The Babble List: 25 Best Fictional Parents

Remember when you’d come home from a hard band practice, and your mum poured you a glass of milk and your dad offered homespun wisdom that made everything better? Wait, that wasn’t your parents — that was Clair and Heathcliff Huxtable on afternoon Cosby re-runs. Pop culture has always been full of enviable parents, and for a generation of latchkey kids they were always the next-best thing. Here are 25 that we’d like to adopt — or at least model ourselves after, now that we have kids of our own. — Marisa Meltzer

25. Joyce Summers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
As if raising an adolescent wasn’t enough to deal with as a single mum, Joyce Summer has to contend with a daughter whose destiny is to slay vampires and save the world. Instead of disowning or discouraging her, though, Joyce embraces Buffy’s fate. Plus, she’s an awesome surrogate mum to Buffy’s equally eccentric crew of friends.

24. Samantha, Bewitched
You have to give Samantha some credit. She’s an other-worldly witch plonked into suburban life, with a husband who won’t let her use her magic powers on housework. Her mother is intent on breaking up her marriage, her husband has constant work dramas and her daughter Tabitha is a little witch in training. No wonder she occasionally breaks out in to her alter-ego, groovy miniskirt-wearing cousin Serena. All mums need to rebel a little.

23. Roseanne Conner, Roseanne
Just the fact that a blue collar, feminist, middle-aged woman with a bone-dry sense of humour (and who wasn’t a size two!) was on TV for nine seasons was pretty radical. But what was even more radical was that, as the antithesis of the stereotypical Stepford sitcom mom, Roseanne Conner was portrayed as a great mother, who negotiated her kids’ battles with puberty and rebelliousness with ease.

22. Carson Drew, the Nancy Drew series
He may have been the most respected lawyer in River Heights, but Carson Drew seemed to have little in the way of a life of his own. As a widower, he rarely had a love interest and instead devoted himself to his spunky girl-detective daughter, Nancy. But that’s what also makes him so cool–he knows Nancy’s special and doesn’t try to get in the way of her passion, even if that means he has to get kidnapped occasionally so she can save him.

21. Gil Buckman, Parenthood
When Cowboy Dan, a children’s entertainer, fails to show at his socially awkward son’s birthday, Gil Buckman makes himself into a DIY cowboy. Any father who will make balloon animals to placate his kids is a true hero.

20. Ma and Pa, Little House on the Prairie
What other parents could successfully turn a pig’s bladder into a toy? As actual pioneers, Ma and Pa do things like make butter, trap muskrats, and chop wood, earning them an exalted place in the hearts of many a dreamy adolescent girl.

19. Sophia Petrillo, The Golden Girls
Fake senility, mob connections, endless straight talk… No one made cranky as lovable as Sophia Petrillo, who, as she once put it, lived through “two world wars, fifteen vendettas, four operations and two Darrins on Bewitched.”

18. Elyse and Steven Keaton, Family Ties
As classic hippie parents who participated in the Peace Corps and went to Berkeley, they seem more amused than annoyed at the culture divide embodied in their kids: Jennifer, the tomboy; Mallory, the boy-crazy clothes horse; and Alex, the Young Republican. The Keatons’ parenting was a hit with both the health-food crowd and Reaganites.

17. Jim and Cindy Walsh, Beverly Hills, 90210
Let’s say your teenage son does a fictional drug called U4EA at an underground rave and can’t drive home. And he leaves the vintage Mustang he worked so hard for, waiting tables at the Peach Pit, only to come back and find it spray-painted and missing tires. How long would you be mad at him? For the Walshes, it’s just about one episode. Their twins Brandon and Brenda were constantly getting into trouble, but Jim and Cindy seemed to thrive on their kids’ drama.

16. Jack and Norma Arnold, The Wonder Years
On the surface Jack seems a little overbearing and Norma seems like a pushover, but as the series progressed, the parents’ lives started to look more nuanced: Jack quit his middle-management job and Norma went back to college. As they found themselves (it was the late ’60s, after all), we were able to watch as they became better parents.

15. Molly, A Country Practice
When Molly died, Australians collectively stopped in our tracks and reached for a tissue. Full of good humour to the end, we’ll remember her for her loud jumpers as well as the lullaby she used to sing to daughter Chloe: “Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly. Blow the wind south o’er the bonny blue sea.”

14. Henry Warnimont, Punky Brewster
A young girl is abandoned by her mum and an old widower, undeterred, fosters her. This is not Masterpiece Theatre, but the plot of the totally ’80s sitcom Punky Brewster. For Henry, Punky’s aggressive uniqueness — embodied in her awesome, mismatched fashion sense (bandannas tied around the leg, tights with legs two different colors, pigtails) — was more of a reason to love her.

13. Mr. and Mrs. Quimby, the Ramona series
Theses parents deal with real life: layoffs, trying to quit smoking, arguing in front of their two precocious kids. And yet, even if their lives aren’t fairy tale-perfect, they try their best and prove that’s enough.

12. Mr. Drummond, Diff’rent Strokes
It takes a compassionate man to step up and honour his former employee’s dying wish to care for her two sons. How does he deal with hostility from his newly adopted son Willis? With lots of toys!

11. Darryl and Sal Kerrigan, The Castle
The blue collar Kerrigan home  may be short on style but big on love. You can be guaranteed than every child’s success – whether they dug a hole or graduated from a hairdressing apprenticeship – will be equally celebrated.

10. Bette Porter and Tina Kennard, The L-Word
They’ve dealt with miscarriages, parent kidnapping, and cheating on each other in this soap version of Sapphic life, but through it all, they always remember to put their daughter Angelica first.

9. Sandy and Kirsten Cohen, The OC
As a couple, they’re a case of opposites attracting: Sandy is an idealistic lawyer from New York, and Kirsten is a WASPy heiress to a real estate conglomerate, but they managed to make their love believable in a nighttime soap filled with fakes. Plus, they gave genuinely sound love advice.

8. Pippa, Home and Away
Rather than give up on their foster children when her husband lost his job, Pippa moved the family to a regional coastal town, quickly becoming a pillar of the community. After years of fostering and the loss of two husbands, Pippa eventually chose to put herself first for the first time in her life and headed overseas with her lover.

7. Edna and Wilbur Turnblad, Hairspray
Edna and Wilbur never make their plus-size daughter Tracy feel anything less than beautiful. And they champion racial integration! In a brilliant casting move, director John Waters cast his muse Divine as mum Edna, making drag queens seem like ideal mum material.

6. Mister Incredible and Elastigirl, The Incredibles
Their attempt to trade in their superhero identity for a bland suburban life fails, and proves to their freaky budding superhero kids (and us!) that it’s never a good idea to hide who you truly are.

5. Julie Rafter, Packed to the Rafters
With two adult kids, a daughter-in-law and her own father sharing her home, it’s a wonder Julie Rafter gets out of bed some mornings. But somehow she does, and even finds the time to go clubbing with her girlfriends.

4. Marge Simpson, The Simpsons
Although close to straight-edge daughter Lisa, Marge has a deep understanding of her “special little guy” Bart and has defended him on many occasions. She once said “I know Bart can be a handful, but I also know what he’s like inside. He’s got a spark. It’s not a bad thing… Of course, it makes him do bad things.” Other mums would be begging for Ritalin.

3. Jack Walsh, Pretty in Pink
Harry Dean Stanton, as single dad Jack Walsh in John Hughes’ ’80s teen masterpiece, had his issues: he was chronically unemployed and was seemingly unable to get over his ex-wife’s abandoning him and his daughter. But he was savvy enough to know that his teenage daughter’s greatest concern is fitting in, and he redeems himself by buying an admittedly tacky dress he can’t afford so she can attend prom.

2. Mike and Carol Brady, The Brady Bunch
With six kids, a housekeeper and a dog, the Bradys didn’t make having a blended family look easy, but they always made it look fun.

1. Clair and Cliff Huxtable, The Cosby Show
As the Huxtables, Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad reigned supreme for eight TV seasons as the brownstone-dwelling, advice-dispensing parents of five kids. Their ability to raise kids in a big city no doubt inspired many young fans to stay (or move) to the city when they started their own families.