No Sense Of Personal Space / Live-Action TV

Those with No Sense of Personal Space in Live-Action TV series.

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• Barney Miller has the obligatory nemesis from Internal Affairs, Lieutenant Scanlon. He has a habit of leaning in really close to people in order to make them uncomfortable, as well as to intimidate them by snarling up into their faces (the actor was not tall).
• When they were doing the casting for Bones, it was noted that at one point during the auditions, David Boreanaz (playing FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth) stepped in close to Emily Deschanel. Where most people would have stepped back in response, she instead stood her ground.
• Castle: In the seasons before they hook up, Richard Castle intentionally invades Beckett's space whenever possible, either in attempts to seduce her or simply because he's overexcited when he comes up with a theory about a potential killer. One of the best scenes is in the first season where he races up to her desk where she's sitting, sits across from her, grabs her rolling chair, and pulls her super close so he can explain. If you pay attention, you can see her gripping the chair in adorable panic.
• The Daily Show: Jon Stewart. Just ask Denis Leary. Or Brian Williams. Or Mike Myers...
• The Devil Judge: Yo-han gets very close to Ga-on, practically holds him against a bookcase, and puts his hand on his shoulder when he finds him in his office.
• Doctor Who: The Doctor in some incarnations.
  • The Second tends to latch onto his companion Jamie at a moment's notice, and there's one scene where they and Zoe did a three-person Sleep Cute.
  • The Fourth has a tendency to place his face very, very close to that of whomever he's speaking to, and often stands so close to his companions that he's practically aligning his body with theirs.
  • The Eighth randomly kisses his companions when he's excited, both in the TV movie and in the novels. In the movie, he also repeatedly gets very close to Grace for no good reason, and she's visibly bothered by it.
  • The Ninth is significantly more distant than most Doctors, but still once said, "I'll hug anyone, me."
  • David Tennant combines this with No Indoor Voice frequently, just in case he hasn't completely overloaded your sense of personal space. He loves humans so damn much that he once asked to hug one that he'd met only seconds before, simply to celebrate humanity. And it may have had something to do with Tennant's close off-screen friendship with Billie Piper, but by the end of the second season of the New Series, the Doctor and Rose were basically a single entity.
  • The Eleventh Doctor manages to have even less sense of personal space than the Tenth. He never stops touching someone. Though he does ask for Rory's permission each time he wants to give Amy a Security Cling. Then he snogs Rory in "Dinosaurs On A Spaceship", just because he's in a good mood — after all, they found dinosaurs on a spaceship! River Song, who has even less sense of personal space, manages to weaponize this: in the middle of a rather epic struggle, they get all up in each other's faces and give each other a quick "Take That!" Kiss. She's wearing poison lipstick. He very nearly dies.
    • Strangely enough, he takes it even further with Clara; who are almost never not touching in some way or another whenever they're together. May be justified, though.
  • The Master towards the Doctor, constantly. And vice versa, a lot of the time; both Three and Ten got grabby with the Master.
• Myrtle Urkel on Family Matters is so madly in love with Eddie that she sometimes breaks into his room at night. At least her cousin Steve knows where to draw the line with Laura!
• Friends:
  • Chandler does this to Joey when fighting over a chair.
    Chandler: [with his hand inches from Joey's face] Not touching! Can't get mad!
  • All of the Friends tend to rub or pat each other just before a scene cut, usually if a joke was just directed at them.
  • It's also notable that, in the first four seasons, if any two of the friends are going to end up draped over each other on a sofa or snuggled in a comfy chair together, even in background shots, it was almost always Chandler and Monica. And this was before the writers started giving them a romance storyline...which might explain why they could get away with openly snuggling on a sofa together during the secret phase of their relationship without their friends cottoning on to the romance: it was completely normal behavior for them.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Littlefinger seems perfectly capable of respecting everyone's space...except when it comes to Sansa, the teenage daughter of his childhood crush. Virtually every time he talks to her, he's either leaning in really close, touching her somehow, or both.
  • Tywin Lannister uses this as an intimidation tactic in his audience with his grandson King Joffrey. Joffrey's attempt to exert his authority over Tywin completely backfires when, as he not-so-subtly explains just how little concern he has for Joffrey as a person compared to his concern for the realm, Tywin walks up the steps to the throne in reaching distance and towers over Joffrey, essentially telling him that he may be King, but Tywin is the real power and will be respected.
• Gossip Girl: Chuck Bass delights in this.
  Dan: I even miss Chuck Bass, who would get so close to talk.
• Sylar weaponizes this trope on Heroes. He gets deliberately and uncomfortably close to whoever he's talking to in order really draw out the maximum amount of terror from his prey. Claire is thoroughly disgusted and practically shudders as he sniffs her hair.
• Colonel Hogan will casually put a hand on his men's shoulders or clap them on the back several times an episode. He sometimes invokes this trope when dealing with Klink as part of his Cloud Cuckoolander Obfuscating Stupidity persona.
• Homicide: Life on the Street: Frank Pembleton anyone? He practically kisses the criminals he interrogates in the "box".
• Horrible Histories: Cesare Borgia's method for dealing with people like this? Murder them. Since his dad's the Pope, he can get away with it.
• Impractical Jokers includes this in challenges often enough, but one of them, Joe, was known even before the show for "nosing" people (putting his nose on them without them noticing).
• On Johnny and the Sprites, the real-estate developer Yolanda Ivanna Wanna was this in "The Sprites Save Grotto's Grove." Throughout the story, and especially in the song "Everything Must Go," she shows no respect for Johnny's personal space, poking him, prodding him, petting him, and otherwise generally being a jerk, all without realizing it and thinking she's actually there to do him a favor by tearing down his backyard to build a hotel and shopping mall complex.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Kamen Rider Wizard: Shunpei Nara and Kosuke Nitoh can both get very close to someone due to excitement or simple lack of thought. Haruto Soma is not particularly touchy-feely, but has a saintly patience.
  • Kamen Rider Ex-Aid:
    • Nico Saiba has about as much respect for personal space as she has for personal belongings. She knows that it makes people uncomfortable. That's why she is doing it. People usually let her because long-term resistance is futile. And Taiga Hanaya is not touchy-feely either...
    • Parado tends to intimidate people by getting a little too close for comfort, often with some disturbing grin. Kuroto and Emu are his usual targets. He gets any kind of reaction out of it only rarely, though.
  • Kamen Rider Build: Ryuga Banjou can get very close very fast because of his (sometimes) foul temper. Outside of that, he can get a little too close (like touching shoulder distance) to Sento Kiriyu, who usually doesn't mind. Explanations vary.
• Dr. Cal Lightman of Lie to Me does this all the time. He sprawls all over the place, gets in suspects' faces for shits and giggles, and seems to be incapable of staying out of Gillian Foster's personal space even when they're walking together. She either playfully elbows him out of it or otherwise doesn't seem to mind. In the Season 3 episode "Funhouse", Dr. Lightman gets himself admitted to a mental health facility (for the purposes of helping a patient there) and seems to dial this behavior up (either thanks to his own psychological oddities or in part because of hallucinogenic drugs; it's left ambiguous even near the end/conclusion of the episode). Cal gets right up in the main man-behind-the-curtain's face, quite literally palming the guy's face like a blind man as Lightman himself talks, and even hanging off of Foster and his other colleagues when they come to help.
• Gene with Sam in Life on Mars. Constantly. Not that Sam ever really seemed to mind.
• The Longest Day in Chang'an: After capturing Li Bi, Long Bo gets uncomfortably close to him and touches him or grabs his clothes at every chance he gets.
• NCIS:
  • Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs uses this to intimidate suspects and witnesses, usually in tandem with his trademark Death Glare. He also gets into the personal space of his team, often to deliver a Gibbs Slap.
  • Ziva does this to men quite frequently, mainly the men on her team. Especially Tony. Sometimes you can even see them start to breathe faster and flush a bit...
  • Of course, Abby beats them all. The other two have mastered this for intimidation/seduction/both, but Abby is like this all the time. Mostly because she's just a happy, expressive person. Abby is genuinely shocked when the team has to attend a mandatory class on harassment and she is told simply giving hugs without asking permission first is not appropriate behavior. Gibbs later tells her that she never has to ask permission from him.
• Odd Squad:
  • Odd Todd absolutely loves to get up in people's personal space as part of his Large Ham tendencies, sometimes even sniffing them if he takes interest in them. It doesn't go away after he pulls a Heel–Face Return, either.
  • Obfusco is also prone to this. In "Agent Obfusco", he gets closer and closer to Olive and Otto at one point when telling them that there's more to their test.
  • While Otto normally respects boundaries, "Soundcheck Part Deux" has him pulling Olive close to him and trying to make her dance whenever Soundcheck begins singing their new song, "The Force of Gravity". Of course, since Olive despises Soundcheck, she doesn't like it one bit and often tries to get the group back on track.
  • In "Bad Lemonade", Oscar uses his Truth-Sniffer-inator gadget to sniff Polly Graph's graphs, with Oscar providing the sniffing noises. As he's doing so, he and the gadget get uncomfortably close to Olive, to the point where she jumps a little in surprise before an irritated look settles on her face.
  • Oksana in "There Might Be Dragons". She thrusts a hand in Olive's face as she's walking to the pea soup the chef has made, and directly after that, she leans incredibly close into her face.
  • In "First Day", as Oprah is giving Party Pam advice on how to sell her sandwiches better, Party Pam misinterprets her advice of "don't yell in people's faces" as "creepily whisper into them instead", and for the cherry on top, she leans very close to her and tells her to "eat my food or I'll make you a balloon".
  • "Odd Squad Needs You" shows Oona's way of returning gadgets: forcefully shoving herself between Olympia and Otis, snatching their gadgets, and racing off to the back room, all while leaving them completely bewildered.
  • "The Creature Whisperer" has Otis getting very close to Decoy!Big O while dancing in order to provide a distraction, which leaves him less uncomfortable and moreso confused.
  • In "Who is Agent Otis?", Xavier does this, waving his hand in Olympia's face to steal her air, then leaning close to her, Oprah and Otis during the latter's trial in a similar manner to Odd Todd in "Disorder in the Court".
• Jefferson, a.k.a. the Mad Hatter pulls this quite a bit in Once Upon a Time. Takes the creep factor up with Emma, at one point even sniffing◊ her hair. She is (understandably) seriously freaked out by this.
• Snafu Shelton in The Pacific, especially regarding Sledge.
• Power Rangers: Dino Thunder: Mesogog, especially when he has Tommy Strapped to an Operating Table in "Legacy of Power".
• Spoofed in a Saturday Night Live parody of a Lifetime movie, To Love, Honor and Stalk: the Gillian Woodward Story, in which Amy Poehler played a woman whose sense of personal space was continually being invaded by... her husband, played by guest star Senator John McCain. Him doing things like attempting to hug her, or offering to loofah her back, were presented as the horrifying attentions of a creepy stalker, and despite Gillian going to the police and taking her husband to court, the justice system kept pointing out that if she were still married to her husband, and not getting a divorce or separation, then it wasn't actually a crime for him to hug her. In the end, Poehler appears as herself with "the real Gillian Woodward" (Rachel Dratch) who's rather bemused by the whole thing and says that it all began when she mentioned to someone in her exercise class that she used to find it mildly annoying when her husband stood too close to her:
  The Real Gillian Woodward: Next thing I know, her sister, who was a producer for Lifetime, was trying to buy the rights to my story. I thought they were nuts.
• Scrubs has the mostly-background character Jimmy the Overly-Touchy Orderly. When Taylor Maddox takes over as Chief of Medicine after Bob Kelso retires, she ends up firing him over it.
• Seinfeld:
  • Elaine has to deal with a coworker who combined this with Offscreen Teleportation.
  • In the episode "The Raincoats", she had a boyfriend (played by Judge Reinhold), who was a "close-talker".
• In Selfie, pharmaceutical boss Sam acts like this a lot — kissing employee Henry on the mouth and getting very close to him in another episode, even remarking that he smells good. It's not all Henry-centric; it's clear Sam wants all his workers to be close like a family. In one episode, he encourages them to cup each other's faces and rate how close they feel, he sits on the table in meetings, and he caresses other employees' faces. In another episode, Sam celebrates a great pitch by Henry and Eliza by giving Henry a great big bear hug and then giving Eliza a kiss on the hand and a romantic dip. Only Henry seems to think this is weird behavior.
• An extremely villainous version in the Sherlock episode "His Last Vow". Big Bad Charles Augustus Magnusson, whose MO is to blackmail people into submission, likes to really violate people's personal space as a way of demonstrating that he "owns" them. For example, he licks the face of a Lady of the British Empire and flicks John Watson in the face repeatedly, and because Magnusson has leverage, they both just stand there and take it.
• In Smallville, Clark sometimes accuses Chloe of this, although he's usually okay with it. There was this time she asked "since when we had boundaries?" and Clark looks uncomfortable, though.
  • In a not even remotely funny or friendly example, E-2 Lionel frequently gets uncomfortably close to people, especially Tess when he's trying to torment her. This is particularly creepy in her case since she's his daughter.
• Star Trek
  • Star Trek: The Original Series: Kirk is quite a touchy-feely person in general, but particularly with Spock. (It's quite interesting to compare the amount of personal space between Kirk and McCoy and between Kirk and Spock.)
    • In a "just ignoring personal space" sort of way, whenever Spock is left in command he tends to stick his nose right into whatever the crewmembers are doing, especially if it's something technical, with a complete disregard for unusual physical proximity.
  • Q of Star Trek: The Next Generation (and DS9 and Voyager) has them all beat. His interactions with people (Picard in particular) are very... friendly.
    Q: Morning, darling.
  • Star Trek: Voyager:
    • Janeway is also rather touchy-feely with her crew — hugging them, hand on the shoulder, etc. She's mostly a Celibate Heroine due to being The Captain, so it's more likely an extension of her role as Team Mom than anything else.
    • This was also one of the many ways in which Seven of Nine had no sense of social etiquette after being raised by the Borg. In her case, she is more hands-off than Janeway due to her Ice Queen nature but has no issue standing too close to people when they are uncomfortable about it.
    • Neelix was also rather more touchy-feely, particularly with Tuvok, than the latter ever really liked.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise: Captain Archer is constantly patting his crew on the shoulder, standing very close, etc, especially with Malcolm Reed.
  • Star Trek: Picard:
    • In "Absolute Candor", Mister Hospitality (the Emergency Hospitality Hologram on La Sirena) gets closer to Picard than what the latter finds comfortable.
    • Later in the same episode, Narissa sits next to her brother Narek in bed, runs her hands over his chest and arms, and even starts to straddle him while they're talking about his relationship with Soji.
    • Elnor is touchy-feely (even tenderly so, as they're gestures of comfort) with Hugh in "Nepenthe", even though they just met and don't know each other well yet. However, Hugh welcomes the physical contact, and even initiates some by grabbing Elnor's elbow and standing very close to him when he says, "We're going to take this Cube away from [the Romulans] forever." As Hugh lays dying in Elnor's arms, he reaches out for the young man's face and holds it tenderly. It's an intimate gesture one would expect from a lover instead of a total stranger, but it was Jonathan Del Arco's intention to depict Hugh as being in love with Elnor.
    • Elnor has met Seven of Nine only once, and when he sees her again in "Broken Pieces", he hugs her tightly and buries his head against her shoulder. He's so grateful to be in the presence of a friendly face again after being trapped alone on the Artifact for days and struggling to avoid being captured by the Romulans, not to mention he's upset over Hugh's death. Seven is a bit uncomfortable with the sudden close contact, but she recognizes that Elnor is very sensitive and is in need of emotional support, so she tolerates it.
    • In "Broken Pieces", Mister Hospitality leans so far forward into Raffi's personal space that she falls backwards on to her bed trying to avoid him.
• Strangers From Hell: Moon-jo constantly gets in Jong-woo's personal space, goes out of his way to stand close to him, and is very touchy-feely with him even when Jong-woo asks him to stop.
• Supernatural:
  • Castiel. From his first appearance, he has been constantly stepping into Dean's personal space. (At this point, something like 90% of Cas's screentime has been spent within a three-foot radius of Dean.) While staring very intensely into his eyes. Much Ho Yay ensues. Lampshaded in "Free to Be You and Me":
    Dean: Cas, we've talked about this. Personal space.
    Castiel: [backing off like three inches] My apologies.
  • Azazel (a.k.a. Yellow Eyes or the Yellow-Eyed Demon) in "In the Beginning". Apparently, they threw it in after the actor playing Azazel got uncomfortably close and smelled Dean. Jensen Ackles (who plays Dean) was appropriately freaked out.
  • A cherub had a habit of naked-hugging complete strangers to say "hello". Apparently, it's the cherub version of a handshake. AWKWARD.
    Dean: I don't like it!
    Castiel: No one likes it.
  • Becky Rosen has problems with this around Sam. She will not stop touching him, even after he asks her to.
• In Survivor: Island of the Idols, Dan was frequently inappropriately touchy with his female tribemates. It was generally seen as skeevy and gross, but it wasn't a serious problem... until it was, when Kellee broke down during a Confession Cam segment over feeling powerless to stop him. Production stepped in and gave him a warning, but he didn't learn his lesson; and late in the game he was thrown out for another offscreen incident involving a member of the production staff, becoming the first person ever to be ejected from the game.
• Derek Hale on Teen Wolf.
• In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Cameron tends to stand way too close to some people (likely to make it easier to kill them if she needs to) and also tends to stare for prolonged periods when she's considering the threat someone else represents to her or John Connor.
• The Thick of It:
  • Space invader extraordinaire Malcolm Tucker. Whether it's engaging in conspiratorial conversations in the narrow corridors of power (or the gent's lavatories), using intimidation to get what he wants or simply flirting with his colleagues, the "Thin White Mugabe" gets in close. Cornering seems to be the favored tactic.
  • A similar example is Malcolm's Bastard Understudy Jamie, who gets just as close (sometimes manhandling people) and is even more likely to shout obscenities right in your face.
  • A very different example is Malcolm's nemesis Steve Fleming. Like Malcolm, Fleming gets much too close to people and has no aversion to touching them. Unlike Malcolm, Fleming is actually trying to be friendly, but fails miserably and comes across as a creepy slimy perv (especially with Niccola).
• Damon from The Vampire Diaries. He pretty much always does it deliberately to unnerve people, though.
• The X-Files: Mulder with Scully. From day one, if they're in the same room, Scully has no personal space. He's also very touchy-feely with her: they rarely even walk out the door together without him touching the small of her back. Scully is (understandably) quite perturbed by this during the first couple of seasons, but she gets used to it. Eventually, this constant lack of personal space becomes an integral part of their UST.

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