My Beloved Smother / Live-Action TV

Mothers who smother and control their offspring in Live-Action TV series

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In General:

• Most American sitcoms from the late '90s to nowadays have at least one of these:
  • There are plenty of British examples as well. Ronnie Corbett played a middle-aged man still living at home with his under-the-thumb father and overbearing mother in the sitcom Sorry!. His mother refuses to accept he is forty-six and smothers Timothy hopelessly as if he were still a child, despite all his attempts to escape. (She gives Timothy's sister very short shrift, in comparison). Also, witness Hyacinth Bucket's attitude to her rather fey son in Keeping Up Appearances.
  • There's the mother (Doug's) in The King of Queens, who deviates between this and lying all the time. Deacon's mother-in-law is also overbearing and relentless in her criticisms.
  • George and Jerry's moms from Seinfeld.
  • Fran's mother from The Nanny is an example of the mother-daughter relationship, with the running joke of her badgering Fran to get married and have kids.
  • Everybody Loves Raymond:
    • Marie Barone is a master in the art of using food as an emotional manipulation tool. Seriously, this trope could've easily been named The Marie.
    • Debra does act just as bad as Marie though. In one episode, she becomes insecure that the kids are having fun with a very good babysitter and sacks her purely out of jealousy. A long arc across the series shows she is growing, slowly and steadily, into an even worse version of Marie, as she proves to be just as passive-aggressive and selfish and, unlike Marie, openly abusive.
  • Malcolm in the Middle:
    • Lois treats Malcolm (and only Malcolm, much to his frustration) this way. Her attempts to help him reach his full potential run the gamut from embarrassing (see "Malcolm Visits College") to insane (see the quote below):
      Lois: When I pick you a wife, I'll let her give you your precious space.
    • Dabney's mother is absolutely horrible. She's conditioned him to be outside of her shower with a towel ready for when she comes out. A lot of their dialogue really cranks up the creepiness-factor, with all of the unresolved sexual tension it sometimes seems they have. In the episode "Hal's Friend":
      Dabney: I know you think I'm a Mama's Boy...
      Malcolm: No, mama's boys are laughing at you, with their moms.
      • Then during a paintball match, getting shot with one pellet trips Dabney's Rage Breaking Point, and he goes absolutely berserk:
        Dabney: BRUSH YOUR OWN DAMN HAIR! GET YOUR OWN DAMN TOWEL! ONE HUNDRED! NINETY-NINE! NINETY-EIGHT! NINETY-SEVEN...!
        Stevie: (wheezing) I call... Dabney's team.
    • Stevie's mom. "Stevie! Stevie! Stevie! Stevie! Stevie! Stevie!!"
  • Carl Winslow of Family Matters accuses Harriet of being like this, which she shoots down with, "Take a long look at me. And a long look at you. Now, which of us looks more likely to smother somebody?"
  • Al's mom on Home Improvement is said to be one, though she never appears onscreen.

By Creator:

• Van Kooten En De Bie: Mother and son Van Putten. Van Putten is a neurotic 40-year-old man who, to his frustration, still lives with his mother.

By Series:

• One of these named Barbara shows up in 1000 Ways to Die. She's shown whining at her daughter-in-law Sabrina because she cooks too many vegetables, then slapping her in the middle of the discussion and almost getting gutted by the pissed-off Sabrina's cooking knife. Sabrina storms out, Barbara tries to get some pizza from an over-full refrigerator... and the fridge falls on her, crushing the Asshole Victim to death. The title of the sketch? "Smother In-Law".
• Accused (2023): In "Jessie's Story" Kara is very overprotective of Jessie, and the moment it looks like Jessie wants to know who her father is via a DNA test, she has a breakdown in front of her and guilt trips Jessie into discarding the test, creates a false donor profile to try and trick Jessie into being content, then later has a meltdown when it looks like Jessie is getting too close to the neighbor's son Will. It's revealed this stems from Jessie being Will's half-sister after Kara had a drunken one-night-stand with Will's father Dominic, a secret she kept from everyone out of fear that Dominic would sue for custody and take Jessie from her, when the thing Kara wanted more than anything was to be a mother.
• Erica Kane of All My Children could sometimes be smothering and overbearing with her daughters Bianca, Kendall, and later her son, Josh.
• Lucille Bluth of Arrested Development with her youngest son, Buster.
• Being Human (US): Max's mother is even trying to control his life from the grave. She's convinced no woman is good enough for him, possessing Sally to make her break up with him. At last she concedes that she's actually ruining his life this way, and lets up.
• The Big Bang Theory:
  • Howard Wolowitz's mom seems to genuinely believe that he's still literally a child; she refers to his job as "school" and when he takes the day off, she asks if she should have someone bring him his homework. Then again, she does know exactly how old he is, as evidenced when she tells Howard that he's almost 30-years-old after his remarks about leaving the nest. It's more that she insists on treating him like a child than her actually believing he still is one.
    • In Howard's case, he allows his mother to do this (despite how much it aggravates him sometimes) because his father walked out on him and his mom when Howard was just a kid. Howard decided to always be "her little boy" so she wouldn't feel worthless.
    • When the group is discussing how their lives would be if they hadn't met Sheldon, Howard (who would have never met Penny, and therefore never met Bernardette) imagines himself living alone and caring for his mother's corpse, a la Norman Bates.
      Amy: Wait, did she die or did you kill her?
      Howard: Meh, to-may-to, to-mah-to, the important thing is she's dead.
  • Bernadette's mother too, which is how she and Howard initially connect during their first date.
  • Amy's mother as well; she apparently used to lock her in a "sin closet" as a child. When Amy gets her ears pierced as an adult, she makes Amy sit in Penny's closet. When she finally makes her proper onscreen debut, she is a sour woman who constantly criticizes Amy and dominates her husband to the point that he can't get a word in. When Sheldon and Amy's wedding is slightly delayed her immediate reaction is to declare the whole thing a mistake and drag Amy home. Only intervention from Penny keeps her from doing so.
• Billy the Exterminator: Donnie is this to Billy and Ricky (especially Ricky). Case in point, when Billy and Ricky rescue a baby alligator, they name it "Donnie" after their mother.
• Big Sky: Helen, Roland's mother, is a subversion. At first it seems like she's this since he still lives with her in his late thirties. She constantly criticizes and nags him, but it turns out this is to make something of himself other than just working as a truck driver. It thus turns out she's not smothering him, but trying to push Ronald in a better direction (it doesn't work).
• Black Mirror explores this in "ArkAngel". Marie is an overprotective mother who installs an experimental and controversial brain implant into her daughter Sara. Marie always knows where Sara is and what she is seeing and can even activate a Perception Filter remotely. Of course this is a very unhealthy violation of her privacy and free will and it ends badly for her.
• Stephanie Forrester on The Bold and the Beautiful, though only with Ridge, her eldest son. Her smothering affection and desire to control his life has led to numerous characters suggesting that she's actually in love with her own son. At one point she went as far as to frame Ridge's paternal half-brother for a murder Ridge committed - and justifying it.
• The Boys (2019): Hughie still lives with his father Hugh Campbell Sr. (although as much due to Hughie being a bit of a doormat at the series' start as due to his father's attitude), and the latter contacts Hughie's childhood pediatrician for grief counseling after Hughie's girlfriend dies, to Hughie's irritation.
• Nora Walker on Brothers & Sisters is this for her sons and daughters alike, as well as the illegitimate children of her late husband - despite the fact that some of them are around 40! She is wholly incapable of not trying to control their lives and will relentlessly stalk escapees into other countries (well, Mexico anyway) because she cannot allow them to be outside the range of her influence. The only exception was her daughter Kitty, who managed to spend several years living in New York because Kitty's passionate political conservatism clashed with Nora's equally passionate liberalism leading to them fighting constantly until Kitty moved away.
• Buffyverse:
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • The show has a mother-daughter variant, where Catherine Madison pressures her daughter to be just like her. When Amy refuses, Catherine uses magic to switch places with her daughter.
    • Spike's mother. Smothering went sideways into sick, evil-land when newly minted vampire Spike turns his own mother. Spike's mother, who is of course now possessed by a demon, tries to shag him. She claims she couldn't wait to get rid of him.
  • On Angel, Phantom Dennis's mother walled him up rather than let him run off & get married. His spirit destroys her ghost.
• Michael Westen's mom Madeleine in Burn Notice, at least in season 1. She eventually becomes a low-action sort of Mama Bear, to the point of standing up to the FBI to protect him. It's a thoroughly suitable retirement for Christine Cagney.
• A stock obstacle for patients of the week on Call the Midwife. Some, like the mother of the diabetic with the Teenage Pregnancy, are depicted as being pills in general. Others, like the mother-in-law who pressures her daughter-in-law into an onerous and ultimately dangerous period of seclusion, get a Freudian Excuse and a generally loving relationship to their families. All are a real pain for the mothers-to-be and their medical providers.
• Cheers: Esther "Ma" Clavin, Cliff's mother. She's also extremely emotionally abusive, with Cliff mentioning she's feigned heart attacks just to win arguments. She's disappointed in the way Cliff's turned out, but dialogue through the series also makes clear she's primarily responsible for this. Bizarrely, she also comes across as a Cool Old Lady whenever she appears, though meeting her in the flesh does cause Frasier to quip "suddenly I have this image of Cliff being heroically well-adjusted!"
• Control Z: Nora is quite protective of Sofia, probably due to losing her husband/Sofia's father. She's often shown asking Sofia many questions regarding people her daughter hangs out with. For her part, Sofia is quite annoyed by this and implores her mom to back off.
• CSI:
  • Since Greg Sanders was an only child, his mother became so overprotective she never let him play sports in high school and once took him to the ER for a bloody nose. After he was savagely beaten trying to stop a crime, he was worried at how she would react considering he never told her he transferred from the lab to field work.
  • Ruthless attorney Diana Chase from season 6 episode "Rashomama". Basically, the woman was a rabid pit bull in human skin who terrorized her daughter-in-law to be and everyone else, with the exception of her son Adam, whom she doted on. The son in question thinks she's wonderful. Everybody else is scared shitless of her.
• Pike's mum in Dad's Army, who made him wear a scarf whenever he went on parade as a result of his 'croup' (an illness usually only found in infants and young children). It's implied on several occasions that much of her over-mothering was a desperate attempt to prevent him from being called up to fight in the war.
• Dallas matriarch Miss Ellie throws a crying jag every time her thirtysomething (Bobby) and fortysomething (J.R.) sons even suggest moving out of the Southfork ranch.
• Decoy: Mrs. Morgan from "The Sound of Tears" raised her son Ken alone and claimed to know his every thought and action. She controlled every aspect of his life, even driving his fiancee away so she could have him to herself.
• Degrassi: The Next Generation brings us Mrs. Torres, mother to Drew and Adam Torres. She is the representative of the school board, but those duties come after running Drew's life and lamenting Adam's choices. Well, that's on a nice day, on a mean day she uses the school board's power to help control Drew's life and lament Adam's choices.
• Characters played by Kyle MacLachlan seem to attract these moms. Orson Hodges's "crazy mother" Gloria from Desperate Housewives was both this and an Evil Matriarch, completely obsessed with controlling her son's life: she guilt-trips him with his father's suicide (despite the fact that she killed him) ever since he was a teenager, supports Orson's Yandere ex-wife Alma to the point of killing his mistress Monique, and endlessly interferes with his and Bree's married life, especially by telling Bree about Monique specifically to plant doubts in her heart about him, helping Alma rape Orson if it'll mean she can bear his child, and locking Alma away when she gives up and trying to kill Bree herself..
• In Diagnosis: Murder episode "A Model Murder", Catherine, having had bad experience with her husband and wanting to avoid her daughter Wendy having the same, has actually murdered Wendy's two previous fiancées and is going to murder a third.
• This was a running gag with one of Sally Rogers' recurring dates, Herman Glimpshire, on The Dick Van Dyke Show.
• Doc Martin: After being left virtually penniless Martin's mother, in series six, moves to Portwenn intent on invoking this trope.
• Donna's mum in Doctor Who. Jackie Tyler could be a bit like this as well, but she was nothing compared to Sylvia Noble, who wanted her to apply for a job she didn't want to improve her chances of getting married, assumed she was playing a silly trick when she disappeared from her wedding and kept putting her down while she was trying to put her life back together. The season finale, though, made it quite clear that she really did care for Donna.
• The Empress: Though her son is ostensibly the emperor, it's well known that Archduchess Sophie calls the shots in the Habsburg dynasty. Maximilian tells Franz that his reputation in Italy is that their mother is the real ruler and Franz just cowers when the Prussians come around.
• In Falling Water, Tess' mother thoroughly documented every supposed neurosis she had growing up, which may go a long way toward explaining how she ended up in a mental hospital for a time.
• Frasier:
  • Frasier Crane's mother Hester — in Cheers she threatens to kill Diane if she doesn't stop dating her son ("I've got a gun and I'm not afraid to use it!"), and later tries to bribe Sam into stealing Diane back from Frasier.
  • Daphne Moon's horrendous mother still seeks to criticise, dominate and exert control from six thousand miles away in Manchester, England. It gets even worse when she moves to Seattle.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Lysa Arryn keeps her son Robin with her in a small mountaintop fortress, caters to his every whim, and breastfeeds him until he's at least six.
  • Cersei tried to be this for her children. The Battle of Blackwater worsens for the Lannisters because Cersei recalls Joffrey to the Red Keep despite him being in little danger. However, she has so far failed at it rather spectacularly, with Joffrey becoming an uncontrollable monster, Myrcella being spirited off to Dorne specifically to get her out of Cersei's clutches, and with Tommen being virtually a non-entity to her — so it's far too late to start anew when he becomes King. Also, another woman has already commanded his affections: Margaery Tyrell. True to the trope though, Cersei fights Margaery fiercely for control of Tommen. In the end, the young King is forced to Take a Third Option, committing suicide.
• Eli's deceased mother (to some extent) in Ghost Whisperer. Whatever her behavior was like in life, it seems to have amped up since she's discovered her son can communicate with the dead.
• Gilmore Girls: Emily Gilmore is this to a T. She believes that she, and only she, knows what is right for her daughter, Lorelai, and her granddaughter, Rory, and will go to insane lengths to try to make these things come to pass. Some particular highlights include when she threw a tantrum over Lorelai paying back the money she had borrowed because it meant that Lorelai and Rory would no longer be obligated to see her regularly and when she pushed Rory's father, Christopher, into making a pass at the already happily-coupled-up Lorelai because she didn't like Lorelai's boyfriend.
• The Goldbergs: Beverly Goldberg. The woman won't keep smothering her children and refuses to see that it's wrong to the level of "yell-at-her-that-she-is-making-your-life-hell-and-she-will-ignore-it" I Reject Your Reality. She does everything because she wishes to be loved by her children, but it's got to be her way, and this means either not showing enough love at the moment she demands it or (worse yet) showing a little more love than usual means that she will become even more annoying to whoever drew her attention.
• The Golden Girls:
  • In "Mother Load", Blanche starts dating a newscaster only to find that his controlling mother disapproves of their relationship. Paying Blanche a visit to demand that she not see her son anymore, the mother states "I'm looking for the cheap Jezebel who's ruining my Gerald's life." Keep in mind that Blanche and Gerald are in their fifties at least. It's clear this isn't the first time she's gotten between him and a potential girlfriend, as revealed when he finally gets fed up with her behavior and, with Blanche's encouragement, tells her he's not going to let her push him around anymore and do what he really wants — which, to Blanche's stunned shock, is to go back to an ex-girlfriend named Christina. His mother is last seen following him out the door, still trying to control him by saying "We don't like Christina, remember?"
  • "Blanche and the Younger Man" features an interesting inversion of the trope. Rose's mother Alma comes to visit and quickly bonds with fellow Cool Old Lady Sophia, but in this case, it's Rose who ends up smothering her, insisting that she knows best and refusing to let her do anything fun. Alma eventually tells Rose that she needs to respect her independence, and Dorothy agrees, pointing out that Rose is being the type of over-controlling nag they all complained about as teenagers.
• Grey's Anatomy: According to Levi Schmitt, his mother freaks out about everything and had three separate conversations with him about purchasing a new backpack as she was worried it wouldn't hold everything he needed and that it could accidentally strangle him.
• Veronica Harrington in The Haves and the Have Nots.
• Becoming a sociopathic killer? Blame being raised by your smothering (adoptive)(?) mother. It's what Sylar realized in Heroes.
• Freddie's mom on iCarly. She entirely subverted the type with her eager approval of the first girl to show interest in him...and then whipsawed back to type by saying "..this may never happen again!". He was in eighth grade when this all happened.
• Intergalactic: Tula, although she does love Genevieve, also tries to control her, such as by putting a "chastity circuit" into Genevieve's cybernetic implant that will stop her having sex without her knowing it.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): Lampshaded by Claudia in "...The Ruthless Pursuit of Blood with All a Child's Demanding" when she scrawls in her journal that "Daddy Lou can be smotherin'."

• Just Shoot Me!: Nina dates a guy briefly whose mom is an epic one. He still lives with her, and she tried her hardest to drive them apart, using every means at her disposal. In the end, he chooses her over Nina.
• Law & Order: They show up frequently.
  • The Season 2 episode "Aria" has a mother who became so obsessed with making her daughter an actress, she forced her to start doing hardcore porn for the exposure, and getting her into hard drugs so she could get through the shooting; said daughter ends up Driven to Suicide and as the Victim of the Week.
  • Law & Order: Criminal Intent actually had an episode titled "Smother", who killed her son's pregnant fiancée.
  • Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
    • One episode of SVU from Season 2 had Margot Kidder star as the Smother to Chad Lowe's unbalanced son. Turns out that not only was she too controlling, she turned the relationship sexual... which would have been bad enough, except that Chad Lowe's character was a bit too unbalanced and killed her, then stayed in bed with her very bloodied corpse.
    • In another episode in Season 5, an overprotective mother convinces her older son to kill his younger brother, because she doesn't want them to go into foster care. She claims that she was protecting them, and considers foster care hellish, but wants nothing more than to control their lives. And then it's revealed that she has an even older son whom she abandoned in the foster care system and lied about to the other two. When he shows up again, she completely loses it.
    • In Season 6's "Intoxicated" had another mother demanding the detectives to charge her daughter's boyfriend with rape, though to be fair it could be considered as such because she is 15 and he is 21. On the other hand, even Benson deems her over-controlling since she is doing this more due to being a single mother abandoned by her husband and believes the same happen to her daughter. Eventually, her behavior leads to her being killed by her child, but it turns out she did it in self-defense since she was also an alcoholic that abused her.
    • Olivia's mother didn't take it to homicidal levels, but she was pretty awful too, being an abusive alcoholic. Olivia once recounted an incident when she wanted to leave home and move in with her boyfriend — her mother flipped out and attacked Olivia while screaming that no one else could have her.
    • In Season 12, Episode 1, the little girl sends an IM referring to her "smother" explicitly, it is later revealed that her mother and father had lost another little girl 10 years ago and had adopted this one to look, dress, and act just like her, going so far as to get her a nose job and dye her hair.
• Longmire: Travis Murphy's mother counts as one. She frequently blocks the Sheriff's Department's attempts to talk with her son, especially after he was fired. This lead to her breaking into her son's room to film Walt's questioning of Travis, to keep as evidence of any wrongdoing. She was also very critical of Vic's and Travis' relationship.
• Rhoda's mother Ida, on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (and later Rhoda).
• Modern Family: Jay's ex-wife DeDe has this relationship with Mitchell, her only son. It mainly manifests through her utter disdain for Cameron, Mitch's boyfriend and eventual husband; DeDe thinks that Cam isn't good enough for her "baby" and has no qualms about dropping passive-aggressive hints about it. Cam summarizes the trope:
  Cam: There's a fish in nature that swims around with its babies in its mouth. That fish would look at Mitchell's relationship with his mother and say "That's messed up."
• Mrs. B on Mommas Boys; when asked to select between two women for her son Jojo to have a final date with, she refused to select either, forcing Jojo to take his mother on the final date.
• ''Monk: In episode "A Model Murder", Catherine, having had bad experience with her husband and wanting to avoid Wendy having the same, has actually murdered her two previous fiancées and is going to murder a third.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: The Mrs. Niggerbaiter sketch in which Cleese plays an adult man who is Minister of Overseas Development, but is still treated like a baby by both his mother and her friend, Mrs. Niggerbaiter. Terry Gilliam commented that the sketch was a satire of many mothers' tendencies to keep belittling their offspring, even when they're already adults.
• Susan Harper of My Family insists on personal intervention in every aspect of her children's lives. As a result of which, they occasionally go to extreme lengths to keep her away. Fortunately, Janey is very good at it; having kept the identity of her own child's father a secret from her for years and secretly planned her entire wedding ceremony behind her back.
• An episode of My So-Called Life has the mother-daughter variant, where Patty is competing with her mother throughout.
• NCIS: New Orleans: Sebastian's mother is this: when she visits, she immediately starts straightening up his apartment, is constantly reminding him to use hand sanitizer, tells him he shouldn't court the cafe waitress because she has piercings and tattoos, won't let him eat eggs because he's "allergic" (he's not), and insists on going out to breakfast with him before he goes to work every day she's in town. Oddly enough, she starts to back down after he's kidnapped as part of a prison break plot and not only survives but manages to get the kidnappers arrested and successfully defends himself against the biggest and meanest one of the lot. The incident is enough to prove to her that he's no longer the weak, sickly boy that she remembers.
• In The OA The OA's adopted mother Nancy gradually turns out to be one of these, ultimately admitting she adopted a blind child solely because she wanted a child that would always need her.
• Our Miss Brooks: Mr. Boynton's mother is a kind woman, but he hangs on her every word:
  • A few episodes suggest Mr. Boynton is still receiving money from home.
  • In "Mr. Conklin Plays Detective", Mr. Boynton gets into trouble for using Mr. Conklin's telephone to make the long-distance call his mother told him to make.
  • The radio episodes "Mr. Boynton's Parents" and "Former Student Visits", suggest Mrs. Boynton has very definite ideas as to the type of woman M. Boynton should marry . . . .
  • In the series' the cinematic Grand Finale, Mr. Boynton ends up buying a house to take care of his ailing mother. However, the elder Mrs. Boynton is ultimately a kind woman and eventually conspires with Mrs. Davis to ensure Miss Brooks is able to marry her son and live Happily Ever After.
    Mrs. Boynton: Believe me, my dear, I wouldn't stand in the way of your happiness for all the world!
• Debbie Novotny of Queer as Folk (US) behaves like this not only to her son Michael, but to her son's best friend Brian, and her own younger brother Vic. Come to think of it, she does this to the entire population of Liberty Avenue. Interestingly, Brian's own mother Joanie is the exact opposite of this, and coupled with Brian's father being an abusive alcoholic, it's implied that the only reason Brian didn't turn out more screwed up than he did is that Debbie cared for him when he was a teenager.
• Samson En Gert: Octaaf is constantly belittled and domineered by his mother. She claims everything he does right is from her side of the family, while everything he does wrong is from his father's side of the family.
• In Say Yes to the Dress, the brides' mothers/stepmothers/mothers-in-law/grandmothers that fit in this trope tend to show up so frequently, it reaches Running Gag levels. It's especially bad in the case of the Atlanta Spin-Off, where Monte and Lori are almost Once an Episode stuck with overbearing older women that treat the brides-to-be like little girls and try to rule everything.
• Scrubs:
  • Ted the lawyer. Many, many times he would be overheard giving lovey-dovey 'I miss you sweetums' talk over the phone. Sounds like he finally found a girl, huh? Nope. It's his MOM. Other dialogue suggests much wrongness, like how her feet are cold.
  • J.D.'s mother praised him so much that he still thinks she was the perfect woman.
• Sex and the City's Bunny, mother of Charlotte's first husband Trey. To the point where she saw nothing wrong with barging into their bedroom in the middle of the night to rub Vick's on his chest (he had a cold), or in the morning to wake him up as though he was still ten years old instead of thirty-something (gets even worse when you realize that she had to get out of her own bed, leave her place and drive over to their place to do this). Not until she walks in on them having sex does it finally dawn on her how out of line her behavior is.
• Timothy's mother from Soap. When he left the priesthood to marry Corinne, she got extremely upset and attempted to murder Corinne, who she labeled as a whore (Corinne did sleep around a lot, so there's some justification). Later she curses their wedding and eventually has a heart attack on their wedding night.
• The Swedish sitcom Solsidan has an example of this. The main character Alexander Lövström buys his mothers' house in the first episode and then she just won't let go leading his pregnant girlfriend Anna to become very annoyed at Alexander for not telling her off. She keeps doing this for the entire series at the moment of this edit. This may change if more seasons are produced.
• Star Trek:
  • Although she's often portrayed sympathetically, Lwaxana Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation is loud and overbearing, overprotective of her daughter Deanna (while simultaneously encouraging the straitlaced Deanna to loosen up), and constantly bothers her about getting married. It's eventually revealed that this is the result of her older daughter, Kestra, dying in an accident when Deanna was a baby, something for which Lwaxana blames herself.
  • Yanas Tigan from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Prodigal Daughter". She wants her children at home and under her control. In fact, this includes possible Malicious Misnaming her daughter Ezri who, as a joined Trill, uses the symbiont's name (Dax) instead of her own last name.
• Dean Winchester of Supernatural is this in the early seasons. It was drilled into him all throughout childhood that he had to protect Sammy, and as a result, he's willing to go to ridiculous lengths to ensure Sam's wellbeing. A significant arc in his Character Development is Sam pointing out that Dean has to "let [Sam] grow up". He does eventually get better and starts treating Sam more like an adult who can take care of himself, but his viciously protective instincts still kick in from time to time, occasionally leading to questionable decisions that royally piss Sam off.
• Eric Forman's mother, Kitty, in That '70s Show. She went into a depression after learning her son had sex.
• In That's So Raven, Victor Baxter, the father of Raven's family, is like a male version of this. He repeatedly signs himself and Cory up for father-son whatever classes, which normally turn out bad. He also once opened up a mobile restaurant called "Baxter and Son" because he thought it was what Cory wanted. He apparently forgot that it was HIM that put up the sign.
• In the Three's Company episode "Jack's Other Mother", an elderly woman named Gladys latches onto Jack and begins interfering in his personal life like an overbearing mother. Glady also mentions that she treated her own son in a similar manner, which ultimately prompted him to kick her out of the house. Apparently she ruined his honeymoon!
• Timeless: Denise's mother, who is quite conservative, was extremely uncomfortable with her becoming a cop when she was younger. She also was closeted about her lesbianism in those days, for fear of how her mother would react. Denise states later though she came out, with her mother eventually accepting this.

• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • "Young Man's Fancy" is about a pair of newlyweds who initially plan on selling the husband's old house where he used to live with his mother. However, when they go back to give the house a final check-over, the wife discovers that the mother's spirit is so strong that the house is being gradually transported back to the time of her husband's childhood. In the end, the mother's ghost appears and tells the wife that it's her son who's unwilling to let go... and he reverts back to the form of a child and tells her to get out. Takes jilting to a whole new level!
  • In "Miniature", Charley Parkes' overbearing mother treats him as if he were a child, even untying his shoes for him when he prepares to go to bed. His sister Myra Russell tells him that he is living the same way that he did when he was 14 years old even though he is in his 30s. She believes that it is sick and partly blames their mother for the fact that Charley is socially underdeveloped.

• Your Family: Alexandra to her sons. She doesn't like her brides and she constantly bullies them. Deep down, however, she wants them for keeping her sons happy.

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