Hollywood Genetics / Live-Action TV

• Brown-haired Mr. and Mrs. Conklin have a blonde daughter, Harriet, on Our Miss Brooks.
• A common joke in 7th Heaven's hatedom was Little Miss Snarker Ruthie Camden either being adopted or the product of an affair with the gardener, because Mackenzie Rosman has a noticeably darker complexion and less WASPy features than the rest of her TV family.
• Dawn Summers from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is a magically-created clone of her sister Buffy, which would essentially make them identical twins. What little resemblance the actresses share to begin with is undermined in later seasons when Michelle Trachtenberg goes through a growth spurt and ends up much taller than Sarah Michelle Gellar.
• Jasmine on Season 4 of Angel is black (played by Gina Torres); her parents (such as they were), Cordelia and Connor, are not. This is a sci-fi/fantasy show, and she isn't a human so much as a goddess of vast power that uses a glamour at all times to look like that (her real appearance gave her sickly, green-tinged skin, with perpetual maggots crawling out of her mouth and eye sockets).
• Brown-haired, brown-eyed Toby Isaacs on Degrassi: The Next Generation has a blond, blue-eyed father and a redheaded, green-eyed mother.
• Dexter has Rita and ex-husband Paul, both blond. Their kids Astor and Cody have medium to dark brown hair.
• Kim Parker from The Parkers is significantly shorter (her actress Countess Vaughn is 4'11") than both her parents (played by the 5'9" Mo'Nique and 6'4" Tommy Ford). Lampshaded by an Enfante Terrible in one episode who, when told by Kim that both her parents were tall, responded with Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe. Kim is also much lighter than both parents, but due to a great deal of African-Americans having recent white ancestry, this is not as implausible.
• The Cosby Show: Cliff is noticeably darker than both of his parents. Sondra and Denise Huxtable are both noticeably lighter than their parents. Actress Lisa Bonet's real mother is in fact a white Jewish woman.
• In Dirty Sexy Money, Juliet has brown eyes while her parents are both blue-eyed. This is actually possible in real life genetics, due to how complicated eye inheritance really is.
• Clarissa's brother Ferguson in Clarissa Explains It All is the only redhead in a family of blondes.
• Lampshaded on the "Hackidu" episode of Everybody Loves Raymond. Ray and Debra have dark hair, while the kids have blond hair. Ray trades Ally's $65 "Hackidu" card to Bill Parker, a blond guy. After getting teased for being scammed, Ray decided to get the card back.
  Ray: [to Debra] I'm going to go see your boyfriend. [leaves]
  Marie: Boyfriend?
  Robert: You know, this could explain why all the kids are blond.
  Debra: And smart.
• Family Ties:
  • This was an early concern during casting: Michael J. Fox almost didn't get the role of Alex P. Keaton because the producers at NBC didn't think it was realistic that the 5'4" Fox could be the son of 6'4" Michael Gross and 5'7" Meredith Baxter.
  • While it's not really viewed this way by viewers, Meredith Baxter said in an interview that she was surprised to see someone as beautiful, dark and kind of exotic as Justine Bateman being cast with such a white-bread looking family.
• Seemingly averted, but actually played straight in an episode of House. A patient in an early episode found out that he was adopted because, as he claims, parents without cleft chins can't have a child with one, and the doctors agree with this claim. In fact, such a parent-child scenario is possible— just unlikely. Based solely on that trait, the patient shouldn't have been able to tell either way if he was adopted, and Foreman (correctly) explains that while it's unlikely for him to be his parent's child, it's not impossible.
• A plot point in Game of Thrones, despite being set in a world with no knowledge of genetics. All three "Baratheon" children all have blonde hair and green eyes like their mother, Cersei, despite the fact that their father, Robert Baratheon, has very dark brown (described as black) hair. While this in itself is possible, Ned reads through a book detailing Baratheon lineage and discovers that every dark-haired Baratheon male has always sired dark-haired children even if their mother was blonde. This would make it a lot less likely that Robert would be carrying recessive genes for blonde hair. Even without knowledge of genetics, this arouses suspicion, and is what leads Ned to the conclusion that Cersei's children are actually bastards born out of incest with her dirty blond-haired brother Jamie.
• House of the Dragon: Like the show it's a prequel to, it plays fast and loose with genetics by associating phenotypes strongly with one family regardless of real life plausibility.
  • It's a plot point that the Targaryens and Velaryons are of Old Valyrian stock, indicated by their white hair. The Velaryons are also black. So when Rhaenyra Targaryen and Laenor Velaryon have three sons that are fair-skinned and brown-haired, everyone immediately knows they're bastards fathered by the fair-skinned and brown-haired Harwin Strong. Somehow, the fair-skinned and brown-haired Alicent Hightower birthed three properly Valyrian-colored children with Viserys Targaryen. In this situation, the white hair serves as an indicator of legitimacy more than it follows logic.
  • Further, Laenor and Laena Velaryon are biracial, their parents being Rhaenys Targaryen and Corlys Velaryon. Laena's daughters with Daemon Targaryen both have dark skin and dreadlocked hair, even though they're only a quarter-black and should be closer to their father in skintone and hair texture.
• Justified in The Neighbors. The Bird-Kersee family consists of father - Larry (British, blond, and Caucasian), mother - Jackie (African-American), older son Reggie (Asian American), and younger son - Dick (Caucasian, american, and red-haired). They are all genetically related, though they are aliens from the planet Zabvron, and could choose their own human appearances. Funny though, because the parents and children don't see why they aren't seen as genetically related by strangers.
• An example where family members are much too similar than is genetically plausible in Orphan Black: In the third episode, Cosima tells Sarah that clones' fingerprints may be close enough to all match, when in reality not even identical twins have the same fingerprints. Even accepting this premise leaves a Plot Hole, unfortunately. Beth's finger prints would have been put into the system when she became a police officer. If Sarah's arrest happened first, Beth would have had quite some difficulty getting into the police at all. If it happened second, the whole mess should have exploded then. Since only Sarah's fingerprints came up when Katja's were run, it must be that Beth's aren't in the system - presumably the showmakers don't know that police employees' fingerprints always go into the system. As for the "identical twins" part of things, averted entirely with Helena, who wore gloves when on the run to avoid getting fingerprinted.
• In Power Rangers Mystic Force, Udonna, who looks Irish, has a son with Leanbow, who looks Spanish. The kid, Bowen, looks Arabian, with skin about eight shades darker than either of theirs— a shade fairly close to that of his parents' close friend Daggeron. No comment is made on this matter.
• Reba
  • The redheaded title character and her blond ex-husband Brock have blonde Cheyenne, redheaded Kyra, and...black-haired Jake? In one episode it's stated that Brock dyes his hair, but it's not made clear if blond was his original color or not. Either way, it still wouldn't explain the vastly different hair colors that their kids have unless either Cheyenne or Jake dyes their hair too (Cheyenne was shown as a blond in a flashback to her first day of school and is unlikely to have dyed her hair at that age. This is the same reason why Jake probably doesn't dye his either.)
  • Adding to the confusion, Brock's other son Henry, whose mother is the very blond Barbra Jean, also has dark hair.
• Roots's Chicken George is the son of Kunta Kinte's daughter Kizzy and her white slave master; he is one of the darkest characters in the series, significantly more so than his mother (and looks about the same age).
• On Smallville, half-Dutch, half-Chinese Canadian Kristin Kreuk actress was cast as Lana Lang. Oddly, unlike their version of Pete Ross, there was no Race Lift involved—both her mother and father were portrayed by Caucasian actors. Potentially played with after the reveal that Lewis Lang isn't her biological father but then when she finds her bio-dad, he turns out to be white, too. Many viewers at first sight assume the Questionable Casting Agency was involved.^note Kristin Kreuk has said that most of her roles involve this, as there are very few roles specifically written to be half-white and half-East Asian. Still, putting an East Asian actor in Lana's bio dad's role would've made a lot more sense.
• Star Trek:
  • On Star Trek: The Next Generation, Wesley Crusher has brown eyes when both of his parents have blue. Picard, on the other hand, has brown eyes... However, while eye color is controlled by at least three genes and blue eyes mean you have to be recessive for all three, the color alleles are not completely dominant. It is possible for blue-eyed parents to have brown-eyed children.
  • On Star Trek: Enterprise, Archer decides to withhold a cure for a disease that's killing an entire race because it's their destiny as decided by their genes and they have to go to make room for another species. That's not even slightly how genetics works. There's no destiny, just a lot of essentially random events (this also overlaps with Goal-Oriented Evolution).
• Sam and Dean Winchester from Supernatural resemble each other so little that not a single character on the show who doesn't already know even ventures a guess that they're brothers, and the majority of strangers think they're a gay couple. This is true even when they're pretending to be FBI agents or have some other plausible explanation for working so closely together.
• Several on The Vampire Diaries:
  • Stefan and Damon sort of (if you squint) resemble their father, but the two brothers don't resemble each other at all.
  • Elena looks very different from her brother and aunt, but then it's revealed that she was adopted. Though it's later played straight when her birth parents were her father's brother John Gilbert and Isobel Flemming. While you could say she shares some of their facial features, there's no way two pale-skinned light-eyed people could have produced an olive-skinned child with dark brown eyes.
  • Elijah bears no resemblance to his family either, having much darker features overall. Ironic since Klaus, who does match the rest of the family, is supposed to be the illegitimate child.
• The Conners 2017: During the 20-year interim, DJ married a black woman and has a daughter with her, Mary, who is as dark-skinned as her mother and doesn't remotely look like she has a white father. It becomes a plot point in one episode when a random stranger assumes Mary is adopted, which offends the girl. The episode was likely meant to address viewers who assumed Mary was DJ's stepdaughter whom he's raising as his own. It turns out he is indeed her biological father, against all odds.
• Good Luck Charlie: Parents Bob and Amy are blonde and blue-eyed, but their only blonde, blue-eyed kid is PJ. Gabe and Toby are dark-haired with brown eyes. While Teddy and Charlie are blonde, Teddy has brown eyes and Charlie's eyes are either brown or green.
• Liv and Maddie: Both parents are brown-eyed brunettes and their son (Joey) looks like Robbie Shapiro (and Parker, also a brunette, is the Rooneys' answer to Ruthie Camden), so its very plausible that the two daughters are platinum blondes. Apparently the producers thought no one would notice. Blonde hair and green eyes are both recessive traits, so it is technically possible for the twins to have them though.
  • Played for laughs in how people are stunned to realize chubby redhead Artie and tall, handsome dark-haired Diggie are brothers. Artie not only assumes the resemblance is obvious but that he's more handsome than Diggie.
• Yaphet Kotto was cast as Lt. Al Giardello on the award-winning cop series Homicide: Life on the Street, though his dark complexion and facial features made it very implausible for him to be the biracial son of an Italian-American father and an African-American mother. One episode of the series even went out of its way to draw attention to the issue when a light-skinned African-American woman declined to date Giardello because he was "too black" for her. That said, Kotto was outstanding in the role and it's impossible to imagine another actor playing Giardello. There is a valid argument for colorblind casting.^note  In Real Life, genetics is a roulette game. It is actually not impossible that despite being biracial, Giardello simply took after his presumably dark-skinned mother and doesn't display a trace of his father.
• Although many of the families on 24 look related, a glaring example of this trope pops up in Season 4 with the Secretary of Defense and his daughter (played by William Devane and Kim Raver, respectively). To say they don't look alike is...an understatement.
• Life Unexpected: Lux lampshades how unlikely two brunettes having a blonde-haired child is in the second episode, where it turns out to be why she got her name (meaning "Light" in Latin). Interestingly, actress Britt Robertson, who plays her, isn't a real blonde anyway-her dark roots clearly show-and they could have just made Lux a brunette with dyed hair too.
• Became a plot point in Arrow. When the cast was revealed, many cried foul at the fact that the dark-haired Willa Holland (Thea Queen) was supposed to be the daughter of two blonde parents (Thea's brother, Oliver, is played by the also-dark-haired Stephen Amell, but flashbacks have his hair much blonder and his present-day hair is cut so short it really doesn't matter.) However, a major plot development in the second season revealed that Thea is actually the illegitimate daughter of black-haired Malcolm Merlyn.
• On Boy Meets World, most of the Matthews family look like they could be related, with the glaring exception of the main character Cory. He is played by the Jewish Ben Savage, who has dark curly hair, while the rest of the Matthews are played by WASPy-looking actors with wavy dark blonde hair. The contrast wasn't quite as obvious at the start of the series, but became quite a bit more noticeable after Ben/Cory went through puberty, where he became noticeably more Jewish-looking and even started affecting some stereotypical Jewish mannerisms. The hair inconsistency gets a reference at one point where it's mentioned that a babysitter once curled Cory's hair and it's been stuck that way ever since. The cast also joke about this at one point on the DVD commentary.
• In the Hawaii Five-O episode "A Bullet For El Diablo," the daughter of a dictator is kidnapped as part of a plot to assassinate him - they'll substitute her twin half-sister, who's a member of the gang. Yes, El Diablo impregnated two completely different women who gave birth to females who look exactly alike. No, this isn't a science fiction story. And yes, the plan does work.
• Played for laughs on Suits with Louis, a short man with a weasel-like face when his sister drops by, played by the gorgeous Amy Acker. People are stunned to see her and trying in vain to figure out how she and Louis could possibly be related. Even funnier? Louis assumes the shock is because "we could be twins."
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Played for comedy and ultimately justified by the tall and slender Dennis and Dee having Danny Devito as their father. They eventually learn that he's not their biological father, to no one's surprise.
• Twin Peaks: Brothers Ben and Jerry look nothing alike and have a foot of height difference between them. Given the weirdness of the rest of the show, this was probably intentional.
• Still Standing: Lauren is a redhead, while her parents and siblings all have dark brown hair. This is somewhat plausible as her maternal grandmother is also a redhead.
• Much like the Reba example above, 8 Simple Rules gives us blond-haired Bridget, red-haired Kerry and brunette Rory. Out of the three, Rory is the only one who looks like he could realistically be Paul and Cate Hennessy's (both brunettes) child. Cate's sister Maggie is also a blonde, further muddying the issue.
• The George Lopez Show: Carmen is much lighter-skinned than her parents and brother due to her actress, Masiela Lusha, being Albanian. George is also far darker-skinned than all his family members, including both his parents. His mom is light enough to pass for Caucasian.
• The Big Bang Theory: Penny is blond-haired, but both her parents ^note again featuring Katey Sagal and Kaley Cuoco as mother and daughter like in 8 Simple Rules are brunettes (her dad's hair is gray now, but Keith Carradine's hair was dark brown in his youth) and her brother has a lighter shade of brown hair. Penny's case may be justified, since a few episodes have implied that she is not a natural blonde. Still doesn't explain her brother, though.
• The brunette Greg and Kim Warner of Yes, Dear have two blond-haired children, Sam and Emily.
• Two and a Half Men
  • At least one episode ("Taterhead is Our Love Child") has pointed out how Jake looks nothing like Alan and, although unsaid, he really doesn't look like Judith either (for instance, both Alan and Judith have dark brown hair while Jake's hair is considerably lighter. Jake has blue eyes like Alan, but Judith's brown eyes should have been passed on to him). When Charlie and Alan drop Jake off at Judith's at the end of the episode, they see a plumber, a water boy, and a postman — all of whom look like Jake and are well-acquainted with Alan and Judith. Alan is oblivious.
  • Charlie and Alan are both brunettes, but their mother Evelyn has red hair. Either Evelyn isn't a natural redhead (it wouldn't be out-of-character for her to dye her hair, considering how she's always boasting about getting cosmetic procedures) or they take after their unseen father.
  • Charlie and Alan have the same hair color and that's it. Otherwise, they don't have any resemblance to each other (for one, Charlie Sheen has brown eyes and Jon Cryer has blue eyes, but it's difficult to tell this in a sitcom.) Much like the Winchesters, they are usually mistaken for a gay couple by those unfamiliar with them and even pretended to be one to impress a gay client of Charlie's.
  • None of Berta's relatives look anything alike. Berta's a redhead, her daughter Naomi is blonde and her sister, other daughter and granddaughter are brunettes. Then again, considering the implications of Berta's family, it could be justified, either due to hair dyeing or illegitimacy.
• In Teen Wolf, redhead Victoria Argent and dark blond Chris Argent were both blue-eyed and had straight hair. Their daughter, Allison, had dark brown eyes and either dark brown or black hair that was naturally a bit wavy when she had it long. There were fandom theories that Allison might actually be the biological daughter of her aunt, Kate, and a member of the Hale family. After she had her hair lightened, she did show a slightly stronger resemblance to her aunt than she did previously. Kate was blonde with somewhat wavy hair and green eyes, and all the Hales shown had either black or dark brown straight hair and a combination of blue, green, and brown eyes. Kate and Chris' father, Gerard, had blue eyes, but it's not clear what color his hair was before it turned white-gray and he started balding. A flashback did show a brown-haired Argent with brown eyes, however, and he might have been Gerard's brother, although all that's said is he was Chris' uncle. Given the fact the Hales were supernatural and Allison started having precognitive hallucinations, this only added to the theory that, at least, one of her parents might not be a biological one.
• iCarly:
  • Sam Puckett is played by the 5'2" Jennette McCurdy. Her mother, Pam, is played by 6' Jane Lynch. Though to be fair, Pam only showed up in one episode after spending four years as The Ghost.
  • Freddie is also much shorter than his mother. Though to be fair again, his biological father is not seen at all, who could be shorter than Mrs. Benson.
• During the mid-90's, General Hospital brothers AJ and Jason were respectively played by Sean Kanan and Steve Burton, who were often said to resemble each other more than real brothers do (the two were cousins in Real Life). However, the two were half brothers, which meant there ought to have been more differences in their appearances, and even if one could assume that they both happened to take after their father Alan, he was dark haired and dark-eyed, the complete opposite of them—they resembled their mother Monica far more even though Jason wasn't her biological child!
• In the Law & Order episode "Blood", the detectives are stunned to learn that their suspect is actually a black man passing for white when they see the baby that he forced his wife to give up for adoption. Despite the roulette game that is genetics, it's highly unlikely that a white person and an African-American so light he could pass for white (and therefore highly likely to have white ancestry himself) could have produced a child with such a dark complexion.
• The Bold and the Beautiful. Stephanie Forrester is dark-haired and dark-eyed while her twin sister Phoebe was the polar opposite—blonde and blue-eyed. While fraternal twins often look different, it's still odd that Steffy would so closely resemble their parents Ridge and Taylor while Phoebe didn't.
• Almost Family: Edie's mother (who's played by Tamara Tunie) is lighter-skinned than she is. Her birth father turns out to be white though, which is genetically quite unlikely.
• How to Get Away with Murder: Laurel and Adrian are much lighter than their father. While it's possible one might have their mother's fair looks, two is pretty unlikely given dominant traits of darker hair or skin.
• Vikings: Bjorn, Ragnar's son from his short-statured wife Lagertha, is quite a bit taller than all of Ragnar's sons from the Statuesque Stunner Aslaug.
• The Sopranos: Meadow has a noticeably darker complexion than everyone else in her family. The actress is actually half Cuban and half Ashkenazi Jew rather than Italian-American. This gets brought up in dialogue in the fifth season, when Carmela recalls how her mother lamented "She's so dark!" when she first saw her granddaughter.
• Succession: The short, stocky, bulldog-faced Brian Cox and the tall, lanky, aquiline James Cromwell could hardly look more dissimilar, but they play brothers.
• Gotham: The Galavan siblings Theo and Tabitha look nothing alike, as the actors aren't even the same race. James Frain (a White Englishman) plays Theo, and Black/European Canadian Jessica Lucas is Tabitha. We never see their parents, so it's possible (but unlikely) they come from a mixed race family with each of them just looking like one side (it's never stated they're not blood siblings).
• Misfits: Jess, a fairly light young Black woman (possibly mixed race) has a baby with a White man who is darker-skinned than her. This is quite unlikely, genetically, unless he had some Black ancestry too (which isn't shown as the case).
• Drake & Josh: Audrey has auburn hair, as does Drake. But Megan has dark brown hair. She looks more like her stepbrother Josh than she does her mother and biological brother. Drake and Megan's unseen father could have been dark-haired, but if that were the case, Drake would likely have had dark hair as well. Josh also looks nothing like his father Walter, with Josh having black hair and tanned skin while Walter has brown hair and pale skin. Like Megan, it's possible that Josh took after his unseen birth mother.
• One Chicago: The Halstead brothers (Jay, of Chicago P.D., and Will, of Chicago Med) are both quite tall - and that is all they have in common. Neither of them look like their father Pat either. Jay is dark haired and has a slimmer face, Will is ginger and has a rounder face. Lampshaded by Will in one episode of Med:
  Will Halstead: As the only ginger in my family, I can tell you the redheaded gene is recessive, so it’s possible it just hasn’t expressed until now.
• The Umbrella Academy: In the third season, Diego encounters his Season 2 love interest Lila, who drops a 13-year-old boy in his lap, Stanley, and reveals that he is Diego's son from their previous sexual encounter. Time travel is a major part of the series, so Diego doesn't question why Stanley is a teenager, but he also doesn't question why Stanley is white, even though Diego is Hispanic, Lila is Indian, and they both have olive skin. It turns out Stanley isn't related to either of them but is the son of Lila's friend. She came up with the ruse because she was two months pregnant with his actual child and wanted to see how he'd do as a father. Stanley was bored enough to go along with it.
• Lucifer: Chloe Decker (blond-haired, blue-eyed, and pale-skinned) and Daniel Espinoza (brown-haired, blue-eyed, and pale-skinned) conceived a daughter who is somehow brown-haired, brown-eyed, and olive-skinned. Chalk it up to recasting; Dan's original actor was Nicholas Gonzalez, who was decidedly closer in look to Trixie's actress, Scarlett Estevez. However, Gonzalez departed before the series was picked up, and was replaced by Kevin Alejandro.
• 18 to Life: Wendy has a darker complexion than the rest of her family, and doesn't look like them at all.
• Shameless (US): Liam Gallagher is assumed to be a Chocolate Baby, given his mother's (played by a Caucasian actress) sleeping around. However, when a DNA test reveals that Frank Gallagher truly is Liam's biological father, Frank remembers an old rumor about his grandmother having had an affair with a black musician, and it all suddenly makes sense to him. What makes it a case of this trope is that neither Frank (played by (William H. Macy) or any of his other biological children have any African-American features at all. You might think it's just Played for Laughs, but following episodes seem to take it seriously.
• Imposters: Patrick, a light-skinned black man, turns out to have three kids with his ex-wife (who seems white, but with tan skin), who are darker-skinned than them both. While not impossible, it's unlikely, particularly that they both would have this skin tone (the kids are twins, a boy and a girl).
• The Sinner: Julian is olive-skinned and has a darker complexion than either of his parents, who look very white. He also has curly hair, which neither of his parents have. While Jack does have a black daughter who's also Julian's half-sister, it's more likely that Heather's deceased and never-seen mother was black or that she was adopted.

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