YMMV / Jonathan Creek

• Angst? What Angst?: In "The Grinning Man", Joey nearly drowns after falling into a tank filled with the corpses of people that have vanished over 70 years, coming face to face with her dead friend who was the last victim, in a scene that has earned an impassioned entry under Nightmare Fuel on this very Wiki. By the next scene she has completely recovered her composure, and at the end of the episode is looking forward to writing it up in her blog.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In "The Seer of the Sands", Carla's husband casually mentions that he was once married to a man. Carla understandably freaks out, but after the episode in question, it's never brought up again.
  • Also, in the episode "Danse Macabre", what was the deal with the Creepy Child who was obsessed with rotating blades? You'd think it would trigger a "Eureka!" Moment, but...nope.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Carla Borrego's crime show Eyes and Ears, which sensationalized various murders in order to get high ratings. Jonathan's face in "The Chequered Box" is fairly priceless when he witness actors restage a hypothetical murder in which the female victim is punched in the face and strung up with a noose.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In "The Wrestler's Tomb," we see Maddy hacking into a presumed victim's voice mail account to get a lead on their movements for her story. Five years later...
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A few examples.
  • In "Black Canary", Jonathan has something of a history with Charlotte; the two both have feelings for each other but nothing happens. By the time of "The Clue of the Savant's Thumb", he is married to Polly. Both characters were played by actresses — Kate Isitt and Sarah Alexander — who were also main characters in Coupling. Their co-star Gina Bellman appeared in another episode of Jonathan Creek, but she played a love interest of Adam Klaus, not Jonathan.
  • After exposing a murderous inspector on air, Jonathan is shocked to find out Eyes and Ears wants him to do 26 more episodes on impossible crimes. Jonathan Creek ran for 27 episodes.
  • In "The Grinning Man", there was a subplot about 3D skin flicks. about a year and a half later...
  • In "Mother Recap", Nicola Walker plays a uniformed police constable who finds out about a series of murders committed back in the 1940s and uses this information to commit a murder of her own. Sixteen years later, she would play a DCI who investigated cold cases in Unforgotten.
• Narm: The infamous "flying cat" in "The Judas Tree". The script called for a cat to jump onto a picnic table, but to avoid any tedious waiting for the cat to jump up by its own volition, somebody simply stands off-screen and throws the cat onto the table-top. The trajectory is all wrong, and it results in a scene in which the cat is clearly not jumping up from from the ground but from mid-air, giving the impression that it's just flown in.
  • Some of the reveals / flashbacks can come across this way, due to the sheer unlikely contrivance of the explanations coupled with how seriously everyone is playing it.
  • One such flashback features a melodramatic sting when revealing that a prominent figure in this week's mystery is actually a ... practicing Christian.
• Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize: Mostly averted, with the best-known guest stars more often playing victims (Colin Baker, Bob Monkhouse, Nigel Planer), cops (Rik Mayall), witnesses (Peter Davison, Joanna Lumley) or comic relief (Bill Bailey, John Bird). A few exceptions are Maureen Lipman in "The Tailor's Dummy", Celia Imrie in "Gorgons Wood" and Paul McGann in "The Judas Tree".
• Replacement Scrappy: Surprisingly averted after Maddy left the show. Although she is far and away the most popular sidekick, both Carla and Joey were generally accepted by audiences. Polly, on the other hand, mocks Jonathan's fascinating and rare (former) career, gets rid of his duffle coat and thinks living in a windmill is childish ... although even she gets better, becoming the Straight Man to Jonathan's deadpan humour and occasional outright trolling.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Fair warning — if you watch QI before you watch this, you may find it difficult to take Alan Davies seriously.
  • A young(er) Paul Blackthorne appears in a single episode as one of Maddy's Temporary Love Interests. He's now better known as Quentin Lance on Arrow.
  • The fake police guard in "The Three Gamblers" is a young Sgt. Bacchus! He changed a lot in the intervening decade, but you'll recognise the voice.
  • Adam's PA in "The Problem at Gallows Gate" is a young Amanda Holden.
  • Rebecca Front was in "The Eyes of Tiresias". Though she had some success prior to this, she's become far more recognisable due to roles such as Lewis and The Thick of It after this.
• Seasonal Rot: A lot of people felt the 2014 series didn't live up to previous seasons thanks to a combination of Character Development and They Changed It, Now It Sucks!. Naturally, there are also those who have nothing good to say about anything produced after Maddy left the show.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Most notably, the first episode of 2014 series broke with the show's long-established Locked Room Mystery format in favour of a Reverse Whodunnit - for many audience members, killing the precise reason that they enjoyed the show in the first place. Thankfully it proved to be a one off.
• Trapped by Mountain Lions: In The Clue of the Savant's Thumb, Joanna Lumley's character is haunted by her past at a girl's boarding school in which one girl died in her bed and was found with a strange circle on her forehead. The entire subplot has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the episode, and isn't really a mystery considering the character knew the true circumstances of the death all along.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Maddy's Clingy Jealous Girl tendencies sometimes make it hard to root for her and Jonathan to get together. A particularly bad example in "Black Canary": Charlotte, an old flame of Jonathan's, privately confesses to Maddy that she's long been carrying a torch for Jonathan. Maddy sabotages the rekindling romance by lying to Jonathan, telling him that Charlotte told her "he's just not my type". Particularly harsh when, not long after the apparent murder of Charlotte's mother, Charlotte has just learned that her mother was in fact her mother's twin sister impersonating her after a horrific accident fifteen years earlier, and Charlotte was upset enough by this revelation to attempt suicide over it. In other words, Maddy has just persuaded Jonathan to break it off with a grieving, emotionally fragile young woman in her hour of need. How charming.
  • Jonathan himself is surprisingly prejudiced towards women who do not meet his standards of beauty, for example in "Time Waits For Norman" he starts going out with a woman who is bright, beautiful and charming ... then breaks it off because he's weirded out by the fact that she wears a wig. In another, "Mother Redcap", Jonathan becomes fixated on the fact that a policewoman he has met who again seemingly has no major flaws at all apart from the fact that she sticks her tongue out when she eats pasta (she's actually a murderer, killer but he doesn't know that yet). Basically, for all the grief that Maddy puts him through, its actually kind of difficult to root for him to find a woman who appreciates him better as whenever he finds one he treats them poorly for petty reasons.
• Values Dissonance: "The Seer of the Sands" aired nine years before gay marriage was legalised in the UK and as such Carla's shock reaction to learning that her husband was once married to a man is understandable. Watching the episode today however, (as he points out) her reaction does have stings of homophobia as it really does seem as if it's the gay part of the marriage that bothers her, not the fact that he hadn't told her that he had previously been married (regardless of the gender of the spouse). And this is followed up by Jonathan cracking a joke about buggery which would certainly net the episode a ton of complaints if it aired today.
  • Also, the sub-plot in "The Problem at Gallows Gate" about the Blind Musician who is not actually blind but uses his supposed disability as a cover for groping pretty women wouldn't fly today. Especially given that it's played for laughs, although he does get his comeuppance in the end.
  • In "Danse Macabre", a man on a plane is asked to store a box in the overhead locker before take-off. When he refuses, the steward tries to take it off him and he resists almost violently. Leaving aside the fact that the box contained the severed head of the author he was obsessed with, not a bomb, in a post 9-11 world there is no way the steward would just give up and let him keep hold of it.