* DoNotDoThisCoolThing: This trope summarizes the whole premise of the show, in the very first episode. Dan Ashcroft's scathing Sugar Ape cover feature, "The Rise of the Idiots", an attack on the hipster subcultures he deals with every day, is taken completely out of context by the magazine's entire readership and manages to go viral. Even rival magazine editors and television directors end up hailing it as an important, defining cultural milestone, despite Dan's original negative intentions, contributing further to his depression and alienation.
-->'''Nathan Barley''': That piece on the Rise of the Idiots, awesome.
-->'''Dan Ashcroft''': [[SarcasmMode Thanks.]]
-->'''Nathan Barley''': Totally sums up my credos.
* GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff: Nathan's geek pie haircut is a moment of embarrassing shame amongst his peers in Hosegate, but randomly becomes Big in Japan when he accidentally bumps into some Japanese TV culture correspondents. A resulting TV segment shows the haircut, along with some of Nathan's mottos like "Peace and Fucking", spreading like wildfire among the Japanese youth.
* HilariousInHindsight: The series is set in a misanthropic WorldOfJerkass where pretty much everyone is a terrible person or at minimum ''deeply'' flawed. Co-creator Creator/CharlieBrooker would then go on to create ''Series/BlackMirror'', and the episode "[[Recap/BlackMirrorRachelJackAndAshleyToo Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too]]" would [[FreezeFrameBonus feature]] ''Sugar Ape'' magazine as a CreatorInJoke... So technically ''Nathan Barley'' could take place in the series' [[TechnoDystopia dystopian nightmare]] of a SharedUniverse, which would kind of match its overall tone.
* MisaimedFandom: both in-text and metatextual; Dan's article satirising the hipsters he's surrounded by sees them venerate him as their icon in the show. On a meta-level, the show is clearly meant to savagely spoof a certain kind of irritating hipster, but that particular audience ended up becoming the show's biggest fans.
* MoralEventHorizon: While it's not quite ''evil'', Nathan soliciting a blowjob from [[BrokenBird Mandy]] in exchange for drug money marked a rather sharp change in his characterisation from "[[UpperClassTwit irritating privileged douchebag]]" to "genuinely awful person".
* RetroactiveRecognition:
** Creator/BenWhishaw, who plays Nathan's [[ButtMonkey eternally-suffering]] web developer Pingu, went on to high-profile roles as [[GadgeteerGenius Q]] in [[Film/{{Skyfall}} the]] Creator/DanielCraig ''[[Film/{{Spectre}} Bond]]'' [[Film/NoTimeToDie films]], as well as the voice of [[Film/Paddington2014 Paddington Bear]].
** '''Creator/BenedictCumberbatch''' has a small role as [[EccentricArtist loony musician]] Doug Rocket's StraightMan business manager Robin.
* UnintentionalPeriodPiece: The series is overwhelmingly an example of ValuesResonance, since Nathan's obnoxiously over-featured mobile phone and vocation as a minor internet prank video celeb turned out to be well ahead of his time, rather than the passing fad the show's creators were expecting his lifestyle to be. However, it's weird watching bell-bottom low-slung jeans coupled with boxer shorts an inch below the armpits, transparent technology, and the extreme sports and anime aesthetics coexisting with characters that appear like modern hipsters, the overall feel coming off like a RetroUniverse version of TheNewTens as imagined by people in the 2000s who have had that decade's culture described to them but not shown. The most obvious anachronism is Dan's horrid style magazine, ''Sugar Ape'', which represented an industry and young contemporary art scene that (thanks to the Recession and the internet) stopped existing only a few years after the show aired. Nathan's conspicuous consumption and limitless (implicitly parental) money supply is also something you would not see in a modern hipster portrayal, who, even if they were moneyed, would be trying to appear guilty about it. (A second series with a more 'Millennial' tone, showing Nathan being cut off from his money and trying to get a house, was floated but never made.) What really jumps out is that the Hosegate idiots are shown to be doing what they do as self-expression rather than an exercise in branding or getting clicks — even the sleazy magazine boss seems to feel part of a legitimate art scene.
* VindicatedByHistory: The series didn't do particularly well when first broadcast in 2005, mainly because its subject matter and therefore humour would have been almost incomprehensible to someone without a working knowledge of the sort of "Shoreditch twat" it was ripping apart (bear in mind that this came out two years before the first iPhone was released, when broadband Internet was still on the uptake rather than the standard it is now and social media, Website/YouTube etc didn't exist). The main issue is this: it was ahead of its time. Come 2017 and the things it is parodying are now part of mainstream culture thanks to social media, banal stupidity is even more prevalent than it was at the time (e.g. the imbecilic "prank" videos Barley subjects Pingu to inclusion in are now standard fodder on Website/YouTube, and things like breakfast cereal cafes get press attention and therefore hatred), and post-financial crash the concept of someone spending ridiculous amounts of money on worthless gadgets makes Barley even more hateful and wasteful than he would have been in 2005.
* TheWoobie: Poor, high-strung Pingu.
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