YMMV / Nathan Barley

• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: This trope summarizes the whole premise of the show, in the very first episode. Dan Ashcroft's scathing Sugar Ape cover feature, "The Rise of the Idiots", an attack on the hipster subcultures he deals with every day, is taken completely out of context by the magazine's entire readership and manages to go viral. Even rival magazine editors and television directors end up hailing it as an important, defining cultural milestone, despite Dan's original negative intentions, contributing further to his depression and alienation.
  Nathan Barley: That piece on the Rise of the Idiots, awesome.
  Dan Ashcroft: Thanks.
  Nathan Barley: Totally sums up my credos.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Nathan's geek pie haircut is a moment of embarrassing shame amongst his peers in Hosegate, but randomly becomes Big in Japan when he accidentally bumps into some Japanese TV culture correspondents. A resulting TV segment shows the haircut, along with some of Nathan's mottos like "Peace and Fucking", spreading like wildfire among the Japanese youth.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The series is set in a misanthropic World of Jerkass where pretty much everyone is a terrible person or at minimum deeply flawed. Co-creator Charlie Brooker would then go on to create Black Mirror, and the episode "Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too" would feature Sugar Ape magazine as a Creator In-Joke... So technically Nathan Barley could take place in the series' dystopian nightmare of a Shared Universe, which would kind of match its overall tone.
• Misaimed Fandom: both in-text and metatextual; Dan's article satirising the hipsters he's surrounded by sees them venerate him as their icon in the show. On a meta-level, the show is clearly meant to savagely spoof a certain kind of irritating hipster, but that particular audience ended up becoming the show's biggest fans.
• Moral Event Horizon: While it's not quite evil, Nathan soliciting a blowjob from Mandy in exchange for drug money marked a rather sharp change in his characterisation from "irritating privileged douchebag" to "genuinely awful person".
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Ben Whishaw, who plays Nathan's eternally-suffering web developer Pingu, went on to high-profile roles as Q in the Daniel Craig Bond films, as well as the voice of Paddington Bear.
  • Benedict Cumberbatch has a small role as loony musician Doug Rocket's Straight Man business manager Robin.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The series is overwhelmingly an example of Values Resonance, since Nathan's obnoxiously over-featured mobile phone and vocation as a minor internet prank video celeb turned out to be well ahead of his time, rather than the passing fad the show's creators were expecting his lifestyle to be. However, it's weird watching bell-bottom low-slung jeans coupled with boxer shorts an inch below the armpits, transparent technology, and the extreme sports and anime aesthetics coexisting with characters that appear like modern hipsters, the overall feel coming off like a Retro Universe version of The New '10s as imagined by people in the 2000s who have had that decade's culture described to them but not shown. The most obvious anachronism is Dan's horrid style magazine, Sugar Ape, which represented an industry and young contemporary art scene that (thanks to the Recession and the internet) stopped existing only a few years after the show aired. Nathan's conspicuous consumption and limitless (implicitly parental) money supply is also something you would not see in a modern hipster portrayal, who, even if they were moneyed, would be trying to appear guilty about it. (A second series with a more 'Millennial' tone, showing Nathan being cut off from his money and trying to get a house, was floated but never made.) What really jumps out is that the Hosegate idiots are shown to be doing what they do as self-expression rather than an exercise in branding or getting clicks — even the sleazy magazine boss seems to feel part of a legitimate art scene.
• Vindicated by History: The series didn't do particularly well when first broadcast in 2005, mainly because its subject matter and therefore humour would have been almost incomprehensible to someone without a working knowledge of the sort of "Shoreditch twat" it was ripping apart (bear in mind that this came out two years before the first iPhone was released, when broadband Internet was still on the uptake rather than the standard it is now and social media, YouTube etc didn't exist). The main issue is this: it was ahead of its time. Come 2017 and the things it is parodying are now part of mainstream culture thanks to social media, banal stupidity is even more prevalent than it was at the time (e.g. the imbecilic "prank" videos Barley subjects Pingu to inclusion in are now standard fodder on YouTube, and things like breakfast cereal cafes get press attention and therefore hatred), and post-financial crash the concept of someone spending ridiculous amounts of money on worthless gadgets makes Barley even more hateful and wasteful than he would have been in 2005.
• The Woobie: Poor, high-strung Pingu.

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