"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."
Reality shows in general can often seem narmy with the way they play ridiculously dramatic music whenever there's some minor conflict, even though said music wouldn't be used in any movie or TV series except for in the most dramatic parts.
Also pretty much every documentary ever made. Name just one that isn't essentially about how humans destroy nature or do awful things to each other.
Are You Afraid of the Dark? had some because of its cheap production values and inconsistent acting. For example:
From the same episode ("The tale of the renegade virus"), there was also the Big Bad's evil laughter. The Big Bad was a silver midget who was constantly laughing.
Another moment was in an episode where a bunch of kids were kidnapped onto an alien spacecraft and forced to eat a horrible alien food product... which was clearly lime-flavoured jello in a bowl.
"The Tale of the Dangerous Soup" had the scene where the girl accidentally unleashed an evil spirit from the restaurant. It looks like she unleashed a badly animated CGI. Also the "cursed statue from a remote jungle tribe" in that episode is a mass-produced ceramic lawn ornament that's widely available in home and garden stores across Canada.
The vampire's death in the episode "The Tale of the Night Shift" was made hilarious because of his high-pitched girlish screaming and because the burning body falling off the side of the building was clearly a dummy.
"The Tale of the Bookish Babysitter" had the scene where the kid encountered the witch in the castle and the witch's subsequent death.
"The Tale of the Dark Music" features the bully's punches on Andy.
"The Tale of the Many Faces": When the two girls simply grab Madame Visage and she makes no attempt to break free, and they easily defeat her while she pathetically screams. So the girls have been working as slaves for her all this time and all they needed to do was simply hold her?
In the Babylon 5 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.
War Without End, Part 1: Ivanova's distress call from the future. Narm-tastically over-the-top.
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:
Then there's the time Logan seems to get the "Virus," which stops him and Max from touching -- but OOPS! NO. It's just chicken pox.
Then there's Brain's repeated pining over Max. She'd normally beat someone for pining over her, but she appears to think that the Max/Brain ship is possible. Let us note that Brain's a rather fat computer nerd. In Hollywood Shipping, relationships like that just don't work if the fat computer nerd isn't the lead.
Jessica Alba. Beautiful. Quite good at acting. But never ask her to cry. If she does, then it will push the narm Up to Eleven.
Bet On It from the sequel (pictured above) must be seen to be believed. Zac Efron, sporting a fake tan as orange as the desert landscaping behind him, has an epiphany moment and breaks into an angry, aggressive, character development song of self discovery. The choreography? A twirly, skippy mix between contemporary ballet and Michael Jackson dance moves. On a golf course. He also takes a golf break in the middle of the song and then sings to his hilariously unconvincing reflection.
Disney made an even more narmy remix music video, which actually aired on Disney Channel during commercial breaks. One could almost imagine that the person directing the editing of this had just discovered various video effects and was using this as their guinea pig.
When Sharpay said that Troy was an excellent golfer to her father. She was completely serious--he was perfect.
The part where a frustrated Troy runs into the empty kitchen, screams at the top of his lungs, and runs out again. Aaaand... SCENE.
If Zac's melodramatic song about "I don't know where to go," with lightning in the background, and going sideways on the walls, and screaming, isn't hilarious, you have no soul.
The ending, when he screams.
While an exhaustive list of Narm in High School Musical would be impossible, Vanessa Hudgens really deserves a mention here. Her Wangst song, where she flounces around the school in an Ophelian manner and sings pitifully to a 20-foot poster of Zac [1], is probably the Narm high-point of the first movie.
The season 4 episode "Volunteers", where the victim rants about how he's going to sue the people who attacked him and buy a "Rolls-Royce wheelchair and enough crack to last a lifetime."
That one seems deliberate.
The episode "In Vino Veritas". It's a rare moment where something is funnier because it's Too Soon. Chevy Chase's impression of Mel Gibson is priceless.
The opening statement in "Talking Points", in which the defense attempts to make his case by tossing out random racial epithets and saying that the jury "probably wants to beat the crap out of him".
The short-livedLaw and 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 and 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.
"Happy Burger"? That's the most generic name for a fictional fast food restaurant ever. You'd think the writers for this show could come up with something clever.
"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."
Law and Order Special Victims Unit is not always clear-cut; it has Narm, but it also has genuine Black Comedy to take the edge off the weekly parade of rape and murder. It's been called "the darkest comedy on network TV."
Eliot's wife giving birth in the car accident. It might have been dramatic if the last two (or more) seasons hadn't been pulling more and more unbelievable plots twists halfway through the episode until you knew something "dramatic" would happen Once an Episode. On the other hand, the extrication was marvelously done, probably because it used real NYFD firefighters.
And then there's "Responsible," which, on a show all about sex crimes and child abuse, is about the horrors of... teenage drinking. It must be seen for the funeral scene of two teens who died in a car crash, which delivers the most hilarious eulogies since Heathers. Only, that probably wasn't what the writer was aiming for...
"Closet": Olivia, holding the Idiot Ball, asks why a suspect's sexuality was such a big deal. (He was an active pro football player.) This is a woman who has probably dealt with more gay bashing and sexuality-based crimes than most people have read about, or seen outside Law and Order SVU.
Olivia Benson, when it comes to dealing with victims, is so made of Narm that she comes off as creepier than the Monsters of the Week.
"Sweet mother of God... it's the carjack rapist!" This comes from a Cold Opening and the extremely nonplussed way the operator says it in doesn't help.
Then there's the pedophile who claimed "our numbers str growing and yours are shrinking!"
Nononononononono. 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.
One description for that episode: "When a dead woman is found with an exotic bird..." It make you wonder if SVU got involved, then where the fuck was she storing that bird?
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:
Then he rushes the bench and has to be restrained. It's supposed to be serious, but it's over the top.
Any time the bad guy starts using his "rape voice".
Example: Special Guest Martin Short attempting to growl out "Best sex I ever had!" Made worse because his character was a fake psychic. (This example not spoilered because, frankly, why else would Martin Short be onLaw And Order?)
Whatever game was in a certain Law and Order Special Victims Unit episode looked like the worst one ever made. An enemy did absolutely nothing while the character slowly hacked it with a sword. The creators had likely never seen a video game.
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?
"My baby mamas are just glad their babies look like me."
"Is there any reason you can think of that they sodomized your husband with a banana?"
Kathleen Stabler's intervention in "Crush". The fact that we're still rooting for Olivia after that reminds us why we still watch this show.
The episode with Jesse McCartney (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).
An episode revolving around an alleged mentally-challenged rapist builds to a court scene which builds decent tension and pity, then completely narms it up by showing the sentence.
Every bit of "Bedtime" after the first 15 minutes. It's like the writers had a contest going to see how much narm they could cram into a single episode.
Law and 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.
On another episode of "Criminal Intent" guest-starringStephen 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?
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.
In "Cats in the Cradle", whilst the two girls give their version of events, the line "Quick, girls! Take the cat and run!" must be intended to be dramatic. It isn't.
The little girl having committed murder to steal a cat is narm in of itself.
CSI New York, season three, episode one. Stella is alone, doing the slow firearm stalk after a Serial Killer. It's supposed to be a tense scene. Stella is Ms. Fanservice, however, and her midriff becomes inadvertently exposed (or maybe advertently exposed). That is quite distracting.
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.
A season five episode of The West Wing, where an upset Josh Lyman stands out front of the Capitol and screams "you want a piece of me?!" at the building with great angst. Who screams at a building?
Torchwood is filled with these. One example is in the second episode, 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.
What about the last episode of Series 1? You know, 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
Any time -- any time -- in "Something Borrowed" 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. Series two. Some parts of that scene was meant to be humorous. Some weren't, but oh, how they were.
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 in the same episode 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 "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.
Jonah's "primal howl" in "Adrift".
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. 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.
In one of the more boneheaded (sorry) episodes, Wishbone once did a series of three short stories from African American folklore. The first one was the story of Anansi, the Trickster Archetype 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.
There was also a Romeo and Juliet episode that featured Wishbone romancing a human actress and ended with Wishbone playing dead like dogs do with his legs stiffly sticking up in the air while the human cast talked about what a tragedy it was.
Wishbone was playing Sherlock Holmes, and at one point he 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!"
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 Cities, 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.
What about his adaptation of David and Goliath? Near the end, 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 revelation that the Romulan senator realizes Sisko's carefully-made forgery was fake in the excellent Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "In the Pale Moonlight" would have had more impact if the senator had not used that exact moment to channel the spirit of the villain from The Shining. It also doesn't help that it was seized upon by the denizens of the internets and completely memed to death, as depicted here: [1]
An earlier example of Star Trek Narm changed the course of an entire species. When Star Trek: The Next Generation began, Gene Roddenberry was involved in the series and trying as hard as he could to make it match the feel of the original series. Thus came the new "big menace for the Federation", the Ferengi, who hooted and howled like monkeys, cracked energy whips, and dressed in furs. It would have fit in perfectly with the original series's cheesy Sci Fi of the day; to new audiences, it just looked ridiculous. The Ferengi were quickly retooled into being a mostly comedy relief species and, ironically, probably became a favorite race of the series because of it.
The best and worst Star Trek: Deep Space Nine example occurs during the climax of "In the Hands of the Prophets." The episode itself was good -- one of the few truly good episodes of the first season, in fact -- but Sisko's slo-motion "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!", complete with dropped pitch, at the most tense moment was jarringly funny.
What, are you all out of your minds?! End of watch? It's the end of everything! WHAT ARE YOU, ROBOTS?! Wound up, toy soldiers?! Don't you know when you're dying?! Watch and regulations and orders? What do they mean?"
A special mention to the lovely ladies from the episode "Spock's Brain":
"Brain and brain! WHAT IS BRAIN?!!!"
Spock's rather out-of-character moment near the end of "The Cage"
"THE WOMEN!!"
"THERE! ARE! FOUR! LIGHTS!". It's not the sentence itself that's Narmy, it's how Patrick Stewart delivers it. He shouts it in defiance, when he could have said it normally and with steel in his voice. Honestly, you'd expect more from Patrick Stewart.
It's not cut-and-dried, as there are all sorts of opinions on this scene. Some fans see it as horrible, some as So Bad It's Good -- this is here largely because of that contingent -- some as simply good, and some consider it a Crowning Moment of Awesome for Picard, who didn't have the strength to stand but still made the effort for a last shout of defiance. There is the argument that, when one has been incessantly tortured by a Cardassian sadist (who brings his baby daughter along to watch) in an equivalent to the Ministry of Love, a mental breakdown will occur, which would cause the petulant childish delivery.
Deanna sensing "great joy and gratitude" in the pilot episode.
Actually, most scenes where Deanna uses her empathic ability fall into this category, particularly in the early seasons.
In "Night Terrors," we are subjected multiple times to Deanna floating through a cloudy, green-screen dreamscape with arms outstretched, desperately shouting, "WHERE ARE YOOOOOUUU??? I'M TRYING TO FIND YOOOOOOUUU!!!"
In Marina Sirtis's defense, she does not hesitate to name "The Green Flying Troi Episode" as her least favorite to fans at every opportunity. She was well aware of how cringe-worthy those scenes were but the director and writers were unable to provide anything better at the time.
"Angel One," in which Riker is temporary ambassador to a matriarchal society which wears sexy clothing; he sleeps with the female ruler and then campaigns for equal rights for men.
Another moment of Riker Narm appears in the otherwise excellentlycreepy "Frame of Mind"; he lets out a Big No so unconvincing that you'll be ready to forgive James Earl Jones for everything.
"Home Soil", which is one long narmfest of an episode - from the three terraformers (the young female one who spends almost the entire episode crying, the young male one with the oh-so-'80s mullet, and the older one who gets most of their dialogue and borders on ham with his delivery of lines such as "I CREATE LIFE... I DO NOT TAKE IT!"), to the cast asking each other rhetorical questions over and over for most of the story, to the entire bridge crew feeling free to chip in and comment during the initial first contact dialogue between humans and the "microbrain" inorganic lifeform serving as the episode's antagonist. Special bonus points go to Dr. Crusher, whose delivery of the line "Life - force! Do - you - under-stand - us!?" is excruciating.
Going back to the original series, the episode "Charlie X". The ending of this episode is particularly narmtacular. The episode had a good concept, but the delivery of Charlie's final lines is... hilariously awesome. "I want to stay... stay... stay..." is not bad in concept; but when the actor sounds utterly bored and is trying to drop his voice 20 octaves below what it's normally been, the laughs start coming.
TNG had "Sub Rosa," in which Beverly Crusher is hopelessly in love with someone who lives in a candle, who has been the lover of almost every female in her family line. This person is killed when the candle is blown out!
That's not the narmy bit. The true narm is in the ghost sex, the hammy, Harlequin-novel-esque dialogue, and Ned Quint.
Nah, neither of those! The most narmy bit of all is the truly appalling, cliched and usual US TV obsession with portraying everything Scottish as Brigadoon.
I thought it was Crusher's line "What, what's happening to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee?"
Voyager was loaded with them, but the topper has to be this:
"Get the cheese to Sickbay!"
In the episode "Twisted," the ship is being crushed by a mysterious space wave and Janeway falls unconscious after accidentally touching the phenomenon. While the other officers stand around discussing how to save the ship, she suddenly sits bolt upright, gasps, "it's tALkiNg tO MEEEE," and then falls back down on the couch.
In the episode "Prototype" Torres describes how she created a prototype robot. She dramatically told Janeway that when she "installed that module, the prototype looked up at me, and asked me for programming."
As pointed out in a nitpicker's guide, the triumphant moment in TNG season 5 episode "Disaster" where Picard and two children, heave themselves through a doorway after escaping a stuck turbolift before it fell and climbed up the shaft, is wrecked if you realise that the ladder goes all the way up. They could have climbed a little higher and just stepped through.
Tasha Yar's farewell speech in the episode "Skin of Evil". It's intended to be a Tear Jerker and likely affects many tropers that way, but not all of them.
"Will Riker. You are the best!"
"Geordi. In those moments I felt the most despair, you took my hand and helped me to see things differently."
"My friend Data. You see things with the wonder of a child."
Same (nsatisfactory) episode: That ink stain on Yar's cheek in sickbay when Dr. Crusher tries to bring her back kills the drama of those scenes.
Attempts to show the original Battlestar Galactica to someone unaccustomed to science fiction result in uncontrollable laughter when any character says "frak", especially during serious moments. It's hard to do this even with someone who is accustomed to science fiction; nor is it all that easy to get into watching it oneself, since, you know... it's Narm, and it simply is ridiculous.
Crew Specialist Cally's cry of "Talk to me, motherfracker!" during a quiet moment with Chief Tyrol on the surface of Kobol.
Though, to be fair, this was probably deliberate, as both Tyrol and Cally crack up straight after, as soon they realise how ridiculous she sounded.
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!"
From Season 4:
"They killed my cat!"
Season 4 also 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 New Caprica episodes when Cally is in a holding cell, she shouts (or rather, says more loudly than usual), "You stupid frakked up toaster". It was never convincing.
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.
There is an explanation, and it was supposed to come out of nowhere. But it's still not very sensible of him.
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 without that face. Those eyes... THOSE EYES!!! [2]
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.
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.
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 audio 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 superheros 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 just 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. Also, if Sylar kills that stupid dog, then it'll be hard for some people to regard him as a villain for the rest of the series.
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 telekenetic-finger-slice across mommy's forehead. The music in the background and the pretentious and Sin City-esque colour 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:
"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:
In the most recent 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...
Nathan's beard at the beginning of season 2.
Peter's Season One Bangs. I couldn't even take the climactic scene of the final seriously, all the emotional weight just got nullified by the all encompassing Bangs!Narm. I was pissed, actually.
A normal occurrence on several Perp Sweating scenes in many a Crime-Time Soap that happens to state that New Media Are Evil, at least to anyone who has some understanding of this new media. Moreso after a few years have passed, and we get to hear Ice-T refer to videogames as "magical rape land" in reruns long after any fear is long gone.
John From Cincinnati had a few. One example is when Butchie calls his ex-girlfriend on the cell phone and insults her, making her hang up in his face. A few minutes later, he calls her again only to repeat the same insult. He repeats the process a few times.
One particularly tense scene near the end of the first season of The Wire had emotionally-torn drug dealer D'Angelo repeatedly shouting "Where's Wallace?" at his boss. In some countries, this can get undermined because Wallace is the long form of Wally, and there are "Where's Wally?" books . . .
In North America, they're the "Where's Waldo" books. But Wally was the original name, and many countries call him that. In France he's called Charlie.
Cyber-Seduction: His Secret Life, in which a teenage boy looking at softcore pornography while drinking Red Bull is treated like his having a hardcore drug addiction.
Made all the Narmier because the actress playing the mother, Kelly Lynch, has done full frontal nudity in other films.
The best part about the movie? It's trying to be a colossal, prudish guilt trip on guys who have an interest in girls; but it shows damp, toned, boy flesh at every opportunity. It's like softcore porn for hardcore feminists.
There's a Lifetime Movie of the Week entitled My Stepson, My Lover. It ended with the stepson/lover completely paralyzed in a wheelchair.
Lifetime movies are MADE of this trope. Of course, for some, that isthe appeal.
The second season finale of The OC, 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 OC 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.
In the Masters of Horror 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 fake 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).
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.
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."
At first glance, the Nanashi from the latest Super Sentai show, 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.
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
Power Rangers has a couple. There's the destruction of the Thunderzords (complete with a clearly low budget and a over the top NOOOO). There's the death of Alex in the first episode of Time Force, during which Erin Cahill desperately overacts Jenn'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 Noforever.
Power Rangers is full of them. 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 this...
"Jason": Zordon whats 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 actually 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.
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.
"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.
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 in the Mexican Spanish dub. He can't be taken seriosuly once you realize that his VA is the same that did voice overs for Bill Cosby of all people!
"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!"
One episode of 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, Summer Glau said they didn't even fit her head and had to be tied in place behind her ears.
The title sequence where Summer is holding dual pistols while spinning around for no reason. :(
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.
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..."
With its abundance of Moral Dissonance and the utterly straight portrayal of Cordell "God Mode Sue" Walker, the series is a veritable goldmine of pure, unrefined Narm.
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.
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 a trying situation where he had to do something to overcome it, and he shouts, "There were mosquitoes...EATING ME ALIVE!" Probably the height of unintentional hilarity of the series as a whole.
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!
Doctor 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 Cold Case is good, it's a Tear Jerker. When it's not, it's this. One good example of Narm comes from the third season premiere, "Family," where the detectives look into the case of a high school senior who was killed at the same prom where a newborn baby -- his daughter -- was dumped in a trash can. When the mother and daughter finally reunite, what does the mom say?
"My God; you have Jimmy all over your face."
Bukkake -- it brings the family together!
Ghost Whisperer can be a wellspring of this. Terrible cleavage-maximizing fashion and frequent after-school special dialogue. They also often try 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.
Jekyll with James Nesbitt gets increasingly Narmy as Hyde takes over.
"I LIIIVE in your SOOOOOOUUUUULLL!!! Like a CAAAAAGED BIRD!!! But SOMETIMES, the DOOOOOR is left OOOOOPEN!!"
Chuck. Every time he decides to get anywhere with Sarah, BAM--Bryce Larkin. It's supposed to be a dramatic moment, every time. They put Matthew Bomer's name in the opening credits, guaranteeing that either we get a flashback episode or he's gonna appear in the end. It's usually the latter. No surprise.
Twenty Four. 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.
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.
In the fifth season of Desperate Housewives, 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 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.
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!"
Especially narmy is the gun is loaded with bullets which don't pierce the water.
Excessive angst and unsubtle tearjerking can create Narm (we laugh so that we do not cry), and so there's a lot of inappropriate laughing when watching Supernatural. The Most Pathetic Christmas Ever (tm) does it for some. The ending of "Heart" is another: It's Old Yeller, but with cleavage!
In the episode "Fallen Idol," a man was in his house, late at night. He just sent the maid home for the evening, and he hears something behind him. He turns around, gasps in horror and says "It's you!? You're supposed to be dead!" The ghost? ABRAHAM LINCOLN! With the most narmish expression of unbridled rage on his face, too.
The entire fifth season finale. Especially that moment where Dean puts on 'Rock of Ages' by Def Leppard to break up the non-fight between Michael and Lucifer. It's especially funny because he trundles up in the Impala so slowly!
In the season 4 episode "When The Levee Breaks," there is a scene where Sam tells Dean to say what he's thinking (that Sam is a monster). He hisses, "Say it!", reminiscent the narmful scene in Twilight in which Edward says the same. Credit is given to Supernatural, though; after that line, the scene ends in one of the saddest ways up to that point: Sam walking out on Dean voluntarily, leaving him alone and crying on the floor.
Season 6's opening episode "Exile on Main Street": the scene where Dean is lying on a bed while hallucinating that Azazel kills Lisa and feeds Ben demon-blood. Dean's desperate cries and sweaty face, the wobbly camera effect, and Lisa's "it's all your fault" are what really sell the hokeyness.
Boss Leviathan Dick Roman's own personal form of You Have Failed Me..., "Bibbing". It should be horrifying, he's essentially forcing his underlings to devour themselves. However, "bib" is just such a stupid word that it immediately kills the intensity any scene it's uttered in. It doesn't help that the first time we see him do it to someone, he has his secretary dress them up with a handkerchief first.
The leviathans in general tend to be pretty narmy. They don't seem to be able to go a single scene without mentioning that they eat people. Their big plan is to make humans lazy and fat. And then there's all the jokes about their leader being named Dick...
In 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.
In the season two premiere, there is 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. "SAAAAAAMAAAAAAAANTHAAAAAA!"
In another season eight episode, there's a flashback that shows Mulder telling Scully that she the reason she can't have children is because her ova were removed and are being stored in a government warehouse. This scene was appropriately heart breaking until Scully responded with, "You found them?" The narm had nothing to do with melodrama--Gillian Anderson executed the line wonderfully. It was just that it sounded hilarious in context.
Donnie Pfaster's (luckily very short) "metamorphosis" in the otherwise excellent episode "Irresistible".
The last part of the Belgian programme man bijt hond has amateur stage players try playing a scene from a feuilleton. This is always outrageously funny because the actors are hamming it up every scene and don't sound natural at all. It's So Bad It's Good at its very best. The jury is still out on whether the actors are deliberately trying to make their scenes sound lame, or if they're just genuinely bad. Considering the poor quality of the rest of the show, the latter is quite likely.
Bonekickers. Lines such as 'I have an Etruscan spear and I'm not afraid to use it!' from supposedly serious archaeologists.
National Geographic's Fight Science -- the little monologues at the end of each segment involving the "winning" martial artist trying to sound tough while shadow-boxing, getting out of breath as they monologued.
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.
"He won't answer my phone calls and I CAN'T DRIVE!"
Or:
"He died a horrible death because I had incredible sex!"
Every single episode contains some elements of narm.
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 dominative matriarch responsible for much of this ill will (making her the Big Bad by default) relates to her successors her basic strategy:
The BBC show Being Human (UK) has a main character who's a werewolf. We see him change into a werewolf several times, with the occasional flash of his naked body mutating and writhing to the sounds of bloodcurdling screams and crunching bones. At the end of this fantastically gritty transformation... we get a guy in a bad werewolf suit.
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.
Xena: Warrior Princess is usually campy enough to avoid this trope, but it occurs in a few episodes where it takes itself too seriously. The sixth season episode "The Haunting of Amphipolous" in particular is pretty much made of narm.
Kamen Rider Faiz 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.
Criminal Minds 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?
Hey, it can happen...
"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 Tear Jerker 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 actually 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 episode ofArthurUp to Eleven and in which the younger sibling was actually sorry, complete with screaming "I told you not to touch it!", makes it either a lot worse, or... well, funny.
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.
The killer in "Profiling 101" was nicknamed the Womb Raider. That was also the name of Tomb Raider porn parody.
A recent 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 beginning of an episode of House where a young man suffers a seisure 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.
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.
It possibly becomes even funnier if you realize that this is the second episode of Monk in which the killer has dressed up as Santa. What is it with San Francisco's murderers and Santa?
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."
Put down the scalpel, Derek.
No, you put down the scalpel!
Also, several narmy moments in "Grey's" happen 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????"
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!
See, this is what happens when a serious show decides to plagiarize Rat Race.
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.)
Sea Change: Two scenes, one sad, the other serious, both from the episode 'Looking Forward to the Past'.
The sad one is when Laura, who is failing to make decent lemon butter, follows the recipe for lemon butter in the cookbook of her ex-boyfriend (who left at the start of the season). Later, Miranda (her daughter) finds her sitting on the floor crying. Naturally, she's concerned. When she asks what's wrong, Laura looks up with teary eyes and a red face and utters a hilarious and Narmish line:
"Oh, he named the sticky date pudding after me!"
The serious one is when, after Angus' ex-girlfriend returns and informs him that she left because she was pregnant and she terminated the baby, Karen (his current girlfriend) convinces him to tell her what's wrong. The next bit has Laura opening the door to find Karen screaming at Angus, "Pregnant? You got another woman pregnant?"
In the NBC miniseries Meteor, there is a scene where Dr. Chetwyn (portrayed by Jason Alexander) is angry and stressed out over the situation he's in, and snaps at the people around him. While this was meant to be a serious scene, Dr. Chetwyn yells and looks up into the air the exact same way George Costanza would have, which ruins the moment.
Speaking of 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!
No, not the electromagnetic field. They said "gravity fluctuations," which is even MORE ridiculous (gravity is constant to the amount of mass. Gravity can't fluctuate without massive changes in that)! Also, the scene with the ship being sucked off of the water, but the water not moving at all was pretty narmy.
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 Memetic Mutation in the fandom, earning Kate the name "Braid-Face."Not that concentration would have helpedin 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.
In the second season of True Blood, 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!!!".
"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."
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!"
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 episode with her Grandmother's funeral. The way Sookie snaps at Mrs 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.
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...
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!"
The Australian Macbeth is the funniest. The witches hiss!
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.
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 Crowning Moment of Funny, 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.
On Bones, every time David Boreanaz shoots, he flinches. His character is supposed to be a trained sniper, but he flinches whenever he fires a handgun.
This is also true of Jennifer Garner in Alias, and several other members of the cast.
"Its a suicide bombing, Bones: everyone dies a little." Not even David Boreanaz could pull that line off.
Watching Goblet of Fire on ABC Family in December. Just try watching the depressing ending and seeing CGI Santa Claus on the bottom of the screen reminding you that it's 25 Days of Christmas.
Many years ago, VH-1 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?!
Sanctuary in the episode "Kali, Part II" Will attempted to contact a god-like abnormal. It went something like this:
I must find her! How can I find her?! ...Dance... I can DANCE!!!
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?
Dollhouse: "Omega, why did you hit me with a pipe?"
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, 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.
Mentally-ill Selwyn in Moses Jones explains that some thugs, who he refers to as demons, "Ironed him! With a... [long pause]... iron!" It's probably the accent.
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.
Moist reacts to a vision where he apparently personally drove Adora Belle Dearheart smoking 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.
Angel 3-15 "Loyalty": Wesley talks to the Loa, which apparently takes the form of a giant anthropomorphic hamburger. Just...look at it. I'm sorry, Joss Whedon, but that was just way too silly for me to take.
That's kind of the point.
"A Hole in the World". From Season 5. You know, the one where Fred Dies. The near entirety of it. Prime fodder for the "creators should not be writers" stereotype.
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 participation 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.
(Donatello zaps the little vampire girl with a ray of ultraviolet light) Little vampire girl(unaffected and unimpressed): You idiot, it's the Holy Solar Orb we're afraid of, not cheap tanning salon light. Donatello(astonished): But it's practically the same thing!
Let's get this straight: those vampire kids know enough about human technology to know what tanning salons are, yet they still refer to the Sun by an archaic and mystical-sounding name?
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 to crash into the river.
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.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans just love to mock the scene in the season one finale when Angel tells Xander that he can't perform CPR on Buffy because, being a vampire, he has no breath. Except that they had been running down a tunnel for a while, and David Boreanez is audibly winded as he says the line.
Dark!Willow's "bored now". It was supposed to be horrifying and a reminder of the awesome creepiness that was Vampire Willow. With Miss Hannigan playing Dark!Willow like she was sleepwalking, it didn't really have the intended effect.
Watch as one of the vampires in "School Hard" seems to purposely swerve into the path of a cart kicked in his general direction.
In season 7, after Buffy and Xander get back from their dates and people start joking about Xander's penchant for hooking up with demon women, Giles gets angry at everybody and chides them quite loudly about their unseriousness. Then he uses the flash cards he made for Chao-Ahn to make his point.
Dark magic gets you high, as in you literally float up to the ceiling. Fantastic.
Buffy and Riley's scene at the end of "Who Are You", mostly due to Riley's dialogue.
Spike's non-reaction to Dru siring him in "Fool for Love".
The way Willow brandishes the gun in "The Killer Inside Me" is distracting.
Much like the above mentioned Are You Afraid of the Dark?, the old Goosebumps TV series was pretty narmfull. Even more so than the books, due to overenthusiastic acting on the young actors' parts, and some really cheesy effects.
Got to put in a special mention on this one. In a Very Special Episode about child abuse, there is a boy in Stephanie's class who keeps showing up to school covered in bruises. When questioned, he says he "fell down some stairs". He finally confesses the truth to Stephanie:
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 Mystery Science Theater 3000 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!
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
Nan's somewhat stupid narration. Yes I understand 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 fight scene between Marc Antony and a teenage Octavian on Rome was quite hilarious, although it certainly wasn't intended as such.
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.
In Dexter, anything to do with Dexter's fear that his son is a burgeoning serial killer. Reason being, he's one! He just took his first steps. Oh no, a child was scratched and it's possible that he did it. Clearly that was due to his lust for pain rather than him not having proper motor skills yet. If that kid's out for blood at his age he needs to team up with Stewie Griffon.
This seems to be just a result of Dexter overreacting, rather than anything that seemed a legitimate concern. Dexter doesn't really know what normal behavior is and he was already anxious about the kid turning out like him, so it's not too surprising that he might misinterpret his son's behavior, and it's played for comedy. That said, it was a little cheesy.
Every time the White Witchopens her mouth, the results are likely to be hilarious. She even responds to Edmund's request for some more Turkish Delight with a Big No.
The third episode opens with the floating head of Maugrim, played by a man in an unconvincing wolf costume, suddenly and unexpectedly appearing and shouting "RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR".
"ASLAN'S ON THE MOOOOOOOOOOVE!"
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 slight resemblance to Kilroy from Styx's most iconic music video.
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 oddlygorgeous music playing in the background. The whole thing is just so damn weird you don't know whether to laugh or be horrified anyway.
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!
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."
In Van-Pires, evil alien vampire cars suck fuel from the cars of Earth. The line "poor, innocent cars!" was uttered often, and when combined with Special Effects Failure it made for a pretty surreal and hilarious show.
Quinn's introduction in The Purple Piano project comes wiith her turning completely goth with pink hair, nose ring, and a Ryan Seacrest tattoo on her back. It is quite hilariously cringe worthy, just like a good majority of this show.
One of the most cringe-making examples was during the Defying Gravity sing-off between Rachel and Kurt. When Kurt misses the high note towards the end of the song, he makes such a weird, helium-high, almost robotical Mal-function!! sound that all inherent tragedy/sympathy in the scene is lost. It's more like "Woah, that was f*cking weird!", than "Aw, bless his heart." That coupled with his shiny, disappointed-post-ejaculation-face compounds the effect.
An unintentional one during Duets, although YMMV: When Artie is calling Brittany out on her using him for his voice and for not realising how important losing his virginity was for him, he leaves her in the hallway and wheels away...at which point it can be seen his back wheels had flashing rainbow lights. It completely ruined the scene, since they most definitely weren't there before this scene. Also, the awkward moment when Brittany had to lift him out of his chair and carry him bridal-style to the bed so they could have sex. I know it was necessary, but she looked just a little bit silly.
Kurt's coming out to Mercedes in the third episode was pretty narmtastic in that his closet was rather see-through. Especially since people had been warning Mercedes earlier on in the episode to stop crushing on him because he was so obviously gay.
Quinn's pregnant girl version of "It's A Man's Man's Man's World" is also slightly ruined by the fact that it's so painfully obvious that the pregnant dancers weren't actually pregnant. Because no girl who is that heavily pregnant can dance like that. In the same way, Bohemian Rhapsody became one huge narm when they decided to cut from Vocal Adrenaline's performance to Quinn giving birth. The whole this was so cheesy and quite frankly bizarre that it became hilarious.
Could be that the writers knew that it was badly conceived but just didn't care; Artie's comment after the pregnoids come in but before they perform is almost a lampshade.
Artie: This is offensive.
Kurt and Blaine's slow motion gay run.
What probably should've been a touching Tear Jerker of a goodbye in the "Somewhere Only We Know" number ends up becoming hilarious due to Blaine's Gonkish and overdone "crying" face, which looks more goofy than sad.
In Funeral when Sue reveals her sister has died as an explanation for her recent behavior is supposed to be stunning, but her behavior had already been more and more screwed up as season 2 progressed so it made for a terrible, yet hilarious, excuse.
Blaine's facial expressions in Last Friday Night...who am I kidding? His facial expressions whenever he sings are hilarious.
Kurt's presidential debate speech is rather heartfelt and touching until he utters a line equating gym dodgeball to modern-day stoning.
In season one, when Finn sincerely sang "Stand by You" to the ultrasound of what he was led to believe was his and Quinn's baby. Then his mom comes in to see what he's doing, and the scene does a 180-degree turn.
iCarly comes up with at least a few of these every season. It's usually part of the webshow. Occasionally parodied and it becomes Narm Charm.
So does Victorious. An example being "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.
"Who Did It To Trina?": Jade's side of the story has Tori acting completely out of character to Trina, very angrily demanding her Cuddle-Me-Cathy doll back and saying that she would kill her. And punching Sinjinn then spitting on him. And then just before she leaves, she looks at Jade and says, "...Why can't I be pretty like you?"
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 aboutboundaries 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 most prominent example is Rick pushing Terri and she falls and her head hits a rock. Which can actually be as devastating as the show projects, but because Reality Is Unrealistic falls here.
It gets more narmtastic. She actually hits cinderblocks. In the middle of the park. And to top it all off, before he pushed her, Rick was kicking the ground; it even got a Fan Nickname, "baby-kicks".
"Are we gonna party? I think I need another bracelet."
"I'm gay. I'm totally, totally gay."
"I'm just a big, stupid loser."
"You're a robot, Liberty. A walking, talking computer." Judging from that flat, wooden delivery, Mia must be one too.
And before that, there was Eli's meltdown in Drop the World: "YOU RIPPED MY HEART OUT!"
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!".
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!!"
Oz features some classic "playing a retarded person" acting from Scott William Winters as Cyril O'Reily, which is sometimes played for laughs (with his childlike voice), but at other points, you're supposed to take it seriously. Any scene where he goes berserk and starts flailing around like a crazed loon tends to have a bit of Narm attached to it.
The popular Game of Thrones show is for the most part well-acted, and it's clear they spent a lot of its budget on the beautiful sets and backgrounds -- but other aspects are somewhat shaky.
In an otherwise chilling and well-acted scene where Viserys is bellowing insanely just before his death, it can end up causing some chuckles if you realise his insistence that he is the dragon is awfully reminiscent of the memetic phrase"Fuck you! I'm a dragon!"
The dogs that play the direwolves are not very good doggy actors. It's very hard not to laugh when a happy puppy jumps on top of a chew toy and gnaws on it with glee as the CGI blood flies everywhere.
My favorite is when Ghost (who is completely silent in the books) is trying to warn Jon Snow that the wights are up and about. The "wolf's" whining and scratching at the door was so dog-like that I half expected Jon to ask, "What is it, girl?Did Rickon fall down the well again??"
YMMV, but the insane level of Fan Service becomes kind of funny after a while. The sheer non-stop boobage crosses over from sexy to hilarious round about the dozenth time naked chicks are just sort of... there.. in the scene.
In one Fan Service scene, Theon is having sex with Ros. Alfie Allen puts a lot of effort into his Immodest Orgasm. It looks like he has had twelve-thousands volts put through him from the way he jerks around in ecstasy, and he bites his lower lip, which, combined with his little beard, makes him look like an electrocuted rat.
During Syrio Forel's Crowning Moment of Awesome one of the Lannister men, straight out of Mook acting school, calls him a "foreign bastard", delivered with a very thick Evil Brit accent.
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.
The ABC Family movie Cyberbully. 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.
The "Boys Beware" TV PSA from the 50's on the EVILS OF THE GAY! (Seen here). See Doug Walker's reaction here.
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.
The Hallmark miniseries of Jason and the Argonauts. The scariness of Pelias is dimineshed as soon as Dennis Hopper takes his helmet off, wearing what can best be described as a Raggedy Ann wig [dead link]. And that's before we get to the performance of the main actor. The Argo is less wooden than he is.
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!"
Mexican telenovela La Rosa de Guadalupe may be the best example of this trope. The series features a single-episode story dealing with contemporary teen issues (and a few episodes dealing with an Adult Fear every now and then), ranging from drugs usage to "My mother uses Facebook". The point of it is being a "modern take" of old telenovelas similar to this one, as at the plots of the episodes are always resolved due to the characters' commitment to the Holy Virgin of Guadalupe. Needless to say, in a typical telenovela-fashion, incredibly cheesy acting is to be expected, unrealistic portrayals of a lot of groups are shown, scriptwriting seems to be nonexistant, and the moral manipulation is just freaking evident. It has unfortunately achieved a quite strong following for the series per se, but still for half the audience it's their favorite comedy show (there was an episode addressing cosplay and the anime subculture, with... disastrous results). This blog entry sums it up nicely.
Hoarders is loaded with Narm, but one example stands out: "Darth Vader Mr. Potato Head! What is wrong with you people?"
An Australian telemovie, Panic At Rock Island, is a gold mine for unintentional hilarity.
"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.
The paranormal documentary series The Most Terrifying Places in America has plenty of cheesy puns and horror-movie cliché lines in its relentlessly hammy narration. But one particularly standout narm line came from the fifth incarnation while introducing a haunted library: "Even the Dewey Decimal system can't help you now!"
Primeval has a scene where protagonist Matt fights an aboreal 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).
For those who don't believe in doomsday paranoia, shows like Doomsday Preppers and Doomsday Bunkers are definitely So Bad It's GoodGuilty Pleasures, due to the overwrought narration of the potential doomsday scenarios.
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 "Pain makes me who I am! It makes me...Grumpy!" was groan-worthy and completely ruined all of the drama in that scene.
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