Web Video / Gayle

"What would you have done?"

But I was off my face on Terra Juice, so I didn't know right from wrong.

—Gayle, on sneaking a panini into a movie theatre by swallowing it whole in a balloon like a drug mule.

Gayle is an Ax-Crazy, exaggeratedly suburban housewife who loves Yanni, couscous, couponing, Chobani yogurt, running her organization Mothers Against Road Head with her neighbors/rivals Bonnie and Linda, The Big Chill, and flirting with the town orthodontist, Bruce. She lives a disciplined life, waking up at 5 AM to power walk every day, insisting on taking her groceries from Whole Foods into the house in one trip to the point of dislocating her shoulder to be able to carry the milk in, and kidnapping an SAT tutor and chaining him to the radiator for most of her daughter's life so she would get into an Ivy League school. Don't even think about trying to steal from her couscous stash.

In Real Life, Gayle is comedian Chris Fleming, who based the character off the hypercompetitive women he'd see power walking around his childhood neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning.

The first episode of the series uploaded in 2012, the show would go on to feature five seasons of New England suburban chaos, not including various in-character sketches Fleming would upload. The last episode of the series (as of writing) would be the 40th, leaving the series Cut Short in 2015.

You can find the series here.

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This series provides examples of:

• 10-Minute Retirement: "Escape to Goosetip."
• Abusive Parents: Gayle to Terry and Ira. She is constantly verbally abusive to Terry, holds her to impossibly high standards, ridicules her appearance, and refuses to let Ira play Spanish guitar, to name a few things. Not to mention she kidnapped Ira when he was a young boy from a Costco, sells him on eBay, and only takes him back as a ploy to see Bruce before he leaves to find his real parents.
• Absurd Phobia: Gayle isn't afraid of anything, not even death... except mall kids.
  • And Trader Joe's employees.
  • Dave is afraid of egrets due to having been attacked by one in 2001.
• Accidental Art: Gayle takes the SATs for Terry and writes an essay called "I Could Do What Katie Couric Does, So F— You." Terry ends up getting accepted into Sarah Lawrence College because the admissions staff are impressed by the maturity she must have as a writer to be able to capture "the voice of this deranged, middle-aged woman."
• Accidental Misnaming: Gayle does this to her own husband.
  Dave: Why do you keep calling me "Richard"?
  Gayle: Because "Dave" is short for "Richard."
  Dave: No, "Dave" is short for "David."
  Gayle: Which is short for...?
• Actor Allusion: In ‘Code Bega’, Gayle rants about a neighbor going by ‘Christopher’ instead of ‘Chris’, deeming it akin to printing 50 pages of Mapquest directions instead of pointing out a shortcut. Of course, Gayle is portrayed by Chris Fleming.
• Actually Quite Catchy:
  • In "Letting Off Some Steam with 'the Park,'" Gayle proves a point to Terry about how all Linkin Park songs sound the same by breaking out into an impromptu parody called "My Dad Got Fat." Terry only briefly reacts as you'd expect before nodding along and finally unselfconsciously rocking out.
  • During Bonnie's musical number "I Can Text" in Episode 38, an incensed and horrified Gayle is nonetheless seen swaying her shoulders and playing Air Guitar to the music.
• Already Met Everyone: The prequel episode "The Wedding" implies that Gayle and Bonnie go back at least to woman's college, where they majored and minored in women's studies (contrast Gayle's earlier statement that Bonnie is a "functional illiterate" because she went to art school), and Bonnie is "Best Woman" at Gayle's marriage to Dave, which Bruce, Rick Gausmann, and Linda also attend. Gayle also complains that Bonnie has gotten irritating since she married "that frat house business chode Reggie," even though "Bonnie's Husband" 10 episodes prior had a Flashback to an already middle-aged Gayle being introduced to Reggie for the first time—during a book club meeting at Bonnie's house—and being shocked that Bonnie is married to someone like him.
  • Though considering how unbearable Reggie is, it's possible Gayle blocked out early memories of him. Problem solved.
• Always Someone Better: Gayle's greatest fear. For example, she resents Bonnie's son for being valedictorian, while Terry's 'only' salutatorian.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Gayle, to Terry.
• Angrish: Gayle is a native speaker.
  Terry: (to a campus tour guide) She's trying to say "course load," sorry.
• Angry Dance: Gayle is so furious when she receives a letter from the town organizer of the new development that she breaks out her best approximation of Kevin Bacon in Footloose.
• Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better: Gayle is constantly trying to one-up her rival Bonnie, whether it's "rescuing" a dog, or attempting to sabotage Bonnie's son's efforts at becoming valedictorian.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Linda provokes a rare moment of sincere appreciation for Dave from Gayle when she asks her, "Would you rather he was more like Bonnie's husband?"
• Artistic License – Biology: Played for Laughs - Gayle's sister somehow doesn't have a pelvis, as a product of her yoga and no-meat diet.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: While tailing Terry, Gayle slams on the brakes in disgust of a tree.
• Ascended Fanboy: Margaret Cho, a fan of the series, guest-starred as American cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other:
  • Gayle and Bonnie.
    • While lost and seemingly about to die in the new development, it becomes clear that they do dearly love and care for each other.
    • In a flashback to Gayle's wedding day, Bonnie saves her from being killed by a shark and they outrun the police together.
    • When planning to abduct an entire High School theatre troupe:
      ''If the feds get sent in, and we get taken out by snipers, I want you to know: I'll meet you in hell by the panini station."
      ''I'll be there, Gayle."
    • Once when Gayle was desperate trying to pronounce Channing Tatum's name in front of a couple from the new development, Bonnie (who was spying on her with binoculars) comes over to help. She too fails to pronounce it. At least they share in their humiliation together.
  • Also, Gayle does care for Dave somewhat, stealing all the khaki pants she could to give to him for Christmas, and drop-kicking him to save him from the aforementioned shark, after she broke free from the police holding her, protesting, "Dave, get out of the way! That's my husband!"
  • Gayle has impersonated Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson in order to spare Terry embarrassment, and also abducted the high school theater group and replaced them with a fake Icelandic Pop band (with her impersonating the lead) just to save her daughter from getting caught lying about having the lead role in the School Play.
• Ax-Crazy: Gayle has threatened to suicide-bomb a Blockbuster for charging her $800 in late fees (she had The Big Chill out for six years), almost set her house on fire with her and Bonnie inside after tying up the latter with an electrical cord, and would be willing to kill the valedictorian at her daughter's high school (she's salutatorian) if it weren't for that manslaughter count for what happened at Cinnabon.
• Becoming the Mask: After infiltrating a group of teen Delinquents at the mall by posing as half of a "mall couple" with Terry, Gayle gets so invested in the True Companions dynamic of the group and her relationship with their leader CJ that she "breaks up with" Terry and denies being her mother until one of the guys suggests they buy their girlfriends gifts from Claire's.
  "Yeah, I'll admit I kind of overcommitted to that one."
• Berserk Button: Gayle's are countless and include Claire's, Trader Joe's, being outdone by Bonnie, being outdone by anyone, ugly trees, 2010s technology, people using her beach towels in non-beach-related contexts, and her husband's use of sensitive toothpaste.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: Some reptile-themed party-planners were apparently very attached to their reptiles.
• Best Woman: Bonnie, at Gayle's wedding. (She was for all intents and purposes a traditional Maid of Honor, with Gayle's Insistent Terminology presumably stemming from her second-wave feminist leanings.)
• Blatant Lies: Gayle, frequently. Notable is when her acapella group, realizing they sound terrible, lip-sync to a Yanni CD. Which is instrumental.
  • Bonnie convinces Gayle that there's an 'Uncommon App', where you draw yourself on a beach towel and send it to a college along with a urine sample.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: While Gayle's behavior should place her squarely in a criminal Cloudcuckoolander realm previously occupied only by Arkham Asylum escapees, it's treated simply as intense competitive suburban mom behavior In-Universe, and she and Bonnie are always on the same page with regard to standards and codes of conduct. Maybe justified, given that it becomes evident that almost everyone in Northbread has some bizarre tendencies.
• Big Applesauce: Never appears in the series itself, but several characters are approached as hailing from it. Many members of the New Development mention having once been young professionals in Brooklyn.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: While Talking Like a Simile about an unattractive tree:
  "That thing looks like John Malkovich from the waist down. That thing looks like a Cobb salad. That thing looks like John Malkovich eating a Cobb salad. That thing looks like MY Cobb AND my salad! That thing looks like me and John Malkovich eating TWO Cobb salads!"
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Gayle's granola recipe:
  3 cups rolled oats
  1/3 cup brown sugar
  1 cup raw almonds
  1/4 cup olive oil
  1 cup pumpkin seeds
  pinch of salt
  1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
  1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
  Blood of a horse
• Break Them by Talking: Attempted by Bonnie at the climax of Episode 30. Gayle has none of it.
• Breathless Non Sequitur: Gayle, often, most typically when she's confessing her attraction to Bruce in bizarre terms.
  Gayle: Okay. Bruce, well, I’d better get going before I have a pig's orgasm.
  Bruce: ...What was that, Gayle?!
  Gayle: Bye, Bruce!
• Briar Patching: Gayle scornfully invokes the Trope Namer when talking about teenaged girls begging boys not to push them in the pool.
• Brick Joke: The backstory for "Lizard People" is established in a conversation that starts when Gayle criticizes Terry's messy ponytail, telling her she looks like she's about to start a reptile-themed birthday party company. This leads the family to discuss a regrettable birthday party Gayle threw for Terry in the 90s, courtesy of one "Reptyyl Mark." Near the end of the episode it's revealed that the half-reptile children of Reptyyl Mark, who have been living undiscovered in the family's basement since that party, are drawn to Terry because they think that she's their dad.
• Butt-Monkey: Just about every time Peggy Gausmann is mentioned, something terrible is happening to her or her Toyota Corolla.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Ira, on Gayle's birthday.
• Catapult Nightmare: One prompts Gayle to yell about needing beach towels in the dead of night.
• Catchphrase: "WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE?"
  • "My husband, DAAAAAAAVE..."
• Celeb Crush: Gayle has a huge one on Yanni.
  • She also has a fixation with Katie Couric, saying she wants to make her cry but also admitting that she would "hate-scissor her until the cows come home."
• Chekhov's Skill: An Overly Long Gag in Episode 17 has Gayle demonstrate the "catalog of leg-wrestling moves" with which she intends to one day beat up Zooey Deschanel. The Season 2 finale ends with her using several of them to take down the egret attacking Dave.
• Comically Missing the Point: Gayle's postmortem analysis of her failed kayak date with Bruce:
  "The whole fiasco of Bruce leaving me on the pond for his wife made me come face to face with a cold, hard fact...menopause is a-knockin'."
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Gayle likes dishing these out. When Dave brings home Jarlsberg cheese instead of Parmesan, she forces him to hand over all the paper from his fax machine and gives him the thinly-sliced cheese to use instead, telling him not to come back downstairs until he's faxed one to each of his most important coworkers. Her customary penalty for putting deli meat away without folding it is attaching a piece of the meat to the offender's car like a flag.
  Terry: Mom, that's not humiliating, that's just a weird thing to do.
• Cordon Bleugh Chef: When Gayle isn't cooking some actually good-looking meals, you can catch her doing things like adding granite to croutons.
• Crosscast Role: Gayle, of course. There's also Rory Shea as Ina Garten and Margaret Cho as Yo-Yo Ma.
• Cutaway Gag: Many, such as Gayle's Derailed Train of Thought about how the word "supine" sounds like the name of a hard-partying Southern health club secretary ("Y'all haven't been to a holiday party 'til you've been to a Sue Pine holiday party!") or her lengthy Imagine Spot about Terry's friend Dennis getting snatched by a Kidnapping Bird of Prey while staging a flash mob-style viral proposal.
• Cut Short: Somewhere between this and No Ending. The series ends with Episode 40, written with the assumption that it would continue past that point. There's a hint of End-of-Series Awareness, however.
• A Day in the Limelight: "DaveCam" is about Dave's daily life from his point of view.
• Deadpan Snarker: Terry.
• Depraved Bisexual: Implied. While she seems to generally prefer men, Gayle seems to have a oddly sexual aspect to her rivalries and feuds with other women. For instance, she wants to make Katie Couric cry but also would "hate-scissor her until the cows come home."
• Description Cut: "Lost in the New D":
  Bonnie: I'm sure my Reggie has noticed I'm not home. I'm sure my Reggie has sent out a search party for us.
  (Cut to Bonnie's husband playing Air Guitar while listening to a Patriots/Celtics game on the radio.)
• Despair Event Horizon: Gayle can't even get out of bed after she inadvertently caused a truck full of Chobani yogurt to flip over on the highway.
  I destroyed something beautiful.
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud?: Gayle's reaction after Bonnie appears to have clawed her way out of the pit of dawning obsolescence by getting an iPad, causing her to blurt out "WHY CAN'T I BE BONNIE?!" in the middle of a rant about how much she doesn't care.
• Did Not Think This Through: Any plan Gayle cooks up will go disastrously wrong.
  • She admits this once when she steals a teacup pig on impulse to prove a point and gets Dave landed in prison for a night.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Gayle, often, as when she committed Vehicular Sabotage on a neighbor she caught with 16 items in a "12 items or less" lane at Whole Foods.
• The Ditz: Linda, though she still manages to be an Only Sane Man to Gayle and Bonnie.
  Gayle: Linda can barely count to 14! When you ask her her favorite book, she says "The Rosie O'Donnell Show"!
  Linda: Yeah...that's my favorite book.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Gayle frequently expresses revulsion for Dave, belittles his interests and his character, gets him in trouble with law enforcement when he steps out of line, observes him with a hidden camera, tries to undermine his passion project business venture for fear it will embarrass her, and attempts to scare off his Only Friend. All of the above is, of course, hilarious. (It probably helps that he maintains a Sarcastic Devotee attitude through it all and gets thrown a few significant bones at her expense.)
  "No husband of mine's gonna have friends of his own, that's for goddamn sure!"
• Drama Club: Parodied in the final episode.
• Drives Like Crazy: Flooring it in reverse down the highway while flipping everyone off through her sunroof to make it to the movie theatre in time for the 6:15 showing of War Horse, or driving at full speed to her daughter's high school, paper worth half her grade in tow, and then abandoning the car to retrieve the paper from a tree.
• Drunk on Milk: Gayle blames her high-risk strategy for smuggling a panini into a movie theater on having been "off [her] face on Terra Juice" at the time.
• Dying Declaration of Love: Between Gayle and Bonnie in "Lost in the New D" when both think they're about to freeze to death. They immediately backpedal when Rick Gausmann shows up in his minivan a second later.
• Dysfunctional Family: Oh yeah.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In the opening few episodes, Gayle engages in rather dark and manipulative behavior such as kidnapping a child, revealing she faked her own death, and holding an SAT tutor captive for over a decade; the tone is notably lighter in later episodes, with Gayle engaging in less serious behavior, and adopting a more chaotic and less abusive personality. The more extreme behavior is generally her stealing bath towels and digging up driveways, as opposed to actions that could cause irreversible damage to others’ lives. Other characters also go from relatively reasonable individuals enduring Gayle’s antics to individuals just as bizarre as Gayle in some ways, albeit more reserved.
  • A good contrast can be seen in her relationship with Terry. In Episode 8, Gayle kicks Terry off her feet for “upstaging” her at performing along with a Zumba DVD. In Episode 40, Gayle constructs a deep, elaborate plot to save Terry from public embarrassment.
  • Ira's entire character can be this, having been Put on a Bus come the end of Season 1, with no mention of him thereafter. Gayle's interactions with him are completely devoid of any sense of concern or compassion Terry and Dave began to receive later in the series, and his apparent captive status in the family makes his presence even more jarring.
• Education Mama: Gayle is an Exaggerated Parody of the type. Even her dogs aren't safe.
  "Back in my second trimester we hired an SAT tutor to go over some basic tricks and methods through my womb. Then, in the delivery room, we wrapped [Terry] in a Scantron sheet and gave her her first practice exam. The results were disappointing. I was devastated. Then one night when I was out peeping on Bonnie, I see that she's got her son a tutor for three nights a week. Three-hour sessions. So I grab Terry's tutor and I say 'Look, Marty, I'm gonna need you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, on call.' He says, 'I'm sorry, I can't do that. I have other clients.' So I chain him to my radiator so he can give Terry full-time SAT attention all day, every day. What would you have done? ... But even after all that, she's still not ready. No daughter of mine's going to a 'Little Ivy.' I have night terrors where I have to put a Colby decal on my car. Or worse, BOWDOIN!"
  • Many of Gayle's opinions on schools edge into Self-Deprecation, given that Chris Fleming himself attended the relatively selective Skidmore College, considered to be a "Hidden Ivy" relative to the Little Ivies.
• End-of-Series Awareness: Albeit the series has No Ending because Fleming had planned to make more episodes, it's hard not to read this into the last episode's musical number "I'm Gonna Miss You Guys When the Show is Done," which contextually satirizes the rapid formation of intense bonds between theater kids over a rehearsal period. At the episode's climax, the residents of the New D analyze the performance they just saw, making many (very broad) claims about its meaning that could extend to the series as a whole. The episode then ends with Gayle saying of her Icelandic indie pop performance, "Yeah, I wrote that" as the final line of the series.
• Enemy Mine: Gayle and Bonnie occasionally join forces to take down a greater threat, such as the residents of the New Development.
• Epic Fail: Gayle's attempt to use a GoPro livestream to prove that the vermin problem being blamed on uncovered trash cans in her neighborhood actually originates in the New Development not only proves her wrong but results in the entire town meeting viewing real-time footage of her getting sprayed by a skunk, losing her pants in a brutal squirrel attack, and urinating in a misguided effort to disinfect the wounds from said squirrel attack.
• Escalating War: Gayle and Bonnie's constant battle for suburban domination.
  "Bonnie got a new Bose player, so I got Yo-Yo Ma."
• Evil Laugh: Gayle and Bonnie can both cackle with the evilest of them.
• Evil Matriarch: Gayle.
• Experimented in College: It's implied that Gayle is speaking from experience when she warns Terry, who she's convinced is heading in this direction, that she doesn't have the wherewithal for successful "lezzing around."
• The Faceless: Dave's face is always either offscreen or obscured.
  • Peggy Gausmann is generally The Ghost, but makes a single appearance in which she's seen from the back.
• Fake Band: Fleming and series composer Brian Heveron-Smith have recorded two full-length albums as "Beef Hutchins," Gayle's favorite non-Yanni recording artist.
• Faking the Dead: Gayle faked her own death to get an Edible Arrangement delivered to her house.
• Family Theme Naming: Both of Gayle's kids, Terry Gross and Ira Glass, are named after NPR hosts.
• Fangirl: Gayle for Yanni.
• Fate Worse than Death: Gayle isn't scared of death, but she is scared of Mall Teens. And Trader Joe's employees.
• Faux Horrific: Gayle and Bonnie's Serious Business perspective on suburban life makes this a staple of the show's humor. In "Town Meeting" we see this reaction from a wider group of people when the town meeting watches a video of Gayle reacting to being sprayed by a skunk, cuing people gripping each other's hands for emotional support. Becomes Subverted when Gayle exposes herself on the livestream, and begins visibly urinating on herself to "treat a wound." Everyone (including Gayle) is understandably horrified thereafter.
  "This is so haunting. ... I've seen some bad things in my life, trust me, but this is the worst thing I've ever seen."
• Feeling Their Age: Come Season 3 and Season 4, the New D presents issues that Gayle can't simply fix with Chobani and gratuitous violence; their relative youth and differing cultural context throw a wrench in Gayle's "she-king" status over Northbread. This is especially noticeably in Episodes 31, 36, and 40.
  "We can assimilate to this new age, together!"
• Felony Misdemeanor: Having 16 items in a 12-item express lane, the prospect of her daughter going to a "little Ivy" like Colby or Bowdoin, being forced to pay late fees for a DVD of The Big Chill, wearing shoes in the house, leaving the box of Swiffer Wet Ones open so they dry out, knocking over a portrait of Tonya Harding, upstaging Gayle while exercising to a Zumba DVD...
• Fish out of Temporal Water: The Lizard Folk living in Gayle's basement. Gayle's speech about everything in "this post-9/11 age" that they're not aware of reveals that she's hardly better herself. They end up fleeing the house in horrified consternation upon overhearing that Kenan ended up being the successful half of Kenan & Kel.
  Gayle: It's very apparent that they haven't seen the light of day since '94. One of them had an open, button-up shirt, Boy Meets World-style!
• Flipping the Bird: Gayle frequently does a double bird flip as a gesture of triumph.
• Foot Popping: Lampshaded by Gayle while observing a pair of Sickeningly Sweethearts in the New Development.
  "IsweartogodBonnieifsheliftsherlegMarilynMonroestyleI'mgoinghomeandslammingmychininmycardoor. ...DES. PIC. A. BLE."
• Foreshadowing:
  • After she gets an iPad, Gayle derides Bonnie for dressing like she’s in an Icelandic indie pop band. In the final episode, Gayle and others imitate an Icelandic indie pop band to save Terry from embarrassment.
  • In Episode 16, Gayle scoffs at Dave's use of Sensodyne by saying, "Oh, do you want a pillow for your teeth?" That ends up being the name of his and Mark's toothpaste brand.
  • Gayle's tangent about Terry wanting to be part of a mall couple in Episode 28 essentially becomes the plot of the next episode.
  • In Episode 33, Gayle is reviewing Terry's extracurriculars for her Common App and asks her what "B-Boy Club" is, to which Terry hastily responds that it's "Barbecue Club." She buys it. Episode 39 deals with the repercussions of Gayle finding out that it's a breakdancing group.
• Fourth-Date Marriage: After Becoming the Mask in "Mall Couples," Gayle cements "Brad's" bond with the group by "breaking up with" Terry, getting together with and proposing to Tiffany in the span of a few seconds. It's over about as quickly as it begins when Gayle winds up kissing CJ.
• Friendly Enemy: Bonnie and Gayle are in continuous tooth-and-nail, no-holds-barred competition for neighborhood supremacy. Bonnie is also a member of Gayle's book club and acapella group and regularly attends meetings of her organization Mothers Against Road Head, and the two spend almost as much time teaming up as they spend in opposition. Bonnie's Worthy Opponent status and the many commonalities between the two push them into Vitriolic Best Buds territory.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Linda is clearly the odd one out in Gayle and Bonnie's Machiavellian Power Trio, and she's often left talking to them from outside a sliding glass door or being put on hold for hours.
• Full-Name Basis: The Gausmanns, Rick and Peggy, are almost always referred to by their full names.
• Full-Name Ultimatum: Parodied when Gayle severely calls Terry "Theresa," to which Terry interrupts to point out that that's not even her name (she being named after NPR's Terry Gross, "Terry" is short for nothing).
• Funny Background Event: When Terry's visiting boyfriend Jay announces at the dinner table that he's vegan, Gayle excuses herself and walks away with the ham she brought in. Jay and Terry proceed to chat with Dave while Gayle can be seen punching the ham and kicking it around like a football in the backyard behind them.
• Gratuitous French: In "Town Meeting" Gayle recalls being traumatized by hearing Bonnie order a croissant in a French accent. Later in the same episode, Bonnie tells her, "Bonne chance, my pomme de terre." ^note "Good luck, my potato."
• Grievous Bottley Harm: Bonnie knocks Gayle unconscious by smashing a bottle over her head while they're both competing to be the first to bring Bruce the whipped cream he requested during Linda's potluck. This being Gayle, it only gives Bonnie enough of a head start to jump into her car.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Gayle and Bonnie beat each other up using Bonnie's son.
• Hands-On Approach: The lyrics to "Come to My Dad's House" from the episode "Trader Joe'd" describe a Not What It Looks Like incident of this.
  I'm never gonna quit on you / Never gonna turn my back / That night at the driving range, it wasn't what it looked like
  I was teaching Dennis how to shoot / He keeps his wrists too loose / I was helpin' with his swing and then things got confusing
• Head Desk: When frustrated or emotional Gayle will often ram her head into the nearest heavy object.
• Heartbeat Soundtrack: Used to punctuate moments of high emotion for Gayle.
• Heartbreak and Ice Cream: Gayle does this in "Bonnie's Husband" with a 32-oz container of Chobani yogurt as she sits with Linda and bemoans Dave's cowardice.
• Hell Is That Noise: The acapella group.
  • Lou Bega's Mambo No. 5 played at max volume.
  • Gayle and Terry have a Seinfeldian Conversation about this in Episode 36, spurred by the cacophonous noise of Gayle's perpetually un-updated laptop booting up, which sounds, according to Terry, "like a pig at the dentist's."
    Terry: ...That's the worst sound I've ever heard.
    Gayle: Oh, that's the worst sound you've ever heard? Okay, let's talk about the worst sound I've ever heard. How about you screaming with glee, getting pushed in the pool by Brent Cardick at that graduation party? [...] That sound you made was, and always will be, the screaming of the spring lambs to my Clarice Starling. It governs my every move!
    Terry: I thought your screaming of the spring lambs was the way Bonnie ordered a "cwassont" at Starbucks in that French accent?
    Gayle: I'll admit that Bonnie going from zero to Gérard Depardieu in one seconds flat shaved about six months off my life and gave me about 24 hours of horse lip.
• Helpful Hallucination: Gayle occasionally hallucinates Ina Garten, who gives her rhyming advice. Advice such as stealing granite from driveways to make croutons.
• Henpecked Husband: Dave. He's soft-spoken and meek, contrasting with Gayle's abrasive nature.
• Hero Stole My Bike: Gayle does this in "The Wedding" and "Lizard People."
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: Terry and Ira, due to Gayle's parenting.
• Hippie Parents: Lisa as temporary guardian of Terry. She also mentions that she has a son named "Leaves."
• Hollywood New England: More or less the idea of the entire series. While it's unclear where in Massachusetts Northbread actually is, the episodes tackle the daily struggles of an upper middle class New England family. See Serious Business below.
• Hopeless with Tech: Zigzagged with Bonnie and Gayle. While they're clearly not incapable of using things like projectors, DVDs, and devices that became more normalized in the 2000s, they're extremely bewildered by smart devices and app services. Gayle shows clear knowledge what Uber and Airbnb are, but also doesn't know the correct word for "livestreaming" within the same minute. It's revealed in Episode 38 that Bonnie has to use a chart in order to keep track of new technological (and related cultural) trends. To their credit, it wasn't exactly an uncommon phenomenon amongst Gayle and Bonnie's corresponding generation at the time the series was made.
• Hostile Show Takeover: "Christmas Card" opens with Bonnie replacing Gayle in her standard powerwalking-while-narrating segment as she announces that Gayle has perished in a coupon-related fire and that she's now taking over Mothers Against Road Head and inheriting Gayle's couscous stash. Gayle suddenly turns up with her face covered in ash and shoves her out of the way to complete the segment.
• Hot-Blooded: Gayle.
• House Amnesia: One of several Establishing Character Moments for Gayle in the first episode.
  Gayle: ...You watch your mouth in my house, Bonnie.
  Linda: ...Uh, it's Bonnie's house, Gayle.
• Huge Schoolgirl: Referenced by Gayle when she contemplates the possibility of mistaking a cello for one in the dark.
• Hurricane of Euphemisms: Gayle never says anything one way that she can't say several bizarre ways in rapid succession.
  Bruce: ... How about you come Monday? Monday at 3?
  Gayle: How 'bout you go on my cooling rack before my crab cakes pop out of their Ann Taylor prison?
  Bruce: ...What was that?
  Gayle: I'm gonna treat you bad. Like a bundt cake.
  Bruce: What are you saying to me?
  Gayle: I wanna put you on my Kindle.
  Bruce: I just can't seem to hear you.
  Gayle: I'm gonna punish you with my legs.
• Hurricane of Excuses: Much of "Disappointment Hotel."
• Hypocritical Humor: Terry says "ass" in front of Gayle, who immediately admonishes her. Terry then lists all the swears Gayle has said in front of her that morning. It's quite an extensive and creative list.
• I Call Him "Mister Happy": Gayle's breasts are her "crab cakes" or her "potato latkes."
• I Can't Believe It's Not Heroin!: Gayle snorts Kashi GoLean Crunch off a countertop and rolls Chobani yogurt up in a spliff. After she and Bonnie go on a "whole-grain bender" in which they take "enough couscous and rice pilaf to see the devil," Dave tells her she has a problem and tries to get her to go to detox.
• Identically Named Group: The "Jennys" in the New D.
• Ignored Epiphany:
  Gayle: I don't need validation anymore! I can't wait to show the whole town!
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: Found throughout the Word Salad Lyrics to ostensible Linkin Park track "Disappointment Hotel":
  Lies, lies, Michael told you all lies / I don't have a needledick anymore (settle the score)
  Sick of screaming til my needledick is sore
• Improbably Predictable: Terry initially declines to tell Gayle that she's only backstage chorus in her school's musical because it would just cause her to "freak out and scream the name of some random actor's erogenous zone and break something". Gayle denies she would do this, then immediately screams "STEVE BUSCEMI'S PENIS!" and slams her head through the kitchen counter she was cleaning when she hears the news.
• Informed Deformity: Played for Laughs. Gayle complains about Terry's facial hair and freaks out about an "ugly" tree in town.
• Interspecies Romance: The "Lizard People" are the exact brand of Half-Human Hybrid that their name implies (technically half-human and half-unspecified reptile). Gayle is thrown for a loop when Terry in turn develops a crush on one of them.
  "In birthing classes they...don't tell you that one day your progeny may...develop sexual feelings for a lizard."
• Insane Troll Logic: Gayle and Bonnie come to the conclusion that, because Mark and his wife are from the Bay Area and they like walking, they're going to open up a trendy bistro and they're trying to steal the positions of salutatorian and valedictorian from Terry and Brendon.
  • Gayle, Bonnie and Linda all believe that girls receiving gifts from Claire's from their boyfriends leads to a higher probability of them giving road head to their aforementioned boyfriends.
• It's All About Me: Gayle. On her birthday, everyone has to watch her exercise. She also tries to sabotage her husband's toothpaste business venture because she can't let people know he has sensitive teeth because of the embarrassment she thinks it would bring upon her.
  • Bonnie's husband Reggie talks nonstop about his wife, his son, his house, his cars, his golf game and other things defined entirely by their relationship to him, leaving Gayle in a white-hot rage.
• Implausible Deniability: Gayle, all the time.
  Dave: Why didn't you come to Couples Therapy today, Gayle?
  Gayle: I did.
  Dave: No, you didn't, you just sent Linda.
  Gayle: ...No, that was me.
• I'm Standing Right Here: Gayle and Linda spend a good chunk of "Bonnie's Husband" discussing Dave, with Gayle complaining about his cowardice. The end reveals that he was sitting quietly in the room with them the entire time.
• Ironic Echo Cut:
  Gayle: Right now, [Lisa and Terry] are probably braiding their hair together, playing with heirloom tomatoes.
  (Cut to Lisa and Terry with their hair braided together.)
  Lisa: Why haven't you been playing the tomato game?
• Karma Houdini: Gayle has yet to get in so much as a hint of trouble for kidnapping at least three people, but Dave was jailed on the spot after she committed pig theft.
• Lethal Chef: On a good day, Gayle is actually a pretty good chef, and many of her concoctions turn out well (baking a pie by electrocuting it [and herself], concocting a cobbler out of crabapples using a lighter). Then you have the time Gayle made a business out of selling croutons with ''granite" in them. Which, as a point of pride to her, are known to shatter the teeth of those who eat them.
• Lizard Folk: Episode 38 reveals that a group of Half-Human Hybrid reptiles have been living in the Waters-Waters family's basement ever since Gayle threw a reptile-themed birthday party for Terry in the 90s and the offspring of relationships between the reptile handler and his reptiles somehow ended up moving in.
• Logic Bomb: Gayle and Bonnie blow literal fuses when trying to pronounce Channing Tatum's name, hurling them through the air and into a nearby yard.
• Lost in Character: Gayle briefly believes she is Brad The Mall Teen.
• Lunacy: Gayle only makes granola during the full moon.
• The Mall: The setting of "Mall Couples.".
• Maniac Tongue: A memorable Character Tic of Gayle's is that the tip of her tongue is always flickering in and out of her mouth like a snake's.
• May–December Romance: It's unclear how far 50-something Gayle's budding romance with teenaged mall rat CJ might have gone if Gayle's real personality hadn't been triggered. Before that, thanks to the disguise she was using to infiltrate his group of Delinquents, he thought she was a guy his own age. As, probably, did she.
• The Maze: Gayle and Bonnie get lost in the New Development.
• Meet My Good Friends Lefty and Righty: Gayle calls her right ankle "Big Bertha" and her powerful legs "the twins."
• Misery Poker: Bonnie and Gayle's competitive discussion of their respective "rescue" dogs (Gayle's being "rescued," according to Dave, "from a breeder") naturally devotes some time to this.
  Bonnie: I will tell you, she's a little skittish, because she was rescued from Hurricane Katrina.
  Gayle: Hilary here is no stranger to tragedy either. Her owners were displaced from Katrina and then she went to Haiti right before the tsunami, so just... (taps heart with hand)
  Bonnie: Let me tell you, she understands abandonment. Her first owners were lost in Vietnam.
  Gayle: Well, when we rescued Hilary she had bulimia.
• Momma's Boy: Bonnie's son Brendan, big time.
• More Deadly Than the Male: In contrast to the men in the series, who range from timid and fragile to easygoing and cheerful to bombastic and spacy, Gayle and Bonnie are ruthless, energetic and on constant high alert.
• Motor Mouth: Gayle, when she gets steamed about something.
  • Bonnie's husband, partially because he wears four Bluetooths simultaneously.
  • Rick Gausmann. At one point, he nearly blows Gayle's cover when she's infiltrating a group of Mall Teens.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Stretching out a beach towel by tying the ends of it to two SUVs, and driving them in opposite directions, or shoplifting a beach towel from Macy's by jumping off the top level of the parking lot, using the beach towel as a parachute, onto your getaway car.
• Musical Episode: "Christmas Special."
• Musical Pastiche: Several, including soft rock with the "Beef Hutchins" oeuvre, punk rock with "Morningwood All Day," and Linkin Park with "My Dad Got Fat" and "Disappointment Hotel."
• My Beloved Smother: Gayle and Bonnie to their respective kids.
• My God, What Have I Done?: The first time we see Gayle even remotely feel remorse for her often psychotic, violent actions is when she accidentally causes a Chobani yogurt truck to overturn on the highway, "ruining thousands upon thousands of light lunches."
• Mystical Pregnancy: Gayle is convinced that Yanni is Terry's real father, and that she conceived her by merely attending a Yanni concert. Even accounting for Terry's delivery by premature C-section, the timeline (six weeks from concert to delivery) seems questionable.
• Naughty Birdwatching: Gayle once got the neighbors to report Dave for doing this even though he was actually birdwatching. We later find out that she does this herself, with Bruce.
• New-Age Retro Hippie: Gayle's sister in California, who Terry temporarily moves in with. Her constant yoga and no-meat diet somehow caused her not to have a pelvis.
• Nice Guy: In contrast to the cutthroat feminine duo of Gayle and Bonnie, most of the prominent men in the series are good-natured, easygoing and innocent, including Dave, Bruce, Mark, Brendan Kin and Rick Gausmann. The major exception is Bonnie's businessman husband Reggie Kin, who isn't quite evil but whose conversational steamrollering and It's All About Me attitude drive Gayle nuts. There's also a representative Nice Girl in Linda.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • Gayle pretends to be a pilgrim to get rid of Dave's friend, Mark. Mark thinks it's a play and gleefully joins in.
  • Gayle pretends to be a wild woman to ruin Dave and Mark's toothpaste business pitch. The toothpaste executives think it's part of the pitch and greenlight the toothpaste.
• No Accounting for Taste: It's unclear what drove Gayle to marry Dave in the first place.
• No Bisexuals: Parodied; Gayle takes this mentality to the point of spearheading an annual "Walk to End Bisexuality," despite whatever feelings might be there between her and Bonnie. Despite this, Gayle does happily listen to a song about a bisexual man advertising his also bisexual father later on in the series.
  "In the words of the late Jimmy Carter: lez out or get out."
• Noodle Incident:
  • Gayle is banned from the crouton convention because of an undisclosed incident.
  • Gayle has also apparently acquired a charge of manslaughter on account of some undisclosed incident that happened at a Cinnabon.
• No Sense of Personal Space: In "College Tour" Gayle leans into the tour guide's face.
• Not So Above It All: Terry is depicted in this light more frequently as the series continues.
• Nuclear Family: Gayle's family are initially a highly skewed version of this, though by the end of the series they appear to be short one kidnapped "son."
• Oblivious to Love: Bruce seems completely unaware of Gayle's (and Bonnie's) flirtation.
• Oh, No... Not Again!: Gayle's family's reaction to quite a few of her stunts, such as flirting with Terry after mistaking her for Yanni.
  Gayle: Jesus, Terry! What'd I tell you about blow-drying on the day I plan to have Greek yogurt?! It gets confusing!
• Oh, Crap!: Gayle looks absolutely horrified when visitors from the New D go and visit the basement on their house tour. This is possibly because she's afraid of them getting mauled by the Lizard People haunting her house since the 90s, but probably also because she's afraid of how their discovery would ruin her home's impression on them. When they return unscatched, she's then horrified by the realization that these potentially dangerous lizard-human hybrids have escaped into the world.
• Older Than They Look: "Escape to Goosetip" has a brief glimpse of a "beach grandma" who looks to be in her 20s or 30s, but is celebrating her 70th birthday.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. Every girl from the New D is called Jenny.
  • The New D also houses a couple named Jesse and Jessie.
    Gayle: They cannot have the same name. There's got to be an ordinance in place that prohibits that.
    Terry: Not yet, write to your local representative about it, Mom.
• Only Sane Man: Linda to Gayle and Bonnie.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Ira, who is usually silent, gives Gayle a devastating lecture on her birthday.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • Gayle dressed as an egret fools Dave—her own husband and an avid birdwatcher—at a distance. Downplayed in that he recognizes her up close.
  • The Mall Teens are totally taken in by Gayle's Mall Teen disguise, not realizing she's a middle-aged woman.
    • Played with given that Gayle's actor, Chris Fleming, was a twenty-something man at the time.
  • Happens again when she poses as Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson at Terry's break dancing performance, wearing an ill-fitting bald cap and sitting on top of Rick Gausmann's shoulders. Everyone falls for it.
  • Subverted by Gayle's Phantom of the Opera; everyone knows it's her.
• Parental Fashion Veto: Gayle takes this to ridiculous lengths with Terry, as shown by a montage of her insulting every outfit she wears to school over the course of a week:
  "Today you look like a storyteller and I can't stand it."
  "Do not leave my house dressed like a thief."
  "You look like Paula Poundstone."
  "You'd better not be dressed like a movement teacher."
  "I can't tell, is that my daughter or Howard Stern?"
• Passed-Over Inheritance: Gayle's will goes exclusively to Yanni. Granted, it's made up entirely of Crate & Barrel store credit.
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: Gayle and Bonnie's preferred mode of warfare.
• Pass the Popcorn: In "Theater," Bonnie is horrified when she finds out that her son Brendan's underwear are clearly illuminated by the stage lights in the costume he's supposed to wear for the school play. Because Gayle also has a vested interest in preventing the play from going forward, she vows to join forces with Bonnie to stop it, while declaring that under normal circumstances she would "sit back with a bag of popcorn and let your spooky boy bulldoze your family name."
• The Peeping Tom: While accusing Dave of looking like this as he's roaming the neighborhood with binoculars for innocent birdwatching purposes, Gayle is not above going to Bruce's house to watch him change into his pajamas.
• Person as Verb: Gayle comes up with some memorable ones, such as "Lisa Franking" to describe the ambulatory progression of a horse girl toward a horse. One episode revolves around her starting a support group for people who have been "Trader Joe'd," or uncomfortably played to by a Trader Joe's employee.
  Gayle: Back-to-back Beef [Hutchins]? Oh, you gotta be Beefin' me.
• Precision F-Strike: Gayle only uses an uncensored F-word once, when Bonnie suggests she just serve a storebought pie at her luncheon for the people of the New D because all her appliances are broken so she can't cook her homemade pie. Gayle gives us one of these before strapping herself with the dog's electric collar and walking through the fence, severely electrocuting herself and flying through her house's roof, but cooking the pie in the process.
  Fuck you, Bonnie.
• Present Day: Has a very tiny bit of Comic-Book Time, considering Terry has remianed in her senior year of high school throughout the series. Becomes even more confusing when you realize that Terry explicitly had a grade school birthday in the 90s, yet was still young enough to be applying to college around (maybe) 2016.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!:
  TUESDAYS! AREN'T! GOOD FOR ME!
  I! NEED! BEACH TOWELS!
• Radish Cure: Attempted; when Gayle finds out that Dave's Naïve Newcomer friend Mark likes the quaintness and old-fashionedness of New England, she and Bonnie, who want him out of town, decide to give him his fill of "quaint and old-fashioned" by impersonating stereotypical New England Puritans when he comes to visit Dave. Though confused at first, he ultimately thinks it's a hilarious game and plays along.
• Rapid-Fire Comedy: To the point of occasionally having characters talk over each other at length, or of one person's dialogue overlapping to cram more words in than they'd be able to realistically say.
• Recursive Crossdressing: Gayle disguises herself as a teenaged boy in "Mall Couples" and as Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (his upper half, that is) in "Talent Show."
• Repetitive Name: Waters-Waters. Gayle and Dave had the same surname, but she insisted on hyphenating anyway.
• Rhetorical Question Blunder: When the Tech Support guys chew Gayle out for damaging her Bose player by maxing out the volume:
  Gayle: Why is "max" even an option, then?
  Mike C: Your car can go 180 miles per hour, but do you drive it 180 miles per hour?
  Gayle: ...Yeah?
• Ridiculously Cute Critter:
  • Gayle freaks out when Dave doesn't get Hilary Clinton (their Bichon Frise) groomed before the luncheon, saying she looks like a "dino baby" and a "strung-out, Albert Einstein looking house bat." Played with in that she still thinks she's cute, trying hard not to crack a smile when Hilary starts licking her nose.
  • There's also the black pig Gayle steals in order to prove a point to Dave after he leaves her box of Swiffer Wet Ones open. Dave is forced to spend a night in jail, but nobody takes the pig back, and Gayle falls in love with it, appointing it guardian of her couscous stash.
• Right-Hand Cat: Bonnie strokes her son's hair in this manner.
• Ripped from the Headlines:
  • The tractor-trailer crash that spilled 18 tons of Chobani yogurt on New York's Interstate 88 really happened. In the show it's blamed on Gayle trying to hijack the truck.
  • One of several sources for the character of Gayle was a local news story: a former member of the government board of Fleming's hometown was charged with embezzlement, with her illicit purchases including $370 in Edible Arrangements sent to herself. This is duly parodied in Episode 1 with a mention of Gayle having faked her own death in a ploy to get Edible Arrangements.
• Same Surname Means Related: Averted; Dave and Gayle had the same last name when they got married, leading to the hyphenation "Waters-Waters."
• Sarcastic Devotee: Dave, to Gayle.
• Say My Name: Gayle's reaction to finding Bonnie successfully bonding with the Jennys is to sink to her knees and scream "BONNIE!!!" at the heavens.
• The Scream: Gayle, at any and all times.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Gayle's response to pressures including but not limited to hitting her husband in the leg while throwing cheese knives, receiving a phone call from the legal department of Trader Joe's, and humiliating herself in front of a town meeting. She has a detailed plan in place for Starting a New Life in Tallahassee if anyone finds out that she uses dog shampoo.
• See You in Hell: Gayle and Bonnie market a literally tooth-shattering crouton under the name "Meet Me In Hell Croutons." Later, when engaging in a stunt that could get them killed, they vow to meet in hell "by the panini station."
• Seinfeldian Conversation: Gayle often veers into this when questioned on a Weird Aside.
• Self-Deprecation: In Episode 24, Gayle tells Bonnie that she hates her and "[her] creepy son." Bonnie of course being played by Chris Fleming's mother.
• Self-Made Man: Reggie Kin, according to himself.
• Serious Business: EVERYTHING. Including, but not limited to: Chobani yogurt, grocery shopping, college applications, unsightly trees, enforcing her "Shoes-Off House" rule, Swiffering, preventing road head, ending bisexuality, and power walking.
  Gayle: As you well know, I always make it in the house with my groceries in one trip. No exceptions. Well, looking around at today's load, I knew it was gonna be a little rough. For one, I was covered head to toe in car grease.
  Linda: Why?
  Gayle: Well, back at Whole Foods, I saw Peggy Gausmann with 16 items in a 12-item express lane! I'm not gonna deal with that shit! So I go out to her Toyota Corolla and cut her brake lines. What would you have done?
• Sexless Marriage: "Christmas Card" notes that Gayle and Dave haven't touched since the 90s—not only sexually but at all.
  Gayle: If he touches me I'll have a panic attack.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: "Bonnie Goes to Vancouver," in which Gayle copes with Bonnie's family vacation photo appearing in a local newspaper by dragging Terry on three separate trips to the Grand Canyon so that she can get a photo of her own (finding flaws in the first two pictures only after they get home in each case, necessitating a new attempt). The result:
  "So, uh...yeah, they didn't accept my submission, but luckily no one's really talking too much about Bonnie's picture, so. No harm, no foul."
• She Is the King: Gayle repeatedly refers to herself as "she-king" of her Massachusetts community.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Gayle's Precision F-Strike against Bonnie in Episode 30.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: Lisa intentionally evolved a New-Age Retro Hippie personality to differentiate herself from Gayle.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: While investigating the New Development, Gayle and Bonnie are revolted by a young couple taking a time-out from bringing in their groceries for some Kodak-level PDA.
  "What, did they just get engaged in their driveway?"
• Sleepwalking: Exaggerated with Gayle, who—in a state of exhaustion after two days and nights spent working on a "bread suit" disguise so that she can sneak into a crouton convention from which she was permanently banned—sleep-powerwalks to Rhode Island, steals a van (which she decorates with a family decal of just herself) and goes through "many of the necessary steps in establishing [her] own Curves franchise" before waking up.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Gayle, especially in her scriptwriting.
  Rick Gausmann: "Farts! It is an avaricious scientist from the state, sent to come to take these wild girls to be locked away in some tiny chamber, no bigger than a Costco tank of cheese curds!"
  Bonnie: "Stand back, you prissy scoon, and say thusly: these two chapped woodland hussies shall be sent to the New England Freaky Girl Museum for Wild Girls to forever live in a chamber no bigger than a Costco tank of cheese curds!"
• Soft Reboot: The later half of Season 2, and to a greater extent, Season 3 as a whole. The plots become a bit Denser and Wackier, Gayle is characterized as much less spiteful and more explicitly caring towards the rest of the Waters-Waters family, and Terry and other Straight Man characters pick up a few strange quirks of their own. Gayle's behavior is much less criminal and irreversibly destructive and leans more towards the bizarre and slightly warranted. Northbread also becomes a bit more of a World of Weirdness come Season 3 with the introduction of the New D. Instead of Gayle being the sole purveyor of chaos, she actually begins being on the receiving end of forces such as mall couples, gangs of girls on Razor scooters, Trader Joe's employees, and human-reptile hybrids. There's also how Ira completely disappears from the series past Episode 10. See Early-Installment Weirdness.
• Stalker without a Crush: Gayle and Bonnie regularly (and openly) stalk each other as part of their standard Spy vs. Spy-type antics. Given, they have some complicated feelings for each other.
  Gayle: Well, it's that time of the morning again: time for me to try to guess Bonnie's AOL password.
• Stepford Suburbia: The New D as seen by Gayle and Bonnie, full of identical houses and lawns easy to get lost among, golden retrievers whose "venom" might cause you to assimilate, and overachieving, immaculately-poised, razor scooter-riding 12-year-old girls who are all named "Jenny."
• Stockholm Syndrome: Gayle mentions that Ira's is wearing off in episode three, contributing to her decision to sell him on Ebay.
• Straight Man: Terry, to Gayle. Dave is sometimes this too.
• String Theory: Bonnie's "Wall of Pop Culture" that shows how she learned to talk to the teenaged girls in the New D.
• Stylistic Suck: Any animal, besides Gayle's and Bonnie's dogs and Gayle's kidnapped pig, will be very clearly made of craft materials.
• Suburban Gothic: The Played for Laughs version.
• Suddenly Shouting: Gayle, quite a lot.
  "My husband, DAVE..."
  "Get rid of the couches, we can't let people know we SIT!"
• Sure, Let's Go with That: Gayle's reaction to the audience's World of Symbolism interpretation of her coup of the high school play via Icelandic indie pop performance.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Gayle giving a house tour shortly after discovering the Lizard Folk in her basement:
  Gayle: To answer your last question, we don't have any serpents who walk or talk, so.
  Jesse: ...That's great, I...never asked you a question.
• Sweet on Polly Oliver: While disguised as a teenaged boy, Gayle becomes close to CJ, the leader of the mall teens. As the group celebrates "Brad's" engagement to one of the teenaged girls, CJ and Gayle share a Held Gaze that ends in a kiss, causing the latter's new fiancée to furiously break up with "him." In an inversion of the standard arc, CJ seems totally comfortable with where all this is going until Gayle's disguise is removed, revealing her as female but also as a 50-something mom.
• Sweet Polly Oliver: Gayle disguises herself as a teenaged boy named "Brad" to infiltrate a gang of mall teens in "Mall Couples."
• Take That!: Linkin Park, Jimmy Buffett and Radiohead come in for unflattering analysis by Gayle, while she weaponizes the perceived badness of Smash Mouth (believing that if listening to Mozart makes people smarter, Smash Mouth will make them dumber) and Lou Bega ("Mambo No. 5" being "the least cool thing this world has ever seen" and therefore sufficient to "undo all the heinous social learnings of a 'hip or with-it' individual" if played at a high enough volume). The show also devotes an entire episode to mocking the corporate culture of Trader Joe's, and in another episode Gayle calls Zooey Deschanel "the Trader Joe's of Hollywood."
  "I get it! You do things a little differently!"
• Talking to Themself: Dave, often. Particularly captured on the DaveCam.
• Talks Like a Simile: Gayle takes this to Overly Long Gag levels. It's occasionally shown that Terry may have picked it up from her.
• Technologically Blind Elders: Gayle's and Bonnie's efforts to prove they aren't this while interacting with the "emailers" and "Netflixers" that populate the New D only make it more apparent, with Gayle attempting to keep up with a "young, tech-savvy conversation" by blurting out a stream of completely made-up apps and eventually just screaming "DVDs!" When Bonnie basks in her purchase of an iPad, Gayle is sick with envy until she runs into her at the town's media services center and finds out that she was only pretending to use it and didn't even know how to turn it on.
• Testosterone Poisoning: The series constantly links this kind of presentation to stereotypically feminine traits and behavior, to hilarious effect (at one point Gayle is seen shaving her legs with an axe).
• That Came Out Wrong:
  • Doctor Bruce occasionally to Gayle.
    Bruce: Gayle, you should have seen me, soaking wet.
  • Gayle and Dave say several in front of Terry, much to Terry's disgust.
    Gayle: Your father and I love to eat out.
• Thinking Out Loud: Gayle does this frequently and only takes minimal precautious to ensure that others don't hear her, as when she does a Mirror Monologue in Episode 31 that is audible to her house guests through the bathroom door, or in Episode 38 where Terry accuses her of wanting to isolate the Lizard People so that she can take them onto The Today Show and become famous and she expresses offense before immediately soliloquizing a detailed confirmation of this accusation into a kitchen cupboard rather than wait for Terry to leave.
• Threatening Shark: Gayle managed to create this situation at her wedding after kidnapping a live shark from an aquarium in a typical effort to show Bonnie up.
• Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: Gayle claims to be 6'1 while her husband Dave is "5'6 in New Balances."
• Took a Level in Kindness: Whereas Gayle starts out as a cut-and-dried Villain Protagonist, remorselessly and relentlessly abusing her husband and children (one of whom she kidnapped and raised as her own), her motives become more sympathetic as the series continues and include trying to "save" a young boy whose parents she believes are ruining his childhood by forcing him to be cool, protecting Dave by beating up an egret, and going to absurd lengths to spare Terry public embarrassment. She and Terry also become closer, developing more of a Vitriolic Odd Couple-type rapport as opposed to a merely dysfunctional parent-child relationship, and her relationship with Bonnie is more explicitly portrayed as a deep friendship upheld by shared history and Worthy Opponent mutual respect.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Gayle is utterly enamored with Chobani Greek yogurt. To the point she nearly went catatonic when an ill fated session of road rage saw her driving a Chobani truck off the road, making it spill its contents. She also keeps a stash of couscous in a treasure chest.
• Trail Of Breadcrumbs: When she and Bonnie are lost in the "New D," Gayle considers doing this with chapsticks, but doesn't have any with her.
• The Unfavorite: Ira. Gayle kidnapped him from a Costco solely so that she could have someone to help her operate a tandem kayak she found a bargain on, and he becomes obsolete after her gym gets a rowing machine. Early in the series she sells him on eBay after he breaks her portrait of Tonya Harding and only retrieves him from the buyer (Bonnie) upon realizing that his dental appointments provide an easy in with Bruce. Although her Education Mama behavior is aggressive enough to extend to household pets, she seems to have no concern for his education beyond forbidding him from playing Spanish guitar, and after he leaves to search for his real parents, she and Dave make zero effort to track him down.
• The Un-Hug: Gayle greeting Terry when she comes home after her stint with Lisa.
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: Gayle, though somewhat less so as the series continues.
• Unusual Euphemism: Dave uses words like 'tiddlywinks' as swears. Gayle also describes sexual acts she would like to engage in with Bruce using different euphemisms, such as ‘I’m going to mess him up like a leaf pile’ and ‘now you're baking my ziti’.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Gayle gets this kind of (non-)reaction a lot, such as when she sees Bruce walking up to her car and breaks the window with her head instead of rolling it down, after which they have a pleasant conversation.
• Victoria's Secret Compartment: Gayle smuggles some Chobani yogurt in her shirt when she goes to a Yanni concert. Which is kinda impressive considering she only has, by her own admission, B cups.
• Villain Protagonist: Gayle, particularly early on.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Gayle and Bonnie increasingly lean into this territory as the series progresses, while sacrificing none of their accustomed ruthlessness. "The Wedding" establishes that Bonnie was Gayle's Best Woman when she married Dave, and Dave explicitly refers to Bonnie as Gayle's best friend, though not to either of their faces.
• Vocal Dissonance: Fleming looks fairly convincing as a middle-aged woman, but he doesn't bother sounding like a woman-in fact, he deepens his natural voice to play Gayle.
• Voice Changeling: Gayle can do a perfect imitation of Dave, unsurprisingly as Dave is voiced by Chris Fleming.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Ira is last seen hitchhiking to Santa Fe to find his real parents.
  • Gayle's first line in the series is about her Labradoodle getting accepted into Carnegie Mellon. This dog is never mentioned again, even when Gayle obtains her "rescue" dog Hilary Clinton.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Downplayed. While Northbread is mentioned as being in Massachusetts, it's unclear which part of the highly regionalized state it's supposed to be. Gayle's incident on Interstate 88 (see Ripped from the Headlines above) imply the series could take place somewhere in the western half of Massachusetts. Goosetip (apparently in Cape Cod) is considered far away enough from Northbread for the family's escape come Episode 37, and is discussed as being extremely different, making it unlikely that the Waters-Waters hometown is anywhere near the eastern coast of Massachusetts.
• Window Watcher: Gayle and Bonnie constantly snoop on each other like this.
• Women's Mysteries: The mystical rite by which Gayle makes granola.
• Word Salad Lyrics: Pretty much any of the original Musical Pastiche songs used to underscore scenes will make you do a double take or two.
• Worthy Opponent: Gayle stops trying to kill Bonnie, and instead applauds her, when she realizes that Bonnie wasn't stealing her couscous, but rather just keeps a stash of Israeli couscous on her person at all times.
• Your Door Was Open: Gayle and Bonnie are pretty free about walking into each other's houses, whether to sabotage each other or simply to chat. In "Valedictorian," Bonnie's reaction to finding Gayle in her son's room in the wee hours of the morning playing Smash Mouth's "Walkin' on the Sun" in an effort to make him dumber while he sleeps is simply a contemptuous "Get out of here, Gayle" and a point toward the exit.

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