YMMV / Black Books

• Aluminium Christmas Trees: The Little Book of Calm is a real book, and the tips Manny quotes from it are all in there too. (In the DVD Commentary, it's noted that it isn't as little as Manny's copy, which was made as a prop.)
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The moment where Bernard and Fran duck under their restaurant table to find a miniature bar, complete with bartender, quite literally under everyone's feet, is surreal even by this show's standards. They barely even acknowledge it, preferring to have an argument about how boring Manny's parents are.
  • The fly in Manny's First Day. It comes in, interrupting them, lands on Bernard's desk for two seconds, then gets up and flies away, shutting the door behind itself....somehow. Then Bernard and Manny immediately resume speaking as if nothing happened.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Fran not telling Bernard that the only woman he ever loved is still alive? Terrible. Fran furnishing a ridiculously large collection of evidence that the woman was still alive? Hilarious.
• Ho Yay: Manny and Bernard towards Jason.
• Jerkass Woobie: Bernard, as is revealed in the final episode of the series. Part of his misanthropic behavior stems from learning that a girl he loved is dead. And it wasn't even true!
• Only the Creator Does It Right: Graham Linehan left after the first series, which causes a divide between people who enjoyed the Father Ted-style rapid-fire insanity, crude misanthropy, and deeply-flawed Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonists he uses in his works, and those who enjoyed the later series' more absurdist elements, slightly more sympathetic characterization, and the absence of his apparently-obligatory Creator Cameo (he managed to appear three times in the first series).
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • The fast food/concessions worker from "The Lockout" is a very young Tony Way, a character actor who appears in smallish parts in high-profile shows such as Doctor Who, Sherlock, and Game of Thrones.
  • The doctor in the first episode is none other than a young Martin Freeman, better known to modern viewers as John Watson and Bilbo Baggins.
  • Elizabeth Marmar (Toni from Peep Show) in "The Blackout".
  • Trebor, the creepy Middle Eastern man who attempts to take advantage of Manny in "He's Leaving Home" is played by Omid Djalili, who appeared in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End as the pirate Teague shoots after questioning the code (as well as his twin brother), and the prison warden from The Mummy (1999) (you know, the one who's eaten alive from the inside by a scarab until he runs headfirst into a wall, killing himself). David Walliams also appears in this episode.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The show is obviously written before ebooks and Amazon annihilated book shops small and large.
    • It's noticable for not being mentioned, but ebooks and Amazon had the least effect on small, used book stores, as opposed to large chains that sold new books.
  • Manny is exploited for erotic photography that winds up in magazines. Pornographic magazines have been almost completely replaced with online sites.
  • The way mobile phones are portrayed puts the show in a very specific time period. They certainly exist, and are popular enough to annoy Bernard into banning them from the shop, but aside from the early Nokia internet phone with a tiny keyboard Fran (slowly) books a holiday on, smartphones are yet to take over and every other one seen is a feature phone.
  • Bernard and Fran's near-constant smoking in the book shop, as well as pubs, restaurants, and other places obviously predates the 2007 indoor smoking ban.

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