asks. It's Michael, who got Annika pregnant when they were at Police College together. Annika didn't think he was prepared to be a father and didn't want to put Morgan through a repeat of her own parents' stormy relationship.
• Averted in The Movie of Black Hole High when Avenir tries to pull this on Josie. It doesn't work.
• Variant in Bones. Cam, it turns out, was an honorary stepmom to the daughter of her very serious boyfriend, but left the relationship (and, by proxy, the girl) when it turned out he had cheated on her. When the man was murdered and the team put on the case, the daughter is now a teenager and very annoyed at Cam who ends up adopting her.
  • Also in Bones, both of Brennan's parents were being hunted by the gang of criminals they used to work with.
• Played with on Brothers & Sisters. Adulterer-patriarch William sired a bastard son with a married woman. The boy, Ryan, doesn't know this until both of his bio parents are dead. William couldn't be part of his life because both he and Ryan's mother were married to other people and weren't willing to destroy their marriages for the sake of their son. Here it's not really even a justification, but rather an explanation. Everyone still thinks William is a dick after this is revealed.
• The Cape: Vince did, as he was framed and forced to fake his death. Unusually, this trope is portrayed from the perspective of the father. He tries to keep a relationship with his son as The Cape.
• It happened twice in Charmed (1998):
  • In Victor's first appearance, he just abandoned his three daughters because he was a deadbeat. This was Ret Conned in later episodes, where he came back into their lives and explained that he and Grams disagreed about how to raise them, and since she could protect them from demons better than he could he opted to stay away.
  • Paige was given away because relationships between witches and Whitelighters were forbidden at the time, and her parents feared the wrath of the Elders (including potentially not letting the girls become the Charmed Ones). When she finally gets to meet her biological father he's still struggling with the pain of having to give her up, and learning she eventually became a witch anyway doesn't make him feel any better.
  • One episode had the girls discover a Doorstop Baby. It turns out that the child's family was being tormented by a vengeful ghost and the dad hoped that this would be enough to protect him.
• In Chuck the reason Chuck's and Ellie's father left was to protect them from the spy agencies that wanted to use him for research on the Intersect.
  • And the reason their mom left them? She was a CIA agent working undercover and an insane international weapons dealer fell in love with her. She had to leave because she was afraid of what would happen if the guy found out about her family.
    • Further along the plotline, the initial reason she left them was to bring the guy back to the CIA, since he was the initial Intersect, that had failed.
• Cold Case:
  • In the episode "Family", the girl's father was killed the night she was born and her mother, who was distraught over what she thought was her dad's abandonment, also abandoned the girl.
  • The episodes "The Thin Blue Line" and "Into The Blue" reveal that Lily's dad abandoned her because he was a recovering alcoholic and felt that his staying married to Lily's mom (also an alcoholic and refused to get sober) would jeopardize his sobriety. Lily's mom threw him out and refused to allow him to have contact with her or her sister.
  • "A Perfect Day" had a woman abandoning her daughter in a church after her abusive husband murdered her other daughter, feeling it was the only way she could keep her safe.
• Happened on Criminal Minds with Reid's Disappeared Dad, whom everyone assumed left due to his mom's mental problems. When a case involving abducted children awakens long-buried memories and leads Reid to suspect that his dad sexually assaulted and murdered a neighbor's child, we get the real story. It turns out that a local man named George Michaels was the real murderer. When Reid's mother realized that, she told the murdered boy's father, who killed Michaels; in the process, Reid's mother fell over the body and got blood on her. Reid's father burned her clothes and helped to cover up the murder, but he was so guilty about it that he lost all confidence and had to abandon Reid to take care of his schizophrenic mother. Six years later. Or something like that. You're on your own to decide whether that's a good reason or not; Reid accepts it as a reason, but it's not clear that he thinks it's a very good one.
  • In the Season 10 episode Fate, Rossi is completely taken aback when he discovers the Intrepid Reporter who's been trailing him for most of the episode is in fact his daughter from a whirlwind romance he had in his youth. According to Joy, the daughter in question, Rossi and her mother got divorced shortly before the latter learned she was pregnant; Joy only found out her true parentage when her stepfather admitted the truth on his deathbed. In a later episode, when Rossi asks Joy's mother why she didn't tell him she was pregnant, she says that the nature of Rossi's work would have kept him from being a father to Joy, a charge Rossi can't say is wrong.
• In season 4 of Desperate Housewives, Lynette's stepfather shows up and tells her that the reason he left her family when she was a kid was because he's gay. Lynette's mother never told her because she felt embarrassed by this. After Edie Britt's death in Season 5, all four lead women and Karen McCluskey visit her Son Travers to inform him of her death and to give him her ashes. When Travers appears unfazed by this, he says his mother didn't try to raise him, just handed him to his father and walked away. Angry, Karen tells Travers about how some years back, Edie comforted Karen on the anniversary of her son's death and told her that she wanted Travers to be brought up properly and she knew she wouldn't have been a good mother to him. Either way she still loved him.
• Diagnosis: Murder: It's revealed that Dane Travis, father of secondary protagonist Jessie, did not leave his family, and start a new one, nor did he continuously cancel get togeathers because he's a Jerkass; he's actually a spy who left his family for their own safety. Naturally Jessie doesn't believe him at first.
  • It's eventually revealed that Mark's own Disappeared Dad did not walk out on his family, he was murdered by his police partner due to a conspiracy; which was discovered when aforementioned partner dies and Mark's father's body is discovered in the mausoleum the partner was to be buried in.
• A downplayed, villainous version in Elementary. Moriarty reveals she had a daughter she gave up for adoption after birth, mostly because it would interfere with running her criminal empire and she considers her motherly instincts a burden, but she also acknowledges that it wouldn’t have been a suitable environment to raise a child in.
• Deconstructed on Everwood, kind of. Before the series began, Andy was a famous surgeon who hardly ever spent any time with his kids (the show kicks off when his wife's death forces him to change). At one point, his son Ephram comments bitterly on the fact that, since his dad was always off saving lives, he can't even be angry at him without feeling like a bad person.
  • Andy's Friendly Rival, Harold, had a similar situation growing up: his mom Edna, a nurse, volunteered during the Vietnam War, and while she says she wanted to help people, he feels like she just wanted adventure and neglected the rest of the family to get it.
• In The Fosters, the twins eventually meet their biological father and learn that he was already 18 when they were conceived, whereas their mother was only 15 and her parents pressed the issue, landing him on the sex offender registry.
  • Callie and Jude's father is in jail at the start of the series, which is why they're in foster care. Their mother died in a drunk driving accident while their father was at the wheel; he's serving time for manslaughter for her death and the deaths of other people involved. When he gets out of jail, he doesn't look for them, telling Callie he wasn't in the right space (financially or emotionally) to care for them. It eventually comes out that Donald isn't Callie's biological father. She was the result of a summer fling between her mother and Robert Quinn, who was forced to end the relationship by his family. He had no idea Callie existed.
• A rare female example in the Frontier Circus episode "The Smallest Target". When the T & T Circus stops in a small town, sharpshooter Bonnie Stevens encounters the husband and son she abandoned years before, and she is forced to explain why she did so. She was feeling stifled and slowly going insane on the isolated ranch, so she left the child with the ranch foreman's wife (who had no children and who she knew would dote on the boy) because she new life on the road was no life for a small child.
• In Game of Thrones, Jon Snow grows up believing his mother gave him up to his father Lord Eddard Stark, he having had an affair with Jon's mother. He doesn't know anything about her as Ned never speaks of her; he doesn't know if she cares about him or if she's even still alive. Ned promises that the next time they see each other, he'll tell him about his mother...but this doesn't pan out due to Ned's untimely death. It's revealed much later in the series why Jon's mother’s gave him up and it's a very good reason: his mother is Ned's late sister Lyanna and his real biological father is Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, who eloped with Lyanna rather than kidnapping her as most people believed. After the Targaryens were overthrown during Robert's Rebellion, Lyanna begged Ned to protect Jon as she feared Robert Baratheon and his supporters would kill him, shortly before she died of childbirth complications.
• Ghost Whisperer:
  • Subverted with Melinda’s father, Tom... or the man she thought was her father. At first, it looks like Tom walked out to protect her from a killer. Turns out, Tom wasn’t really her biological father, and was actually actively keeping her real father away by framing and trying to kill him so he could keep Melinda and her mom to himself. When Paul came over to confront Tom over his deception, they had a scuffle, and Tom murdered Paul. Tom left his family to hide his own crime, and even tries to kill Melinda when she finds out the truth.
  • Played straight with Melinda’s real father, Paul. He was convicted for a murder he didn’t commit over a misunderstanding. Melinda’s mother, Beth, who was pregnant with Melinda when he was arrested, went to the prosecutor, Tom, to plead on his case. As they went over Paul’s case, the distance took it’s toll on his relationship, and she started developing feelings for Tom, who knew Paul was innocent but secretly pulled strings to kill him and keep him in jail. Eventually, she gave up on Paul and married Tom, telling Melinda that he, not Paul, was her real father.
• In the 2016 reboot of Gilmore Girls, Rory finally gets the opportunity to ask her father why he wasn't around during her childhood. Christopher says that Lorelai was determined to raise Rory by herself and didn't ask his opinion, and that despite this, he feels like that was the way it was meant to be. This caused a Broken Base amongst the fandom, as it contradicts information in the series proper, where Chris was largely in control of how often he saw or phoned Rory and he simply chose not to if Lorelai wasn't romantically interested in him. Other fans felt that Lorelai pushed him away, though when Rory asks that question point-blank, Christopher denies it.
• Used in season three of Gossip Girl when Chuck Bass' supposedly dead mother shows up. Serena desperately wants to believe that her reason for leaving would play into this trope, since that would make Serena feel less horrid about having been abandoned by her own father. Chuck's maybe-mama crushes Serena's hopes and fantasies however by simply explaining "I didn't want to have a kid and I never regretted giving my child up."
• Deconstructed on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys with Herc and Zeus. Herc grew up wanting to meet his father, but also resenting him for effectively abandoning him before he was even born. Of course, Zeus is the king of all gods; even Herc acknowledged what a big, consuming job that is. It's demonstrated that Zeus has always protected Hercules from his various enemies on Olympus and was secretly in contact with Alcmene for much of Herc's childhood. Still, the overall experience left Hercules with a lot of emotional baggage that he still struggles with as an adult, alternating between wanting to embrace his father and resenting him at a moment's notice. Zeus choosing to engage in an affair rather than prevent Hera from killing Herc's wife and kids only made it worse. Every encounter between them afterwards is a tense affair.
  • The spin-off, Young Hercules, stayed true to this, but also added a few new wrinkles. Since he hasn't even met Zeus at this point in his life, Hercules is downright obsessive in trying to get the attention of a father literally at the top of the world. On multiple occasions, he risks his life and/or endangers his friends simply because the word "Zeus" came up. In the final episode, Zeus appears in disguise and talks to Hercules about having a son he loves dearly but is not close to; he acknowledges his failings as a parent and feels staying away is better.
• Subverted in Season 2 of Heroes with Maury Parkman. After Matt tracks his father down, Maury hugs him and pretends to be sorry he left. However, Maury then uses his telepathic powers to trick Matt and Nathan into fighting each other.
  • Played straight during Season 3 when Maury performs a Heel–Face Turn and works for Arthur Petrelli in exchange to ensure his son's safety.
• In the Heat of the Night: Gillespie had an affair with a woman who married another man and left Sparta. She was pregnant and never told him. He meets his daughter when her mother is murdered.
• While a number of Kamen Rider shows have characters with daddy issues, this particular trope is a bit less common:
  • Kamen Rider Double portrays Sokichi Narumi as the epitome of a badass detective and all-around great man, which makes it strange that he's so detached from his only child that she doesn't know he's a Posthumous Character. It's not until after the show that one of the follow-up movies provides an explanation: a bomb in his hand that would go off if he ever came near the person he loved most.
  • Kamen Rider Ghost rather abruptly brings up secondary Rider Makoto Fukami's daddy issues in the show's second half as part of the tie-in to the summer movie featuring said father, who turns out to have abandoned his son and daughter in a failed effort to keep them from being dragged into the show's central conflict.
• Keep Breathing: Liv's hallucination of her mom claims she left to spare her more pain since she'd been a terrible mother to her.
• The Knight Rider remake has the character from the original show giving his son an It's Not You, It's My Enemies excuse for not being around.
• Dr. Mondo Tatsumi, the father of the titular Kyūkyū Sentai GoGoV, left his family ten years before the start of the series because he predicted the coming of a horde of demons during the Grand Cross of 1999. When nobody believed him, he went underground to develop the means to fight them. The series explores the various degrees of acceptance of this from the five siblings, and how each of them coped with their father's disappearance.
• In Law & Order: SVU, Amaro learns that while undercover, he fathered a son he never knew about, who is now ten years old. Once he learns the truth, he makes it a point to be in his son's life.
  • Played with in Rollins' backstory. She feels that her father was justified in leaving because her mother "rode his ass, nagging him until he had to leave", but Murphy suggests that maybe her father (who was The Gambling Addict) was the problematic one and her mother was just trying to get him to clean up his act. Based on what we see of them later in the series, it would seem that neither parent was exactly great at parenting.
• Done very sympathetically on an episode of Lie to Me where the team investigates a congressman who has spent 80 grand on a prostitute. However, they find out that he never had sex with her, and was giving her money to get her out of that business. She doesn't know that he is her father, and he is portrayed as someone who gave up his child for adoption but regretted it. The fact that he has no hesitation to sacrifice his reputation and political career in order to protect her from the scandal counts a lot toward making him so sympathetic.
• Then there are cases where the other parent forces your hand, as with Michael on Lost.
  • Or Miles, whose father makes his mother take him off the island to save their lives.
• Lucifer (2016) has a weird one in its final season, when Lucifer and Chloe's daughter from the future travels back in time partly to get revenge on her father for walking out on her and mom before she was born, partly to try to find out why he did it^note technically the time-travel was accidental, but that's what she does when she realised what she'd done. One of her arguments for why it can't have been a good reason is that her mother would have said what had happened if it was a good reason. As it ultimately turns out, it's a Stable Time Loop: the daughter made them swear to have him leave and her mother keep silent about what really happened so that she would travel back in time and everything that happened after that would still happen.
• An episode of MacGyver (1985) gave us a variation: Jack Dalton's mother gave him up for adoption to protect him from a mobster that was targeting her.
• Mako Mermaids: An H₂O Adventure: Nerissa, Zac and Mimmi's mother, gave the two of them up for different reasons. In Zac's case, the bad blood between mermaids and mermen meant that no mermaid pod would accept even an infant merman, so Nerissa sealed away his tail and left him on the beach for a human couple to find. In Mimmi's case, Nerissa was at war with another powerful mermaid named Aurora, so she sent Mimmi to the Mako pod in Australia where she'd be safer.
• Married... with Children: Seven's folks stick the Bundys with the kid, but for a good reason: They felt Al/Peggy would be better parents. Of course, he ended up on the side of a milk carton, so...
• NCIS: The Season 18 episode Sangre explores Agent Nick Torres's estranged relationship with his father, Miguel over being abandoned during his childhood in Panama. The actual reason for Miguel's disappearance: He rebelled against Manuel Noriega and abandoned his entire family to ensure their safety. Additionally, Miguel became an undercover CIA agent.
• On Once Upon a Time, the Evil Queen casts a curse on Fairy Tale Land, forcing Snow White and Prince Charming to place their baby daughter Emma in the portal which carries her to the real world in order to save her from the curse. Emma herself has very mixed feelings on the matter. The original plan was for Snow White and Prince Charming to go with Emma, but circumstances and another character's motivations prevented that from happening.
  • Peter Pan tries to use this as an excuse, but his son doesn't buy it for a second.
• Outlander: Believing he is destined to die in the doomed Battle of Culloden, Jamie Fraser sends his time traveling wife back to her own time period for her safety and that of their unborn child. When said child, Brianna, learns that the man who raised her was not her biological father, she is hurt and offended, assuming that Jamie was a fling who couldn't be bothered to raise the resultant child. Claire corrects her, telling Brianna that Jamie loved her more than his own life and was devastated when he realized he wouldn't even get to meet her, let alone raise her, but gave up even the hope of doing so to ensure that Brianna and Claire would be safe and sound when he wasn't around to protect them.
• Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin: Imogen's father Sawyer lives in the Millwood quarry and thought that wouldn't be a good place to raise a child. And her mother specifically stated in her will that Sidney Haworthe would have legal guardianship of Imogen after her death, believing that she would be taken care of and loved as if she were her own daughter.
• Prison Break: Aldo Burrows to Lincoln and Michael.
• In The Sarah Jane Adventures episode "The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith", Sarah Jane's parents abandoned her to kill themselves by car crash, fixing the Timey-Wimey Ball and saving the world from being devastated by aliens.
  • Likewise Rose's dad, in Doctor Who episode "Father's Day".
• In Sleepy Hollow we have a case of Mommy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning you. Katrina gave birth to her son Jeremy after her husband Ichabod's 'death'- which was actually Katrina sealing him underground for centuries to save his life. However, this act earned Katrina the ire of her coven, and she left Jeremy in the care of trusted friends to protect him. She ended up captured and sold out to Moloch by her coven, and Jeremy was left alone. Unfortunately, Jeremy's life ends up going south soon after that, and when he reunites with parents 200 years later he is not happy, and has no time for Katrina's excuses.
• In the first episode of Stargate SG-1, Teal'c turns against Apophis and escapes to Earth with SG-1. We later learn that he left behind a wife and son, both of whom are understandably bitter with him for his abandonment. They eventually come to understand that he left for the greater good because he realized that the Tau'ri would be valuable allies in overthrowing the Goa'uld.
• One episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation had Jean-Luc Picard learn that he had a son by a woman he'd had a brief fling with decades ago, who had subsequently upped sticks and left for a frontier planet without bothering to tell him she was pregnant. It then turns out that the woman had died not long afterwards and her son had ended up a street-rat and a petty crook, and was understandably not very pleased that his father hadn't bothered showing up until he was an adult. That the only reason Picard knew he existed was because a Ferengi with a grudge against him was threatening his son's life really didn't help. And then it turns out he's not actually Jean-Luc's son...
• In Supernatural, the protagonists' father John lived his entire life believing that his father had walked out on him. Sam and Dean learn that their grandfather had actually travelled to the future in order to keep a valuable artifact out of demonic hands and died before he could return home.
• In a Season 3 episode of S.W.A.T, when a teenage boy is abducted at gunpoint, it turns out he's the biological son of a former political activist and explosives expert who turned state's evidence against the rest of his group when their motives switched to domestic terrorism. His pregnant girlfriend broke off the relationship rather than cut all ties with her family and go into Witnes Protection with her boyfriend, eventually marrying someone else who adopted and raised their son like his own. It turns out the boy was abducted because some of the men his biological father helped put in jail had broken out and wanted to use the boy as leverage to get his father to help them blow up a few targets.

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