The 25 Worst Fictional TV Moms

Does your mom get on your nerves sometimes? Well, as Livia Soprano would say, "Poor you," because we're sure she's got nothing on the matriarchs on television these days. From neglectful and apathetic to domineering and downright prolicidal, the mother figures on the boob-tube in recent decades have been responsible for some of the most horrific upbringings imaginable.

After a season in which some of our favorite shows have depicted some truly awful parenting, Complex was inspired to compile a list of The 25 Worst Fictional TV Moms. Click on to see who made the list, and when you're done reading call up your own mother and say thanks, because it could've been a lot worse.

Written by Frazier Tharpe (@The_SummerMan)

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In case you were wondering what drove Jay Pritchett (Ed O'Neill) into the loving arms of the younger, sultry Gloria (Sofia Vergara) besides the obvious, look no further than the episode which features guest star Shelly Long as his ex-wife, DeDe. Simply put, she's a nutjob, and despite her marriage to Jay ending on natural terms, she can't help but jealously put hands on Gloria every time they're in the same room, even after causing a scene to end all outbursts at the couple's wedding.

She also continues to screw with their two children, like the time she showed up with daughther Claire's (Julie Bowen) high-school boyfriend on her arm. We can't wait to see what stunt she pulls during her next appearance.

The mothers of "The Gang" are all shining examples of awful parenting in their own unique ways, so let's list them:

-- Charlie's (Charlie Day) mom, Bonnie (Lynne Marie Stewart), is a prostitute who can be found during the holiday season servicing mall Santas. And their elves.

-- Mrs. Mac (Sandy Martin) is generally apathetic towards her son, Ronald (Rob McElhenney), but still managed to impart upon him that the meaning of the holiday season is to enter other people's homes and steal the gifts.

-- Dennis (Glenn Howerton) and Dee's (Kaitlin Olson) mother, Barbara (Anne Archer) is a vain gold digger who died from a failed neck-lift, of course. She always favored Dennis over Dee, leaving the latter nothing in her will and declaring that she was a mistake. Seeing how Dee and Dennis are twins, we're not quite sure how that tracks, but OK.

Evelyn walks around with the air of a woman who has genuine affection for her two sons, Alan and Charlie (Jon Cryer and Charlie Sheen), and grandson, Jake (Angus T. Jones), but really she's one of the most superficial people alive, way more concerned with her wealth and lifestyle. Prime example: In between dramatic sobs during Charlie's funeral, she drops hints about selling his house (she's a realtor) with zero subtlety. She also keeps quite, um, busy in the bedroom, even giving Ashton Kutcher's Walden Schmidt an official "welcome" to town this season.

It's great that homicide detective Linden has this whole righteous, champion-of-the-wronged thing going on and sets her personal life aside to solve and avenge the murder of teenager Rosie Larsen. What she tends to forget, however, is that she's got her own kid, who's still very much alive and in need of some TLC. It takes his disappearance to finally wake her up, and by then it looks like he might turn up dead himself.

Nope, turns out he just ran away for the day. That still isn't enough to get Linden to make her family a priority over the case. At this point, it's almost certain that the Lindens are never going to make it out of rainy Seattle for sunnier pastures like Sarah keeps promising.

Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) probably wouldn't be the man he is today without the tough love and nurturing—for lack of a better word—of his domineering mother Colleen. Still, it's not hard to imagine how rough life with her as a mother must've been, especially when Jack's childhood to-do list included "Hit Mom With a Car," which he later did. By "accident." Sure it was, man.

Most of the mothers on this list are overbearing, but none are as batty as Estelle (Estelle Harris), the drama queen who, together with her equally nuts husband, made George (Jason Alexander) the awkward, socially stunted man he is today. Even in his adulthood, mommy can shame him into submission, no example more memorable than when she threw out her back after catching George choking the chicken in a garage.

Most parents that grow up impoverished but grind to a better class of living usually grind even harder so that their kid's don't endure the same struggles. In season one of The Wire, we met Wee-Bey, a top lieutenant in the Barksdale organization and one of the few to actually get stuck with some jail time. Later in the series it was revealed that he has a teenage son, Namond, a spoiled, entitled brat thanks to his life of hood luxury, and far from the corner cat his father was.

However with Bey in jail, the funds quickly dried up and that's when Namond's mother De'Londa stepped in and basically forced her son to start hustling drugs to maintain their lifestyle. It was so obvious that Namond wasn't built for the world that we were sure he would end up dead, but he wound up being one of the only kids to escape the block and grow up well-adjusted. Far from our favorite Wire kid but we're just glad someone got a happy ending. As for De'Londa, well, Popeye's is hiring.

During the Fox show's four-year run, Julie Cooper wasn't just one type of bad mother to her two teenage daughters—she was every type. Materialistic socialite who abandons her husband as soon as he gets into financial trouble? Check. Money-grubbing trophy wife who marries a much older man for his multi-millions? Done, and by the end of the first season. Cougar? Indeed, since she had an affair with her daughter's long-time, but by then ex, boyfriend.

Julie covered the promiscuous divorcee thing in the series' entire back half; she also threatend to ship her daughters off to boarding school multiple times. For all her trifeness, though, Julie was a walking soap opera the audience loved to watch. It's crazy to remember she wasn't even a main cast member when the show first started.

The matriarch of the superpowered Petrelli clan can be loving in one instant and a Lady MacBethian ice queen the next. Angela's actions and agendas routinely wavered, much like the sloppy Heroes itself, but the trait that stayed constant was her desire to see her eldest son, Nathan (Adrian Pasdar), ascend to the highest power possible: the presidency. At one point, she used her youngest son, Peter (Milo Ventimiglia) to nuke half of New York, a cost that she was more than willing to live with.

Tara's (Rutina Wesley) mother, Lettie Mae, is the town of Bon Temps' resident alcholic, not to mention an all-around hot mess. If that's not bad enough, she's also a Bible freak who routinely misuses the good book to bully Tara into thinking that she is the one living a sinful life. Lettie Mae finally gets cleaned up, but then continues to spout useless nonsense and make her daughter feel like shit, while also hypocritically carrying on with the town reverend. Tara had plenty of great reasons to make her leave Bon Temps, but we're sure Lettie Mae was number one.

Liane and Sheila come from two opposite ends of the mother spectrum, yet the same kind of messed-up children resulted from their craziness. Liane is promiscuous as hell and directly responsible for the little monster that is Eric Cartman. Sheila, on the other hand, is insufferably overbearing, which is just as bad. Plus, there was that time Sheila started a war between the U.S. and Canada, thus enabling Satan to walk the Earth. So there's that.

The brutal murder of their mother was the root event that catapaulted brother's Dean (Jensen Ackles) and Sam (Jared Padalecki) into the isolating, depressing world of hunting demons, ghosts and otherwise spooky creatures. Yet, what they didn't know at first is that their mother basically invited her murderer to the crib that night. Flashbacks reveal that mom dukes was a hunter herself, but her family got caught up investigating the villainous Yellow-Eyed Demon and he wiped out her mother, father, even her innocent boyfriend John in one night. That's when a teenage Mary made a bargain with Mr. Yellow Eyes, which stated that if he revived John she would have ten years to live her life and then he would come calling.

We feel your desperation, Mary, but what did you think he would do when he came through in a decade? The least she could've done was try to not have kids. But, hey, it's not like she knew she'd be condemning them to a shared life with an alcholic, militant dad and then a lonely existence on the road witnessing tragedy and unable to maintain normal relationships. Sometimes it pays to think beyond the "five-year-plan."

The sister of West Baltimore drug kingpin Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris), Brianna was a well paid advisor. Her advice to him may have been sound, but it certainly wasn't for her own son, D'Angelo (Larry Gilliard Jr.). For instance, she introduced him to the family business despite having enough money to, you know, maybe steer him clear of the corners.

At the end of Season One, when D was arrested while trafficking drugs for his uncle and he learned that the crew murdered Wallace (Michael B. Jordan), one of his teenage underlings, he decided to flip on everyone. However, he pulled out of his plea deal because his mom convinced him that he had a duty to his "family." It should be noted that, while trying to do his time quietly and isolate himself from the crew, his uncle's cautious partner, Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), had him strangled to death, his murder staged to look like a suicide by hanging, to eliminate the possibility of testifying against the organization. Thanks for the advice, ma!

We should have known what we were in for early on in the series, when Betty's response to her daughter running around with a plastic dry cleaner sheet over her head was that she "better not wrinkle the clothes." Like a few of the other mothers on this list, Betty's horrendous motherdom is a product of both a troubled upbringing and having kids way sooner than she should have.

Mentally, she is a child herself, which explains why her reaction to having an absentee, philandering husband is to unhealthily befriend Glen, the local neighborhood boy that has a puberty-inducing crush on her, and then spitefully move the family to another town when Glen grows up and starts befriending her daugher Sally.

Her mindstate is so juvenile that she even sees Sally's child psychiatrist (are you surprised she needs one?) on the low. Context clues lead us to believe that her unresolved issues with her own mother are to blame, but it doesn't seem like she's going to get over them anytime soon. Fear for Sally.

In the scene pictured above, teenage heroine Veronica (Kristin Bell) is enrolling her absentee, alcoholic mother in rehab, to the cost of, oh, her entire life savings. Every penny that she's spent the year cautiously saving since her family unexpectedly dropped from comfortably middle-class to the father-daughter back against the world detective duo that scrape to get by. It's the nest egg that she had planned to use as her ticket out of town and to her dream school of Stanford, but restoring her family is more important. So Veronica bets it all.

How does Lianne repay her daughter? By secretly leaving rehab early but showing up claiming to be reformed. On the low however, she's keeping a lot of "water bottles" in the fridge and she's thirsty every five minutes. When Veronica finds out she kicks her out for good. And just when we thought Lianne couldn't sink any lower, she swipes a big P.I. paycheck to the tune of $50,000 out of Veronica's father's coat pocket on her way out. The local bartender got a real nice tip that night!

One of the biggest twists of the final season of LOST was that the events of a series consisting almost exclusively of characters with daddy issues was set in motion by two immortals with extreme mommy issues. As the immortal adoptive mother of Jacob (Mark Pellegrino) and the Man in Black (Titus Welliver)—she stoned their mother to death after she gave birth to them—Mother basically used them to ease her eternal burden and become the protector of the Island, mentally turning them against each other with her oft-skewering favoritism.

When the Man in Black abandoned the plan and tried to leave the Island to find his true home, she destroyed his entire village and their work, through probable Smoke Monster-ish means, and enticed him to kill her—but not before laying her job on Jacob, setting in motion an eternity's worth of sibling rivalry that would claim the lives of many innocent people. She didn't need more than the one appearance—or a proper name—to make her eligible for top 10 worst mothers of all time. It's too bad she was stuck in one of the corniest episodes the show ever attempted.

The fourth season of 24 is notorious for its main storyline, which featured an American Muslim family that appeared assimilated on the surface, but was really a fully functioning terrorist sleeper cell planning an especially eventful day for L.A. and the nation overall. That's right, father, mother Dina, and son Behrooz were all in on the act.

That is until Behrooz actually got caught up in the faux assimilation, got himself a snow bunny, and started re-thinking that whole nuke the country shit. Even worse, the chick got jealous and followed Behrooz to one of the secret hideouts, although she was none the wiser. When Dina found out about the relatively minor indiscretion she promptly invited Behrooz's secret girlfriend over for tea with a side of cyanide, and then shot her for good measure to both eliminate the potential threat and rededicate him to the cause. And you thought your mom was disapproving.

We have no evidence to support the claim that Gemma is actually a bad mother per se. In fact, fierce love and loyalty to her family is her number one character trait, and she will do anything to both protect them and keep them close. If that means holding an infant at gunpoint, then hey, so be it.

Oh, there is that little historical sidebar that she actively participated in the conspiracy to kill her son Jax's (Charlie Hunnam) biological father when he was just a child with his stepfather, on some Hamlet shit. All because he wanted to take the motorcycle club that she helped him start in a more legal, less violent direction.

In the present, she manipulates anyone and everyone she needs to to service her own agenda, and is one of the most accomplished liars we've seen on television to this day, even when she's telling the truth. (She used the revelation of her gang rape to heal a rift between step-father and son, and when she finally came clean about his dad's murder, she conveniently left her involvement out of it.) It's a credit to Sagal's overdue Emmy-worthy performance that this foul woman is actually our favorite character on the show.

Contance is the Southern belle with the heart of ice and the matriarch of one of the most fucked up families currently on TV. She came to California to be a movie star, but what she ended up with was four malformed children and death and despair all around her. There's one the audience has yet to meet, as for the other three? Well there's Beauregard, the deformed son reminiscent of Sloth from The Goonies that she kept chained in the attic then had killed so that Child Services wouldn't take him away. There's Addy, the daughter born with Down's Syndrome that she did genuninely love (we think), but still treated cruelly. (There was a whole mirror room punishment thing that was straight out of Carrie.)

But the crown jewel of the family was her second son Tate. We don't know what their day-to-day relationship was like. We do know that she murdered his unfaithful father then told him that he ran away on the family, while moving on with poor sap Larry solely for his financial support. This all drove Tate to do drugs, go to Larry's office and burn him alive, then go to school and massacre his classmates, which led to a shootout with the cops at his house.

Both of her sons died on Murder House premises and thus are ghosts, enabling Tate to continue his reign of terror on anyone that crosses his path. When Addy died, Constance selfishly tried to bring her body to the house so that she would remain a ghost, thus dooming her to an eternity on Earth. She loves hard, this one.

Mags is the epitome of tough love. She manipulated her three sons into helping her control the drug trade in Harlan County, and in one memorable scene, beat her youngest's hand with a hammer when he stepped out of line. She also poisioned the father of a local teen Loretta for barely any reason at all and took her in under false pretenses because she had always wanted a daughter of her own.

Despite her overbearingness, Mags genuninely cared for Loretta and the favoritism showed, inciting a jealous streak among her emotionally deprived sons that led to two of their deaths. For some strange reason, when Loretta discovered the truth she wanted absolutely nothing to do with the Bennetts anymore. We have no idea why.

Sure, Nancy started out with good intentions—a little mid-grade drug dealing to maintain her family's comfortable life style after her husband died. The keyword is started. Over the course of Weeds' whirlwind eight seasons, Nancy has committed mild wrongs against her sons like preventing one from going to college and lying about their true heritage. Typical dysfunctional family shit, right?

Oh, but she's also had one arrested—because he was involved in a rival drug outfit. She embroiled them in the drug cartel universe, which led to numerous kidnappings and even a shooting that was meant for her. She even helped one son cover up a murder. All said and done, we're pretty sure her kids would have been better off moving to a less affluent neighborhood than going through all of that.

It doesn't get much worse than trying to have your own son killed, which is what Soprano matriarch Livia tried to do on multiple occassions. When she wasn't subtly manipulating people to whack Tony (James Gandolfini) she was generally just a miserable old woman doing her best to bring everyone around her down to her level. Her lifetime of berating her kids led to each and every one of them ending up just as crabby as she was and if Marchand didn't pass away around Season Three we're sure she would've done worse before the series ended.

Who is worse than a deadbeat dad who doesn't care or provide for his family, sleeps with his son's girlfriend, steals money from his kids (and takes out new cards in the younger one's names, thus fucking up their credit history before they can even own a credit card themselves), and gets so wasted on the daily that his kids actually end up taking care of him? Monica Gallagher, the mother who abandoned her kids with him in the first place, that's who.

For most of her life, superspy Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) believed her mother died in a car accident when she was young. In the debut season of Alias, though, she discovered that her mother was actually a KGB double-agent and her whole identity was a cover. Then she found out her mother was still alive. Upon meeting her daughter for the first time in 30 years, mommy dearest, Irina Derevko, shot her in the shoulder.

For the rest of the series, Irina popped in and out and led Sydney on an emotional rollercoaster, appearing genuinely regretful (her favorite motto was "truth takes time") and in the same instant selfishly vicious. Let's just say that for all her alleged regret, that first meeting wasn't the last time she shot at her own daughter.

We pity Gillian. She was raped at 13, subsequently impregnated, and left to raise a son on her own with only some help from the pitying Nucky Thompson. But responding to that unfortunate situation by developing an increasingly unhealthy, inappropriate, and manipulative relationship with her son Jimmy (Michael Pitt) earns her the number one spot on this list as the worst TV mom ever.

The 13-year age difference was always going to hinder it from being your typical mother-son relationship, but the more time spent with her and Jimmy the more it became apparent that something was not right. By mid Season Two it was clear that Gillian had an actual attraction to her son and we feared he would be too powerless to her controlling ways to prevent something gross from happening.

Then came the big game-changer: It already happened! One drunken night Gillian successfully seduced her son, and the morning after he was so freaked out that he enlisted in the army and fought in WWI, setting in motion a chain of personality-altering events that would lead to his death. In effect, Gillian drove the confused, impressionable Jimmy to both incest and to betray Nucky, the only person who ever truly cared for him. Did we mention that leaves his toddler son orphaned and in her hands now? Ick.