Tangled Family Tree / Live-Action TV

• On American Horror Story: Murder House, Constance has four kids (three of whom we meet; the fourth finally appears in the eighth season, Apocalypse). Her son Tate ends up impregnating Vivien, who also gets pregnant by her husband Ben on the same day, meaning her twins have different fathers. Meanwhile, Tate falls in love with Vivien and Ben's daughter Violet. And all of this crazy happens before we bring up the fact that Tate is also a freaking ghost, who impregnated Vivien so that there would be a baby for his ghost surrogate mother figure Nora Montgomery to raise.
• Angel: The show has some considerable problems with this. This is because it treats siring like family, so you have The Master siring Darla, Darla siring Angel, Angel siring Drusilla, and Drusilla siring Spike. Then Angel killed Darla, who was brought back to life as a human. Then Drusilla sired Darla again, making Dru—as Dru herself puts it—both Darla's granddaughter and mother. By extension, this makes Darla Angel's mother and granddaughter and Spike her brother and great-grandson. Then Angel and Darla screw like bunnies, defy the laws of the natural universe and conceive Connor, Angel's son, who, by the whole siring thing, is also Angel's brother and great-grandson. Then Connor sleeps with Cordelia (whom Angel is in love with) and conceives the earthly form of the fallen power Jasmine (who calls Connor her father but also takes credit for creating him by setting up the events that led to his birth, and was possessing Cordelia's body when she slept with Connor), Angel's granddaughter/niece/great-great-granddaughter. So in other words, Jasmine is Connor's mother, daughter and lover. And this isn't taking into account that Angel sired an unknown number of other vampires in addition to Drusilla, including Penn from the episode "Somnabulist", Sam Lawson from "Why We Fight" and possibly James and Elizabeth from "Heartthrob", and we have no idea how many vampires they or anyone else in the family sired. So, theoretically, any onscreen vampire could be related to Angel. Plus, there's the fact that in Season 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike sired a whole bunch of vamps while under the First Evil's control, who may have sired others.
  • Since Drusilla sired both Spike and Darla (the second time), Spike is Connor's uncle. But since Angel sired Drusilla, Connor is also Spike's uncle. And because Darla sired Angel, Connor is his own uncle.
  • Cordelia also had at least one other pregnancy that didn't go to term (a good thing, since the multiple demon offspring would have killed her in being born). And considering Buffy's romantic involvements with both Angel and Spike, it's something of a relief that Buffy Summers and Scott Summers aren't related...
    • In many a fanfic, they are, adding a hitherto unmanaged dimension of supernatural weirdness to the whole mess.
    • Fanfic nothing; according to Word Of Joss, in one of the two times he got a chance to write Cyclops, he tried to fit in a bit of dialogue where he references a "third cousin who thinks she spends her time fighting demons" (which would be Arbitrary Skepticism given that the X-Men themselves have fought Dracula, and demons from the Limbo dimension).
• Arrested Development becomes this after several family revelations over its run. Among them:
  • Buster was actually fathered by Oscar Bluth, who he believed to be his uncle.
  • Lindsay was revealed to be adopted in the third season finale, then in the fifth season revealed to also be Lucille's half-sister, sharing the same mother.
    • Which makes George Michael and Maeby initially believe they are Kissing Cousins until the third season finale, after the revelation that Lindsay was adopted, meaning they are not blood relatives, then backtracked in the fifth season after the revelation that Lindsay is Lucille's half-sister, meaning they are second cousins once removed by blood.
    • Steve Holt is revealed to be Gob's illegitimate son, making another kissing cousin for Maeby, then similarly stated to not be blood-related, then revealed to actually be second cousins once removed.
• Big Love: Thanks to the multiple marriages and multiple wives in the polygamist compound of Juniper Creek — "Prophet" Roman Grant alone has 31 children and 187 grandchildren — figuring out who's related to whom can be an impossibly arduous task. As expressed by one of Roman's wives, Adaleen: "I'm my own grandmother."
• Chousei Kantai Sazer X: All the members of Neo Descal's Standard Evil Organization Squad are descended from one of Descal's Three Shoguns, but the genealogy of each bloodline isn't all that elaborated on, leading to a lot of ambiguous relations.
• Dark (2017) has this in spades, due to a combination of Time Travel and incest. The family tree, which involves four families (Nielsens, Kahnwalds, Dopplers, Tiedermanns) intertwined across three generations, gets progressively more tangled with each season.
  • To begin with, Season 1 reveals that the protagonist Jonas Kahnwald's father, Michael Kahnwald, is in fact Mikkel Nielsen, who traveled back in time over thirty years and was Trapped in the Past. The problem? Mikkel is the younger brother of Martha Nielsen, Jonas' ex-girlfriend, meaning Jonas had unwittingly been in an incestuous relationship with his aunt. Also, Mikkel/Michael's wife Hannah is having an affair with Ulrich Nielsen, who unbeknownst to both her and Jonas is her father-in-law and Jonas' grandfather.
  • Then in Season 2, we learn that Noah, a character who previously seemed to be separate from the four families, is the brother of Agnes Nielsen, tying him in with the Nielsen family. Noah is also revealed to be the father of Charlotte Doppler, which ties the Nielsen and Doppler families together. To make matters even more complicated, turns out that Charlotte's mother is in fact Elizabeth Doppler... who's also her daughter, resulting in a convoluted case of My Own Grampa.
  • By Season 3, the family tree is as tangled as it can get. Jonas and an Alternate Universe Martha conceive a child who in turn has a child with Agnes Nielsen in both realities - starting the Nielsen line. This means that the entire Nielsen family, including Jonas, is part of a causal loop with no beginning or end. Moreover, Jonas is revealed to have a half-sister named Silja (the product of an affair between his mother Hannah and Egon Tiedermann), who eventually marries Bartosz Tiedermann. Their children - Agnes and Noah. This ties together the Nielsen, Tiedermann, and Doppler families by blood (the Kahnwalds as well, through Mikkel/Michael's adoption by Ines Kahnwald).
  • The convoluted nature of the show's family tree becomes a plot point in Season 3, with opposing characters trying to uphold or destroy the Stable Time Loop that holds it all together, in order to either preserve their family lines or spare their families from the misery of their existence. This is indeed what fuels the central conflict of the series.
• Doctor Who:
  • The show gets into this with the Ponds, properly starting from new series late Season 4 onwards. Amy and Rory are together and have a daughter, Melody, who was named after their childhood best friend, Melody. Amy, however, fancies the Doctor and forces him into a kiss early on. Melody turns out to be River Song, who eventually marries the Doctor and is also Amy's and Rory's best friend Melody, accidentally named after herself. On top of that, Melody's second mother is the TARDIS, who considers herself married to the Doctor and has a rather romantic (as well as biologically symbiotic) relationship with him. Things get more complicated when Amy accidentally marries Henry VIII in a throwaway gag — because the Doctor, rather briefly, married Queen Elizabeth I, who happens to be Henry VIII's daughter, making her simultaneously his biological mother-in-law and his stepmother-in-law. And in the middle of all that, the Doctor seems to start fancying Rory a bit and snogs him for no reason.
  • Gets even more twisted in "The Husbands of River Song": the Doctor and River have both at different points in time been married to Cleopatra.
  • And that's just in-character, before one gets into the Cast Incest implications of Georgia Moffett's appearance as "The Doctor's Daughter"...
• This trope is discussed in the Frasier episode "Lilith Needs A Favour" in a conversation between Martin and the titular character regarding the consequences of Lilith and Martin conceiving a child together (however unlikely such a scenario would be). This is how Martin's train of thought runs.
• Friends: Phoebe's family tree is rather convoluted. Her parents were originally part of a polygamous relationship, with her biological mother, also called Phoebe, stepping out after the twins were born. Frank, the father, soon after abandoned Lily (his other partner), leaving her to raise two children that weren't even biologically related to her; this fact was kept from Phoebe (the daughter) until much later in life. Lily would then go on to marry someone else (who strangely goes completely unnamed in the series), but when the girls were teenagers, he was sent to prison and Lily killed herself. Meanwhile, Frank started another family with another woman and had a son, only to abandon that family not long after too. Years later, when trying to track down her biological father, Phoebe discovers her half-brother and becomes close with him to the point that she ends up being a surrogate to triplets he has with a much older woman.
• Game of Thrones universe:
  • Game of Thrones:
    • It's not touched on much, but the Lannister family's inbreeding produced such a situation. Joffrey, Tommen and Myrcella are Cersei and Jaime's children and niblings, Tyrion's double niblings, Tywin's double grandchildren, and each other's siblings and cousins... and it only gets more complicated when marriages are arranged with the Tyrells.
    • Lady Olenna Tyrell gives a speech about the complications of these arranged marriages. Her granddaughter Margaery is getting married to the current king, Joffrey, and her grandson Loras is betrothed to the king's mother, Cersei, which would make him the king's stepfather and brother-in-law. Cersei will be Joffrey's mother (as well as aunt) and sister-in-law, though this depends on definition. A lot of people nowadays don't count the spouses of your siblings-in-law as additional siblings-in-law, but in this society they seemingly do. Loras will be Margaery's brother and father-in-law. Then Olenna goes on to explain how any children would fit in, specifically that Margaery and Joffrey's son would be Loras's nephew and step-grandson.
    • Later, Tommen was married to Margaery, who at that point was his brother Joffrey's widow.
    • Furthermore, Lord Tywin Lannister's marriage to his first cousin Joanna makes him both father and cousin once removed to Jaime, Cersei and Tyrion.
    • It doesn't even scratch the surface on the former royal house, the Targaryens, who frequently (but not exclusively) practiced Brother–Sister Incest by custom. To complicate matters more, King Robert Baratheon, Queen Cersei's husband and the legal father of her three children by Jaime, was a cousin to said Targaryens; and Jon Snow was raised by Lord Ned Stark as his bastard son alongside his legitimate children (but, in reality, was actually the son of his sister Lyanna Stark by Prince Rhaegar Targaryen).
  • House of the Dragon elaborates on the Targaryens. Due to Royal Inbreeding, the family tree of House Targaryen and House Velaryon gets increasingly convoluted over time. Rhaenyra Targaryen herself first marries her second cousin Laenor Velaryon and then her uncle Daemon Targaryen, who himself first marries his first cousin once removed Laena Velaryon (the sister of Rhaenyra's first husband). Daemon and Laena have two daughters together, who are later betrothed to two of Rhaenyra's sons from her first marriage (who were actually sired by an unrelated man, Ser Harwin Strong). The betrothed are simultaneously stepsiblings, first cousins (legally), first cousins once removed (biologically) and third cousins (biologically).
• Heroes:
  • True to the show's comic book roots, the Petrelli family tree is like this. It started with mom Angela, sons Peter and Nathan, and Nathan's wife and sons. Then Claire is also revealed to be part of the Petrelli family as Nathan's daughter, tying in Claire's adopted family, the Bennets, and her biological mother Meredith. It is later revealed Meredith has a brother, Flint, and Angela has a long-lost sister, Alice.
  • For a while, it was teased that Sylar was a third Petrelli brother, but this turned out to be a big fat lie. But Sylar has his own problems, as his relationships with his parents and their siblings are kind of screwed up. Then he joined the Petrelli tree for real by becoming Nathan's Replacement Goldfish. However, the brainwashing and mind-rape eventually wore off midway through Season 4.
• In the History Bites episode "The Filthy Stinking Rich", the penchant of the Rothschild family (see Real Life section) for marrying within the family to keep their wealth from being scattered among countless sons-in-law and daughters-in-law is depicted in a sketch in which Charlotte Rothschild^note  daughter of Nathan Rothschild, patriarch of the London Rothschilds shows her family album to her fiance and first cousin Anselm Rothschild^note  son of Nathan's brother Salomon, who took over from his father as patriarch of the Vienna Rothschilds - while he rolls his eyes and repeatedly points out that they're also his family.
• Kamen Rider Ex-Aid: Poppy Pipopapo was created by Kuroto Dan from the Bugster virus, which technically makes her his daughter in a sense. However, Poppy was made by Kuroto infecting his terminally ill mom with the virus so he'd always have a piece of her with him. As such, their relationship waffles between being a father-daughter one and a mother-son one.
• Knots Landing: Steve Brewer's parents were Claudia and Paul Galveston. As such, he is both Greg's maternal nephew and paternal half-brother.
• Parodied in Lab Rats, when Adam tries to figure out how exactly he and his biological siblings are related to his long-lost sibling Daniel. He somehow ends up making Chase his wife and finding out he died years ago.
• The Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode "Playing Dead" has a family with a two parents, a stepdaughter from the wife's previous marriage, a son that the parents share together and a daughter that the stepfather shares with his stepdaughter.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Pharazon and his son Kemen, Tar-Miriel and Tar-Palantír are distant relatives to Elendil and his children, Isildur, Anárion and his Canon Foreigner daughter, Eärien, as they all are descendants of Elros Minyatur. This also makes Elrond their distant uncle, as he is Elros' brother.
• Married... with Children: "In Wanker County, nobody's really outside the family."
• Modern Family:
  • In an early episode, Luke (Claire's son) gets in a fight with Manny (Claire's father Jay's step-son) at school because Manny wouldn't stop referring to Luke as his nephew. Manny has also been known to refer to Claire and Mitchell (Jay's son) as his brother and sister, and at one point Haley (Claire's daughter) tried to have an unsupervised party by telling her mother "my uncle agreed to chaperone," without mentioning that she meant Manny. The fact that Manny actually made a pretty good chaperone just meant the joke was on her.
    Principal: I gather that you're all related... somehow.
  • Played for a quick joke, as everyone struggles to figure out how Jay and Gloria's new baby is related to each of them:
    • Joe is the half-brother to Claire, Mitchell, and Manny, despite being young enough to be the former two's son.
    • He is also the uncle to Alex, Haley, Luke, and Lily, despite being much younger than all of them.
    • And at the ripe old age of six, is the grand-uncle to Hayley and Dylan's twins.
• On The New Adventures of Old Christine, this didn't end up happening, but was played with a lot when Old Christine was dating New Christine's father, and New Christine was dating Old Christine's ex, Richard, with whom Old Christine had a son. There was one scene where Old Christine was trying to diagram their family tree if both of these relationships ended in marriage.
• NUMB3RS: In the Season 3 episode "Nine Wives", which deals with an Expy of the FLDS, a family tree diagram found in a suspect's trailer is so convoluted (due to the massive number of marriages each man has, as well as the prevalence of incest within the cult) that Charlie and Amita don't even recognize it as being a family tree. They only figure it out after Millie initially mistakes it for a cattle-breeding chart (which is close enough to "family tree" for Charlie and Amita to finally make the connection). Later in the episode, a mother and daughter at the center of the case are revealed to also be half-sisters; the father married one of his older daughters and had a child with her.
  Millie: (following a particular line) For example, this guy married his brother's third wife's second daughter. Ugh!
• Have you ever tried to draw out the family trees on The O.C.? It's upsetting. At one point, Ryan was dating his long-lost illegitimate adoptive aunt. Then he got back together with his ex-girlfriend Marissa, who also happened to be his adoptive step-aunt and later became his biological stepsister (albeit after she'd already died).
• On the Australian comedy-drama Offspring, the Proudman family seems to be getting like this. The father Darcy has two girls (protagonist Nina and her sister Billie, who couldn't bear a child with her partner so she got sperm donated from his brother instead, but that went down the gurgler) and a boy (Jimmy) by his estranged wife Geraldine, as well as a son (Ray) from a one night stand with Nina's work mate Cherie. Jimmy himself goes on to impregnate Nina's other work mate Zara. That's nothing, right? It gets more complicated at the end of Season 2 when it's revealed that Darcy isn't Nina's father, meaning she's not related to baby Ray at all.
• Once Upon a Time:
  • Henry, in spades. His mom is Emma. His dad is Baelfire, Rumplestiltskin's son. His grandparents are Snow White, Prince Charming, and Rumplestiltskin and his late wife Milah. He has five sets of great-grandparents: two from Charming (his birth mother Ruth and her husband, Robert; and his adoptive father King George and his wife), one and a half from Snow White (her birth parents are King Leopold and Queen Eva, and Leopold's second wife, Henry's step-great-grandmother: Regina, who is also his adoptive mother, thus making Henry his own great-uncle), Rumple's parents (Malcom/Peter Pan and Fiona/The Black Fairy), and Milah's unidentified parents.
  • There's also Charming's late twin brother James, Regina's mother Cora (the Queen of Hearts) and father Henry; and Henry's adopted aunt, Regina's long-lost half-sister Zelena, AKA the Wicked Witch of the West. And since the immortal Rumplestiltskin apparently had a mentor with benefits relationship with Regina's mother, Cora, leading to some speculation that he is Regina's father... Charming hangs a big, fat lampshade on the mess by saying it's a good thing the Fairy Tale culture doesn't have Thanksgiving—because that dinner would be awkward as hell.
  • The end of Season 3 adds Henry's newborn uncle Neal, the son of Charming and Snow White, and Rumple's second wife Belle and HER parents, Sir Maurice/Moe French and Collette, to the mix.
  • Season 4 adds Zelena, Regina's half-sister, being pregnant via rape by fraud with Robin (Regina's love interest). Regina is going to be the step-mother of her niece!. Season 5 reveals Belle's pregnancy, adding another uncle, named Gideon in season 6, who's younger than Henry.
  • Then, a few episodes later, along comes Rumplestiltskin's mother! And guess what? She is a fairy — the Black Fairy, to be precise — and is, exactly as expected, complete with evilness. Rumple had no chance at all!
  • Season 7 adds the New Enchanted Forest's Cinderella (not the same one from previous seasons), who becomes the mother of Henry's daughter Lucy, and has her own stepmom and stepsisters. Plus the Wish Realm version of Hook (who was tricked into sleeping with Mother Gothel and became the father of Alice of an alternate Wonderland) and Henry's own Wish Realm counterpart (who ends up adopted by Regina). Plus, Wish!Hook's Alice gets engaged to Zelena's daughter Robin. Also, Emma and Hook have a daughter named Hope, Henry's baby half-sister.
  • Throw in the fact that due to time travel and curses, Henry's parents, grandparents, step-grandfather, step-great-grandmother, and new paternal step-grandmother are all approximately the same age (late twenties to mid-thirties).
  • Lampshaded in the episode "Family Business", when Elsa learns the Snow Queen (who, incidentally, was also Emma's foster mother for a year, and views her as a surrogate sister) is her aunt:
    Elsa: Her name is Ingrid. I didn't even know my mother had any sisters. I'm as surprised as you are.
    Hook: Spend a little more time in this town, love, and you'll realise just about everyone's related.
  • When Rumple and Emma encounter Milah, Rumple's ex-wife in the Underworld, he recounts to her the whole tangled mess of their family, especially since Hook is the man Milah left Rumple for. Milah's dumbfounded reaction is priceless.
    Milah (to Emma): You've been with my former lover...and my son?
• On One Tree Hill, Karen had a baby, Lucas, with Dan Scott who had another son, Nathan, with his wife Deb six months later. Years later Karen ends up getting pregnant by Dan's brother Keith. Her daughter, Lily, is technically both Lucas's half-sister and his cousin.
• Orphan Black: Main character Sarah is a Project LEDA clone, and the clones all consider each other sisters, particularly the core group of her, Alison, Cosima, and Helena. Helena is also biologically Sarah's twin sister. Then there's Charlotte, the sole survivor of another generation of clones, who is technically another sister but is the same age as Sarah's own daughter. Sarah also has a foster brother, who in later seasons reunites with his biological half-sister. Then there's the set of six male Project CASTOR clones, who are biologically brothers to the LEDA clones. And then to make the whole thing even more complex, both sets of clones were derived from the mother of Sarah's foster mother, making Sarah, at least in terms of DNA, her own grandmother.
• Power Rangers Ninja Storm: Marah and Kapri are Lothor's nieces by marriage, but it's unclear whether their aunt/uncle used to be married to Lothor, married an unmentioned Watanabe sibling, or was Lothar's sister-in-law (Cam's mother).
• In The Pretender you have Jarod who is the son of Charles and Margaret and has a brother Kyle and a sister Emily. He also has a half-brother Ethan who is the son of Charles and Catherine Parker. Catherine also being the mother of Ms. Parker and her long-lost twin brother Mr. Lyle. The twins thought their father was Mr. Parker but in reality his long-lost brother Mr. Raines is their true biological father and Mr. Raines also had another child Annie with his wife Edna. Oh, and Brigitte's son may be the son of Mr. Lyle or his uncle/father Mr. Parker.
• Pretty Little Liars starts off with the DiLaurentis-Hastings lineages. Jason is actually the result of an extramarital affair between Jessica DiLaurentis and Peter Hastings. Thus, he's actually Melissa and Spencer's older half-brother. Jessica also has a secret Evil Twin named Mary, who is actually Spencer's biological mother, making Spencer and Alison first cousins. Jessica and Mary being identical twins technically also makes Spencer, Alison, and Jason full genetic siblings and Charlotte the latter two's half-sister (which is what they initially believed).
• Lister from Red Dwarf, who gave birth to twins via impregnation with his parallel universe female self ^note You read that right and is also his own father by an alternate universe Kochanski, meaning his children have only 50% of the genetic material they should have.
• RuPaul's Drag Race: In Drag culture, the traditional way a queen makes a name for herself is by learning under a mentor, her "Drag Mother" (or "Father" if a king). A drag mom can have several daughters, who will naturally view each other as sisters, and might eventually take daughters of their own, leading to drag grandmas, aunties, etc.^note This can lead to jokes about "incest" if related queens start a romantic/sexual relationship, and "babies having babies" if a queen takes a daughter while still being youngish herself On Drag Race, several queens across multiple seasons have been mother/daughter, sisters, or some other relation. This gets parodied in a Season 14 soap opera challenge featuring the families Davenport, Michaels, and O'Hara, the three most oft-recurring surnames in the series, as many (though not all) contestants with those names have been connected to each other in some manner. That being said, the queen who has had the most daughters compete on the show is Alyssa Edwards with six. Three direct proteges: Shangela, Laganja Estranja, and Plastique Tiara, and three she adopted into the family: Vivienne Pinay, Gia Gunn, and Cheryl Hole.
• Sisters: Teddy's ex-husband marries her younger sister Frankie, making Frankie simultaneously an aunt and stepmother to Teddy and Mitch's daughter Cat. When Frankie and Mitch have a child of their own, the child is both Cat's cousin and her half-brother. Adding yet another twist, because Frankie had fertility problems, middle sister Georgie had to serve as her surrogate, meaning she gave birth to her own nephew. Due to this, Georgie had considerable problems acknowledging that the child was Frankie's, not hers.
• The The Vampire Diaries universe has quite a few weird relations through marriages and adoptions. Some of the most interesting ones are Elena being stepsisters with Caroline and Alaric's children and Davina being both Hope's aunt (through marriage to Kol) and niece (through being Marcel's adopted daughter, who himself is Hope's adopted brother).
• Soap operas are notorious for using this trope. This is especially a given as time goes on due to most soap operas reaching long-runner status over several decades. The full list of particularly tangled soap opera family trees would be too long for this page, so here are a few examples:
  • All My Children: Bianca's first child is conceived when she's raped by Zach's brother. Her second is conceived through artificial insemination using Zach's sperm. Zach is/was married to Kendall, Bianca's sister, and they have a child. Kendall also had a child by Ryan who once donated sperm and was suspected to be the father of Bianca's second child, but was actually the father of another child entirely.
    • To make a long story short, Miranda (Bianca's older daughter) and Gabrielle (Bianca's younger daughter) are half-sisters as well as first cousins who share the same mother, but have different fathers who are brothers. Gabrielle and Ian (Zach and Kendall's son) are first cousins and half-siblings who share the same father, but have different mothers who are sisters. Miranda and Ian are double first cousins since their fathers are brothers and mothers are sisters. To make matters more complicated, Kendall and Bianca are also half-sisters, sharing the same mother in Erica Kane. This means that Gabrielle, Miranda, and Ian all only have one mutual grandparent.
    • That doesn't even cover the half of it. Let's just consider the Chandler family for a moment. Adam Chandler has been married thirteen times, and had two affairs. Between those marriages, he had five children (Hayley, J.R, Anna, Colby, and Miguel) and raised Skye as his own before discovering they weren't related. And he adopted his nephew Scott. J.R had an affair with Annie (wife #13) to break them up, and now they've fallen in love. But Annie is engaged to Scott, and used to be married to Ryan, who she had a daughter Emma with. Ryan was engaged to Greenlee (who's also Emma's godmother), but she died and then came back and married David out of spite because Ryan had started a relationship with Madison. He also had a child with Kendall, Erica's daughter (and by the way, Erica married Greenlee's dad Jackson). But wait! Because Erica's been married just as many times (including to Adam) and almost fell in love with Caleb, who's the nephew to Palmer Cortland. And his ex-wife had an affair with Adam. Plus there's the situation with Tad. He lives in a house with two daughters, each from different previous marriages, has a grown-up son who was also from a previous marriage, adopted Damon (who turned out to be his biological son anyways) and had a fling with Liza, who's Colby's mother, who's dating Damon. And then there's the fact Liza's mother married Adam's twin brother while Adam and she were married. It's like one giant loop-de-loop!
  • As the World Turns: The Snyder Family tree is a tangled family tree if ever there was one. Started out with salt of the earth Emma Snyder and her six children, which included Holden and Iva. Holden fell in love with Lily Walsh while working as a stable boy for her rich family. He later learned that that Lily was actually Iva's biological daughter who was conceived when she was raped by Joshua Snyder-Stricklyn... their cousin. But it's okay; you see, Iva was actually adopted. Holden and Lily then became a supercouple, and the family tree would only get more complicated from there.
  • The Bold and the Beautiful: The way that the Forrester and Logan families have intermingled over the years, made even worse by the fact that Brooke Logan has had children by Eric Forrester, Eric's stepson Ridge, and Ridge's half brother Nick Marone, while the rest of the characters don't seem to mind marrying and having children with their step-relatives or the former spouses of their siblings/parents/children.
  • Days of Our Lives: The Hortons and the Bradys have also intermingled several times (to the point where they may as well be one family, even though the writers don't quite see it that way), not to mention several connections with the Kiriakis and DiMera families (the latter of which apparently leading to John Black being his own uncle... somehow).
  • Eastenders: The Fowler-Beale clan was once quite extensive but has largely been supplanted by the extensive Branning-Jackson clan. In fact one character, Liam Butcher, is the blood relative of half the cast due to the fact that his mother Bianca Jackson belongs to both of the aforementioned clans, while his father Ricky Butcher has a few connections of his own.
    • How about the Mitchells? More just seem to be coming out the woodwork and creating more havoc for Walford. There was even a plot about the Secret Mitchell with Ronnie having a long-lost daughter she thought was dead, only for her to really die once she found out the truth.
  • The McQueens from Hollyoaks are an egregious example despite only appearing on-screen for three years (with Retcons of course saying they've lived there for over a decade and some members to have actually been McQueens but with different surnames), even having multiracial members and a vengeful son.
  • Graduados: In the beginning, Martín was the son of Loli Falsini and Pablo Catáneo, and everybody was happy. Then the telenovela began, and Loli realized that Martín's true father was Andy Goddzer, who had a one-night relation with her during the high-school graduation night in 1989. It was confirmed with a DNA test. This gave Martin a whole new family, and a total of 2 parents and 3 grandparents. Pablo has a brother, Augusto. Clemente Falsini, Loli's parent, got married to the younger Patricia, who in fact attended high school with Loli. And then... Pablo and Patricia had a secret romance, and Pablo left Patricia pregnant, but they told everybody that it was Clemente's son.
  • One Life to Live: Among the usual twists and turns, Jessica Buchanan is related to CJ and Sarah Roberts through both their father Cord (she is Cord's half-sister, making her their half-aunt) and their mother Tina (who is her half-aunt, making them her half-cousins as well).
    • Oh, it's a lot more complicated than just that. Originally within the show, Jessica was believed to be the only biological child of series heroine Viki Lord and her then-husband Clint Buchanan. When she was a teenager, a woman named Natalie Balsom came to town as she grew up believing that she was the daughter of Roxy Balsom and her husband Walter and the older sister to their son Rex. She revealed that she and Jessica had been switched at birth and SHE was Viki and Clint's daughter. Of course, later on, it was revealed that they BOTH were half-twins as Jessica was conceived when Viki was raped by series villain Mitch Laurence and Natalie was the biological daughter of Clint and Viki. Then the story gets even MORE twisted as it is revealed that Rex was the result of a one-night stand that Roxy had with Mitch, making him Jessica's biological half-brother. Before people can come to terms with that, it is THEN revealed that Rex was taken from his biological mother and switched with another baby Schuyler Joplin making HIM Jessica's half-brother instead. Rex was revealed to be the product of an affair that Clint had with Echo DiSavoy, making him Natalie's biological half-brother after all, though at first, everybody thought that Viki's husband at the time Charlie was his father. By the end of the show, it was revealed that Mitch WASN'T Jessica's father after all, making Jessica and Natalie full siblings and Rex their half-brother.
  • Guiding Light: Two women were married to each other's fathers, making them simultaneously each other's stepdaughters and stepmothers.
• Outlander: Due to multiple time travelers hopping back and forth between the 18th and 20th century, the Fraser/MacKenzie family tree is quite circuitous. First, Claire was already married to Frank Randall in the 20th century when she met and married Jamie Fraser in the 18th century. Jamie and Claire conceived Brianna who was then raised in the 20th century by Frank and Claire. Geillis Duncan, another time traveller, met Dougal MacKenzie, which eventually led to Roger MacKenzie Wakefield, a distant 20th century cousin to the Fraser family (Jamie is both the nephew of Roger's seven times great-grandfather Dougal and Roger's father-in-law after Roger and Brianna marry). Things are even more snarled with William Ransom, Jamie's illegitimate son. Between biology, marriage, and law, William technically has three sets of parents (biological: Jamie Fraser and Geneva Dunsany; legal: Geneva Dunsany and her husband Ludovic Ransom; adoptive: Geneva's sister Isobel Dunsany and Isobel's husband Lord John Grey). While Claire is in the 20th century, Jamie marries Laoghaire MacKenzie, gaining two stepdaughters, including Marsali who will go on to marry Jamie and Claire's adopted son Fergus. Then there was a brief stint of time where Lord John and Brianna (William's adoptive father and biological half-sister) were affianced during her first pregnancy to keep her from being forced into another marriage while Claire and Jamie searched for Roger.