Narm / Live-Action TV

"The gang paddles frantically, with Locke yelling at them to pull (which makes no sense) or move, and I'm giggling so hard I'm going to get the hiccups. Miles says, "I think they want their boat back," and I have to pause the TV to catch my breath, even though the music is trying to tell me this is a desperate serious scene and in no way at all funny."

— Television Without Pity's recap of Lost, "The Little Prince"

Come on, admit it... when you saw these scenes on TV, you wanted to laugh out loud, even if you weren't supposed to.

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Series with their own lists:

• Are You Afraid of the Dark?
• Arrow
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Daredevil (2015)
• Doctor Who
• Estoy Vivo
• The Flash (2014)
• Game of Thrones
• Gotham
• Jessica Jones (2015)
• Once Upon a Time
• Riverdale
• The Shining
• Star Trek
• Supernatural
• The Walking Dead (2010)

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Others:

• The Trope Namer comes from a scene in Six Feet Under where Nate suddenly has an aneurysm. It goes as follows.
  Nate: My arm is numb. Numb arm. Numb arm. Nu'arm. Narm....(sputters out and falls)
• American Horror Story:
  • Murder House: All over the place, but one thing stands out. The line about Ben burying his sorrow "in some twenty one-year-old's pussy" was clearly intended to be dramatic; it is listed on the Funny subpage.
  • Asylum:
    • Dr. Arden puts lipstick on a statue of the virgin Mary, yells "whore" at it for a few minutes, then pushes it over.
    • Thredson's apparent homage to Frank Booth from Blue Velvet: "Baby needs some colostrum." Doubles as Squick when you realize that colostrum is the first form of baby milk.
    • The scene where Dr. Arden attempted to rape a prostitute would have been much more horrifying without the straight-faced delivery of the line "Show me your mossy bank."
  • Coven:
    • When Hank tries to ask for forgiveness from Cordelia in "Head," he does so using the sappiest lines ever, such as saying that "his heart is bleeding."
    • "Surprise bitch. Bet you thought you'd seen the last of me." Compared with the general tone of this season, that's a little hard to take seriously.
    • Misty's idea of hell is her middle school biology class where she's in an infinite loop and raising and killing her frog. Becomes heartbreaking, though, when she can't escape the loop and dies trapped there.
  • Freak Show: Twisty's weird flip-out over his balloon trick failing.
• Babylon 5:
  • In episode "A late delivery from Avalon", when the faux-King Arthur Laments:
    "I was responsible... Their armor was not strong enough to protect them... Their horses were on fire!"
  • In the episode "Moments of Transition," the denouement, in which Neroon makes a Heroic Sacrifice, is just packed with Narm, especially since it turns into a three-way Ham-to-Ham Combat between Neroon, Delenn, and Shakiri.
  • The climactic scene in the River Of Souls telemovie in which the souls possessing Dr. Bryson leave his body; a dramatic scene, up until Ian McShane slumps over catatonic in the dorkiest way possible.
  • The telemovie Legend of the Rangers (a pilot for a spin-off that was never picked up) features a starship with an infamously-goofy "karate-powered" weapons system, represented by a member of the crew floating in a holographic simulation of space and then punching and kicking to fire the ship's lasers (accompanied, in the final battle at the climax of the film, by screaming).
• The new series of Battlestar Galactica:
  • Crew Specialist Cally's cry of "Talk to me, motherfracker!" during a quiet moment with Chief Tyrol on the surface of Kobol. Shouting "Frak you" to her would be rapist in the Astral Queen also qualifies.
  • The Season 3 episode "Unfinished Business" has an interesting emotional moment between Lee Adama and Starbuck when their sparring turns to embrace and Starbuck whispers, "I missed you". Lee, however, forgot to take off his mouth guard for that scene and sputters out a faint "Ah mufft yoo".
  • The creepy music from the finale of Season 3 that only got creepier when you realized that it could only be heard by four people, who turned out to be Cylons, lost its effect when everyone started dramatically reciting the lyrics to "All Along the Watchtower" by Bob Dylan.
  • Grace Park (Boomer, Sharon) apparently has "grunt" mistaken for "roar." After headbutting plate glass, she literally yells "RAAAARRR!"
  • Season 4 gives us an argument where two characters attempt a big Cluster-Frak Bomb. It's supposed to be dramatic, and it comes to blows; but hearing two grown men yelling "Frak!" every other word is a bit much.
  • All of this is trumped by Starbuck and Anders' Slap-Slap-Kiss scene in "Ties That Bind":
    "I don't want to fight, Sam. I want to frak. You don't get it, do you? I'm not the same girl you married. All I want to do right now is frak. Really frak, like it's the end of the world and nothing else matters. So come on, Sam. Make me feel something. I dare you."
  • In the finale, Cavil's final words and actions, as a firefight has broken out when the Cylons think they've been betrayed, is to yell "Frak!" put a gun in his mouth, and pull the trigger. It comes out of nowhere.
  • Also in the finale, Galen "Angry Face" Tyrol upon learning that Tory killed Cally. Although the expression was supposed to be intense anger, it ended up being incredible narm. It could have been a serious, wrenching scene if his eyes didn't look like they were about to pop out of his head◊.
  • From season four, Adama DRAMATICALLY PAINTING A WALL during his crowning moment of emo. Seriously, try to keep a straight face through this. It doesn't help how visually similar it is to Starbuck's paint!sex one season earlier.
• Many years ago, VH1 ran a Behind the Music episode on the Village People. At one point, the narrator intoned, in the kind of completely serious voice usually reserved for car crashes or drug overdoses, "Some people began to suspect there were homosexual undercurrents to their songs." WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!
• Blue Bloods gives us a terribly done scene in the first episode where the young protagonist meets up with family and friends on the street and then one friend out of nowhere remarks "can't be easy, after burying your brother". Did we forget to mention there was no build-up to her saying that and it happened on the middle of the street. Obviously meant as dramatic but ended up making many laugh at the ridiculousness of it.
  • From 2x10 "Whistle Blower", the wife of a murdered informant ends up screaming at Erin to leave her family alone about four or five times more than necessary for her to get the message.
• Breaking Bad:
  • Some of Jesse's emotional outburst moments become this since Aaron Paul pushes them super hard every time, to varying degrees of success. Special mention goes to the anguished and infuriated yet also whiny sounding and memetic "HE CAN'T KEEP GETTING AWAAAAY WITH IIIIIIT!" in Season 5.
  • Hector's Death Glare just before he blows himself and Gus up. For that matter, Gus' sudden howl when he realizes what's about to happen the literal second before it happens.
  • Due to the fact it became an extremely popular reaction gif, Walt collapsing in despair after witnessing Hank's death has become this in re-watches due to how heavily it's now associated with ironic memes.
• From what was otherwise the dramatic climax of the Caprica pilot:

  Daniel: You mean, only the Gods have power over death. Well, I reject that notion. I reject that notion!

  • In regards to Zoe, any seriousness of a scene where she and another character are face to face is compromised because Alessandra Torresani goes cross-eyed whenever looking anyone in the face close up. Once, her eyes dart around wildly (perhaps trying to avoid going cross-eyed?), which makes her seem mildly psychotic.
• Discovery Channel's "Challenge of the Fire Beasts". Especially its opening narration. To wit:
  The fire beasts were united by only one thing... the fire.
• In episode 14 of Choujin Sentai Jetman, Kaori tells Ryu that no matter how he may feel about her, she will always love him. Gai, who is in love with Kaori, responds to this by furiously driving off on his motorcycle, crashing it, and then sobbing his eyes out as he demands to know why he can't be the one in Kaori's heart. A bit too melodramatic to really work.
• In Choujuu Sentai Liveman, when Guildos has just been revealed to be a robot, he stumbles around on a cliff until he trips on a rock and falls off said cliff. This would be horrifying if it weren't for the cheap robo-Guildos costume and the inanimate dummy that take Guildos' place as he falls to his doom
• The BBC TV adaptations of The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • The second episode ends with the Pevensies reading the note left in Tumnus' house by the secret police, when Peter's reading it aloud is replaced by the transparent face of Maugrim, played by a man in an unconvincing wolf costume, speaking the remaining lines and inexplicably shouting "RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR". The third episode begins with an even narmier repeat, as Maugrim's head floats out of the mantle with that same scream and reads the lines.
  • The situation surrounding the first line itself, as it devolves into Puddleglum offering his own life for Eustace’s in a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment that is both not in the book and never brought up again in the episode.
• Community had an In-Universe example in the episode "Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality" with Abed's script "Police Justice".
  Abed: I showed it to Troy and he thought it was the funniest thing ever. I didn't have the heart to tell him it wasn't a comedy.
• Criminal Minds:
  • The series tends to have its narm moments during the villain's reveal. One villain was a man with a split personality. The other personality was a very feminine woman. It was probably meant to be scary, but - a grown man walking and talking like a southern belle?
  • "Soul Mates" featured a pair of sexual predators with a thing for teenaged girls discussing how they liked their hamburger meat "fresh" and "rare" in a flashback. It started off creepy and ended up hilarious, doubly so because the first phrase uttered after the flashback was "You think that's funny?". From the same episode, Morgan drags the one of the pair they have in custody into a couple verbal scuffles while trying to interrogate him. A couple of his remarks (case in point, Morgan presses him on the implications that the two are romantically attached to each other, the unsub says Morgan has no idea what he's talking about, and Morgan's deadpan response is "You're right - I have absolutely no idea what it's like to be in love with another man") can come off as either low blows, under the circumstances, or just exchanges that wouldn't be out of place in a... less serious series.
  • If it isn't a Tearjerker to you, "True Night" is probably this, just because they had Frankie Muniz playing a violent psychotic.
  • "Shades Of Gray." Disturbing episode in which the team realizes the one who killed a little boy was said boy's sociopathic few-years-older brother, on top of that a Manipulative Bastard in the making. The only real problem with the revelation of the killer is the flashback to the murder. The elder brother has been working on a model plane, and the little brother wants to play with it. He ends up dropping and shattering it, which is the trigger for the murder. Realizing that it's practically a reenactment of a certain, particularly reviled episode of Arthur up to eleven and in which the younger sibling was sorry, complete with screaming "I told you not to touch it!", makes it either a lot worse, or... well, funny.
    • A scene at the end of the episode, where Prentiss notices the boy's anger problems, leading to the realisation that he's the killer, is a slightly milder point of narm. Prentiss had given him some chips and he had trouble opening the bag... so he starts banging the bag against the table. Instead of coming off as a disturbing sign of a kid who has trouble controlling his temper, it comes off as slightly funny in a "Why on Earth is he doing that?" kind of way.
  • Frank and Jane's suicide at the end of the Season 2 finale. Surely everyone knew that was fake.
  • In "Sex, Birth, Death", the team interview a troubled teen named Nathan Harris about local murders of prostitutes. Nathan insists that he didn't kill them, but admits that he felt a desire to. In interrogation, this happens:
    Morgan: The prostitutes we spoke to said you would hang around, watching them. Did you fantasise about having sex with them?
    Nathan: (angrily) NO, I fantasised about KILLING them!
  • It makes perfect sense in context for him to say this, because he wants to get across the idea that he's turned on not by thoughts of having sex with women, but thoughts of killing them, and that really scares him, but the delivery makes it sound like he thought that fantasising about killing them is better than fantasising about having sex with them.
  • In "Remembrance of Things Past", Rossi brings a box of files about a serial killer who was never caught. When Morgan asks him what it's in it, he gives the hilariously cheesy response of "evil."
  • In the season seven premiere, "It Takes a Village," when Morgan is testifying about Emily's "death" the man questioning asks if he did what he did for revenge, and he replies, "No, it was for justice." The line makes sense in context, but how often "justice" is used as a rationalization on TV shows when the doer was really seeking revenge, combined with the manner in which the line was delivered made it hilarious.
  • In the episode "Seven Seconds", when the mother of the six-year-old girl missing in a mall is pleading for her return. It crosses the line into Narmalicious territory when the mother chokes up while delivering the laughably cheeseball line, "The other day Katie told me she was ready to ride a big girl's bike... <voice breaking>... without training wheels." Also, the flashback to the girl's cousin in the video arcade.
  • From the episode 19 of the fifth season, Hotch meets a gang of drug dealers who use illegal immigrants to pass drugs. They are quite... mean spirited. But it would be more intimidating if they didn't all have a tattoo of the letter "L", stylized exactly like THE "L" in Death Note.
  • Near the end of "Charm and Harm" the villain is trying to drown a woman in a body of water, all the while screaming "How does that feel? SHUT UP! I'M GONNA KILL YOU!"
    • The episode opens with the villain eating dinner in front of a woman he's holding captive and has just recently tortured. The creepiness of the scene is somewhat undermined by the fact that the unsub takes a number of bites from an obviously empty fork.
  • Spit is just flying all over the place when the killer starts freaking out at the end of "In Heat".
  • "Somebody's Watching" - "Don't call me Maggie, YOU DON'T KNOW ME!"
  • Near the end of "Extreme Aggressor," the victim briefly gets away, but since she neglects to immediately lift her makeshift blindfold, she runs into a pole.
  • Any time Elle did a Rabid Cop routine.
  • The killer in "Profiling 101" was nicknamed the Womb Raider. That was also the name of Tomb Raider porn parody.
  • An episode had a guy saying, "Oh my God, I think you broke my back" with as much inflection as if he were complaining about the weather
  • The whole Staged Car Crashes = a symbol of rape thing from "Paradise".
    • From the same episode, Wil Wheaton snarling "You... didn't... touch... my... PANCAKES!"
  • The climax of the season 7 episode Closing Time starts as a heartbreaking scene where the Unsub's teenage son is overcome with grief when he learns that his biological father was a victim of the Unsub's violent jealousy... and turns absolutely silly when the boy and the Unsub unintentionally quote Star Wars nearly word for word.
    • "YOU KILLED MY FATHER!" "I am your father."
• The opening sequence of almost every episode of CSI: Miami, when Horatio Caine dramatically removes or puts on his sunglasses and makes a clever comment. While this is supposed to be cool and smooth, it generally winds up being hilariously ridiculous and cliched. See here, here and here. The opening credits song, "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who (YEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!), probably doesn't help.
  • The crowning moment is in the Season 5 opener. Caine, for some reason known only to himself, is crouched in the Rodin's Thinker pose next to the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, and part of the tune is playing. Long helicopter shot of this, Caine getting up and putting on the sunglasses, and the "YEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!" kicking in.
  • In isolation, this scene must be a Crowning Moment of Narm. Horatio Caine takes his sunglasses off just so he can dramatically put them back on.
  • "I'm the Fiber King, Dave. I'm the Fiber King." Not exactly a particularly intimidating threat, Horatio.
  • "Stupid... BUILDING!"
  • "They were YOOGE contributors!"
  • This exchange:
  *suspect's phone rings*
  Horatio: "Aren't you going to get that call, Jack?"
  Jack: "No, I'll get it later."
  Horatio: "Let's... *5 second dramatic pause* "...get it now.".
• The ABC Family movie Cyberbu//y (2011). The focus of the film is a nasty rumor that was started by a girl using a fake internet profile to masquerade as cute boy. The main character falls for this and then attempts to kill herself, but can't get the child safety cap off before her friend arrives to stop her. The solution to this problem is apparently getting the government to pass legislation to ban trolling minors on the Internet. Yes, that was the actual solution to the movie.
• Dallas: The Season 8 season finale, "Swan Song" features the supposed death of Bobby Ewing (after Patrick Duffy wanted to leave the series) after he is struck by a car driven by a suicidal Katherine Wentworth. The narm kicks in during the final scene, where all of the major cast players – Pam, Jenna and the Ewings – are at Bobby's bedside, tearfully saying their goodbyes. A Tearjerker scene devolves into narm with bad acting and obviously fake tears from several of the actors (particularly J.R.) as Bobby whispers his final words, "I love you" to both Pam and Jenna before he loses consciousness and the EKG flatlines.
• Dawson's Creek:
  • The season 3 finale has lead actor James Van Der Beek making what can only be called the most hilarious face in the history of television drama while crying. (The embarrassing part is that it was not acting: Van Der Beek was actually that overcome by emotion. Whether that's embarrassing for him or for laughing viewers is another matter entirely.)
  • The season 1 scene where Joey sings "On My Own" from Les Misérables for a beauty pageant is pretty narm. It's meant to be a dramatic moment where Joey sings a song alluding to her love for Dawson while, at the same time, Dawson watches her sing and sees her in a new light. Unfortunately, most viewers agree Joey isn't the best singer, so the scene becomes unintentionally comedic. It's made even worse when the show plays the recording of Katie Holmes' high-pitched singing over a dramatic montage at the end of the episode.
  • The episode in which Dawson's father, Mitch, is killed in a car accident because he drops ice cream on the floor and bends down to pick it up.
• From Degrassi:
  • The most prominent example is Rick pushing Terri and she falls and her head hits a rock. This can be as devastating as the show projects, but because Reality Is Unrealistic it falls here and gets more narmtastic. She actually hits cinder blocks; in the middle of the park. To top it all off, before he pushed her, Rick was kicking the ground; it even got a Fan Nickname, "baby-kicks".
  • After Riley consults a man on how to "cure" his homosexuality, he tells Fiona about it at school. Fiona responds negatively, and says something along the lines of "Riley, you can't cure being gay" Riley in turn SHOUTS back with "TOO BAD YOU CAN'T CURE BITCH!".
  • Also, in "Accidents Will Happen", up until the part where she tells her mother about her pregnancy, Manny's reaction to it is seen as this. She's supposed to be upset and on the verge of tears, yet her "upset" face somehow resembles a smile. Even at the part where Ashley vengefully announces her pregnancy to the cafeteria, she displays the same "I think I'm going to laugh" expression. The next scene has her crying in the bathroom where she hears Paige talk about her with Terri, which has its own Narm qualities:
  Look, I like Manny, but this has to be the most loserish thing she's ever done. She's going to be somebody's MOM. She's ruined her life, and quite possibly her figure, but that's a nice lip color you have there. What is that called?
  • And let's not forget Craig and his weird mantras and other behavior. His destroying the hotel room, screaming to clear his head and laughing at his father's funeral best display this:
  I messed up again. And again. And again! AND AGAIN!
  What, so I can go home, and Dad can, uh...?
  I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm sorry! How many times do I have to say it?
• From Desperate Housewives:
  • In the fifth season, Bree Hodge comes home from a catered party to Orson sitting at the dining room table. He is hungry, and hasn't eaten because she didn't make dinner. She points out that it's after midnight and she got caught up talking to a famous radio personality. Orson insists that she make a pot roast—because she promised. He sits at the table as she turns on the stove and begins chopping vegetables. She starts crying as she works.
  • In Season Two, Mike confronts Susan about paying his biological son, Zach money to go find Paul in Utah in order to keep him away from her and Julie, while lying to Mike and pretending she's helping him with the search, Susan is eventually forced to admit the truth and Mike leaves. Susan then follows him, begging for him to come back...whilst wearing a wedding dress. She stats screaming at him not to go and Mike drives away, leaving Susan bawling in the middle of the street like a baby and all the other housewives, plus her mother, come flocking to her like they're comforting a toddler who scraped her knee. Add to that it looks kind of similar to a certain scene from Bridesmaids and it just becomes hilariously wangsty.
  • During the hurricane episode in Season Four, Carlos and Victor are duking it out, with Victor trying to kill Carlos - then when the men run outside, Victor gets impaled by a piece of wood. That's not the funny part - the funny part is the hilariously cartoony SQUISH sound effect used, and the wood just has a little fake blood on the tip, instead of being coated in it from being rammed through someone's body. It looks like a cheesy Halloween prop, and Victor's blank expression as he falls down dead only makes it funnier.
• In episode 8.02 of Dexter, "Every Silver Lining", the first scene is an old video of Harry talking about how he took young Dexter to a crime scene (at his request) to shock him out of his "problem". Instead of that, he says Dexter was fascinated with it, and then he starts crying. It's supposed to be heartbreaking, but it's hilarious instead.
• "Hush Little Baby", an episode of the BBC daytime medical soap Doctors, had Ruth being threatened during a confrontation by an angry pedophile over the surrogate mother of his baby... with a fork◊. Yes, he was in a commercial kitchen store room, which explains why he had a fork, but it was still ridiculous.
  "I'VE GOT RIGHTS!"
• Dr. Phil:
  • "What gives you the right to imprison your wife in the basement?!" It doesn't sound all that hilarious; but Phil delivered it rather melodramatically, and the ads for that particular episode repeated it endlessly.
  • "Did you stab the baby? ... Twice?" Now, there is nothing funny about murdering babies. But it's certainly an... interesting phrase to cut to commercial with when you have no idea what the hell he's talking about.
  • "When you're in there looking at those other women, it's the same as if you were cheating on your wife."
• Dollhouse: "Omega, why did you hit me with a pipe?" Alan Tudyk's calm delivery makes Alpha sound less like he's honestly shocked by an attack that he never even considered could happen, and more like he's asking her why she hasn't fed the dog.
• The Earth Day Special, which aired on ABC in 1990, is full of Narm. It's basically nearly every pop culture icon of The '80s delivering a Green Aesop Anviliciously. Think Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue, except live action and with a more agreeable message. Bonus points for Robin Williams's anguished cry of "MAMA!".
  • How about Robin Williams giving a speech as a Strawman Political advocating progress for progress' sake at an Earth Day event? And he's cheered until Mother Earth comes along!
• All of the ads for NBC's The Event.
  The CIA lying to the president is not THE EVENT. A mysterious missing person on a cruise ship not THE EVENT. What is THE EVENT?
  • And segments from the show are just as good:
    "This information on a need to know basis."
    "I'm the President of the United States... I need to know."
  • The entire show IS narm. There's even the beginnings of an MST3K-style following of people who watch The Event just to laugh at it.
  • Made even narm-ier for anyone who's ever watched the post-apocalyptic Quiz Broadcast sketches from That Mitchell and Webb Look, which repeatedly and vaguely refer to "The Event".
    Host: Ahh, it almost makes you think about The Event... [Beat]... NO! DON'T THINK ABOUT THE EVENT. THINKING ABOUT THE EVENT WILL UPSET YOU!
  • Extra narmy, also, for people who were re-reading The Order of the Stick at the time. Trauma about THEEVENT can be funny.
• From Farscape: when Crichton discovers the reason why Zhaan was an imprisoned convict, he decides to shout the information back at her. Twice. "You killed the man you were having sex with!" The line is bad enough, but the way he stresses the words makes it sound as though he considers having sex with someone is just as horrific as killing them afterwards.
  • A lot of Ben Browder's line deliveries can count as this.
  • Each time a cast member yelled "STARBURST!" to send one of the leviathans into overdrive was rather painful considering Starbursts are a brand of candy. After a while, it's hard not to imagine the characters demanding a lollipop or a gummy fruit whenever they shout the word.
  • In one episode, Zhaan dramatically yells "I must have food... or I'll die!". Sure, it makes a bit more sense in context, but still...
• On the old soap opera First Love, a cliffhanger episode was supposed to end with Rosemary Priz's character telling Patrica Barry's character that "Chris cracked up his plane." She misread it as "Chris crapped up his plane." Even Barry laughed. On camera.
• From The Flash (2014):
  • The ending of Season 2's "Rupture". The team tries to give The Flash his speed back, only to apparently kill him instead. They react with well-acted, mostly silent horror. But then Zoom shows up, takes a look around, and in his creepy villain voice, tells us what we just saw:
  Zoom: You thought you could give The Flash his speed back? Well done. You killed him instead.
  • In season 3, Barry meets his future self who lost Iris and became depressed. Unfortunately, said future version of Barry has an emo haircut that gave viewers flashbacks of Emo Peter Parker from Spider-Man 3
• Episode seven of the third season of Fringe revolved around the presence of a serial kidnapper who used the hormones of small children to keep himself from aging. Yet, every time he donned his silver mask, he bore a resemblance to Kilroy from Styx's most iconic music video.
  • Fringe's usual tone being a combination of deadly serious, goofy and just plain weird, it's often difficult to pin down a bona fide narm; many fans however felt Olivia's episode-and-a-half possession by the soul of William Bell was about as close as the show came to a true narm moment, since the plotline was meant to be taken as seriously as anything else on the show.
  • A scene where a man turned porcu-bat dramatically flew off the top of a building near the end of Season 4 might also be cited for narmishness; supposed to be serious yet goofy-charming-weird, just came off as embarrassing to some viewers. (When something's too embarrassing even for Fringe, that's probably saying something.)
  • The apparent Big Bad of the third season, the alternate universe Walter Bishop, is chilling, menacing, and altogether pretty scary. Or they would be, if it was possible to take anyone seriously when they're being called Walternate. Punny portmanteau names are not conducive to drama.
  • One of the victims in a first-season episode hallucinates being attacked by a swarm of razor-edged butterflies. It's a bizarre notion, even for Fringe, but the kicker is when the butterflies of DOOM make him leap out a twentieth-story window in slow motion, with oddly gorgeous music playing in the background. The whole thing is just so damn weird you don't know whether to laugh or be horrified anyway.
• Ghost Whisperer was often a wellspring of this, with its terrible cleavage-maximizing fashion and frequent after-school special dialogue. They also sometimes tried to make a ghost scary at first by having it attack Melinda. Frequently, Hilarity Ensues.
  • Flashbacks to Melinda's horrible high school experience. They kept 29-year-old Jennifer Love Hewitt, but tried to make her look sixteen by giving her the worst hairdo possible. Then she would talk to ghosts in the middle of the corridor instead of, say, an empty classroom. Naturally, the other kids teased her. JLH's subsequent attempts to cry resulted in more hilarity.
• In the miniseries of Terry Pratchett's Going Postal:
  • Moist reacts to a vision where he apparently personally drove Adora Belle Dearheart to smoke with the same terror as he did from learning that he unintentionally drove people, including her father, to suicide. OK, smoking is bad, but the impact is rather wasted after the previous visions. It may go better with the Rule of Symbolism, though, for Adora's smoking is obviously symbolic.
  • In contrast to the character's subtle menace in the book, Mr. Gryle the banshee spends most of his screen-time screaming and ranting in the hammiest possible way. It doesn't help that his costume looks like he just fixed some wings to a suit. And then he's blown up by a swarm of burning letters, of all the damn things.
• Gossip Girl's "The Revengers" ends on a rooftop with Blair, Chuck and Bart (the latter two get into a fight and Bart has a Disney Villain Death). It's cringemaking, with the truly terrible scoring by Transcenders the icing on the cake.
• In one episode of Grey's Anatomy:
  • McDreamy lost it and got himself into a Mexican Standoff. In the OR. With scalpels. It was hilariously funny.
  Put down the scalpel, Derek.
  No, you put down the scalpel!
  • Several narmy moments follow in succession before Meredith and Derek's romp at the "Prom", while they're arguing. First, Meredith breaks into a speech about not being all right and presses "I am not. Alright" in a confusingly British accent. Then there's McDreamy's acidic and almost scary "YOU THINK I WANNA LOOK AT YOU???"
• Grimm: When Monroe mourns the death of Angelina he woges and starts howling in sadness. What was supposed to be a sad scene ends up looking like a parody of a sad scene, sort of like an SNL sketch of what would happen at a funeral for a werewolf.
• The Handmaid's Tale, episode "Unknown Caller": June is dragged to pose in a video that's supposed to convince Canadian government that baby Nichole/Holly was kidnapped from Gilead from her rightful parents. She's warned not to do anything stupid and act along, but her angry face, glowering and clenched fists make it hilarious. It's supposed to be a serious dramatic moment and her situation is unspeakably tough, but there's no way totalitarian, fundamentalist Gilead would let that video with her acting like this out.
• Happy Days: The 1978 episode "Richie Almost Dies" – where Richie suffers a severe concussion in a motorcycle accident and is unconscious for days – was intended as a Tear Jerker. Instead, critics often considered the episode full of narm for its over-the-top acting and script (e.g. Fonzie having a total emotional breakdown when he begs God to let Richie live) and the incorporation of a very late-70s pop tune (Suzi Quattro's "Find Strength in Your Friends") while a montage of Richie clips plays as the Cunninghams and the other regulars sit somberly in the living room.
• In Hawaii Five-O's "The Ninety-Second War, Part 1," Steve McGarrett is critically injured in a Wo Fat-sponsored car crash and he's in danger of paralysis. When he clenches his hands and realizes that he'll recover, our hero is moved almost to tears — "I can move them! I can move them!" — but what should be an emotional moment is just cringeworthy, despite the best efforts of Morton Stevens on the music side. Being weepy and sensitive does not work for Jack Lord (or James McArthur, as demonstrated in "Beautiful Screamer" when he's shattered by his girlfriend becoming the victim of a serial killer); thankfully such moments are rare.
• Many scenes in Heroes might qualify.
  • One that almost certainly does has to be when Hiro confronts Nathan Petrelli at a press conference and asks what he's going to do about an upcoming prophecy. When Nathan tells him that there is nothing to do and drives off, he leaves Hiro in the dust shouting, "You not a hero! You a bi-ran! You a bi-ran! Bi-ran!" (That's "villain" for the Engrish-impaired.) In the DVD Commentary, Masi Oka notes that the third repetition of the phrase made it, for him, hilarious.
  • Hiro often has incredibly moving Japanese, that is utterly butchered by the show's own subtitles. "We are taking this sword!" — his friend, eyes askance "We?" See? utter gibberish. Hiro's "we" is a sort of "the group of superheroes I belong to!" sort of we. It kinda indicates that he's headed off the deep end. The English kills the whole scene, because it seems like Hiro's "we" includes his friend (whom the Japanese was not including).
  • Several of the oddly drawn facial expressions on the characters in both the online comics (particularly the last scene in Chapter 56) and Isaac's paintings are wonderfully Narmful.
  • Any serious scene Mr. Muggles is a part of. It's so, so hard to take Sylar seriously with a cute, smiling Pomeranian tucked under one arm. But if Sylar killed that stupid dog, then it would have been hard for some people to regard him as a villain for the rest of the series.
    "Save the cheerleader, save the world."
  • The scene where Sylar killed the woman with super hearing. She asked, "That sound, in your heart... what is it?" And he replied, "Murder."
  • West in general can be narmy, especially when he said, "Mr. Butler, what are you doing?"
  • Nathan's speech at the end of season two, because of the line "at first I was afraid". Some mentally add "then I was petrified".
    • You mean Petrellified?
  • The scene with the rental guy in "The Eclipse, Part 1"... who the hell would ever react like that?
    "She filled me in pretty good, you serial killin' scum of the earth! ... I should kill you right now! I'd be a bona fide hero!"
    • Elle and Sylar are narm-y in that scene, too.
    • There are disproportionately ominous church bells playing over the scene.
    • Sylar's bizarre breathy, rushed way of talking in that episode. We know you know how to talk like a regular person, dude; you were doing it just fine, and hilariously, when paired with Bennet. Come on.
  • This may have been intended as black humour, but there's the scene in "Cautionary Tales" where Mohinder turns to Elle and asks bluntly, "Have you killed many people?"
  • In Volume 4, Sylar flashes back to the day his father sold him in a diner and watches his biological dad do the dread telekinetic finger-slice across Mommy's forehead. The music in the background and the pretentious and Sin City-esque color filter on the blood raise the bathos levels so high that not even Zachary Quinto's incredible acting talents can save the scene from corniness.
    • The lead-in to this scene is Luke telling Sylar that maybe it's a good thing he's repressed painful memories. Sylar responds, "No, it eats away at your soul!"
  • In "Six Months Ago," Sylar shrieked "It's the evolutionary imperative!!" as he whanged Brian Davis on the head.
  • Although HRG is normally a badass, his "pulling the trigger" face sometimes resembles an "I'm taking a really big poop" face.
  • Sendhil Ramamurthy, who plays Mohinder, seems to find many of his own scenes Narmtastic. He has mocked the endless references to his father's death and research; and on episode commentary tracks, he frequently goes into Mystery Science Theater 3000 mode during Mohinder scenes.
  • In the Volume 4 finale, Angela Petrelli's inhuman wails upon discovering Nathan's dead body.
    • For those who haven't seen it, it's like a guinea pig about to start an anime battle.
  • Sylar's Gollum-style conversation with his mother in Volume 4.
  • Linderman waxing lyrical about pot-pies in a clichéd (slightly camp) Affably Evil manner:
    "Voila! A pot pie. Wholesome, warm, healthy. That's, of course if you can live without the cream sauce"... [seeing Nathan pull a gun on him] "Now you can't have any of my pot pie".
  • Near the end of season 1, Sylar had just recently acquired Ted the nuclear man's powers. This is a big deal, considering the future paintings showing a destroyed NYC along with an exploding man. At the end of the episode, Sylar is playing with his powers as he gazes over the city. Then he says, "Boom." That's it? You're a nuclear bomb, and all you say is "boom!"?!
  • Sylar's taco line in the third season premiere.
  • From Ted, a quote hilarious when heard out of context:
    "Why are you THINKING IN JAPANESE?!!?"
    • That line's hilarious even in context.
  • In the earlier episodes, the sheer number of ways Claire managed to damage herself quickly reached Bloody Hilarious levels. Yes, honey, you can regenerate. Now stop sticking your hand in the trash disposal!!
    • In the final season, she cuts her own wrists while on (yet another) Wangst fest. Geez, why not just wear all black and get face-obscuring bangs already? Then again, there was that Bad Future scenario where she had dyed her hair black and wore all black clothes...
• The opening scene in one episode of Hill Street Blues contains vintage Narm. A man is being booked at the police station and his wife follows him in, livid at the trouble he's gotten into. He protests his innocence, but she's not buying it. She shouts this:
  "Why don't you tell them about the night you broke parole with Lester Goober?"
  • She continues to scream "Lester Goober!" about a dozen times as he becomes increasingly angry. He lunges at her, and she grabs a cop's gun from a nearby desk and shoots him to death. This scene was unintentionally hilarious because of the name "Lester Goober."
• House:
  • The kindergarten teacher's request to "die with dignity" in the eponymously titled pilot episode is horribly contrived, enough to ruin the entire episode, considering nearly every patient afterwards goes/has gone through far, FAR worse. Just because you come up with a show doesn't mean you know how to write for it.
  • The episode featuring the guy who can't make a decision without his dominatrix around is a lengthy series of incidents inadvertently showing people in S&M relationships to be complete idiots. It's already ridiculous that neither of these two are unable to turn off their roleplay at all even while the guy is in the hospital dying from some unknown ailment, but it truly reaches absurd levels when his dominatrix erotically strangles him in his hospital bed because "it calms him down." Later, Chase tries to get him to sign a consent for surgery that would save his life, but he's so passive that he won't sign it until the dominatrix is allowed back in the hospital (after she was banned because she was strangling him) to browbeat him into signing it.
  • The beginning of an episode where a young man suffers a seizure while operating an ATV, resulting in his going off the road and hitting a large gas tank, and everything EXPLODING! It was meant to be serious, but it seemed like something better suited for The A-Team or MacGyver.
  • Amber's death at the end of Season 4. Considering she was intentionally written as an unlikable character, it's easy to be unsympathetic about it.
  • Season 5 episode "Let Them Eat Cake" has a fitness guru have a nightmare where she is essentially crushed by fat people. As weird as that is, it's not the narm. The narm was the Catapult Nightmare when she bolts upright and awkwardly screams something along the lines of "GET THEM OFF ME" two more times than any actual person would.
  • It may have been just a dream sequence, but still, the scene with House taking out a horde of zombies is really over the top.
    House: Good thing I brought my axe-cane.
  • One episode has an eleven year old girl whose mother never lies to her. Okay. At one point the team asks her about the mom's dating life. She mentions that the mom used to prefer being on top, but now prefers the guy being behind her. This is treated as a revelation even though the only reaction an audience could possibly have is "what the hell?!?"
• How I Met Your Mother: In the near-to-finale episode "Sunrise", we have a scene that signifies Ted finally letting his love interest of many seasons Robin go, it is an emotional development 9 seasons in the making. Unfortunately, it was depicted as Robin flying away as the sun rises and it looks more than a bit ridiculous. As someone quipped, "Robin has to go now. Her planet needs her."
• NBC miniseries, "Impact" was Narmish to anyone who knows astrophysics, from the bright and low-flying meteor shower on. The geography can get funny, too — astronomers in Arizona and astronomers in Berlin (what's left of it) can observe everything going on at the same time! The electromagnetic field radiated by the star "fragment" causes things to start FLOATING. Highlights are a guy and his kid grabbing onto a swing set to avoid falling up, and a train being launched off the rails into the air in a scene strangely reminiscent of Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue.
• In the Latin-American dub of the newest version of the Brazilian telenovela Isaura the Slave, Big Bad Leóncio is dubbed by Mario Castañeda. Problem is, Castañeda voices Leoncio with a VERY high-pitched tone that reminds the LA viewers a liiiiiittle too much of the tones he uses when he voices characters played by Jim Carrey. Therefore, whenever dub!Leóncio speaks, any scene becomes incredibly hilarious.
• The Hallmark miniseries of Jason and the Argonauts. The scariness of Pelias is diminished as soon as Dennis Hopper takes his helmet off, wearing what can best be described as a Raggedy Ann wig◊. And that's before we get to the performance of the main actor. The Argo is less wooden than he is.
• Kamen Rider franchise:
  • Kamen Rider 555 was not immune to this. The Dragon Orphenoch was kicking Faiz's ass and was able to do him in, but stopped after this — a paper airplane...
    • The Spider Orphenoch's headphones. At one point, he broods seriously to the sound of Biggie Smalls singing, "Rub ya clits if ya love hip hop!" In his first appearance he was killing people to Kriss Kross!
  • Kamen Rider BLACK RX suffered from this once. Kotaro spends most of the episode being beaten up by the bad guys and had to transform to Biorider. Large Ham and the WTF nature of the scene reduced it to Narm.
  • Did two of Kamen Rider Double CycloneJokerXtreme's Maximum Drives have to be a "taste the rainbow" beam and slash?
  • Kamen Rider Kiva: Saga's finisher? Brutal and suitably chilling. The voice of his Transformation Trinket? Not so much. One YouTube commenter remarked that it sounds 'like a baby robot on helium'.
  • Kamen Rider Wizard is notorious for the belt's extremely silly jingle (Shabadoobie Touch to henshin), to the point that even the showrunners seemed to notice how drama-killing it was and started either skipping it or drowning it out with BGM.
  • On the subject of belt jingles, Kamen Rider Gaim has the Genesis Driver announcing SODA. It's appropriate since the Next Generation Riders are energy drink-themed, but it can still be a drama-breaker.
  • Kamen Rider Ghost was also "blessed" with a Transformation Trinket that wouldn't shut up. Except this time it was literally shouting "Batchirimina!", roughly meaning "Look at me!". So it was actively yelling for people to pay attention to it, which kind of sucked the drama out. To say nothing of the manual shutdown sound being a nasal, high-pitched "Oyasumi!" ("Good night!").
• Kyle XY: In one episode, as he and Jessi are exploring a cabin in the woods, Kyle exclaims, "Is that a closet?" as though a closet is a highly unusual thing to find in a house. It's not so much the line itself but the way he said it that made it Narm. (And that says a lot about the way he said that line.)
• Law & Order:

• Season 17's finale "The Family Hour", where Harry Hamlin plays a patriarch of a very dysfunctional family. As if his own hammy portrayal wasn't enough, just for giggles, we are then given Jeffrey Tambor as a judge, who decides to cry dramatically during a summation of the case while in chambers and who even causes McCoy to quip that he's "not fit to judge a pie-eating contest".

• The short-lived Law & Order: LA had at least one. The detectives are questioning the victim's parents and ask if she has been behaving oddly. The mother, who is sobbing in a non-narmful way, opens her mouth to say... "She deleted me on Facebook". Cue hysterical laughter from everyone in the room.
• The Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Authority", guest starring Robin Williams was a brilliant episode, but it had its Narm moments. They exploited Robin's ability to do voices and used it as a plot point. Or the pillow fight scene; then again, maybe that was supposed to be funny in a disturbing way.

• "Ripped": Eliot finally sits down with a shrink and talks about the source of his scary, scary rage. And one of the early incidents was... when his dad, himself a rageaholic, smashed young Eliot's diorama. Note to writers: few dramatic revelations are successful when centered around words like "diorama."

• Nothing can possibly beat "The monkey is in the basketball!" Made even worse because a sexual crimes division is dealing with animal smuggling. Just watch it. The narm is underlined when they open the basketball and the monkey climbs out and hugs Captain Cragen.
  • Fans of the show have adopted that as a general phrase of disbelief in relation to the show, i.e., "oh, that episode was good, but I'm calling some monkey basketball on [this ludicrous plot point]..."
  • In the same episode, the bad guy in a level of James Bond villainy kills a witness by unleashing a hyena into his apartment. How do we know the hyena has killed and eaten his victim? Because the hyena coughed up all his bling.
• In "Savior", a Hooker with a Heart of Gold has to testify against a homicidal Straw Evangelist. Cue this line:
  "Satan has penetrated you over 13,000 times, you whore... GOD DEMANDS YOUR REPENTANCE!"
  • Then he rushes the bench and has to be restrained. It's supposed to be serious, but it's over the top.

• Dizzer, a Card-Carrying Villain of a DJ who was Pretty Fly for a White Guy and whose creed was "Wrecking decks and getting sex." When questioned about a girl he slept with at a party, he replied, "Which one?" His response to being asked about child support?
  "Baby mamas are just happy their kids look like me."

• The episode ("Babes") with Jesse Mc Cartney (yeah, really; that's narmish enough on its own) involved the acronym "FATH"—"first and true husband." This led to some wacky misunderstandings regarding an instant message (the detectives thought the victim was talking about her father, etc).
  • Even narmier in that episode is when McCartney's character arrives at his girlfriend's apartment to find out if the rumors that she got pregnant were true. The two proceed to hug and cry. An emotional scene but at one point during it, it looks as if McCartney is sniffing her hair.
  • In that same episode, Olivia tries to convince a teenage girl that deliberately getting herself pregnant was a bad idea by saying, "A baby is not an accessory. It is not a bracelet or a pair of earrings or a slammin' pair of jeans."

• In "Torch", about a suspicious house fire, Jo Marlowe says "There's one witness we haven't questioned. The house." Investigating the house with an expert was actually a good idea, but did she have to suggest it in those words?

• One episode had a woman's anguished cry that sounded like the whinny of a horse.
• Benson and Stabler once interrogated a suspect while he was dressed as a bunch of grapes. Seriously.
• The now-infamous episode "Intimidation Games" is a goldmine of Narm. It tries to tackle sexism in gaming seriously, but... Let's just say it misses the mark.

• One guy who dislikes the presence of a woman talking about video games at a convention interrupts her with the quality line "GO HOME, GAMER GIRL." It's supposed to be ostracizing, but the bored delivery and the sudden arrival of the gamer makes it hard to take seriously.
• After a scene where a woman is gang-raped by two sexist gamers (which is decidedly not Narm), the woman's confession is "These guys, they just... They just can't stand women in gaming!" She then follows this up with a tasteless euphemism to describe her own rape: "They leveled up."
• The conversation that equates developers to Gods in the eyes of gamers as a serious explanation for why they wouldn't support a female game developer.

• The entire existence of K.O.B.S., an ISIS-like group of gamers that treat video games as Serious Business enough to commit rape and murder for. Serious threats of kidnapping, rape, and murder are more difficult to take seriously when described using gaming lingo, almost sounding like a very dark joke.
• The anonymous terrorist hacks into a projector screen to read a supposedly threatening message, "GAME ON, NYPD!"

• The NYPD storms into the house of a suspected terrorist, and when inquiring his mother, shout "DOES HE PLAY VIDEO GAMES?!" at her with urgency.

• A Mormon girl learns that her friend was brutally murdered. Her response? "Oh my heck. That's awful."
• "Revenge", the now-infamous Ripped from the Headlines episode where a string of break-ins and violent attacks leads the SVU team to a conspiracy of incels, which includes the deranged misogynist villain ranting that, "There's no such thing as rape!" because the Constitution entitles him to the pursuit of happiness and sex makes him happy, the SVU team going on a wild chase looking for people called "Stacey" and "Chad" (and needing to go on "the Dark Web" to figure out that this is Internet slang) and topped off by Ice-T making the truly legendary declaration that, "There's absolutely no reason for anybody to be involuntarily celibate. That's why God invented hookers."

• Law & Order: Criminal Intent, "The Good Child". A murderer and his murderous mistress are betrayed by the mistress's kleptomania, as she stole an eggcup from the murder scene. The episode ends with the murderer being dragged away by the police, screaming "Eggcup!" over and over again.
  • Similarly, there is the episode "In The Wee Small Hours" two-parter which was based off of the Natalee Holloway case. At one point, the Jerkass suspect's even bigger asshole of a father, who's a prominent judge, was angry at his son for betraying him and talking to detectives. What's his insult for him? Saying "You...Iago! Iago! IAGO!" in the most flat and uninspiring way possible. To add to the Narm factor of the performance, while he is likely referring to the villain from Othello, thanks to Pop Culture Osmosis, fans were left wondering, "Why is he talking about that loud parrot voiced by Gilbert Gottfried?"
  • On another episode of "Criminal Intent" guest-starring Stephen Colbert, the plot centered around an organization's attempt to push their namesake to sainthood. One plot point involved the main characters repeating the phrase "Goat Letter" every few seconds. "Goat letter" was Truth in Television, since the episode was a thinly disguised retelling of the Mark Hofmann case, which centered around the "White Salamander Letter." It just happens that goats don't have the same sinister vibe salamanders do...

• In one episode, Nicholls is conducting a very emotional, soft-spoken interrogation of a somewhat-sympathetic serial killer, when Stevens suddenly feels the need to yell "DID COURTNEY SCREAM?!?" Calm down, will you?

• Las Vegas: the fifth season episode "My Uncle's a Gas" ended with a bunch of thieves releasing some sort of toxic gas into the casino, causing everyone to panic and pass out. Our hero, Danny, attempts to single-handedly bring down the bad guys, but passes out before he can... in slow-motion... to the mournful strains of Gary Jules' "Mad World." It's an aggressively silly show anyway, but this was just spectacular.
• Little House on the Prairie:
  • The Season 1 episode "The Lord Is My Shepherd," which – in addition to some panning the over-the-top emotional acting of Michael Landon and Karen Grassle as their characters, Charles and Caroline Ingalls, mourn the death of little Charles Frederick Ingalls – some also consider laughable because Laura decided to climb a mountain to "get closer to God" and to persuade Him to exchange her for her late brother… in southern Minnesota (where there's not a mountain in sight).
  • The Season 4 finale, "I'll Be Waving As You Drive Away," earned its place on the yuksters' narm parade via the particularly dramatic scene where Mary wakes up one morning and realizes, to her horror, she has gone blind, with Charles breaking down in tears upon this realization. Melissa Sue Anderson's acting – particularly her "I can't see! I CAN'T SEE, PA!!!!" screams – is not seen as heartbreaking but comedy due to what is seen as an over-the-top performance, and the dramatic music that plays adds to the propensity for a yukster to roll on the floor laughing at a very dramatic scene.
• Lost:
  • WAAAAAAALLLLLLTTTTTT!!!! WAAAAAAAALLLLLLLTTTTT!!!! WWAAAAAALLLLLTTTTT!!!! That storyline of Walt's kidnapping dragged....
    THEY TOOK MAH BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  • Matthew Fox's acting is hilariously overdone. The bizarre facial expressions (which have their own page on Lost's wiki, by the way) and over-the top shouting destroy any emotional investment in his scenes. Watching Jack scream every time he got emotional can make one laugh, hate him more and more, and start cheering for everyone else he was fighting against, no matter who it was. It doesn't seem that you're supposed to feel that way for a main character. Here's a five-minute compilation of his more infamous moments.
  • This from the episode "Dr. Linus":
    "Dude you're gonna BLOW up!"
  • Another Hurley line from the episode "LAX": "YOU'RE NOT SAVING HIM, YOU'RE DROWNING HIM!" Thanks, Hurley. That wasn't obvious at all.
  • Also from "LAX," there's Dogen's quip, "I don't like the way English tastes on my tongue." Dogen is a rich source of Narm, given his tendency to deliver everything in the most absurd way possible.
  • A lot of police officers lol'd at Jack asking Ana Lucia how long it would take to build an army. Cops =/= Generals. Doubly silly because there is an experienced soldier among the survivors, and there was no reason to go to Ana Lucia over him.
  • The line itself is delivered nicely, but the way the music swells up for no reason when Sawyer says "We're taking the sub" makes the whole thing seem over-the-top and ridiculous. The music? A theme Michael Giacchino wrote for 1999's Medal of Honor. Its title? The U-Boat.
  • Desmond X running over Locke X with his car and driving away. And then, several episodes later, he goes back and tries it AGAIN, only pausing long enough to beat Ben X into enlightenment.
  • When Kate is telling her husband why they can never be together:
    Kate: "Taco night?! I don't DO taco night!"
  • "We have to go back, Kate! WE HAVE TO GO BACK!"
  • A Latin-American VA-induced one is Locke's voice (Francisco Colmenero) in the Mexican Spanish dub. He can't be taken seriously once the audience realizes that his VA is the same that narrates Disney cartoons and did voiceovers for Bill Cosby, the Swedish Chef, Scooby-Doo and freaking Goofy!
  • Daniel Faraday in general can be this due to his actor's over-dramatic performance, as he delivers almost every line in a ridiculously intense manner along with dramatic gestures. His dialogue doesn't help, such as in season five where he explains how time travel works to a truly absurd degree, as if the writers thought they were inventing the entire concept. "When we first met, did I have a scar on my neck? No. Because that was my past."
• From the Polish long-running series M jak Miłość, the Hanka Mostowiak's death scene became the laughingstock of the Internet. Hanka is shown driving down the road, when a child with a bike pops up on the road. Cue extremely sappy music and slow-down. Her car swerves to the side, then brushes against a bunch of boxes which just happen to be inexplicably sitting there, and apparently this somehow causes Hanka to instantly die.
• The 1979 Ian McKellen version of Macbeth. Specifically, Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth. The part in the banquet scene where Macbeth has gone (in this version) berzerk at the sight of Banquo's ghost, and she tells the other guests to leave? She practically shrieks the line. Nooo, nothing suspicious happening at all...
  • Ian McKellen going crazypants oscillates so quickly between genuinely good acting and spittle-flecked Narm, your neck starts to ache after a while...
  • This is the same version where MacDuff's son gets tossed around like a hot potato before finally being skewered on a sword and shrieking, "They have killed me, Mother! Run away!"
• There is so much narm in MacGyver that it could have its own page.
  • Almost every Very Special Episode ends up being so over the top that it almost trivializes the issue in question. Teenage prostitution, poaching, drugs, racism, sexism, corporate corruption, pollution, and much, much more - all were handled in a completely anvilicious manner. The show always portrayed the issues in a one-sided, black and white manner, in such a way that they became comedy. When Richard Dean Anderson was giving a speech about poaching at the end of an episode, there was simply no way to react but to laugh at the sheer narminess of it all.
  • In one episode, Jack Dalton was having nightmares surrounding his brainwashing on a nightly basis and usually woke up in a cold sweat. One of those times he woke up, he ended up just having a normal morning with MacGyver. He was waving his hand around to make a point when he noticed he was holding a gun. "Hey, where did that come from?" He then notices the symbol on MacGyver's pitcher is the same as his trigger, shoots it (with the show suggesting that MacGyver also got shot even though he was holding it away from his body), and then wakes up. Again.
  • The show had a bit of a focus shift over time, for the worse. In the first season, MacGyver dealt with terrorists, corrupt politicians, Renegade Russians, and such. By the fifth season, he was dealing with... small time mobsters, corrupt small store owners, and street gangs. It's hard to take it seriously when MacGyver's issue of the week is counterfeit baseball cards.
  • The way a slum lord is exposed for what he is in one episode was by... someone making a graffiti painting of him as some giant monster eating dilapidated buildings.
  • A rumble between two street gangs involving guns had both sides line up in plain view, side by side, twenty feet away each other. It made one wonder about their survival instincts when they set themselves up so perfectly to insure that nobody was going to survive without divine intervention.
  • During the episode about MacGyver's traumatic childhood experience with guns, the drama of the dying kid got undermined by MacGyver's doing a full body conversion of a couple of bicycles as the kid lay there bleeding.
  • The ultimate narm moment was the revelation of MacGyver's long lost son MacGruber?. With as much effort as was put into portraying MacGyver as the epitome of clean living, it all sort of fell apart by showing that he had insufficiently protected, premarital sex in college. Whoops.
    • Earlier episodes establish that young MacGyver was a leather-jacketed motorcycle-riding loose cannon on the edge. If you started watching during a street-gang season, however, you might have missed that subtle point
• This immortal scene in the Mexican telenovela María la del barrio, wherein the main villain, Soraya, walks in on her much younger lover giving a chaste kiss to her wheelchair-bound stepdaughter. She then proceeds to throw the most melodramatic fit ever put on film, involving, among other things, beating her stepdaughter's maid, knocking her stepdaughter's wheelchair over, and stabbing her lover with a pair of scissors. All while increasing numbers of people come in the room and stand around, apparently powerless to stop her or get medical attention for those who need it.
• Masters of Horror:
  • In the episode "Right to Die", there's a tender scene in which a married couple — not hugely wealthy, not in showbiz or anything, just an ordinary married couple — take a bath together. They're gazing into each others' eyes, smiling gently in close-up... and then the camera pulls back to reveal that the wife is sporting the most comically enormous set of breasts imaginable. If you didn't know better, you'd think this was a The Naked Gun-style sight gag. As it is, it destroys any claim the scene might have had to emotional realism. It also lets you know just why this particular actress was hired; the rest of the episode demonstrates it wasn't for her thespian talents.
  • Brown Jenkin camps hilariously in "Dreams in the Witch-House", even going "boo!" at a passing police officer for no reason whatsoever after brutally murdering the main protagonist.
  • While "Imprint" is supposed to be a serious story, some of the actors' thick accents make it kind of hilarious.
  • "The Screwfly Solution" is rife with this, especially Amy, who's got to be the most suicidally stupid teenager ever portrayed in fiction.
  • "The Washingtonians" was roundly mocked for a premise that should be horrific — a secret society of cannibals who even eat children. However, they have to dress up as snarling colonial-era Americans for their dinner parties, and George Washington himself being revealed as a cruel monster who wanted to create a "cannibal republic" is so outlandish that there's no way to take it seriously.
• The very end of the Season 5 finale of Medium. There's a Not Really Dead Montage of all the times Allison woke up from her Prophetic Dreams.
  • There's an opening scene that's Narmful in a joke with a punchline sort of way. A man calls a woman's house, asking for a Naomi he met at the bar because he was given that number, and the woman assumes it was a man simply given the wrong number by an uninterested woman. The man keeps calling, and the woman slowly becomes increasingly annoyed until she notices that her dog is dead. When the man mentions the dead dog, her annoyance quickly turns to fear, realizing that he's right there. Suddenly he grabs her and stuffs her in the closet. The punchline? Naomi was dead in the closet all along!
• The climactic scene of the Miami Vice episode "Calderone's Return, Part 2". Tubbs corners Jose Calderone, the druglord who killed his brother in New York. With Calderone's daughter watching, Tubbs (and Crockett, who had been caught by the kingpin) take out two of his guards. Calderone turns to fire at Tubbs, but Crockett empties an entire clip from a submachine gun in his direction. The next image we see is Calderone sitting on the ground by his pool, raising his hands in slow-motion and shrugging his shoulders, as if he's asking "Why did you do that?" before he slowly moves backwards into the pool. Combined with his daughter's ridiculous screams (complete with her clenching her fists really hard in front of her when she yells), it comes off as absolutely hilarious.
  • Also keep in mind that, had the show ended at this point (the series was in danger of being cancelled when it premiered, so the episode served as a sort of finale), it would have been with Crockett and Tubbs sailing home. During this end credit sequence, Philip Michael Thomas looks like he's about to throw up over the side of a speedboat.
    • And please don't miss the part where Tubbs had formed a relationship of sorts with said daughter, which was obviously rather marred by his involvement in her father's death—so the ending scenes are scored with "What's Love Got To Do With It?" Awesome. There should be a category for Musical Narm.
• In an episode of Monk, an old woman is attacked by a man. She escapes and runs to a man dressed as Santa. She says, "That man just tried to rob me!" "Santa" says "I know" and bludgeons her in the head with a pipe.
• Standup comedian Natasha Leggero discusses this in one of her shows in regards to the show My Strange Addiction. The show tries to plays its conflicts as deadly serious, the way its inspiration Intervention does, but because it involves cases that are much more absurd, it becomes unintentionally funny. She specifically singles out an episode that's aiming for super-serious intensity about a woman who was addicted not to hard drugs, but to eating the stuffing out of her couch.
• The Latin-American children's show Nubeluz was chock-full of Narmy songs. Not only the songs were almost idiotically childish (as in, it's a kid's show, but there are still some limits), but one of the two female hosts seen pouting like a little girl at every single thing. The worst case is the song about boundaries and risks "Cuidado" ("be careful!"): the lines supposed to teach kids An Aesop about not letting strangers touch them inappropriately are ruined because, instead of making the girl look plucky and determined to not let others walk over her, she looks so very whiny and cross-eyed. Way to ruin the lesson, lady.
• The second season finale of The O.C., in which an incongruous vocal track (the refrain from Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek") starts playing the instant Marissa shoots Trey in the back and continues playing as he slowwwwwly registers that he's bleeding, turns around, looks at her in shock, and then keels over. It started out shocking, but the music was stretched out too long. Saturday Night Live parodied the hell out of this scene in a sketch nicknamed ''Dear Sister'', and it then became a meme multiplying and mutating all over YouTube. None of the parodies are as hilarious as the original.
  Mmmmm-whatcha-saaaay...
  • This could apply to most death scenes in The O.C. that try to be emotionally gripping, since most of them seem to involve Marissa.
  • Especially funny because of Marissa's completely flat and hilariously badly-acted "oh my God, stop, you're killing him" when she first enters the room and sees Trey and Ryan fighting.
  • It doesn't help that the scene suffers from a hefty dose of accidental Soundtrack Dissonance. Playing a song with lyrics about how "you only meant well" and "it's all for the best" over somebody bleeding out is full of unintentional comedy.
• In a TV Series about The Odyssey, one of the main characters, before committing suicide because of one of Odysseus' men, spins around screaming "NO!!!"
  • Armand Assante as Odysseus himself.
    "POSEIDOOOOOOOONNNNN! WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM MEEEEEEE?!"
  • Also, when Penelope tries to stop Odysseus' mother from drowning herself, she gives a Narmtastic Big "NO!" complete with melodramatic hand movements.
• Once Upon a Time is generally well-written and well-acted, but when Grumpy tells Snow not to take the potion that will erase her memories of the Prince, his line of "I need my pain. It makes me who I am. It makes me Grumpy." was groan-worthy and completely ruined all of the drama in that scene.
  • The ending of "An Apple Red As Blood" is supposed to be very shocking and dramatic, but since Emma and Henry are basically having a tug-of-war over a magical apple turnover, it just comes off as silly. (Seriously, can you even say "magical apple turnover" without at least cracking a smile? If you can, try adding "evil" and\or "deadly" to the start.)
  • In "And Straight on 'Til Morning," one of the Lost Ones threatens Hook that their leader rips the shadows from those who lie to him, punctuating it with a drawn out "Rrrrrrrrip." that undercuts the gravity of the threat.
• In Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, Jafar is a generally terrifying villain, but his hammy roars of "RRRRRRABBITT!!!" to the fleeing White Rabbit in "Heart of Stone" will probably elicit more laughter than fear.
  • He does it again in the finale, with the line "with nothing but a sword and a RRRABBIT!" That last one is the only word he raises his voice at.
  • The last shot of the twelfth episode: Jafar looks silly open mouthed and with glowing white eyes. It looks like Jafar is entering the Avatar State. Come to think of it, a Jafar-looking Avatar was spotted in The Legend of Korra.
• An episode of One Life to Live had a couple driving off to get married. They had been planning this for several weeks, complete with numerous anvils about how happy and in love they were and the wonderful life they were going to have together... only for her to unbuckle her seat belt when she dropped the box containing their wedding rings. A few seconds later, the car crashes into the river.
• One Tree Hill famously has the absurd scene where, while Dan sits in the hospital waiting to receive a heart transplant, the man carrying the donor heart trips and a stoned dog eats the heart. The scene is made even funnier by Dan's shocked face and Lucas' smug expression after it happens.
  • The website The Ringer did an oral history of the scene, and John Oliver discussed the scene on Last Week Tonight.
• Outlander: Claire gets the 18th century version of a Brazilian wax and Jamie remarks "Your honeypot is so smooth!"
• On Pan Am, Kate is frustrated with her sister Laura seemingly still acting like a child. When Laura refuses to admit it, she shouts "You're wearing bunny slippers! YOU'RE WEARING BUNNY SLIPPERS!" The delivery just makes it sound like she considers this an act akin to robbing a bank or something. Not helping is Laura's response of "I like them!"
• An Australian telemovie, Panic At Rock Island, is a gold mine for unintentional hilarity.
  • For a start, the title. The Horror of Party Beach springs to mind.
  • Then there's the concept. Supervirus breaks out at a rock concert held on a small island in the middle of Sydney Harbour.
  • Then we have the dialogue. Much of these will be cases of You Had To Be There, but there are some gems...
    • "This is a level four virus. There are only four levels."
    • "I know where you live, obviously." This line is delivered by a standover guy who's already present in the hapless victim's house. Exactly how the hell Vince Colosimo delivered this line with a straight face is beyond me.
    • "We can't have that infection getting loose in this hospital." This line is delivered by the protagonist. Would be nice and dramatic... if he wasn't standing next to his buddy, a doctor who knows he has already been exposed to the supervirus standing right next to him with what appears to be a sort of satisfied smirk on his face.
    • "I can't tell you this over the phone. Meet me on the roof." Cut straight to the roof, where the conversation continues.
• In the Police Woman episode "Fish", Royster and Styles are in a motel room to guard a bookkeeper who is preparing to testify against his mobster boss. The boss has hired a hit man to take out the bookkeeper. The hit man stations himself across the street from the motel. He makes his hit just after the bookkeeper takes a swig of beer. So how does the poor victim react to getting shot? That’s right - he does a Spit Take before diving into the card table where he and the cops had been playing poker.
• In the Japanese BL drama Pornographer, one scene has main character Haruhiko going on with his everyday life after trying to end his relationship with his highly dysfunctional lover Rio. He leaves Rio alone with one of his ex-boyfriends, in that moment intoxicated and quite angry, and goes to buy groceries while repeating himself that everything's going to go smoothly until his sense of guilt gets the best of him, causing him to have a small panic attack in public. An effective and nicely melodramatic scene, at least until the camera pulls back and lingers for a couple seconds on the back of Haruhiko's shirt◊.
  I'm living in the future
  so the present is my past
  my presence is a present
  kiss my ass

• Power Rangers has a couple. There's the destruction of the Thunderzords (complete with a clearly low budget and an over-the-top NOOOO). There's the death of Alex in the first episode of Time Force, during which Erin Cahill desperately overacts Jen's emotional reaction; her slo-mo noooooo is funny every time it's shown, and it's shown a lot in flashbacks.
  • Pink Rangers are good at Narm. Operation Overdrive's Rose is usually only used for exposition purposes. Then she gets an episode requiring her to do some real emotion, and we learn why. Watch her after Tyzonn's apparent death, and you'll forget all about Jen's Slow Mo Big "NO!" forever.
    "BATTLE CRY!"
  • "Rocky Just Wants to Have Fun."
  • Tommy's Evil Laugh during the first season of Mighty Morphin.
    • There's a backdoor in the Megazord.
  • Many occurred in Turbo when the producers took footage from a 20th anniversary parody season and tried to play it seriously. We were expected to feel great suspense when the Rangers were baked into a giant pizza.
  • A special narm award goes to Zeo's "Another Song and Dance." Tommy and Tanya are put under a spell. It's played as serious because it leaves Tommy unable to operate his voice-controlled Red Battlezord. But the spell they're under is one that makes it so they can't stop singing...
  • Another standout moment comes from the episode "The Ninja Encounter, Part 2," just after the introduction of Rocky, Adam, and Aisha. By this point Jason, Zack, and Trini were being represented by stock footage and some hilariously unconvincing voice actors. Austin St. John's regular voice was Narmtastic enough but...
  "Jason": Zordon what's happening?
  Zordon: I have been monitoring this dangerous situation, Jason. What concerns me the most is the Terrorblossom's threat to reproduce itself.
  "Jason": Aw man! Can he do that?
  Zordon: It's going to try.
  • In Samurai, children are used on a comparatively regular basis, most often for flashbacks to Jaden and Antonio's childhood. The child actors' inability to replicate American accents or say lines realistically turns what was written as touching scenes about friends that think they'll never see each other again into something absolutely hilarious.
  • Any time the Power Rangers strike a pose whilst trying to be intimidating. Bonus points if they throw in a couple of HHHHYYYYAAAAAHHHHS!
  • That episode of Power Rangers in Space where Mooks get into the ship and unhook Zhane's life support, causing him to flatline. Not only did Andros apparently just know the instant it happened when he was outside the ship, but cue his slow-motion drop to his knees with bonus "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! YOU are going to PAY for this!"
  • Megaforce has Red Ranger Troy, who delivers almost every line more robotically than the Sixth Ranger Robo Knight. All sorts of Narm ensues. In "The Human Condition", his Narm even sets up the other rangers for their own moments of Narm:
  Robo Knight: I want to know why humans cry.
  Troy: You should ask [Pink Ranger] Emma. She knows more about tears than me.
  • Megaforce also has a particularly bad case, while Super Megaforce is only marginally better. More often than not, the dialog used to "break the tension" is more over the top and cheesy than the rest of a given episode.
  • "End Game", where the Rangers apparently have to pass behind an object of some kind if they want to remove their helmets, even if it's inside the Command Center. It's pretty obvious the helmet props the actors are using aren't really helmets.
• Pretty Little Liars on ABC Family.
  "If lying was a crime, we would all be in jail!"
  • Also, the following exchange, after Ezra discovers the writing on his windshield. Eerie music plays and Narm ensues:
  Ezra: "I See You?" Not "Wash Me" not "Go Sharks!", but "I See You". That's really specific.
  Aria: Maybe it's specific, but it doesn't mean anything.
  Ezra (highly alarmed tone): Aria, it means somebody saw us!
  • The constant use of "bitches." Bonus points when it's in a text message and Capitalized.
  • The many scenes of the girls reading texts out loud in unison and then looking at the camera shocked fit into this trope as well.
  • Emily being chased at Homecoming and yelling for help. Stunning though she may be, Shay Mitchell (admittedly never an Emmy contender to begin with) is no Jamie Lee Curtis in this department.
• Primeval has a scene where protagonist Matt fights an arboreal dinosaur. Problem is that it looks like he is waving his knife at nothing (they didn't have the both of them in the same shot, which makes things worse). It's made worse by the fact it hardly even looks like a dinosaur.
• Profiler, a few episodes before the last one: The federal-law-enforcement-high-up-gone-rogue played by Gregory Itzin is having a clandestine meeting with two other people on a park bench, at night, as part of his mysterious, sinister plan. He tells them not to look at each other so they won't look suspicious. So they talk while blatantly not looking at each other, sitting up rigidly, staring straight ahead. Itzin is dressed in all in shiny black leather, from his snap-brim fedora to his pants to his shoes.
• In the teen Soap Opera "Rebelde", there's an episode where Teo, the heroic nerd, and Giovanni, the complete moron, are trapped in a burning cellar. They discover a passage leading out, but for some reason, Teo can't escape, so Giovanni goes through it and promises to look for help. Giovanni spends quite some time walking around the roofs and looking for a way to get back to ground level. The situation is very serious as Teo is in real danger, but somehow the producers missed the point that absolutely everything Giovanni has done throughout the series has been for comedic purposes and it's not appropriate to suddenly put him on a dramatic situation. Result: Giovanni walking around the roofs for a couple of episodes instantly becomes a Funny Moments, especially if you had missed the previous episode and you didn't know why on hell Giovanni was there.
  • The fact that such a dramatic moment is one of the funniest moments of the series says something about its quality.
• In-universe in "Family Day" from Resident Alien - Mayor Ben hosts a play with the town's schoolchildren about the 59. It's supposed to be a serious affair, rather too serious in fact, as the kids act out scenes of death and destruction. Then, they sing a song called "Where Have All the Daddies Gone?" and Harry and Liza cannot help but bust out laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.
• In the BBC version of Robin Hood, the death of peasant girl Kate's brother was meant to be a tragic, heart-rending event, and it perhaps would have been... if it weren't for the spectacle of Kate's utterly bizarre HAIR◊. It's impossible to even concentrate on the scene, let alone be moved by it, when you're fixated on the fact that the actress looks like she's wearing a basket on her head. It became something of a meme in the fandom, earning Kate the name "Braid-Face." Not that concentration would have helped in this case.
  He keeled mah bruthah!
  • Then there's Tuck. The writers of the show drop the "Friar" part of his name and refer to him as "Brother" Tuck. For the record, this is historically accurate, considering there was no such clerical position as "friar" until many years after King Richard's reign. The problem is that Brother Tuck was played by David Harewood... a black actor. So we end up with a group of white Merry Men (Djaq is already gone) who are constantly referring to the only black guy in England as a "brother." It's utterly hilarious, particularly since Harewood takes his role oh so very seriously.
• RunningMan there is an ongoing running joke between permanent cast members Lee Kwang Soo and Haha where they cross arms and yell "PIL!! CHOK!! CROSS!!" (roughly: Feel! Touch! Cross!). The first time it was done, it was done seriously and was incredibly Narmy. Then it rose to memetic status in Korea and is now done intentionally for laughs.
• The Patrick Stewart TV movie Safe House, when his ex-DIA character Mace meets his live-in maid/caretaker Andi (played by Kimberly Williams-Paisley), this conversation takes place:

  Mace: "What kind of a name is Andi for a girl?"

  Andi: "It's short for Andrea. What kind of a name is Mace?"

  Mace: "It's short for IN YOUR FACE!"

  • "YOU MOTHERFUCKERS ARE GONNA KILL ALL MY LILIES!"
  • Especially narmy is the gun is loaded with bullets which don't pierce the water.
• At first glance, the Nanashi from Samurai Sentai Shinkenger, are probably the most menacing, demonic-looking Mooks in Sentai history. This falls apart the second you see them in action. Not only are they just as ineffectual as any other Mooks, but they also have ludicrous electronically distorted voices. The costumes they wear, while quite nice to look at, are rubbery & have bits that flop around when they flail helplessly with their deceptively nasty-looking swords.
• Ashlee Simpson's attempt at lip syncing through her Saturday Night Live performance being ruined when they played the wrong song was funny. That she reacted by doing a "hoedown" and then wandering offstage as the band continued to play? Hilarious.
• Jessie's caffeine pill addiction on Saved by the Bell. This was supposed to be a Very Special Episode, but instead was considered the height of unintentional comedy for the show's fans, particularly the climactic scene in which Jessie shout-sings this:
  "I'm So Excited! I'm so Excited! I'm so... scared..."
• On the Reality Show Scream Queens (2008), this occurs frequently with the performances of some of the more hopeless contestants. When it's especially bad, the show often cuts to a Reaction Shot of the other contestants laughing backstage, and sometimes edits the footage to make it funnier; for example, one contestant's especially theatrical performance was overlaid with a grainy, black-and-white filter and made to look like a silent film.
  • Also invoked when host Shawnee Smith shows the season 1 contestants an unintentionally funny scene from The Brain That Wouldn't Die as the introduction to a horror-comedy challenge in which they'd be reenacting that scene.
• In Scorpion:
  • One episode features a silo falling over and getting caught with a net. The CG is so terrible it's hilarious, depicting complete disregard for Isaac Newton's first law of motion and the fact that the Silo looks absolutely fake.
  • Another episode features the gang trying to drive a van through a driving range - and they are still pelted with golf balls by people who are still swinging their clubs despite the obvious van. In Real Life, this can get you kicked out of the golf course.
• The Scrubs episode "My Cabbage" has, early on, an explanation of germs spreading showing with a green glow. OK, it's a little silly, but it's used silly at first anyways, so it's OK. Then at the end, as the screw-up intern is leaving and touches a patient leaving the hospital, they bring it back for drama. Which would still be fine. Then the patient touches her face and looks so much like an grandmother version of The Hulk that the drama just turns into full-on hilarity.
  • There is a moment in Season 9 that is potentially Narm if you know the series far too well. It's a regular dramatic moment, with Turk trying to stop a patient from dying. The problem is the music. It's the same music they used for when JD and Turk were practicing their slow-motion running way back in Season 4.
• SeaChange had a couple of scenes from the episode "Looking Forward To The Past":
  • The first, which hilariously invoked the Narm, had Laura trying to make lemon butter from her ex-boyfriend's book of recipes, until she comes across something she didn't expect. Cut to Miranda walking in on Laura crying over the book, asking her what's wrong, and getting this immortal line in response: "Oh, he named the sticky date pudding after me!"
  • Then you get Laura opening the door of her office to find Karen screaming at Angus, "Pregnant? You got another woman pregnant?" Even with context, the cut between scenes makes the whole thing sound like it came out of nowhere, and it doesn't help that Angus looks like he has no idea what she's talking about.
• Sesame Street: Today, how many viewers — now older and wiser — might view the 1976 episode featuring Special Guest Margaret Hamilton as The Wicked Witch of the West (from the 1939 MGM movie The Wizard of Oz), in contrast to when it originally aired and was seen as nightmare inducing to millions of its younger viewers. Scenes that were seen as genuinely frightening to a preschool audience — the Witch, after losing her broom and learning that it had fallen into various characters' hands, had threatened them with such things as turning them into a basketball or a feather duster ... and according to at least one recollection, she also threatened the audience — would today likely be seen as rolling-on-the-floor-laughing skits by older audiences (especially college-age students) who had learned to distinguish the show as fiction and appreciate its comedic value. ^note (The episode was not re-aired during the show's summer 1976 rerun cycle due to overwhelming negative reaction.)
• Shaka Zulu: The scene where the British expedition lose their ship in a storm and wash up on a beach is positively silly, with the overwraught dramatic music, constant cuts between different members of the crew swimming on the shorelines with horses and goats, throwing around boxes and barrels... it's meant to look adventurous, but instead it looks like a bunch of people having the weirdest beach holiday ever.
• Stargate SG-1: in the episode "Lifeboat," it was pretty Narmish when Daniel let out a bloodcurdling scream when he saw Teal'c. It was probably the hand-gesture and the face.
  • In "Homecoming," Jonas Quinn's finger gets zapped by a force field, leading to this dialogue:
    "Arm?"
    "A little numb."
    • That was probably intentional, though it technically was a "Narm."
• Stargate Universe: The beginning of the pilot, featuring a Private-Ryan-esque scene with background screams, hurt people, and too-close-to-an-explosion abrupt silence - because the cast was being launched through a stargate too quickly and landed on their asses. Granted, some of the cast did get hurt; but still, it's hard to take seriously, especially since this is the event that launches the series.
  • Having a United States Senator played by the actor who played Shooter McGavin in Happy Gilmore was Narmish.
  • In the episode "Sabotage," Camile's frenzied "YOU WERE GONE FOR HOURS!" Classic narm.
• Lots of Smallville moments apply, but one of the Narmiest has to be the next-to-last scene in the episode "Persona" when Lex decides to step outside in the rain and do some Primal Scream Therapy and cry. Yes, he'd just ordered the death of his cloned brother, but good god it was hilarious. It was meant to call back to another episode where he was younger and did the same thing. That was also narmy but, to long term fans, it made sense.
  • The 7th season finale just had to have one more narmful moment. When Clark runs into the Krypton lab (don't ask how) and faces his nemesis, who is trying to kill him as a baby and who has already beat Kara into submission — what is the first thing he says?
    "You're going to fix Lana!"
    • WHAT?! Even Brainiac doesn't seem to know how to respond to Clark's first thought being Lana when he has a dagger to Baby Clark's cute tummy.
  • Chloe and Jimmy's tango was either the funniest or the most painful thing ever.
  • James Marsters talking in his natural accent as Brainiac. Something about his American accent is amusing, which makes every time he has a serious scene with Clark Narm-tastic.
  • Season 8, episode 3, Oliver goes through being poisoned and flashes back to his days on the island where he honed his archery skills. Later, when he's angry that Clark kept knowledge from him, he accuses Clark of never having had to overcome a difficult situation (because his powers make everything easy or impossible), and he shouts, "There were mosquitoes... EATING ME ALIVE!" Probably the height of unintentional hilarity of the series as a whole.
• Stolen Voices, Buried Secrets is a true crime show on the cable channel Investigation Discovery. Murder cases, narrated in the (entirely fictional) voices of the murder victims. Exactly how did they fail to notice just how narmy this would be!?
  "I once saw a cat kill a bird just for fun. ... I know it's the way of nature, but it's not the way of humanity."
  • Somewhere in the Beyond, the victims are watching that show and screaming "I'd never make such terrible puns!"
  • This made even worse due to the show deciding to give them stereotypical voices based on where they're from in the country, such as a murdered teenage girl from South Carolina was given a slow, drawl-laden Southern-accented voice although her mother doesn't sound like that and another one featuring a murdered Black woman giving her a stereotypical Black woman's voice.
• Stranger Things:
  • In "Holly, Jolly", we get a flashback of Eleven being forced to use her powers on a cat. While it makes a variety of noises, the cat makes one very common stock yowl, usually seen in cartoons and comedies, which can pull you out of the otherwise tense scene.
  • After all the emotion over Eleven's disappearance at the end of Season 1, it's pretty jarring when Season 2 reveals she just walked right back into our world.
  • Some of Will's monologues in Season 2 about the Upside-Down and the Mind Flayer feel very stilted and theatrical, as opposed to the more naïve and childlike naturalism of the other child actors. At times, he sounds like a thirty-year-old stage actor inside a twelve-year-old's body.
  • "The Mind Flayer" lingers ominously on Bob having left his gun behind, but between the Demodogs' bullet resistance and Bob barely knowing which end to point, it's obvious to the viewers it's useless to him anyway and comes off a bit silly. (In retrospect, the point may be to show he's lacking vital situational awareness that he'd forget it, but that's not apparent in the moment.)
  • A huge amount of tension is built around Will fighting the Mind Flayer's possession to give a message to the other heroes... Which turns out to be that they should close the gate they already knew full well was the cause of everything.
  • While Finn Wolfhard and Millie Bobby Brown continue to do a stellar job in portraying the relationship between Mike and Eleven in Season 2, "The Gate" occasionally saddles the former with some very cheesy lines that sound more like something from a cliched romance film than something a kid would say.
  • The sheer fact that Billy never runs into any legal issues throughout season 2. So much about him is so Obviously Evil that it breaks the suspension of disbelief that no one would ever call the cops on him.
  • During Billy and Steve's fight in "The Gate", Billy breaks a plate over Steve's head. While it's likely meant to highlight just how insane Billy has gone in the moment, it comes off a bit like something out of Looney Tunes.
  • The first couple episodes of Season 3 really can't make up their mind on how normally Eleven can speak now. Thankfully, this clears up for the rest of the season.
  • Grigori's resemblance to the Terminator seems like a nice homage, until you rewatch previous seasons and see that the actual film exists in the Stranger Things universe. The end result makes it seem like he is deliberately channeling The Ahnold in an attempt to be trendy.
  • Cary Elwes does a fine job as the slimy mayor Larry Kline, but his reaction to Hopper breaking his nose stands out as hilarious in an otherwise intense scene. His delivery is definitely what sells it.
    Larry: MY NOSE! YOU BROKE MY GODDAMN NOSE!
  • Will still has his bowl cut in Season 4, even though he's long since grown too old (both in and out of universe) for it to look anything but daft.
  • Eleven beating Angela with a roller skate is treated as a shocking assault and compared to her apparently massacring the test subjects at the lab, which can be hard to take seriously as it's far from the most violent thing she's done. The build-up to this moment, with her menacingly walking after Angela with ominous close-up shots of the skate in her hand, is also rather overdramatic, and is almost played like she was going to kill her.
    • Just to drive home the point, in the following episode, Angela is being helped by paramedics (as if her injuries were life-threatening) and every person in the roller rink is crowded around, gaping at the scene.
  • Hopper's daring escape attempt from the Russian gulag seems to forget Hop is just supposed to be a small-town sheriff, since he spontaneously gains superhuman-level pain resistance and immunity to cold weather. For a start, he breaks his own ankle only to continue walking, running, and even landing on it without expressing any discomfort, not even a limp, then later travels quite far through snow without any footwear. He's still not given any, even when captured again, and continues to never express discomfort over conditions that should have led to him losing his feet to frostbite.
  • The big reveal that Vecna is Henry Creel/001 can be a little hard to take seriously when you realise he's delivering a dramatic, eloquent Motive Rant to an eight year old child. And when they reunite years later, he gives another rant about what he's been doing since then.
  • Vecna can use telekinesis, so the shot of him carrying Max over one shoulder is hard to take seriously.
  • The scene where Will delivers a speech about being different to Mike and then turns away and starts crying fits into this trope. It's a sad moment for Will and his struggle to accept his sexuality, but it has become a meme. Many fans were especially confused at the fact that Mike couldn't see Will obviously crying right next to him.
• One episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles had Cameron walking around wearing Scary Shiny Glasses - except that these were the absolutely gigantic shades worn by motorcycle police officers, on itty-bitty waif-child Summer Glau. The result was silly. These glasses were so huge that, on the DVD Commentary for that episode, Glau said they didn't even fit her head and had to be tied in place behind her ears.
• Thunder in Paradise: Intentionally or not, The Simpsons managed to parody this show brilliantly in one episode with a show called Knight Boat, where during a land based chase scene there was always a conveniently placed canal or river that was there solely because the titular boat would have been absolutely defeated otherwise. Another highly amusing trick they liked to do to try and prevent this was to have a fleeing car or baddie stop and get into a boat for literally no reason whatsoever.
• Tipping the Velvet - the BBC adaptation... Oh god, SO MUCH NARM. There's nothing wrong with the acting, but the BBC for some reason got very overexcited and tried to fill what was essentially a period drama with special effects. This includes slowmo, fastmo, PEOPLE RANDOMLY TURNING NEGATIVE WHEN KISSING EACH OTHER...
  • Not to mention Nan's big "NOOOOOOOOOO" when she walks in to find Kitty and Walter having just had sex
  • The opening credits with the SLOWMO OYSTERS FALLING FROM THE SKYYYYYYY
  • Nan's somewhat stupid narration. Yes, they had to simplify the story to make it easier to understand for people who hadn't read the book. But the narration did make her sound hopelessly naive and a bit on the wrong side of thick.
  • The "there's a rose... in my heart... for youuuuuuu." Didn't happen quite like this in the book. The moment was so filled with narm (slowmo spinning rose!) that when French and Saunders parodied it they barely had to change anything.
• In Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger, Hoji is forced to kill his old friend in what is a dramatic scene... up until he breaks out the Gratuitous English at the worst possible time.
  "GOOD-bye... for-EVUH. Annnnd EVUH."
• Torchwood is filled with these. One example is in Day One", when Jack Harkness stands over all that remains of the sex-obsessed Monster of the Week, a small pile of dust, and wistfully says, "travel halfway across the universe for the greatest sex, still end up dying alone." It's like a line from a bad porn film.
  • Then there's the "End of Days". Where a giant demon from the seventh circle of hell appeared in the last ten minutes for no adequately explained reason.
  • In the episode "Meat", the narmy line "What have they done to you my dear friend?" is uttered. John Barrowman's delivery of the line just makes things worse. And from the same episode: "Give Rhys all my love and I'll see you tomorrow," delivered as a low, angry hiss. Jack seems to be a magnet for these lines
  • The Alien homage in "Something Borrowed".
    • Any time — any time — when Gwen insists she's having a baby. Or refers to the alien egg thing as a baby... or even says 'baby'. It's the accent.
    • Her facial expression on showing Jack her engagement ring. Half cheeky surprise and half Tom Welling-style ACTING HARD face.
  • Ianto and Jack. Naked hide and seek. "Adrift". Some parts of that scene were meant to be humorous. Some weren't, but oh, how they were.
    • Jonah's "primal howl".
  • Jack's "We're outside the government, beyond the police" line.
  • Adam is rewriting Captain Jack's memory of his father and brother; Jack desperately tries to hold on with some awful delivery.
    "MUM JOINS US!!"
    • Ianto being cutie-broken was cripplingly hilarious.
  • Any time Ianto cries. He's... he's not a pretty crier.
  • When Gwen confesses to cheating on Rhys and the Retcon kicks in, it becomes hilarious when she's trying to get him to forgive her; it turns from pleading for forgiveness to annoyed demands coupled with slapping him on the face to wake him up. Hilarious.
  • Despite being terrifying in context, the scene in Torchwood: Children of Earth when the Colonel comes to the realization that the 456 is shooting up on children.
    • Even funnier is Jack's giving orders to a crowd of panicking people who aren't at all listening when the virus is released.
  • The episode "Cyberwoman", wherein the pizza girl who has had the brain of Ianto's old girlfriend-turned-Cyberwoman implanted into her (or something) tearfully recounts, at gunpoint, the time they went to the beach and had cheese toasties. If there is an award for the least poignant and dramatic phrase in the known universe, then "cheese toasties" is a strong contender.
• True Blood has a lot of narm because it is about vampiric ham and campiric supernaturalism in rural Louisiana. Examples:
  • The episode with her Grandmother's funeral. The way Sookie snaps at Maxine Fortenberry for taking a pie out of the fridge is just hilarious for Anna Paquin's delivery and the fact that she uses the Full-Name Ultimatum too. Also her randomly shouting "shut the fuck up!" when she's giving her speech because of everyone's thoughts. Imagine being at a funeral and someone's giving a speech but then randomly shouts at you to "shut the fuck up". Oh Sookie.
  • In the second season, any time Sookie or Tara look at that awful picture of Gran. Often, sad music plays, and the actresses have a pained expression as they mourn the old lady and remember how it was back then. The problem: Some guy behind the scenes had the brilliant idea to photoshop Gran to make her look younger. Apparently, they decided that it would be best to hire an amateur who sucks at Photoshop and who probably never heard of it before coming into work. The picture looks like Gran during her first time on crack trying hard to do something that resembles a smile. The worst part is that the camera keeps zooming in on that awful picture as if they're proud of their shitty work.
  • Tara's alcoholic mother, upon having coffee spiked with alcohol spilled all over her, starts sucking her clothing, yelling "It's the demon, honey! It's the demon!" It's supposed to be sad, but it's just funny... which makes it just sad again.
  • Almost any time Sookie or Bill open their mouths... especially if they're together... especially if Bill's calling Sookie "SOOKAH!!!". Lampshaded by Sookie at one point:
    Sookie: Every sound I hear, every time the phone rings, every shadow, I think it's Bill. I keep expecting him to come through the door and say... Sookeh.
    • "Thyat will NOT be NYECCESSERAH!" Bill is priceless.
    • What about his love declaration to Sookie?
      "Ah will not ap'holhojahze foh whyat yu ave ahwakhen in meh, Sookeh."
    • No, really. That is how he sounds.
  • For the record, Bill is supposed to have an Old-Timey Southern Accent, in the vein of Gone with the Wind. But it comes out wrong, and he sounds more like Foghorn Leghorn. Still an old-timey Southern accent, but it's lacking a certain something. His accent usually blends in, but whenever he tries a particularly heavy or oddly-worded line, you will roll your eyes.
    "Ah ahym not hyuhman, Sookeh. Ah ayhm vhaympire."
  • "Ahm a fairy? How fuckin' LAME." Indeed, Sookie. Indeed.
  • There's one line from the Channel 4 trailer for the show that is amusing — and sad if you know the show's premise.
    "A vampire cares about only one thing. Drinking. Your. Blood!"
  • "GODRIC, DON'T DO IT!! PLEASE!!!! BAW BAW BAWWWWWW!!!"
  • PIIIIIIIIIIG!!!
  • There's this one werewolf named Cooter who gets killed. Next episode, his girlfriend is trying to explain to her boss what happened while blubbering and sobbing. Then, all of a sudden, this immortal line:
    "THEY KILLED MY COOTER!"
    • Beat Panel and then... uncontrollable laughter. Everyone else in the room during this scene deserves an award for making it through without cracking.
  • The Season 6 episode with the classy title "Fuck The Pain Away" gives us out-of-nowhere caveman-fairy vampire sex.
• The last two episodes of The Tudors are somewhat undermined by Jonathan Rhys Meyers' attempt to convey Henry's elderly and infirm status, which consists mainly of talking in an almost comically hoarse voice and sprinkling his lines with lots of odd pauses. (It also doesn't help that the makeup department seems to have suddenly decided to age Henry about 15 years, even though the Time Skip leading up to the two episodes in question was more like two years, tops.)
• 24. Twice during day 4, the son of the Secretary of State gets brought into CTU under suspicion of working with the terrorists. Each time, he cries and whines to most hilariously Narmy levels. "YOU CAN'T DO THIS TO ME! THIS IS ILLEGAL!" It gets even worse towards the end of the season with The Reveal that "the secret he's been holding back", which CTU has spent hours torturing him to get him to divulge, is that he's bisexual.
  • Wayne Palmer's cerebral hemorrhage in series 6 is quite narmish to some.
  • Visual Narm: Hector Salazar before being killed by his brother Ramon◊
  • On Day 2, a U.S. general relevant to the plot was named Colonel Samuels... kind of difficult not to mentally fill in "Colonel Sanders."
  • Jack Bauer's well-known shouting usually falls under the Rule of Cool, but two moments on Day 4 stick out: his Big "NO!" when Habib Marwan falls to his death, which he yells up at the sky like a werewolf and the fact that the critical nuclear device was called "the nuclear football." Maybe this is Truth in Television - regardless, hearing Jack violently demand "WHERE IS THE FOOTBALL?" is freaking hilarious.
  • First Gentleman Taylor finds out who killed his son.
  • The latter third of Day 2 focuses on three Middle Eastern countries being framed for an attack on the US. Except the producers really didn't want to upset any Middle Eastern people, so the dialogue has to tie itself in all kinds of knots to avoid ever naming those countries.
• Hudson's speech to Mrs Bridges in the Upstairs Downstairs episode where he becomes infatuated with Lily the housemaid. With Hudson's gloomy demeanour it's entirely in character. However, it comes across as if they wanted to make him look like a cape-swirling villain crowing about his crime and is rather cringeworthy when you consider his position and beliefs about personal dignity. Because of her age it also makes him look perverted and a bit of a Dirty Old Man. The series is filmed in an old-fashioned, teleplay style and the acting is rather wooden to modern audiences, but this is far and away the most Narmful scene they ever came up with because the acting style can't handle the subtleties of Hudson's feelings for Lily.
• Victorious "Beck's Big Break", when the obnoxious lead star of a movie, Melinda Murray, is quarreling with Tori who is trying to convince her to let Beck back on the film, she yells "GET OUT!", which was the cue of one of the cast members, who then shoots a crossbow that goes through Melinda's hand. It shouldn't be funny, but given how much the rest of the cast hated her, it turns out to be.
• Any of the scenes from Walker, Texas Ranger that were chosen for Late Night With Conan O'Brien's "Walker Texas Ranger Lever." The one that comes most prominently to mind is the scene in which a child is standing on a ladder and the father of the child urges him to jump down to "overcome his fear," and the father steps out of the way and lets the child fall to the ground. Cue Conan feigning horrible shock and lying down on the guest couch.
  • A later episode revealed a clip that they had been hesitant to use for the segment (remember the clips are all out-of-context): Haley Joel Osment arriving with Walker somewhere and just as soon as he's greeted the others, says, "Walker told me I have AIDS." End clip. The audience reaction of shock-and-awwww was such that Conan hilariously feigned guilt and stared out the "window" of the set.
  • Then there's the one where Walker tastes the ground, looks up and declares, "plane crashed here".
    "God, you BORE me! And you do not want to get me bored..."
  • One funny point, taken overall: Walker seems to bust a meth lab every other episode. You'd think criminals would have moved out of his area of influence after the first twenty or so.
  • There was also the episode with the Satanic cult. On Halloween, a mother sends her son out trick-or-treating. She then turns on the radio and hears a report about a Satanic cult abducting children. Within seconds, she runs out to see the cult has painted a perfect pentagram on the ground and are in a van driving off with her son while cackling.
  • In one episode there's a genuinely tense scene where Walker is hot on the heels of a criminal who, among the other things, shot Alex and sent her into a coma. When he manages to catch one of the criminal's henchmen he gets especially ruthless, breaking the henchman's nose during an interrogation. Later Trivette comes in to continue the "questioning", and when the man refuses to answer he grabs his injured nose... and does so with a "got your nose" kind of pinch, between his pointing and middle finger.
  • One episode has the Villain of the Week throw a random passenger off a plane, so Walker puts on a parachute, jumps off, managing to catch the guy and save his life. The genuine stupid awesomeness of the scene and the coolness of it being a practical stunt filmed mid air are then completely obliterated when the plane blows up with such an amateurishly superimposed explosion it looks like it was made in an early version of Windows Movie Maker - as Conan O'Brien pretty accurately described it, "They just took footage of a plane and had someone hold a match in front of it."
• What Would You Do? doesn't always have the most amazing acting. For instance, the test on "mothers forcing their daughters to get their stomach stapled" featured the actor playing the daughter, who delivered the ridiculous line "WURY ARE YOU ASHAMED OF ME!? UUUUUURRR HURR HHURR HURR HURR!!"
• PBS once had a series called Wishbone in which a well-read Jack Russel Terrier would dream and imagine himself as the hero of various stories and novels. A cute idea to be sure... except that this is the kind of concept that's better animated. Instead, it was live-action; Wishbone was a real dog whose thoughts were expressed as a running voice-over, and all the other characters were humans. In the episode "Furst Impressions," for instance, kids would get to see an otherwise dead-serious dramatization of Pride and Prejudice in which Mr. Darcy is a cute little dog in a suit, and everyone else is human and acting as if Mr. Darcy being a talking dog is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.
  • The Pride and Prejudice episode is further made Narmful by constant cases of Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping and Just a Stupid Accent due to the actors all being Fake Brits. The cast aim for prim and proper English accents and come off somewhere between Canadian and Scottish.
  • In the episode "Bark That Bark," Wishbone once did a series of three short stories from African American folklore. The first one was the story of Anansi, Trickster God Spider. Fair enough, Wishbone wore an adorable spider costume. The second was a rather dramatic slave trade story. In it, winged Africans were forced onto ships to be sold, violently shedding their wings after being captured. The third one was the story of a plantation rebellion and in it, Wishbone, clad in a little doggie style plantation slave outfit liberates human actors. He even calls them "Brother". Its heart is in the right place, but it's just so bizarre.
  • "Rosie, Oh! Rosie, Oh!", the Romeo and Juliet episode, featured Wishbone romancing a human actress and ended with Wishbone playing dead while the human cast talked about what a tragedy it was.
  • In the second Sherlock Holmes episode, "A Dogged Exposé,"Wishbone at one point trots into the scene with his voice actor laughing. Watson asks him what the matter is, and he responds in between giggles, "I can't tell you, Watson! It's too funny!" His next line should have been, "I'm really a dog!"
    • Also the scene (based on "A Scandal in Bohemia") where Sher-bone comes in and Watson doesn't recognize him because he's in "disguise." You want Watson to say: "Sorry. I thought you were a different talking dog."
  • It gets better. Several novelizations of episodes were released. They featured more of the original literature's text, but still integrated Wishbone as a dog into the story. For example, in "A Tale of Two Sitters," as Darnay (played by Wishbone) gets out of his coach, he muses that he needs a private moment with a tree; and it is noted that he can only trot at his (human!) wife's ankle height when they walk together.
    • Sidney is played by a human actor. Sidney and Darnay are supposed to be Identical Strangers.
  • There's a nice bit in "Little Big Dog," his adaptation of David and Goliath. David is to take down Goliath headshot style. Cut to a scene of Wishbone as David, with his paw up in the air, spinning a sling around his head.
• The X-Files:
  • The eighth season episode where Mulder finally comes back but seems to be dead ends with what should be an incredibly brutal scene of Scully collapsing to her knees and giving a Big "NO!", with Gillian Anderson demonstrating that she's one of a diminishing number of actors who can pull it off. Except, before that, the script makes her shout "This is not happening!" because a guy at the beginning of the episode said it, and it's the title of the episode, so it means... something. It just comes off as utterly Out of Character. Though there are some fans who believe that line works, and it's the "Noooooo!" that doesn't.
  • The Season 2 premiere, "Little Green Men," has a flashback scene revealing, from young Mulder's point of view, the circumstances of the night Samantha was abducted. The scene plays out in a very tense manner and carries its own emotional weight gracefully until young Mulder starts screaming out Samantha's name... in slow motion. In a ridiculous deep voice. "SAAAAMAAAANTHAAA!"
  • The Season 8 episode "Per Manum" has a flashback showing Mulder telling Scully that the reason she can't have children is that her ova were removed and stored in a government warehouse. The scene is appropriately heartbreaking until Scully responds with, "You found them?" The narm has nothing to do with melodrama, as Gillian Anderson executed the line wonderfully; it's just that it sounds hilarious in context.
  • The otherwise excellent episode "Irresistible" has Donnie Pfaster's (luckily very short) "metamorphosis" into other people, as well as a seemingly demonic creature, though it can be argued that they weren't real and were only hallucinations caused by the stress factor. However, Donnie's demonic looks become really cheesy in the sequel episode, "Orison".
  • In "Redux II", Scully is dying of cancer and Mulder watches her sleep at night. Beautiful Dreamer trope is very effective and it's all very sad, until David Duchovny's acting gets too intense and Mulder looks as if he wants to bite off Scully's arm.
  • The show's staff tried its damnedest to avoid this trope in the Season 5 episode "Folie à Deux," whose villain is a giant bug-like monster, played by a stuntwoman in a ridiculous costume. Since nobody on set found it scary, the visual effects editor added a jittery motion blur to the costume's movements, which prevented viewers from seeing the monster clearly and gave it a more unnatural and unsettling feel.
• Yo Gabba Gabba! manages to have this. Normally it would be overlooked because it is a show for preschoolers. But in the episode "Careful," Plex is temporarily shut down because he was hit by a snowball by Muno. Everyone else proceeds to sing about not throwing things at friends. Was there ice in that snowball, or is Yo Gabba Gabba! trying to eliminate snowball fights?
• There was a microwave instructional video played in some home economics classes that showed a girl putting a donut in a microwave. After she pressed the start button, the video then showed footage of the atomic bomb exploding.
• A local TV station in Columbus, Ohio once aired a negative review of the film 1941 (1979), given by a strait-laced newscaster. She tried to be indignant as she asked, "What is so funny about the inability to make a bowel movement?" but came off as unintentionally hilarious.
• Singapore's early attempts at English-language drama were considerably marred, and even put on hold for nearly a decade, all thanks to one narm-tastic line in the soap-opera-esque series Masters of the Sea. The premise holds together well on its own — rival shipping companies with all their dark dealings and hidden secrets make up the plot — but then the dominating matriarch responsible for much of this ill will (making her the Big Bad by default) explains her basic strategy to her successors:
  "CRRRRUSH him! CRRRUSH him under your FOOT! LIKE YOU WOULD! A COCKROACH!" (Punctuated by a foot-stomp at the end.
• In the TV series Medic, “Boy In The Storm” [1] in which a sheltered young man Robert Maxwell (Dennis Hopper) has an epileptic seizure at the beginning of the episode. It is very unconvincing. (Years later, a talk show used that scene as a part of the montage of Hopper's acting career, and even HE looked embarrassed.)
• The WB drama 7th Heaven has its share of scenes that are overdramatic, and come off like a public service announcement. However, its crowning moment of Narm is the scene where Rev Eric Camden finds out his son Matt is smoking pot. The kids weirdly have no problem telling their dad then the fight starts. The acting and the music are so over the top, you think his son confessed to something way more heinous, and therefore the scene comes off as more funny than serious. You can find it on YouTube.
• By episode of 10 of Survivor: Panama, Bruce has been suffering from severe stomach pain for days and has to be medically evacuated, something that had only happened once before in the entire franchise up to that point. While the producers tried to edit to be as one of the saddest moments in Survivor history (complete with the same music they had used when Jenna Morasca's mom died in All-Stars), it's hard to not to find the scene where he leaves unintentionally hilarious because the only two people who are there to help Bruce in his time of need are Shane and Courtney, the season's two resident CloudCuckoolanders who spend the entire scene either fighting for no reason, singing for no reason, or being naked for no reason.

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