History YMMV / YesMinister

* OnceOriginalNowOverdone: The series (and even the stage play) was accused of being laughably outdated next to ''Series/TheThickOfIt''.

** In a show written by two people who saw how British government works from the inside, Hacker's suspicious and often hostile attitude to Europe speaks volumes about how so many senior politicians in both parties were already predisposed towards europhobia and Brexit, even several decades before the event.

* SeinfeldIsUnfunny: The series (and even the stage play) was accused of being laughably outdated next to ''Series/TheThickOfIt''.

* RetroactiveRecognition: Younger tropers may recognise Bernard from his role on ''Series/{{Heartbeat}}''.

*** Or indeed ever since the '73 event.

* BaseBreakingCharacter: Dorothy Wainwright from ''Yes, Prime Minister''; fandom is split as to whether she was the strong, politically minded female character that ''Yes, Minister'' was sorely missing (Annie, while a fairly strong character overall, was more of an everywoman), or a CreatorsPet who is constantly shown to be right about ''everything'', and is able to quickly reduce senior civil servants to babbling idiots in a way that even the likes of Ludovic Kennedy couldn't manage. Notably Claire Sutton, Dorothy's SpiritualSuccessor in the play and 2013 series is considerably less moral and while still brainy makes one or two huge mistakes of her own.

** Hacker's plan to become Prime Minister through lying about European standards on food and then declaring a victory over Brussels by convincing them to change their plans to rename sausages in Britain can come across as unpleasantly similar to Brexit and Boris Johnson's rise to Prime Minister, considering that Boris Johnson while a Journalist helped to foster Euroscepticism by writing blatantly untrue stories about European standards on bananas etc. One wonders if he was taking notes from the series.

* SeinfeldIsUnfunny: Granted, classic-style {{Brit Com}}s are near-invariably ripped to shreds by television critics regardless of how well (or badly) they're written anyway, but still the series (and even the stage play) was accused of being laughably outdated next to ''Series/TheThickOfIt''.

** The senior local government officer who is presented as a "socialist" and considers in a patronising way that she knows best and that the proles should not worry their silly little heads with issues they are not equipped to understand. She makes common cause with Sir Humphrey over the idea that the governing class should be allowed to govern with the absolute necessary minimum of democracy or accountability. Again, a decade or two before the event, this is anticipating the mentality of [[UsefulNotes/TonyBlair Blairism]], which governed in exactly this way with exactly this mentality towards the people who voted for them.

** In "Party Games", Sir Humphrey and the government chief whip agree that neither of the two front-runners to succeed the retiring Prime Minister is desirable, with the chief whip mentioning that either of them would split the party, and that the next Prime Minister needs to be someone quieter more moderate. This uncannily predicts the situation in which UsefulNotes/JohnMajor came to succeed UsefulNotes/MargaretThatcher six years later, with Major getting the top job largely because fellow contenders Michael Heseltine and (to a lesser extent) Douglas Hurd were considered too controversial.

** Multiple times the PM's special adviser Sir Mark Spencer appears, the name being a joke on the chairman of Marks and Spencer, Sir Derek Rayner, a Government adviser at the time. In 2010 a Mark Spencer entered Parliament who is currently Chief Whip and Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury.

** The plot of the stage play involves an oil-rich central Asian state negotiating a pipeline deal with the government. The deal is jeopardised by the state's foreign secretary asking the British government to supply him with an underage girl with whom he can have sex. In the light of the Me Too movement and the trafficking of Jeffrey Epstein, this comes across as exploitative rather than sleazy. The 2013 series (which is based on the play) isn't ''quite'' as bad in that regard, with the foreign secretary instead having designs on Claire Sutton, who ''is'' willing to go through with it, with the main sticking point being her holding out for a promotion and a big cash bonus; it still comes across pretty tasteless, however, especially since ''Series/MadMen'' had more realistically explored implications of such a scheme just a few years beforehand.

* SeinfeldIsUnfunny: Granted, classic-style {{Brit Com}}s are near-invariably ripped to shreds by television critics regardless of how well (or badly) they're written anyway, but still the series (and even the stage play) was accused of being laughably outdated next to ''Series/TheThickOfIt''.
* {{Sequelitis}}: To say that the 2013 ''Yes, Prime Minister'' series wasn't as well-received as its forerunner would be a '''gigantic''' understatement. Common criticisms included:
** {{Flanderization}} of all three major characters. Hacker became far more bad-tempered and ineffectual than the original version ever was, Sir Humphrey became so corrupt and such a megalomaniac that he seemed to become similar to [[Series/TheNewStatesman Alan B'stard]], while Bernard seemed to have degenerated from being idealistic and pedantic to being an outright ManChild.
** {{Padding}}: The series started out as a stage play and retained broadly the same storyline, resulting in a lot of clumsy exposition dumps. In particular, the entirety of the third episode basically consists of just two scenes; firstly Sir Humphrey trying to manipulate Hacker for fraudulent expense claims, and then Hacker trying to do the same to Sir Humphrey for illegal usage of government credit cards.

* UnintentionalPeriodPiece: While the original series generally manages to avoid this for the most part, the 2013 series experiences it far more thanks to it being clearly based on the UK political situation in the early-mid 2010s, with the country being ruled by a coalition government, the government being beset by expenses scandals, and there being talk of closer links with the European Union to offset the damage caused by the Great Recession (in real life, of course, the complete opposite happened). Though one area where it does come across as oddly prescient is by depicting Hacker's coalition partners as being the Scottish National Party, presaging the complete collapse of the Liberal Democrats (who were the junior partners in the 2010-2015 Conservative-led coalition government) at the 2015 general election, and the SNP rising to become the third-largest party.

*** Far more likely this was a reference to the then US Secretary of State Alexander Haig.