TV’s Best Father-Daughter Relationships – TV Fanatic

Father-daughter relationships are undervalued far too often, mainly because the rare onscreen chemistry necessary to make it believable is lacking.

Or, shows featuring dads and daughters aren’t written with that particular focus. It’s not a simple act to pull off, either.

Creators assemble the dynamic that creates an appealing rapport between a father and daughter with a complicated layer of inherent personality traits.

For instance, fathers tend to have a soft spot for daughters while struggling to understand them as they age. Love and genuine befuddlement are funny and interesting character studies, but they usually result in the lame ‘goofball-idiot father’ routine.

A bit of that exists in this list, but I’m going with something a little more nontraditional. Besides, as a father myself, I find the dumb but well-meaning dad schtick to be the invocation of wholly unoriginal minds.

What Makes for an Exceptional Father-Daughter Relationship Anyway?

Once upon a time, the careless, absentminded, insipid father who could barely grill a hotdog without burning the back porch down was a funny stereotype. Clashing with reality is good comedy.

That is, until 70+ years later, and we’re still making the same commercials and sitcoms. It’s easier to write a buffoon than a complex character, and the father-daughter dynamic is even more difficult to fully capture.

Don’t get me wrong; there is a degree of ignorance dealing with fatherhood and daughters. The things that daughters go through are completely alien to us, so fathers often exist somewhere between the doting parent and the uncomfortable dad.

The father is the guiding force, and a balance between discipline and affection is key. At the same time, his affection is his blindside weakness, opening him up to comedic or actionable value.

The daughter, on the other hand, has the greater arc. She’s finding her way, without his inherent blindspots, but with all of the blindspots that come with youth and inexperience. It’s a fun dynamic, but only when it’s done right.

Prax and Mei – The Expanse

Prax and Mei are not even the main characters, but their subplot is a great example of the father-daughter dynamic I’m talking about. All of season 2 revolves around this metric, as Prax searches for Mei across the solar system with help from the crew of the Rocinante.

Prax and Mei remain separate for most of the season, but Prax’s sacrifices to reach her, coupled with Mei’s innocence in the face of monstrosities, sets a tone of extreme tension throughout.

In fact, it’s their separation that makes their connection so unique. The wide gulf of space and time between them becomes the antagonist.

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Gomez and Wednesday Addams – The Addams Family

Wednesday hardly explores the relationship between the titular character and her father, Gomez. If we want to look at the father-daughter duo more closely, we must go back to where things began — The Addams Family.

The infamous Gothic family may have been on the weird side, but most of the family dynamics, especially throughout that time period, are present. Wednesday presents the heart of her father, and, like Netflix’s Wednesday, he clearly dotes on her.

However, she clearly inherits some of his strangeness, more so than a love for arachnids and judo. Her first relationship forms within the box of normalcy, while her macabre lifestyle revolves outside of it.

Though she finds it challenging, she shares her father’s compassionate nature, a trait explored more deeply in subsequent versions of the character.

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Eric and Julie Taylor – Friday Night Lights

Friday Night Lights‘ Eric and Julie Taylor are not on the father-daughter list because their relationship was exemplary and a prime example of how a father should raise a daughter.

They are on this list as a lesson to others. Julie, of course, goes through the typical rebellious stage, making her character unlikable for a time. Live with any teenage daughter going through the same thing, and you’ll empathize.

Eric, however, does what some fathers are guilty of — he spends way too much time focusing on work rather than home. Any dad understands there’s a fine line to draw if you want to have meaningful relationships with your kids.

Eric goes through all the fatherly motions, including speeches on dating, but often finds himself on the outside, trying to find his way in. It’s frustrating, heartbreaking, and occasionally infuriating, but it’s also more real than some will feel comfortable admitting.

Eric clearly loves his daughter, and he plays the awkward, often absent father on Friday Night Lights, who spends more time playing father to a football team than at home.

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Robert and Mary – Downton Abbey

Out of all the father and daughter characters on this list, Robert and Mary are the most dynamic. How one treats the other sets the stage for choices and revelations seasons later.

As a show set in the early 1900s, the lifestyles, morals, familial behaviors, and society in general on Downton Abbey are conservative and traditional.

Mary never reaches the point of embracing full-blown feminism, but her relationship with her father is clearly the catalyst that propels her into the eventual role of inheritor of Downton Abbey.

Sure, Matthew named her as his heir, but Robert could have made life much more difficult for her if not for his ultimate concession to the fact that she is a younger version of himself.

She is capable and adaptable to changing times, and he ultimately believes in her ability to carry on after he is gone.

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Philip and Paige – The Americans

In many ways, The Americans is another serving of the same dish — parents are divided over what is best for their children. Or, at least, it gets that way over time.

But what separates The Americans from other shows with similar parent-child dynamics is the wholesale destruction of the child at the hands of one parent (the mother), while the father can stop none of it.

Some of the show’s standout moments are when Philip instills some of his learnings in his daughter — the hand-to-hand combat lesson springs to mind.

Philip shows his daughter that reality is far different from instruction. It’s a little out there, but it reflects the father-daughter dynamic. His primary concern is her safety, and his lessons are harsh and representative of that fear.

Scenes like that also make it that much harder to watch Paige become her mother’s pawn as the father loses faith in his allegiance to the Soviet Union.

It’s tough to watch but, again, a common theme in a multi-billion dollar family court system, compiled with Social Security Title IV-D and a preponderance of fatherless children across the U.S.

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Jimmy and Alice – Shrinking

Jimmy and Alice don’t encompass the traditional father-daughter relationship in Shrinking because her mother and his wife just passed away, leaving both to pick up the pieces and navigate around each other’s grief.

He is no imbecile (he’s a psychiatrist, after all), but his grief digresses him, and the dynamic between two grieving family members under one roof, especially with a teenage daughter, is fascinating to watch unfold.

Fortunately, Jason Segal (Jimmy) and Lukita Maxwell (Alice) had solid chemistry on set as well as off. That’s an important factor in making a dad-and-daughter relationship believable.

How Jimmy acts and reacts to his daughter also reflects his complete 180° turn in the office when he starts telling patients what he thinks rather than what he thinks they want to hear.

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Father-daughter relationships are not always easy to pull off, at least not in a believable way that allows the audience to sit back and live vicariously through the characters.

What do you think? Do you feel like the above family dynamics are believable? Drop a comment below and let us know!