YMMV / Coupling

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Jane really a desperate Attention Whore, or is she more of a Troll that does what she does for the entertainment value? There are moments when she almost seems aware that what she is doing is ridiculous.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Jeff. He's more or less the third main character, but far and away the most memorable.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Jeff claiming his girlfriend Julia is dead is a lot less funny and way more depressing when her actress died of cancer two years after the show ended.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • During series 4, while Susan is coping with her pregnancy, the very vain Sally is very uncomfortable with the whole process. She mentioned in "Nightlines" how she doesn't really want a child, and mentioned how unsettling she finds it. In "Circus of the Epidurals," whenever Susan goes into detail about the actual birth, Sally faints and goes to her "safe place." When you learn that Kate Isitt (Sally) was actually pregnant during Series 4, it either becomes a hilarious in-joke from the people behind the scenes, or becomes unsettling to watch a pregnant woman face the gruesome truth about what's going to happen to her head-on.
  • Steve including Daleks among the things sofas are designed to protect from, given Steven Moffat's later career.
  • In the episode "Bedtime" in series 4, Oliver wears a sweater that says "Bring Back Doctor Who". Considering who writes the show, and that a mere ten months after that episode aired, the 9th Doctor made his first appearance... even better, Jack Davenport's wife Michelle Gomez played The Master.
• Ho Yay: Jeff imagining Steve nude. Also, Jeff enthusiastically playing along with (what initially appears to be) the mistaken assumption that Patrick's gay in "Gotcha" by pretending to be his latest boyfriend.
• One-Scene Wonder: Jane's Aunt Muriel in "Sex Death and Nudity."
• Replacement Scrappy: Oliver for Jeff.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Jane is a far more believable and likable character in season 4.
• Retroactive Recognition: Nigel Betts appears as the winking, "Anybody can have a dead aunt!" neighbor in "Sex, Death, & Nudity". He'd later appear in—among other things—Doctor Who and its spinoff Class2016.
• Seasonal Rot: Some believe the show went off the rails at the start of the fourth series, when Richard Coyle quit, Richard Mylan proved an inadequate replacement, and the Patrick-Sally relationship began to receive too much emphasis. Others believe the real rot began in the third series, where the laughs seemed more predictable and less spontaneous than before. Geoffrey Perkins leaving The BBC in 2001 (he was once described as an "enormous influence" by the Father Ted writers) may have had something to do with this.
• Values Dissonance: "Dressed" has Susan making a string of Unsettling Gender-Reveal jokes to make Patrick, his rival Ivan and his wife uncomfortable, which haven't aged well.
• The Woobie: Jeff.

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