YMMV / The Hour

• Designated Villain: Angus McCain.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Thomas Kish and Adam LeRay tend toward this with fans, considering they're played by Burn Gorman and Andrew Scott, respectively.
• Growing the Beard: Literally. As soon as Freddie shows back up in Lime Grove with a beard and a nicer suit in episode one of the second season, the show seems revitalized.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Early in Season Two, Lix tells Randall to stay calm when she tells him bad news, and not to start rearranging his desk. At the time, this is a bit of Lix's typical Deadpan Snarkery about his OCD, but when they find out that their daughter (who they've never seen and Randall spent years trying to track down,) died in an air raid we see that Randall does in fact try to cope with extreme stress by rearranging his desk, and it's not funny. At all.
• Ho Yay:
  • Freddie and Hector. They spend a lot of time staring jealously at each other and sniping over Bel. Plus, all of 1.03 (which involves Hector dressing Freddie in his own clothes and Hector showing off at the hunt for Freddie) and Freddie pretending to be Hector's wife in order to sneak out of the studio past MI-6. Hector also loans Freddie his car with no questions, and later accompanies Freddie to the Elms' house when Freddie puts the pieces together about Ruth.
  • Hector and Laurie in Season Two. They used to be in the army together, and Laurie is apparently very accustomed to putting drunk, handsy Hector to bed. There's also a ton of tension when Laurie participates in the debate on the Wolfenden Report; it's almost as if Hector is angrier at him for hiding his own possible homosexuality and still carrying out the law than the deal with Kiki.
• Jerkass Woobie: Hector. The idiot brings most of his trouble upon himself, but one does feel bad for him.
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • People other than Ben Whishaw are in this?!
  • Before Ben Whishaw got famous, it was common for fans of The Wire to tune in for Dominic West.
  • Season Two also garnered a number of fans of The Thick of It due to Peter Capaldi. The series itself also received a large influx of people discovering it for the first time when Capaldi was named the new Doctor.
• Les Yay: Lix Storm confuses everyone's sexuality, but she and Bel seem especially close. They change clothing in front of each other, borrow each other's clothes despite having vastly different body types, and Lix calls her by more pet names than anyone else ("darling", "sweetheart", "munchkin").
• Moral Event Horizon: Cilenti crosses it when he has Pike kill Rosa Maria for talking to the team.
• One-Scene Wonder: Lord Elms, especially in 1.06.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Sissy, who comes off as annoyingly naive in the first series, gets a bit more development and backbone in series two.
• Retroactive Recognition: This series has been home to some excellent actors. You may be surprised to see Jimmy McNulty, Q, Talisa and Qyburn, The Twelfth Doctor, Moriarty, Owen Harper, Princess Margaret, John Shelby, and Cardinal Ascanio Sforza.
• The Scrappy: In Season One, it's Sissy and/or Isaac, before they get more characterization.
  • Camille really takes the prize, though. She tends to get hit with Die for Our Ship and/or Murder the Hypotenuse by Bel/Freddie shippers.
• Ship Mates: It's not hard to ship Lix/Randall and Hector/Marnie if you already ship Freddie/Bel, since they're all canon pairings and the pairings that the show ends on. If you ship Lix/Freddie, though, you tend to root for the Bel/Hector affair to continue.

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