YMMV / Pacific Palisades

• Nightmare Fuel: Joanna's recurring nightmares about her rape and the fears that Rachel herself will get raped too. At one point, she sees her being attacked by her boyfriend in these bad dreams.
• Retroactive Recognition: A pre-Grey's Anatomy James Pickens Jr. guest stars in one episode.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Rachel. While the shocking reveal that Joanna is her mother via rape as a teenage girl and should have had the incident brought up more gently instead of blurted out in the heat of the moment, her role as a reckless Bratty Teenage Daughter before and after the secret got out puts her into this territory. She feels nothing for what Joanna went through, continues to go out with Michael even after learning he only wants to sleep with her, and continues to stress out her family makes her less endearing than otherwise.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Joanna's past rape is initially handled very unsympathetically by both Rachel and Nick. Although keeping the secret of being Rachel's mother from both of them was upsetting, their respective attitudes leave a bad taste in one's mouth, and even has shades of Victim-Blaming to it.
  • Robert and Jessica's affair was already bad enough, but given the stronger stigma towards workplace romances, namely with her working for him, it's incredibly problematic and they should consider themselves very lucky that a sexual harassment lawsuit wasn't brought forth, let alone how Kate could have taken them to the cleaners, including taking his company from him. Additionally, the fact that the show tries to paint them as soul mates is quite loaded.
• The Woobie: Kate. She's a total Nice Girl who is devoted to her husband Robert and helped to start up his lucrative contractor company, only for him to cheat on her with his assistant Jessica (who was also welcomed with open arms by Kate when she was first hired), she becomes pregnant with the child she's always wanted, only to suffer a miscarriage in a car accident and after losing her mind and abducting a baby from the hospital, she's soon arrested.