Team Dad / Live-Action TV

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Phil Coulson, especially towards the younger members of his team. Skye even refers to him as such. One particularly notable occasion has him buying groceries and cooking a meal for Simmons after looking in her fridge and realizing how poorly she was eating due to the stress of being undercover.
• The A-Team: Col. John "Hannibal" Smith smiles at (and sometimes plays along with) Murdock's antics like a parent watching their young child act out fantasies, he can keep B. A. under control, and he reminds Face to keep his wandering eye in check and focus on the task at hand. He also has this cute habit of referring to the other members of the A-Team by their military ranks (Captain, Lieutenant, and Sergeant, respectively), even though they've all technically been discharged, and they often refer to him as "Colonel". He always has unwavering faith that his men will get the job done, and his Nerves of Steel are likelier to be rattled by something threatening Face, B.A., or Murdock than him.
• While Leonard on The Big Bang Theory is a Deadpan Snarker at times, when it comes down to it he's the go to guy for moral support. Fittingly, his on-again off-again girlfriend and later wife is the Cool Big Sis /Team Mom.
  • Most notably, they're this with Sheldon, Leonard's roommate. While Leonard is unusually exasperated if not always annoyed with his roommate, he cares deeply for him.
• The Bill — Sgt. Bob Cryer (for uniform branch) and DCI/Supt Jack Meadows (for the CID).
• At times, Dr. Goodman seemed to be something of this in the first season of Bones.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Captain Raymond Holt acts as the strict parental figure to the precinct, getting every member to reach their potential through discipline, and he is willing to put his team first in every decision he makes.
• Buffyverse:
  • Giles, particularly with respect to Buffy. ("Wish I could play the father, and take you by the hand." — "Once More With Feeling")
    • For Giles, it helps that he's a Parental Substitute for a bunch of kids with few if any parents, especially fathers. Buffy and Dawn's father is in another country with his secretary, Willow's father was mentioned once and basically never again, Xander's is an alcoholic, Anya's has been dead for centuries, and Tara's is an abusive bastard. Giles is literally the only positive adult male in any of their lives.
  • Xander to the new Slayers in Season 8. Any Slayer who ever seems depressed or on the verge of a Heroic BSoD is always quickly cheered up by Xander.
  • Angel villain Holtz tries to be this, but ends up forming a cult.
  • Angel himself. Lampshaded early on, in which Angel addresses to a bickering Cordelia and Wesley as "children."
• Sam Axe from Burn Notice though he prefers to be Cool Old Guy and a best friend/Plucky Comic Relief, when one of Team Weston is in trouble, going crazy or approaching either the Moral Event Horizon or Despair Event Horizon he will step in and either pep talk or start a "what is wrong with you" fight, though usually he leaves it to Maddie.
• Charlie's Angels — Charlie; in the TV series, he is just Voice with an Internet Connection and acts as Mission Control, but the movies emphasize the parental relationship he has with his "Angels".
• Community — Jeff Winger is the de facto Team Dad, with Shirley acting as the Team Mom. Lampshaded with both of them really acting like the parents of unruly children in "Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples."
• Criminal Minds — Gideon and Rossi, the latter's status as Team Dad being lampshaded by one of the team asking, "Where are Mom and Dad?" "Oh, Hotch and Rossi are still at the conference."
• Crossing Jordan — Dr. Garret Macy.
• The CSI-verse almost always has a Team Dad:
  • CSI — Gil Grissom, then DB Russell
  • CSI: Miami — Horatio Caine.
  • CSI: NY — Mac Taylor.
  • Without a Trace — Jack Malone.
• Dead Like Me — Rube.
• Doctor Who — the Doctor, depending on which incarnation we're talking about. The Doctor is almost always a Parental Substitute to his companions, and as such is generally this when he has more than one companion at a time. Notable examples include the First, Second, Fifth (who was a little less off-the-wall than normal), and Thirteenth Doctors with their respective TARDIS teams (despite the Thirteenth being a woman, she still acts like a man more often than not), while the Eleventh Doctor is an aversion due to how he treated Amy and Rory more like friends than children. Which turns out to be appropriate, given that they're his sort-of parents-in-law. However, even then he still has moments of being a Parental Substitute, such as going full Papa Wolf when Amy is kidnapped, acting as a Shipper on Deck to them, and referring to them as "the kids" while talking to the TARDIS.
• Engine Sentai Go-onger — Renn. Well, technically, he says "stopping children from fighting is a mother's job", but you get the idea.
• Firefly — Mal Reynolds.
  • Demonstrated especially well in the episode "Out of Gas," when he handles each of his people differently during a crisis.
  • "You're on my crew."
    • "Why are we still talking about this?"
    • "One of you is gonna fall and die and I'm not cleaning it up!"
• The character "Competitive Dad" from The Fast Show takes the concept and blows it up to a ludicrous extreme.
• Dr Harrison Wells of The Flash (2014). He's the head of S.T.A.R. Labs, making him Caitlin and Cisco's boss, but his relationship with the younger members of Team Flash is much more than that of boss and employee. He talks to Cisco about his problems with his family, helps Caitlin to deal with the loss of her fiancé, and guides Barry through the ups and downs of being the Flash. Cisco in particular is like a son to him, and he tells him as much when talking him out of quitting the team after he was forced to tell Captain Cold Barry's secret identity. At the end of the first season, this gets nastily subverted when he turns out to be Eobard Thawne, the Reverse Flash, though it's indicated that he still cares about Cisco to a certain extent, and somewhat less so Caitlin.
  • Detective Joe West (already Barry's foster father) slowly evolves into this for the rest of Team Flash, and provides a more human perspective to counter Dr Wells' For Science! tendencies.
• House, M.D. — Dr. Gregory House, with Wilson and/or Cuddy as his Team Mom. Wilson and Cuddy also often act strikingly like they're House's parents.
  House: *calling Wilson on the phone*Hi, honey. How are the kids?
• Ted in How I Met Your Mother, who often lectures and bosses the others around when they're uncooperative or behaving stupidly, and always seems to be the go-to guy whenever anyone needs advice.
  • This is lampshaded in the episode dealing with Lily and Marshall having a kid. He denies it, but we're then treated to flashbacks of him telling cheesy jokes and chastising Barney and Robin for breaking a model ship. He retorts with a sharp, "I don't like your tone, young lady."
  • His most definitive example of dad-ness is probably "False Positive", where he after the group begin making large life-changing decisions, only to begin chickening out at the last minute, he finally snaps and gives them one hell of a chastising speech to their group of friends (and a brief moment later, Punchy on the phone) to get them to stop being cowards and pursue said life-changing decisions — a move which drastically improves all of their lives for the rest of the show. Comes complete with Barney snickering "Marshall and Lily got in troooouble!"
• JAG: Rear Admiral AJ Chegwidden, the Judge Advocate General of the Navy (boss of the team) and a former Navy Seal.
  • When Harm goes back to flying Tomcats for a while, he is considered this by the younger aviators.
• Law & Order — Jack McCoy; previously, Adam Schiff and Arthur Branch were his Team Dads.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - Captain Donald Cragen; his role in the show is more that of Mission Control, but his relationship with his subordinates is Dad-like. At one point, Fin lampshades the trope by greeting Stabler and Benson with "Dad's mad." When he's temporarily reassigned after the nightmare that was Season 8, he bids the team farewell with, "Try to behave yourselves."
• Leverage — Part of Nathan's Character Development is his growth from mere Mission Control to surrogate father for a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits. Cemented by his romantic tension with Sophie, who becomes the Team Mom : in a Christmas episode, he has gotten Parker, Harrison, and Elliot gifts, which he and Sophie watch them play with, the parallel to parents watching their kids play obvious.
• Station Officer Sidney Tate in the first three series of London's Burning.
• Makito in Mahou Sentai Magiranger, due to the team's real dad being MIA. It turns out their Dad is actually The Dragon, only brainwashed, and he joins the team for good later.
• M*A*S*H — Colonel Potter. Before Potter took over, Colonel Blake was a sort of "older brother" figure filling this role: at least the officers in the main cast almost invariably called Blake "Henry" except when deliberately speaking formally or to third parties; only very rarely did anyone dare to call Potter "Sherman".
• The Monkees — Insofar as the group has one, it's definitely Mike.
• Joel of Mystery Science Theater 3000 treats the Bots like wayward children, offering support when they're down (or struggling to keep their sanity through the terrible movies) and admonishing them when they go too far. Of course, he also built the Bots, so in a sense he actually is their father.
• NCIS — Jethro Gibbs is often seen as this, though it is debated as to which characters see him in this light.
  • Abby also spells out the entire "Mom and Dad" setup with Jenny Shepard, preempting an oncoming argument with a pretty accurate summary of what's about to happen, and ending:
    Abby: The kids don't like it when Mommy and Daddy fight.
  • When trying to calm down an unwitting human bomb, Gibbs says "My son, Tony, plays that same game" as a way to start a conversation.
  • Not to mention Ziva calling him, with tears in her eyes, "the closest thing I have to a father".
  • Later, Gibbs directly calls Ziva his "kid".
  • When Ziva was considering marrying her boyfriend in Season 9, Tony tells Gibbs that he "should be getting ready to play father of the bride."
  • Gibbs also easily stepped into the "father of the groom" role at McGee and Delilah's wedding.
• Noah's Arc: Chance, being the typically more rational, level-headed leader. Also is the oldest of the main 4 characters.
• NUMB3RS: Don Eppes. He cultivates a slightly less authoritarian manner than Gibbs — not quite first among equals but not as forbidding. Kind of "team big brother".
  • Alan Eppes also plays out aspects of this trope despite not actually being a member of the team in question. By midway through the series, various members of the team are coming to him for advice, and the entire group is regularly included in family dinners.
• Many Power Rangers had team dads:
  • Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers through Power Rangers Turbo: The ancient sorcerer Zordon also served as The Mentor and was aided by his robot assistant Alpha 5, the Team Mom.
  • Power Rangers Ninja Storm: Sensei Watanabe, The Mentor and the father to team's Hypercompetent Sidekick Cam can parent the entire team even after getting hit with Forced Transformation.
  Cam: My father is not a rat. He is a guinea pig.
  • Power Rangers: Dino Thunder: Dr Tommy Oliver. It's no wonder he was reluctant at first and the team's antics would often drive him up the wall. He wanted a peaceful life away from all this mess and it caught up to him anyway. Even though he is one of the most experience veteran rangers out there and led several teams before, they were all staffed by the "idealized youth" sort of teenagers, not the petty, scatterbrained, eternally bickering kind. That doesn't stop him from trying his best to guide them through the hardships of the Ranger duty or occassionally confiding his stresses and fears to the Team Mom Hayley.
  • Power Rangers Operation Overdrive: The Indiana Jones/Batman expy Andrew Hartford alongside the Hartford family's butler, Spencer. Given the motley crew Andrew assembled as the team to find the Artifact of Doom before the bad guys, there is a significant need for guidance and supervision.
  • Power Rangers Jungle Fury: RJ is the father figure to the team with his wise, laid back attitude that irons out the road bumps between conflicting personalities of the unsteady, inexperienced Casey, the acerbic perfectionist Theo and the confident, energetic Lily.
  • Power Rangers RPM: Averted. Colonel Truman is A Father to His Men and the real father to the team's red ranger Scott, but he generally avoids him (and by extension the whole team) because of their strained relationship.
• Scrubs — Dr. Cox, mostly unwillingly.
• Shadowhunters — Magnus and Alec act as the Team Dad couple to the rest of the characters, Magnus is most notably a father-figure to Raphael and Simon.
• DI Greg Lestrade often plays this role in Sherlock fanfiction, due to being the show's leader type/cool older guy (relative to John and Sherlock)/Reasonable Authority Figure.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World — George Challenger. Summerlee could be considered the Team's grandfather.
• Sliders — Professor Arturo.
• Stargate SG-1 — O'Neill and Hammond both qualify.
  • Jacob Carter has this role to a degree, particularly when he actually is the father of Samantha Carter.
  • As well as Landry in the last two seasons.
• In Stargate Atlantis John Sheppard picks up the role, with Weir as his Team Mom counterpart.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation — Jean-Luc Picard.
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has Captain Pike, who cooks means for his officers and has a very warm, paternal command style.
• The reality show The Surreal Life featuring former celebrities living under one roof, always seemed to develop a Team Dad (although not always a Team Mom, curiously). Celebrities such as MC Hammer, Dave Coulier (Joey from Full House), Christopher Knight (Peter from The Brady Bunch), and the lead singer of Smash Mouth all acted as the dad in their respective seasons.
  • This is lampshaded by Christopher Knight who lamented that he was "the dad" despite never having been a father or being in a similar position.
• Red Foreman (played by Kurtwood Smith) from That '70s Show. Much to his own displeasure.
  Red: This house is always littered with kids! It's like we're... Mormons!
• Malcolm Tucker of The Thick of It is Her Majesty's Government's Team Dad. The scariest, most abusive one imaginable.
  "Never mind what Mummy says, just do what Daddy says"
• Jeff Tracy in Thunderbirds is literally and figuratively the daddy of the team.
• Torchwood: Captain Jack Harkness (at least to the team members he's not actively hitting on).
• Warehouse 13: Artie, so much, particularly to Claudia. Even outright stated by Pete in one of the Christmas specials:
  Pete: I'm like your big brother, Myka is like your big sister, and Artie is so much like your dad it's kinda annoying.
• Waterloo Road: Tom Clarkson. This teacher has acted as a father figure for numerous kids at the school: Chlo and Mika Grainger (Series 3-4); all the Kellys (series 4 onward); his biological son Josh (series 5 onwards); plus other kids experiencing moments of distress. Sambuca Kelly openly declares that she "found her dad" in him just before her death.
• President Bartlet on The West Wing, countering Leo's non-female Team Mom. (Hilariously, Martin Sheen and John Spencer acknowledged this in interviews, but each said the other was actually the Team Mom.)
• White Collar: Peter is the team dad of the FBI's white-collar division. All the agents, especially Jones and Diana, are 100% loyal to him. And he has to practice tough love with Neal. A lot.

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