Boyfriend Blocking Dad / Live-Action TV

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Boyfriend-Blocking Dad in Live-Action TV.

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• John Ritter's 8 Simple Rules was also based on this concept, particularly a very funny list from such a father. The full title, of course, was Eight Simple Rules for Dating my Teenage Daughter.
• Alias: Facing off with Jack Bristow is bad enough when you think he's just a very tall, broad-shouldered, poker-faced airplane parts manufacturing executive/bank manager/large glowery person who seems to know everything you get up to. Telling him you want to date — or worse, marry — Sydney when you know he's a Xanatos Speed Chess-playing double agent who keeps multiple caches of weapons around is the really fun part. The man has broken just about every rule in the book in the course of protecting his daughter, and he's probably broken rules that didn't even exist in the course of protecting her. Lampshaded by Dixon after it's revealed the lengths Jack was willing to go to, to protect Vaughan — just because it meant protecting his daughter.
  Vaughan: You know, it's funny. It's the first time I ever felt Jack accepted me.
  Dixon: Or else he manufactured a very elaborate scheme to postpone your wedding to his daughter.
• In the "Explorer" episode of Another Case of Milton Jones, Annette, daughter of camping tycoon Mr Millet, complains of having an overbearing dad. Millet forces Milton to row across the Pacific (as Product Placement) before he will let Milton marry his daughter, but reneges on this promise and locks her up in a fortress.
  Milton: And my heart went out to her, as she sat there in her cycle helmet and bubblewrap dress.
• Arrow:
  • In "Year's End", Tommy Merlyn says to Laurel Lance's dad "How are you?" and gets the response "Fully proficient with firearms". Of course since Laurel's sister died due to dating Tommy's best friend, you can't blame him.
  • In a flashback to when Laurel was dating Oliver Queen, she wants them to get an apartment because her father has threatened to taser Oliver if they're in a room together with the door closed.
  • In "Corto Maltese", John Diggle is cooing over his newborn daughter. When his wife jokes about her growing up and discovering boys, he says in the same tone of voice, "Well, that's what my Glock is for."
  • In "Emerald Archer", when Rene Ramirez gets the idea that William and Zoe might be into each other, he makes it a point to let the teens know he'll be in the room right outside theirs...cleaning his guns. Ironically William is actually gay, though no-one knows that at the time.
• Played with in an episode of The Big Bang Theory in which Penny pretends to still be dating Leonard when her father is in town. See, her dad loves Leonard: he's nice, stable, educated and intelligent, while Penny's previous boyfriends were... not. When Penny eventually comes clean, her dad sends her out of the room, makes a stern face at Leonard... then begs him to keep going after his daughter. He even helps Leonard out by making a big show of shouting, "Leave my daughter alone!" loudly enough so that Penny can hear, knowing that his disapproval has always made her more willing to date guys in the past.
• Blackadder:
  • Parodied in "Amy and Amiability", in which Blackadder is attempting to get the prince to marry the rich heiress Amy Hardwood to save his dwindling fortune:
    Blackadder: You have a beautiful and charming daughter, sir.
    Mr Hardwood: Indeed I do. I love her more than any pig, and that's saying summat!
    Blackadder: It certainly is.
    Mr Hardwood: And let me tell you, I'd no more place her in the hands of an unworthy man than I'd place my John Thomas in the hands of a lunatic with a pair of scissors.
    Blackadder: An attitude that does you credit, sir.
    Mr Hardwood: I'd rather take off all my clothes and paint my bottom blue than give her to a man who didn't love her!
    Blackadder: What self-respecting father could do more?
    Mr Hardwood: On the other hand, if he's a prince, he can have her for ten bob and a pickled egg.
  • Played with in "Duel and Duality", where Prince George, having spent the night with the Duke of Wellington's nieces, is horrified to discover that the Duke, who has sworn to kill anyone who takes sexual advantage of his family, has been back in England for several months.
• Ripley Holden in Blackpool veers into Squick territory over this, describing his daughter as a "wet dream" and trying to threaten and even bribe his daughter's "unsuitable" fiancée to get lost. Made worse by the fact that the man in question is her father's age. Add in the fact that the fiancé gets beaten up by Ripley's gay son because he thought that's what his father wanted and you have a family just MADE of Squick.
• Angela's dad (played by Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top fame) on Bones. He's scared Hodgins plenty of times and knocked him out, then tattooed him and abandoned him, twice. At the same time, he warns Hodgins that it's a very bad idea to ask him for permission to marry his free-spirited daughter. If she finds out, they're both dead.
  Angela's Dad: Hodgins, I've got cars, and I've got guitars, and I've got guns. You treat my little girl right, and you'll only see the business end of the cars and guitars.
• Castle:
  • Richard Castle whenever he runs across a case that hurts teenage girls... Alexis may be the most responsible one in the family, but there's no denying that he loves his daughter dearly. Though the standard scene where the father intimidates his daughter's date is defied when she goes out with Owen, as she insists that he gets rid of the fake severed head and bloodstained coat, and is ready to leave immediately.
  • Castle invokes this another time when he is talking with Beckett about Alexis' upcoming prom night and how he will instill fear into the young gentleman to ensure he didn't do anything untoward. While discussing this, Beckett revealed her father didn't do it (to her knowledge) but thinking back while talking she does admit her date was far more nervous after she stepped out of the room to finish getting ready, and left him alone with her father, than he was before.

• In an episode of CHiPs, the captain's adult daughter complains about her father's habit of greeting her dates while cleaning his gun when she lived at home.
• In Chuck, Casey instantly becomes this on meeting his college-aged daughter. Possibly he feels he's missed out on years of overprotectiveness. Now imagine how he feels after finding out that she's dating Morgan.
• Tommy Harris in Coronation Street. More recently, Owen Armstrong.
• CSI: Miami: In an episode that was otherwise a homage to The Hangover, the bride's dad really disapproved of the groom and at the first sign that he had hurt her (emotionally, by going to a strip club after swearing he wouldn't) he bribed a stripper to bring him out back, hogtied him and left him to die at sea in a tiny inflatable raft.
• CSI: NY: When Lucy was still a baby, Danny was already saying boys won't get close enough to get her pregnant. He wouldn't even let one of the male lab techs hold her the first time he and Lucy took her to work... she was only a week old.
• In Community episode "Basic Genealogy", Pierce is shown to be this of his adult ex-step-children.

• Dear White People: The motive behind Dean Fairbanks' strict parenting — to mold Troy into a model individual so that he won't face the same struggles his father did as a black man.
• Cain Dingle in Emmerdale has gotten violent on several occasions when he thinks someone is trying to take advantage of his little girl.
• In the Enemy at the Door episode "After the Ball", John Weston is an overprotective dad to his only daughter. He doesn't threaten Marie's dates, because he hasn't even got to the stage where he lets her have any; he supervises her social life very closely and has never let her had any kind of unchaperoned contact with the opposite sex. (She's not a legal adult yet, but she is old enough to reasonably find his attitude unfairly restrictive.) When she takes an opportunity to slip away and have a good time on her own initiative, it goes badly, at least partly because her sheltered upbringing has left her unprepared for what might go wrong.
• Eureka's Sheriff Jack Carter is a prime example. At the end of one episode, he handcuffed her to keep her from talking to a boy, and it was played for laughs. However, considering how she's implied to have acted before coming to him, it was a fairly understandable level of caution. He gets much better about that whole thing later on as she gets a bit older and more mature. At one point, we think the APB he's been given is about the Mystery of the Week as he rushes off... to confront his fifteen-year-old daughter who is wanted on charges of credit card fraud to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. All through the first season, it was played with, as his being protecting her from the law (he is in the business of "law enforcement" after all). After that, he started to relax as she became more comfortable and began to fit into the town. To the point that he has not voiced any problems with Zoey and her boyfriend going to colleges in the same city on the other side of the country from Eureka. When he walks in on them being... intimate, his only reaction is "now my day is complete" and then turns to work on the issue of the week. At the end of the episode, it is commented on his self-restraint not making any threats while they are making out in public.
• The father of Eddie's girlfriend Greta in the later seasons of Family Matters, to the point where he stops paying her college tuition when she won't break up with Eddie.
• In The Flash (2014), the first thing Gypsy's father Breacher (who also happens to be her boss) does upon stepping foot on Earth-1 is to try to kill her boyfriend Cisco. All Cisco knows is that some scary-looking Hispanic guy (helps to be played by Danny Trejo in full Machete mode) in a Badass Longcoat and with the same powerset as Cisco and Gypsy. He then reveals to Cisco that he hunts down and kills all of his daughter's boyfriends (she's weirdly resigned to that fact). If Cisco survives a full day without using his powers, Breacher will leave him alone. Breacher finally earns a measure of respect for Cisco after the latter stops him from killing Barry and another metahuman, showing that Cisco has balls. But he still doesn't like him! Also, the "overprotective" part of the trope only extends to boyfriends. Being her boss, he has no problem sending her after dangerous enemies.
• In Flashpoint, the father in "Jumping at Shadows" had a really good case for being Properly Paranoid since his daughter and family were under Witness Protection and the people gunning for his daughter managed to find them after bribing the police.
• The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air:
  • Philip Banks with Ashley. He could be that way with Hilary as well such as the episode when she was going to pose for Playboy. Though he was never as protective with her as he was with Ashley.
  • Will was also pretty protective of Ashley, to the point of throwing a fit when he sees her kissing boys.
  • Will meets one such dad of a girl he was currently dating. The dad however happens to be a pilot and tricks Will into a plane ride where he uses his flying skills to try and scare Will away from his daughter. It doesn't get much better when the plane stalls, they have to bail out and end up stuck alone in the forest together.
  • And another during the show's first season, who doesn't think ANYONE is good enough for his little girl, to the point where no one even bothers to ask her out because they know her dad will say "no".
• Friends:
  • When Monica and Richard tell her parents that they're dating Ross makes sure to snatch a baseball bat out of his father's hands before he hears the news. In the next scene Richard implies that Jack chased him out of the house and down the street. Jack's reaction is understandable as Richard is an old family friend meaning there's a significant age gap between him and Monica.
    Monica: So, are you sorry that I told them?
    Richard: No, it's been a long time since your dad and I went running.
  • Bruce Willis plays an overprotective dad to Ross's college-aged girlfriend, Elizabeth Stevens. He strongly disapproves of Ross dating his daughter and repeatedly antagonizes him, even threatening to expose their relationship and have him fired if he doesn't break up with her. Much like Jack, his disapproval is understandable since Ross is Elizabeth's teacher and there's an age gap between them.
• Danny Tanner of Full House, specially in regards to DJ.
• Gene Simmons of Gene Simmons Family Jewels is shown as an overprotective father to his daughter Sophie, since he knows what young guys want from his own past experience. He might as well breathe fire to any guy trying to get close to Sophie. He was even called a hypocrite by one of his friends.
• George in The George Lopez Show. He tries to scare almost all of her boyfriends away and succeeded with all but two of them.
• Sam Radford enjoys playing this to his stepdaughter Grace in Good Witch. He has a lot of fun Twerp Sweating her boyfriend, with Death Glare, Implied Death Threat, and inquiring about the boy's intentions. Unlike many examples on this page, he's actually a Nice Guy who approves of Luke—he just enjoys giving the guy a hard time. On a more serious note, though, he warns his Alpha Bitch ex-wife that if she wants to go through a complicated legal battle for custody over their son, he will oblige her, and she will lose.
• Subverted in one episode of Growing Pains. Carol's dad isn't like this, but in one episode where she sneaks a boy home without telling her parents and they come home early, she panics, and tells him that he's "insane and carries a gun". Naturally, that only makes the situation worse.
• H₂O: Just Add Water: Cleo's father is the type of father who has a hard time accepting that his daughter is growing up. He's especially against her dating, becoming hostile to Lewis every time Cleo shows romantic interest in him. Funnily enough, he simultaneously only approves of Lewis, being willing to team up with him if both of them think Cleo dating another boy.
• Mr. Noah Bennet (a.k.a. HRG) in Heroes is also an Overprotective Husband. The writers of the show figured they couldn't go without this in Season 2, playing the stock plot almost to the letter. Despite everyone involved knowing there was a damn good reason for caution.
• Joel Nash and Rhyss Sutherland in Home and Away.
• iCarly: As Carly's legal guardian Spencer can do this a few times, like in "iDate a Bad Boy". Spencer generally averts the trope though, trusting Carly to make good decisions about her movements and activities.
• The first rule of Lie to Me is that you don't mess with Cal Lightman's daughter. Ever. As people that make that mistake find out, he'll only begin with punching you in the face.
• Jack Foster towards Tess on Life with Boys.
• Ben with Alex on Lost, though for good reason, as women who become pregnant on the Island invariably die. Still, locking the kid in a cage and then brainwashing him A Clockwork Orange-style was a bit extreme. It's even reinforced in a parallel dimension in the final season, Ben gives up dreams of school-wide domination for Alex's benefit.
• Married... with Children:
  • Subverted: where Peg's father actually approves of Al, so much so that he literally forced Al at gunpoint to marry Peg after Al mistakenly proposed to Peg while drunk and later tried to get out of the marriage.
  • A Running Gag has Al frequently discovering his Dumb Blond daughter Kelly making out with a new loser in his house. Al always responds by grabbing the guy behind the neck and hustling him out the door, usually banging him into the wall beside the door before flinging him outside. Whenever she lands a rich guy, however, Al actively supports the relationship and tries to exploit it for his own benefit.
  • And when Bud confides that he has been dating his 40-year-old teacher, Al shows up at the school the next day to blast the woman as a "cradle robbing pervert" and bring in two cops to arrest her. Unfortunately, the woman was out, so Al just humiliated the completely innocent elderly substitute, but overall, kudos to Al for not buying into Double Standard Rape: Female on Male, even if the woman was "hot" and Bud was "consenting".
• NCIS: A particularly twisted example is seen in the episode "Heartland". The victim hails from Gibbs' hometown, and as a young man pursued the daughter of arguably the town's most prominent citizen. The father relentlessly forbade the young man from having anything to do with his daughter, but never gave a clear reason. Only after the victim's death is it revealed that he was in fact the man's illegitimate son. Incest aside, acknowledging the truth would mean acknowledging a potential heir to the man's fortune, so his daughter's husband ended up killing the old flame (though not because he knew the truth, but out of jealousy that his wife may have cheated on him).
• Once Upon a Time:
  • While he might have a point given that the man in question is Rumplestiltskin, Belle's father definitely crosses into this trope when his solution for getting Belle away from the man is to force her over the Storybrooke line, which would completely erase her Enchanted Forest memories, possibly for good.
  • Rumplestilkstin himself is an absurdly overprotective father, to the extent of murdering an innocent man whose cart might accidentally have hurt his son... even though said son actually came out fine and the man was apologetic. His slaughtering innocents left and right and insisting that Bae stay inside with him all the time and away from the big, bad world is one of the major contributing reasons to Bae leaving him.
  • David/Prince Charming ranges from hostile to reluctant when it comes to Captain Hook dating his daughter, Emma.
    Emma: Okay, Killian. We should get out of here before David decides to give you his Overprotective Dad Speech.
    Hook: Well, you can spare yourself the trouble, mate. I assure you your daughter couldn't be in better hands.
    David: That's exactly what worries me. Especially now that you have two of them.
• Our Miss Brooks: Mr. Conklin has this attitude toward his daughter Harriet, sometimes kicking off the plot of the week:
  • In "Madame Brooks Dubarry", Mr. Conklin unaccountably thinks that Miss Brooks is a "modern day dubarry" and carrying on with Mr. Boynton. This leads to him ordering Miss Brooks to have a talk with Harriet and ultimately leading to Mr. Conklin and Harriet spying on Mr. Boynton, Miss Brooks, and landlady Mrs. Davis from a hiding place in Mrs. Davis' living room.
  • Again, in "Parlor Game", Mr. Conklin believes that Harriet is growing up "far too fast". He's disgusted with her relationship with Walter Denton. To fix this, he plans Harriet, Walter, Miss Brooks and Mr. Boynton to spend a quiet evening at the Conklin house.
  • In "Cat Burglars", Harriet is mortified that her father forces her to have a babysitter after a series of cat burglaries in town.
• Subverted and Played for Laughs in Parks and Recreation. Jerry is not this trope, but Chris thinks he is. Cue the hilarity when Chris begins dating Jerry's daughter and goes out of his way to keep their relationship on the down-low, despite Jerry's explicit support and approval.
• Penn & Teller: Bullshit! takes two episodes arguing against and beating down this mindset. "Abstinence" deals with the Helicopter Parents thinking at the societal level and how the attendant lack of sex education is doing teens a disservice, while "Teen Sex" deals with the pitfalls of teen relationships and sexuality — including actual parents!
• An episode of Power Rangers Time Force had Ransik turn into this because his daughter Nadira fell for Blue Ranger Lucas. However, rather than threatening him, Ransik interrupts a fight with the Monster of the Week to help out, dusting off the young man's uniform, handing him some flowers to give Nadira, and then chewing out the MOTW for nearly ruining his daughter's date.
• Henry Spencer from Psych tends to show signs of this, from early as season one episode two.
  Henry: This is a derivative of methyl parathion. High-grade stuff. Whatever you're into, I want you to get out quick. I'm not kidding.
• Pushing Daisies gives us Chuck's father Charles Charles, when he gets resurrected.Of course it doesn't help that young Ned accidentally killed Charles Charles.
• Resident Alien: According to Asta, her father never likes any man she's close with (as her apparent first was an abusive prick, it might be at least somewhat justified).
• The River gives us Emilio, who won't even let his teenage daughter be alone with a guy. Of course, he ends up being right, but not for the reason he thinks.
• Roseanne has a classic overprotective dad in Dan Conner as played by John Goodman, with an only marginally more rational Overprotective Mom in Roseanne herself.
• Turk in Scrubs has an infant daughter but already plans to be this. He claims he won't tell his daughter that she has a vagina until she's 18. On the other hand, he's eager to get Izzie married to JD's son Sam.
• Even though he was only a one-shot character, the father of Jerry's Girl of the Week from "The Raincoats" episodes of Seinfeld is a good example. If you're still grounding your daughter and preventing her from seeing her boyfriend when she's old enough to rent an apartment (or at least a car), then it's probably safe to say that it's moved outside being a "tough but fair" approach to parenting and into the realm of control freakish-ness. Jack Byrnes didn't tell us he had family there. Though there was some Hypocritical Humor to be had in the later episode "The Hamptons". For all his religious faith, it only took a dish of food for a peace offering.
• Rob Fitch (Katie and Emily's dad) in Skins.
  Rob: They're not still virgins tomorrow, I'll hunt you down like dogs.
• Special Ops: Lioness: Joe immediately orders the boy whom her daughter Kate's making out with out when she finds them together.
• Proving that Even Evil Has Loved Ones, Gul Dukat from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine tends to overreact quite spectacularly to his daughter Ziyal's feelings for Garak. Roughing the tailor up in the middle of Quark's for holding Ziyal's hand before embarking on a dangerous mission comes to mind. However, this has as much to do with the identity of the man in question as with a general protectiveness of his daughter; it's well-established by this point that Dukat and Garak hate each other, possibly because Garak might have had something to do with Dukat's father's death.
• In a case of What Could Have Been, an episode was planned for Star Trek: The Original Series in which Kirk would have courted Dr. McCoy's daughter. The storyline would have involved McCoy being torn between his friendship with Kirk and his desire to protect his daughter.
• Star Trek: Picard: In the episode "The Bounty" it takes Geordi two seconds to see Jack is quite interested in his daughter Sydney and even less time to tell Jack to stay away from her.
• Jim Hopper's behavior in the early episodes of Stranger Things 3 might be the least justified instance in the history of the trope, for two reasons: first, Mike Wheeler is not at all the kind of boy who would put his own desires ahead of his girlfriend's wellbeing, and second, any boy who tries to pressure Jane Hopper into doing something outside her comfort zone and won't take no for an answer is liable to find himself hurled across the room.
• That '70s Show:
  • After Kelso gets a girl pregnant and she bears his illegitimate daughter, he finds himself unable to take advantage of a Dumb Blonde as he can't stop worrying about his daughter being exposed to some sex-crazed jerk. He eventually decides that the only way to have guilt-free sex is to get the father's permission. This . . . doesn't quite work. It doesn't help that he says something very close to: "I'd like to have sex with your daughter and I thought I'd ask you first because I couldn't help but worry about my own illegitimate baby girl."
  • Bob Pinciotti was like this with Donna in relation to her dating Eric, especially after finding out the two of them had sex.
  • Played for Laughs when Red decides to "convince" Kelso not to date his daughter Laurie.
• Subverted in True Blood when the vampire Bill Compton threatens to throw the mortal Hoyt Fortenberry through a closed window when Bill discovers Hoyt and Jessica, who is Bill's progeny (or is it his ward?), making out in his living room. Bill's physical threats were intended to protect Hoyt in case Jessica's love lust turned to blood lust.
• The West Wing:
  • Played straight with Jed Bartlet for six seasons, particularly toward his youngest daughter Zoey.
  • Often lampshaded (especially in the sixth season), in which his wife would make fun of him for being a cliché. Fortunately for him, being President of the United States came in very handy for intimidating potential mates.
    President Josiah Bartlet: Just remember these two things: she's nineteen years old, and the 82nd Airborne works for me.
  • In the seventh season, when his middle daughter, Ellie, was getting married to a nerd named Vic, he deliberately engineered a situation where Vic would get swarmed by backslapping military brass. The nerd eventually wins over Bartlet, of course.
• Parodied with Hermes Pinzan in Yo soy Betty, la fea, who follows the trope to a T, but the daughter he protects so obsessively is such an ugly, nerdy and wholesome woman that he shouldn't have any reason for worry... Or has he?

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