Series / Coupling

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Coupling was a 2000–04 BBC sitcom about a circle of friends in their 30s and their complicated sex lives. Written by Steven Moffat, produced by his wife Sue Vertue, and based very loosely on their early relationship. (The Word of God is that Steve and Susan went on to make a sitcom about their lives, after which Steve worked on "some old kids' show they recently pulled out of mothballs".)

The series was notable for its meticulously-crafted plots, revolving around lies and misunderstandings in the "Fawlty Towers" Plot and Three Is Company veins, and hilarious cases of Digging Yourself Deeper. Each episode was very detailed and expansive on matters such as impotence, masturbation, pornography and lesbianism.

The characters are intended to represent a spectrum of confidence and paranoia in relationships among men and women. They are:

• Steve Taylor (Jack Davenport): A nice, if somewhat neurotic everyman, who starts dating Susan after breaking up with Jane.
• Susan Walker (Sarah Alexander): A snarky and practical blonde with the occasional mean streak, who starts dating Steve after breaking up with Patrick.
• Jeff Murdock (Richard Coyle): Steve's best friend. A paranoid Manchild who provides the show's most awkward moments, generally by overthinking everything.
• Sally Harper (Kate Isitt): Susan's beauty-obsessed best friend. Although originally written as a one-note character, she gets plenty of serious character development after the first series.
• Patrick Maitland (Ben Miles): Susan's ex, a laid-back casanova who does have his heart in the right place on occasion. He is also very well-endowed (a "tripod", apparently). Although he's not too bright, he has his serious moments.
• Jane Christie (Gina Bellman): Steve's ex. A walking mess of crazy with many hidden layers of even more crazy, although hidden underneath all of that crazy, she seems to be a very sweet, very scared woman.
• Oliver Morris (Richard Mylan): The final series' replacement of Jeff. Owns a fantasy/sci-fi store and is worse with the opposite gender than the rest of the cast combined. Notably, even Jane thinks he's crazy.

It had an American remake on NBC, which lasted for only four episodes in the US before being pulled (though the full season of 13 episodes was broadcast in the UK, ironically enough). There was also a Greek version that ran for a full series of 10 episodes.

Came fifty-fourth in Britains Best Sitcom.

There are some commented out Zero-Context Examples.

This show provides examples of:

• Aborted Arc: Jeff and Jane were implied to have an interest in each other at the end of series 3, but Richard Coyle left the show and this was never mentioned again. This was, however, salvaged for Oliver in the fourth series.
• Ambiguously Bi: Jane claims to be bisexual, but the truth of this is dubious as she mostly uses it to titillate Steve. Susan doesn’t believe there’s a single woman Jane has actually slept with and says so to her face. Oliver likewise believes it’s another quirk made up to get attention, and demonstrates his point by flashing open a porn mag full of naked women and watching her cringe. The closest thing to a sexual or romantic relationship with another woman she’s shown having is when Susan snogs her, also to titillate Steve, which she seems quite flustered by.
• Answer Cut: In Inferno, Patrick tries to reassure Steve that as long as Susan hasn’t watched the titular video, the title doesn’t give anything away.
  Steve: Patrick… "Inferno" isn’t the full title.
  Patrick: Well, how bad could it be?
  (Cut to the girls in a different bar)
  Sally: Lesbian Spank Inferno!?
• Anthropomorphic Personification:
  • We do not talk about the Melty Man!
    Jeff: All of us, in our time, are visited by the Melty Man.
    Patrick: The what?
    Jeff: Don't say his name, Patrick! Don't even think his name! Or he will rise from the shadow dimensions to do his evil work inside your terrified pants.
    Patrick: (scoffing) Terrified pants?!
    Steve: (gravely) There's nothing funny about the Melty Man, Patrick!
    Patrick: You know about the Melty Man, too?
    Steve: We all know the Melty Man.
    Patrick: Who is he?
    Steve: The arch-enemy of trouser confidence.
    Jeff: Professor Moriarty, in groin form.
    Steve: Darth Vader.
    Jeff: Without the helmet!
  • We do talk about Captain Subtext, but only when we mean something else...
• Attention Whore: Oliver pegs Jane as this, seeing through her "crazy wacky Jane" act. He suggests that she’s afraid that she’s not interesting enough, so she’ll say anything to get attention. Her reaction suggests that he has her dead to rights.
• Author Avatar: Steve. Susan is an example of that more rarely seen species, the Producer Avatar.
• Babies Ever After: The series ends with the birth of Steve and Susan's child.
• The Baby Trap:
  • Discussed by Jane in "Gotcha":
    Jane: Where are we going wrong? Are we supposed to hang around bars, shag every man in sight, get ourselves pregnant and then trap some poor loser into a lifetime of misery and heartbreak?
    Sally: Of course not.
    Jane: Okay, you suggest something!
  • Susan attempts this with Steve:
    "We never really got 'round to organizing a wedding. Thought maybe a whole human being would be easier."
• Bad Liar: Patrick has this problem, leaving him unable to keep secret the fact that he recorded another woman over his sex tape with Susan.
  Susan: Did you tape that woman over me?
  Patrick: I can explain. Yes, I did.
• Bait-and-Switch Comparison: Part of Susan's snarky repertoire.
  • From "The Girl With Two Breasts":
    Susan: Jeff, Jeff! Listen to me! Women want someone with command, with confidence, someone who won't take no for an answer. We want somebody arrogant and gorgeous with a terrifying sexual appetite and an amazing range of sexual technique. But when it comes right down to it, d'you know what? We'll settle for a man!
    Steve: [after Jeff leaves]) So have you settled for me, then?
    Susan: Oh, don't be paranoid, Steve. [beat] Of course I have!
  • Susan even does this in Sally's head in "The Melty Man Cometh":
    Sally: What am I doing?
    [Susan and Jane appear behind her]
    Jane: Well, you're about to attempt sex with a close friend.
    Susan: He's so worried his erection will fail again.
    Jane: Which will destroy one of the most important relationships in his life.
    Susan: And his relationship with you!
  • She gives a very mean-spirited one in "Gotcha", in response to Jane seemingly implying that she's better at turning Steve on than her. Even the audience reacts at her retort:
    Jane: Oh, it's pretty easy to get a response out of Steve as long as you hit the right notes. It's like... snake-charming.
    Susan: Well, personally speaking, I'm not in the habit of charming snakes... I just try to be polite to you. [walks out of the salon]
    Jane: Well. I think I got out of that okay.
• Becoming the Mask: According to Jane, this is how she got the way she is. She went on holiday, pretended to be her own imaginary insane twin sister, and eventually it just stuck.
  Jane: D'you know, I could get away with anything when I was my crazy twin Jane.
  Sally: But you are Jane.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Sally and Patrick, from the first episode right up until they become an official couple at the end of season three.
• Better as Friends: Susan and Patrick only saw each other once a week while they were dating, and Susan wasn’t even being faithful. They get along quite famously after separating.
• Better than Sex: Jeff once said this in "The Cupboard of Patrick's Love" of a childhood activity that involved writing the word "naked" hundreds of times on a sheet of paper and rubbing his face in it.
• Big Brother Mentor: Jeff tries to be this to Steve, even though they're the same age and Jeff is presented as pretty incompetent in his encounters with women.
• Bigger Is Better in Bed:
  • Patrick, so much so that a former girlfriend used him as a model for a sex aid—without his knowledge.
    Steve: I think you may have been had, mate.
    Jeff: And a lot more often than you realized!
  • In his personal opinion, he's also "got technique". Woman don't always agree - he's been advised that, when kissing, he should stop considering the epiglottis at the back of the throat a target and that he should stop trying to make nipples revolve like the knobs on an etch-a-sketch.
• Big "NO!": In "Faithless", Jane lets one out when she realizes that the guy she likes is against premarital sex. It gets worse for Jane when she subsequently finds out that before he decided that premarital sec is wrong, he was in a sexual relationship with Susan.
• Bilingual Bonus: "The Girl With Two Breasts" plays with this, the latter half showing the same conversation twice: once from Jeff's perspective, then again from his Israeli crush's. (Her side has Jeff speaking improvised mock-Spanish, though he speaks English with a Welsh accent.)
• Birds of a Feather: As the pairing develops: Only Sane Man Susan and Steve, shallow and vain Sally and Patrick, Cloudcuckoolander Jane and Jeff/Oliver.
• Birthday Suit Surprise Party: Happens in the aptly-titled episode "Naked". Oh, Jeffrey.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: Susan, Jane, Sally.
  Jane: Quite a threesome, huh?
• Bondage Is Bad: Averted in the episode "The Freckle, the Key, and the Couple Who Weren't". Jeff and his girlfriend are shown to take part in bondage as part of their relationship and it is shown as part of a Safe, Sane, and Consensual relationship... or would be if Jeff weren't so bad at it. Also discussed in that Julia's possessive ex-boyfriend walks in on them and misunderstands what's going on.
• Bottle Episode: The most common location for any given scene is the pub that Steve, Jeff and Patrick frequent, followed by the wine bar that Susan, Sally and Jane often go to. Some episodes take place entirely in the former, particularly those that make heavy use of multiple perspectives on the same scene, such as "The Girl with Two Breasts" and "Nine and a Half Minutes".
• Brick Joke: In most episodes, there's often a particular joke that keeps coming up at the first half, and is then set aside until the near-end of the episode. Sometimes, jokes even reoccur in later episodes, and often when you least expect them.
  • In "Size Matters", Jeff rambles on about celebrities hooking up because all the people who are currently having sex and fantasizing about each of them create a kind of psychic charge. At the end of the episode, when Susan sleeps with Steve, the scene cuts to Angus Deayton and Mariella Frostrup meeting each other, they being the objects of both Susan's and Steve's fantasies respectively.
    Susan: So is it absolutely necessary to think about somebody else?
    Jeff: Well, everybody does. That's why there are so many celebrity marriages.
    Sally: I'm sorry?
    Jeff: Well you know, if you fantasize about someone else during sex, and so does your partner, and you know, those two people that you're fantasizing about happen to meet while you're still doing it, you know, they're bound to sense something, aren't they? Because, you know, they're connecting on like a virtual plane! So can you imagine what it was like when Posh first met Beckham? They were the epicentre of a non-stop, nationwide, virtual shag! I mean, it's no wonder she got pregnant!
  • After Jeff explains the "unflushable" concept in "Flushed", it doesn't come up again until the season 1 finale, where Steve gets dumped and Jeff asks how he feels. He simply answers, "Flushed."
  • In "Split", Susan constantly remarks that hearing Jane's voice makes her grind her teeth. At the end of the episode, she sees Steve asleep on her bed, and performs oral sex on him. Meanwhile, the phone rings, and as the answerphone picks up the call, Jane's voice plays, after which Steve immediately sits up and screams.
    Susan: I'm sorry.
    Steve: I'll be fine...
    Susan: It's just Jane's voice... doesn't it set your teeth on edge?
    Steve: It will now...
  • "Faithless" has Jeff overreacting over saying "Hi" to a colleague at work, complaining that there are very few ways to end an "H" sound. The last word he can think of is "Hippo". Later in the episode, flustered by said colleague's casual admission that she's also in a relationship but still wants to date Jeff, he ends up saying "Hippo." In the season 3 finale, Steve says "Hippo" when he reacts awkwardly to Susan's revelation that she's pregnant.
• British Brevity: Four series, and a total of 28 episodes, just barely more than a single American season of 22.
• Buddy Snaps First: In the climax of "The Giggle Loop", the camera focuses on the blokes as they desperately try not to laugh at the funeral of Jane's aunt ... only for Jane to burst out laughing instead.
• Buffy Speak: Sally panics at the sight of the positive pregnancy test, describing it as a “big blue line of blue lininess”.
• Cannot Talk to Women: This is one of Jeff's defining characteristics. It inevitably leads to him panicking when talking to women, leading to (among other things) him claiming to only have one leg, which the lady in question actually finds endearing.
• Can't Act Perverted Toward a Love Interest: In "The Melty Man Cometh", Patrick doesn't succeed getting an erection during a hookup with Sally because he was falling in love with her.
• The Casanova: Patrick is unashamed about his "love 'em and leave 'em" approach to women. Once he has succeeded in getting a woman into bed, he invents whatever excuse he can to get out of the relationship so that he can move on to his next conquest. Steve and Jeff note that he almost never refers to his latest partner as his "girlfriend" as a result, as it implies a level of emotional attachment he rarely forms.
• The Cast Show Off: In the U.S. version, Chris Moynihan showcases his juggling and balancing talents in one episode.
• Catchphrase: Susan has a habit of saying "apparently" with a raised pitch on the last syllable when she’s annoyed. Steve knows there’ll be trouble when he hears it. Sally and Jane are also aware of it and make fun of her for it in a song. Her mother says it in exactly the same way.
• Category Traitor: In "Size Matters", Sally accuses a gay man of being a traitor because he supports the Conservatives.
  Howard: Maggie Thatcher, in my opinion...
  Sally: Now listen to this, Patrick, this is the voice of an oppressed minority!
  Howard: Maggie Thatcher, in my opinion, is THE best Prime Minister we've ever had.
  Sally: You can't say that! You're gay, you're on our side!
• Cerebus Syndrome:
  • Started rearing its head in series 3 with the increasing Patrick/Sally tension, but became more noticeable after Jeff left.
  • Jeff himself was going through this just before he left, especially in his last conversation with Jane - it's filled with plenty of jokes but it slowly becomes clear just how lonely and deeply unhappy they both are, especially when they get onto talking about their love interests who are supposedly 'exploring their feelings' which as Jeff sadly points out means they are actually being dumped.
• Character Filibuster: Steve, about Once A Series - topics include pornography ("Inferno"), the pointlessness of cushions ("Her Best Friend's Bottom"), and the sanctity of the toilet ("The Girl With One Heart").
  • From "Inferno", when Steve is forced to justify owning a VCR tape of lesbian porn:
    Jill: How could you possibly enjoy a film like that?
    Steve: (exasperated) Oh, because it's got naked women in it! Look, I like naked women! I'm a bloke, we're supposed to like them, we're born like that! We like naked women as soon as we're pulled out of one! Halfway down the birth canal, we're already enjoying the view! Look, it is the four pillars of the male heterosexual psyche; we like: naked women, stockings, lesbians and Sean Connery best as James Bond, because that is what being a boy is! And if you don't like it darling, join a film collective! I want to spend the rest of my life with the woman at the end of that table there (gestures at Susan) but that does not stop me wanting to see several thousand more naked bottoms before I die! Because that's what being a bloke is! When man invented fire, he didn't say, "Hey, let's cook!" He said, "Great! Now we can see naked bottoms in the dark!" As soon as Caxton invented the printing press, we were using it to make pictures of, hey, naked bottoms! We've turned the Internet into an enormous international database of... naked bottoms! So, you see, the story of male achievement through the ages, feeble though it may have been, has been the story of our struggle to get a better look at your bottoms. Frankly, girls, I'm not sure how insulted you really ought to be.
  • Even Susan has one in "Split":
    Susan: Okay. You know what's really getting me mad? My boyfriend, my fiancé, the man who, against all my better judgment, I actually love, chatted up a woman in a bar. And on the very same day, the very same day, I chatted up a man. Do you see? Do you get it? I'm equally at fault. How can I ever forgive him for that? Well, of course, I'm not going to forgive him, because men, and I don't mean to generalize, are crap! They're the human race's only failed gender! Who needs them? And why are they so difficult to keep hold of? Do you think they realize, that were it not for the genetic imperative to populate the earth, they wouldn't get a date? That's one hell of an inducement: "No pressure, girls, but shag one of these or it's curtains for all humankind!" That's harassment! But you know what? Do you know what's even more crap than men? We are more crap than men! All those stupid books you guys have, and... and these magazines! A hundred pages of "men are useless bastards" and an article about why you should wake him up with a blowjob! Am I alone in spotting the inconsistency here? And these places! (referring to the salon) Because, for God's sake, don't let them see what we really look like! Just let them enjoy the results, don't let them see how it all happens!
    Jane: You know, I went out with Steve for six years, and—
    Susan: No, you didn't! You went out with him for four years, I checked!
    Jane: Oh. Well, it seemed longer.
    Susan: Yeah. Yeah! Of course it seemed longer! I myself have been going out with him since the 12th century! Or possibly since last week, it's hard to keep track. Because how are you supposed to measure time with the one you want to spend the rest of your life with? What would make sense? Centuries? Nanoseconds?
    Sally: Eggs.
• Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends: The finale of series 3 had Patrick and Sally finally getting together, and series 4 gave Jane a love interest in the form of Jeff's Suspiciously Similar Substitute Oliver.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: Sally and Patrick have their moments when the Rule of Funny demands, but Jeff and Jane have bought a 2-bedroom maisonette in Cloud Cuckoo Land and only return to reality once a month to collect their mail.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Sally's reaction to discovering Patrick's engagement ring in the series finale.
  Sally: Fuck... Fuck... Fuckity-fuck...
  Patrick: Was that a yes?
• Corpsing: In-Universe, thanks to Jeff introducing the concept of the Giggle Loop, the other guys start having this problem at Jane's aunt's funeral. However, the only one shown to break is Jane herself, despite not being in the initial conversation.
• Cross-Referenced Titles: Steven Moffat is rather fond of this trope, hence...
  • "The Girl With Two Breasts", "The Man With Two Legs" and "The Girl With One Heart".
  • Two consecutive episodes titled "Naked" and "Dressed".
  • The final series begins with "9 And A Half Minutes" and ends with "9 And A Half Months".
• Dead Body Roommate: Parodied in one episode. Jeff impulsively tells a girl that his girlfriend (who is out of town) is actually dead, in order to stop her flirting with him. The girl still ends up coming home with him and finds the girlfriend (who had come back early due to illness) asleep on his bed. Naturally, she assumes the worst.
• Dead TV Remote Gag: One time Steve checks the TV remote just to discover that there are no batteries in it. He tells his new girlfriend Susan of this and is surprised when she goes to her nightstand to retrieve some batteries but finds those are also dead before opening up a drawer to reveal several huge multipacks of spare batteries.
• Depth Deception: Jeff being dragged up to the invoked miniature guillotine.
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud?: Happens to Sally quite often.
  • From "Flushed":
    Sally: Facial - Wednesday evening.
    Susan: Well, just don't count every time you find a wrinkle.
    Sally: Do I do that out loud?
    Susan: You have a running tally in my file!
  • In "The Girl With Two Breasts", when the girls look jealously at the Israeli woman at the bar:
    Sally: I bet she doesn't lie on her back and fill her armpits. Hah!
    Susan: Sally. In case you didn't realize, you just said that out loud.
    
    Sally: No, not Jeff...
    Susan: Yes.
    Sally: But she's not meant for a guy like Jeff. He's supposed to have someone plump and organized. Healthy-looking, but mottled. Probably called Joan or Frieda, all chunky jackets and hill-walking and they'll get married and she'll age badly, and I'll just seem prettier and prettier.
    Susan: Sally. Still out loud.
• Didn't Think This Through: Sally demands access to "the cupboard of Patrick’s love" to find the sex tape of him and Jane. Patrick, being the quick and brilliant thinker he is, has locked the cupboard and thrown away the key. However, Sally points out that the cupboard is always locked, meaning that what Patrick actually did was unlock it (and remove his means to lock it again). Sally dramatically swings the door open to demonstrate her victory.
• Digging Yourself Deeper: Jeff, in spades - the trope was formerly named for Jeff's epic "Bucket of Ears" speech in "The Girl With Two Breasts". Steve has his moments, too.
• Drama Bomb Finale: A rare Happy Ending version of the trope.
• Drama Queen: Steve, with his hypochondria and his passionate speeches about everyday annoyances.
• Dream Intro: "Nightlines" opens with Steve in an old Mexican jail, with a moustachioed Patrick arriving to announce that "it is time" for his execution. After he protests that he is innocent, the executioner is wheeled in: Susan, heavily pregnant. As she lines up to push out the baby at him, he jerks awake, and Susan asks if he was being executed again.
• Dumped via Text Message: Patrick calls Linda to break up with her and is delighted when it goes to voicemail. He proceeds to leave a very callous breakup message, reminding her that if she ever feels like talking, he screens his calls.
• Early-Installment Weirdness : In the premiere, Susan's implied to be more of the player that Patrick eventually became, whereas Patrick is totally into his monogamous relation with Susan, even "saving up" for Susan instead of masturbating.
• Earpiece Conversation: Jeff gets talked through a possibly-a-date with a co-worker in the consecutive episodes "Faithless" and "Unconditional Sex".
• Embarrassing Voicemail: Patrick dumps Linda by voicemail for ruling out the possibility of a threesome. When he meets her in the pub and it turns out she’s reconsidered, finds it a turn-on and wants to do it that evening, he tries to cover his tracks: first by (unsuccessfully) pretending someone else was pranking him; then by getting to her flat first to erase the voicemail before she hears it.
• Everyone Has Standards: In "Jane and the Truth Snake", Patrick plans to dump Linda (his latest Girl of the Week) purely because she has ruled out the possibility of a threesome — even though he has never had one, the fact that she has openly ruled it out is reason enough for him to ditch her (since, by his logic, he has already had sex with her so, without the prospect of a threesome, there is nowhere else for their relationship to go). Him dumping her (by voicemail) before finding out that she's reconsidered leads, ultimately, to her inviting Jeff to the threesome.
• Everything Sounds Sexier in French: In "The End of the Line", it's mentioned that Susan has a bad weakness for an Aussie accent. According to Sally, when they were visiting Australia, they always knew it was time to leave town when a new bar was named after her. And it turns out that she has taught Steve how to do an Aussie accent (so well that she is totally fooled when he puts one on when they speak on the phone). As the episode plays out, it turns out that the French woman that Susan was talking to at the start of the episode was Julia invoking this trope on who she thought was Jeff. By that point, Susan has attracted the attention of another man who thought she was French, while Sally and Jane both attempt (bad) French accents because they think this trope might help them to attract men after Susan told them about what happened to her.
• Expecting Excites Everyone: When Susan reveals she's pregnant, Steve (the father), Patrick, and Oliver attend the birthing class with her (though Patrick, with his long standing reputation of bedding many, many women, pauses to make sure he doesn't recognize any of the pregnant women in the room, first), as well as the Attention Whore, Jane. Steve actually goes on one of his famous long-winded rants about the benefit of taking painkilling epidurals during the delivery versus drug-free pain management techniques.
• Extreme Doormat: Steve "It's up to you" Taylor, at least where women are concerned. Can't say no to girls in bars, can't stand up to his girlfriend, and couldn't break up with his ex without assistance.
• Faking Faith: Towards the end of season 3, Jane meets and is smitten with a deeply religious man who invites her to his church. While Jane claims to believe in the faith, her Attention Whore tendencies and history of sleeping with any male she finds attractive (and her claims she's done this with women as well), have her advocating for premarital sex and promiscuity in the middle of the discussion on faith.
• "Fawlty Towers" Plot: Given that Moffat's previous show, Chalk, was basically just Fawlty Towers in a secondary school, this is to be expected.
• Fear of Parenthood: A large part of the final season is about Steve’s anxiety about becoming a father and the birth itself, much to his pregnant girlfriend Susan’s irritation. One episode starts with his recurring dream of being executed by an axe-wielding foetus.
• Fidelity Test: The plot of "Faithless" involves a rumor about businesses that sent actors to tempt people into cheating, so their spouses know if they're faithful. Jeff fears he's being targeted by his girlfriend when another woman comes on to him. Since this is Coupling, and he is Jeff, rather than do anything sane and reasonable, the others equip him with a radio and talk him through the encounter like he's an undercover cop trying to bust a drug kingpin.
• Flashing Discretion Shot: Steve has gone to his girlfriend, Susan's apartment to see if he left his keys there, and tries to call Susan. However, when the call forwards to her home phone, which is answered by her friend, Sally, who had been using Susan's shower, and when she answers the phone her towel drops, just as Steve notices her. The audience only sees Sally from the shoulders up, but Steve gets a full view, especially when Sally drops the phone and bends over to pick it up.
• Food and Body Comparison: Oliver complains that his nipples have "activated" and shows Steve and Patrick. Steve remarks that Oliver is definitely "packing peanuts".
• Freudian Excuse: Jeff's mental (in)stability is largely a result of the way his mother raised him.
• Freudian Slip: Lampshaded with Captain Subtext in "Her Best Friend's Bottom".
  • From "Size Matters", after a discussion about when "dinner" really means "sex";
    Susan: When I say "dinner", I mean dinner.
    Steve: I know that, absolutely.
    Susan: Plain, ordinary cooking.
    Steve: Well, I wasn't expecting a fish course. (Jeff cracks up)
  • Occurs frequently in "Gotcha":
    Susan: (noticing the wedding invitation) What's that?
    Steve: Ah, just a final demand— I mean, a wedding invitation!
    
    Susan: Sorry I'm late.
    Steve: That's okay...
    Susan: Should've called.
    Steve: They took my phone away. It's at the front desk.
    Susan: Oh, really?
    Steve: Well, you know, phones can be a bit irritating when you're trying to eat a bra— A meal! Not a bra, a meal! Did I say "bra"?
  • Susan makes one in "The End of the Line":
    Jane: So what's the guy like?
    Susan: I'm with Steve now.
    Jane: Yeah, but if you had a night off from Steve, is he the kind of guy you'd go for?
    Susan: There's nobody I'd go for. Absolutely nobody. Nobody at all. Or an Australian.
    Jane: Australian?
    Susan: (embarrassed) Sorry... I don't know where that came from.
    Sally: Australians are her weakness.
• Freudian Slippery Slope:
  • Patrick gets stuck in one in the episode "Her Best Friend's Bottom":
    Steve: Okay. Anyone want another drink?
    Patrick: Better not. Came in my penis. I'm taking it to the garage; been having a lot of trouble with it lately, it just won't start.
    Steve: Your car?
    Patrick: I said "penis" there, didn't I?
    Jeff: So. Having a bit of "car" trouble, are we?
    Steve: Anything you wanna share with us?
    Jeff: Any of your "motoring" difficulties?
    Patrick: Hey, hey! Now look, you guys, you two may have subconsciouses but let me tell you, there's nothing going on in my head!
    Jeff: All right, only joking...
    Steve: Just kidding, Patrick!
    Patrick: Anyway, it was your fault. You started talking about traitors in the first place. Penises! Not traitors, penises!
  • Happens to Jane in "Faithless":
    Jane: I do not say "penis" when I mean penis! I mean, penis! Penis, car, penis, car...
• The Friend Nobody Likes:
  • Jane is Steve's ex; Susan seems to genuinely loathe her, Steve is uncomfortable around her and no-one else seems to particularly like her, but she continues to hang out with them apparently out of sheer obliviousness to how they feel.
  • Averted with Patrick. His relationship with Susan was never serious and once they break up, he almost immediately becomes friends with Steve and Jeff and is generally supportive of Steve's relationship with Susan.
• The Friends Who Never Hang: The Cast Calculus generally splits the gang into guys and girls, apart from the various, well, couplings that arise, plus Steve/Jane and Susan/Patrick occasionally interacting as exes. Jane also attempts to have sex with Patrick at one point, but it's implied that it never goes beyond that (although the show's final episode confirms that they did in fact have sex multiple times, without any of the others being aware of it until much later), plus Jane gets a bit of a Ship Tease with Jeff in the third series, leaving Jeff and Sally as the only pair who never really interact together, and she seems to fairly openly dislike him.
• Full-Name Ultimatum: Jeff's mother's reaction to the (very many) times she caught him doing something embarrassing was always "Oh, Jeffrey..."
• The "Fun" in "Funeral": The "Giggle Loop"; also the memorable "Will you three stop playing Reservoir Dogs?" As well as Jane's very snarky (living) aunt.
• Gaussian Girl: Discussed by Jeff when Steve and Patrick encourage him to go over and talk to the beautiful woman who’s giving him longing looks.
  Steve: Captain Kirk, it’s time to go over there and shag the alien’s girlfriend.
  Jeff: Do you remember when Captain Kirk saw a beautiful woman, the screen would go all misty? I thought his eyes were steaming up because he was so excited. Every time I talked to a girl in my class I tried to make my eyes steam up. They called me 'Scary Jeff'.
• Gay Conservative: Howard, Jane's "date" in "Size Matters". He considers Margaret Thatcher to be the best prime minister the country has ever had, much to Patrick's delight and Sally's horror.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: Three guys (Steve, Patrick and Jeff) and three gals (Sally, Susan and Jane).
• Gilligan Cut: When Jane tries to invite her therapist to a dinner party:
  Jill: ...and now you're doing what you always do, which is try to manipulate me by emphasising your vulnerability. It's what we call 'passive-aggressive' and it doesn't work on me, because I'm a professional.

  [cut]
  Jane: Hiya Susan! This is my friend, Jill.
  Jill: [sourly] ...Hello.
• Girl-on-Girl is Hot: Noted by every main male character, Steve in particular.
  • So crucial is lesbianism to Steve's (ahem) solo sex life that he finds himself unable to give a sample at a clinic until Jeff fetches some porn from home to supplement the material provided.
  • In "Nine and a Half Minutes", when Susan complains that Steve doesn't find her attractive anymore after becoming pregnant, she kisses Jane in front of him.
    Susan: Told you I could fix anything with one snog.
• A God Am I: Jane has a strange moment like this in "Faithless" when she likens her job as a morning traffic reporter riding a helicopter to being God.
• Granola Girl: Jane, though it's debatable though in how far this is just another mask she uses to manipulate the people around her.
  Jane: Vegetarianism, for me, is about saying yes to things. Even meat.
• Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: As shown in "Remember This", Jeff is clean-shaven in the present, but in a flashback to about two years earlier he has a goatee and shorter hair. He also has 5000 fewer synonyms for 'breasts' in his collection.
• Hand Puppet: "Jake the Snake" is a character Jane invents for an audition as a children's TV presenter: literally just a sock over her hand with crudely drawn eyes on it. Nevertheless it has a nasty habit of voicing all of Jane's unpleasant thoughts and opinions about people, including Susan and Sally, her former boss, and even herself.
• Happy Place: In "Circus of the Epidurals", when Susan tries to talk to her birth partner Sally about the possibility of the doctors having to make "an incision", we cut to Sally sipping champagne in a white room, looking serene as a string quartet play Madame Butterfly. Susan's voice calling her then starts to fade in, then the scene cuts back to Susan shaking her awake. "Sorry... I went to my safe place." A later attempt to retreat there is interrupted by a giant scalpel blade literally cutting it apart.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Jane. Compared to Susan she's still pretty shallow but she's actually less insane and more sensitive to others' feelings than she appears to be. She is, however, still an Attention Whore.
  • Susan, on the other hand, is actually more shallow than she appears to be.
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: Jeff. Among other things, his mother threatened to cut off his penis with a guillotine. He still has nightmares about it.
• Holding in Laughter:
  • In "Sex, Death, & Nudity", Jeff explains to his friends Steve and Patrick the concept of "the giggle loop". During a very solemn occasion, a person can create a mental feedback loop of thinking how inappropriate it would be to laugh, and then laughing at how inappropriate it would be if they had just laughed. Later, they're put to the test when Jane's aunt dies and they have to attend the wake. A giggle loop begins during the minute's silence, and all three men fidget, sweat, and hold hands to keep their laughter inside, until finally ... Jane bursts out laughing. When the rest of the room look at her, she says, "Well, you've got to laugh!"
  • In "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps", Susan goes to a fertility clinic to find Steve, and when she asks about him, the nurse stifles a laugh and covers her mouth. It turns out Steven had been there for over an hour and a half.
• Home Porn Movie: Patrick has an entire cupboard full of these, as revealed in "The Cupboard of Patrick's Love" — he's recorded himself having sex with almost all of the women he's done it with. In "Nine and a Half Months", Sally revisits the cupboard to find the video of him and Jane.
• Hypocritical Humor: Sally's punchline to this speech in "Size Matters":
  Jeff: If you're gay, see... if you're gay, masturbation is practice. Y'know, you can have a good old practice on your own, and then later, when you're ready, when you've got the hang of it, you have a go on someone else's. It's a piece of piss! See, it's different... it's different when you're a straight bloke. When we finally get our hands on the gear, let me tell you, it's not a drill! Gays have their own practice kit, but you don't get any practice women. We're supposed to fly those babies the first time we get in 'em!
  Howard: That's a very good point, actually.
  Sally: No it's not, it's homophobic, you stupid queen!
• I Am Spartacus: In "The End of the Line", all of tte girls admit to being Giselle, and all of the boys confess to being Dick Darlington.
  Susan: But I'm Giselle!
  Sally and Jane: So are we!
  Patrick: In that case, I'm Dick Darlington!
• I Banged Your Mom: A variant occurs when Patrick sees an ex of his in the bar, and wants to avoid her because he also had sex with her daughter. Turns out, though, that she actually is the daughter.
• I Call Him "Mister Happy": In "My Dinner in Hell", he calls it "Junior Patrick". It transpires that it also has a silicon incarnation on sale with the same name.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: There were several episodes titled "The [Man/Girl] With [X] [Body part]", such as:
  • "The Girl With Two Breasts"
  • "Her Best Friend's Bottom"
• Idiot Ball: In "The End of the Line", Steve has been freaking out the whole episode about how he needs to intercept the phone so he can tell the woman he gave his phone number to that it's the wrong number. But when she actually does call, he freezes up, refuses to answer it, and does nothing as Susan puts her on speaker-phone and lets the whole room know what he did.
• If You Die, I Call Your Stuff: According to Jeff in "Flushed", "porn buddies" are a variation in which the surviving buddy has to retrieve all the porn from the dead one's flat before their family goes through their effects, to spare the dead man's post-mortem embarrassment and help the survivor through the grieving process. Getting to keep said collection is of course merely a bonus.
• Ignoring Sexual Orientation: The oddity that is Jane. She's Ambiguously Bi, since we know that she's dated and had sex with Steve from conversations he's had, but also claims to have had romantic liasons with other women, though she's prone to making outlandish statements for the sake of gaining attention, so it's unconfirmed. In "Size Matters", Jane tries to date a gay man named Howard, only for him to try to explain to her the situation.
  Howard: Jane, I'm gay!
  Jane: No problem. So am I!
  Howard: No you're not!
  Jane: Well, I'm a bit gay.
  Howard: And if you were that would be two problems...
• ...In That Order: When Susan invites Steve back to her flat for their dinner date, she clarifies that she means come to her place, not the other meaning of the word.
  Susan: I'm going to go home and start cooking. You can come and watch. In that order.
• Intrusive Thoughts: Jeff Myrtlebank could be a poster child for intrusive thoughts. By his own admission he has had numerous intrusive thoughts on a wide variety of subjects but primarily on sex.
  • In "Sex, Death, and Nudity", Jeff is preparing for an interview for a promotion, and he is worried about the intrusive thoughts he might have, suggesting that he might have the word "vulva" come into his head and say it out loud. A remark by his friend Steve adds the word "thighs", and in rapid order Jeff has a ton of sexual thoughts multiplying in his head. Patrick, trying to be helpful, suggests Jeff use the technique of picturing the interviewers naked. Jeff says that as it is a known technique, the interviewers could retaliate by viewing him naked. As time goes on, Jeff is picturing everyone naked, and as he laments to his friends, "I can't turn off the naked people!"
  • Also in "Sex, Death, and Nudity", Jeff explains to his friends about the "Giggle Loop". It's a feedback loop where you find yourself at a solemn occasion, such as a minute's silence at a funeral. All of a sudden, a funny thought pops into your head, and you almost laugh. But you fight it back. And you think of how bad it would have been if you'd laughed, which invariable almost causes, a second, bigger laugh. Again, you fight it back, but ad infinitem you repeat the process until you can no longer hold back the laugh. Steve, Jeff, and Patrick all find themselves, shortly after, at a funeral observing a moment's silence, and all of them choking back laughter, until Jane, whose Aunt is the deceased, starts laughing herself.
• Ironic Echo:
  • From "The Girl With Two Breasts":
    Susan: Go!
    Jeff: But she won't understand a word I'm saying!
    Susan: Yeah, but on the plus side, she won't understand a word you're saying!
    Jeff: I hadn't thought of that...
  • "Where are you going" and "up to you" in Season 2's finale, "The End of the Line." Steve feels like he's constantly being asked, "Where are you going?" while Susan is annoyed at Steve's indecisiveness, answering "It's up to you" whenever he's asked to express an opinion. This is Played for Laughs until the end of the episode, where Susan is left uncertain of their commitment to one another and leaves Steve's apartment. Steve asks her, "Where are you going?" to which she replies, "It's up to you."
• It's Not You, It's Me:
  • Steve tries to use this line to break up with Jane in the premiere. It doesn’t work. She asks why she’s the one being dumped if it’s his fault, and then when he agrees that it is his fault and asks her to dump him, she refuses and says they can work on his problems.
  • Patrick inverts this line in his dumping voicemail to Linda:
    Patrick: It’s not me, it’s you. Sorry, that’s meant to be the other way round, isn’t it?
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Patrick, in the series 3 finale. It's epic. And a subversion.
  Patrick: Sally, you need someone who'll love you forever, properly. You're my friend, Sally, and I wanna see you with the best. You need Mister Amazing, Mister Incredibly-Superbly-Fantastic... ness. And in your heart, I'm sure you know I'm right.
  Sally: I don't want Mister Incredibly-Superbly-Fantastic-ness, you stupid, stupid arse. I want you.
  Patrick: Oh, for God's sake, Sally...
  Sally: What?
  Patrick: ...I was talking about me!
• I Was Just Joking: In the premiere, Susan explains that she wasn’t serious when she asked if she needed to show a breast to make Jeff leave her and Steve to their date. Jeff retorts that he ''is'’ serious, and this is the only way he’ll leave.
• Joke and Receive: Susan expresses her incredulity that Steve not only needed Jeff to bring him porn from home to the fertility clinic in order to get a sperm sample, but that Jeff is still there. She rhetorically asks why not invite Patrick alomg for good measure, at which their faces drop, and Susan swings back the door to find that Patrick is in fact there as well.
• Kavorka Man: Plenty of women have slept with Patrick despite finding him intellectually, politically and/or personally repellent, if not physically unattractive, apparently just because he's so well hung. He's even described as not being great in bed.
• Ladykiller in Love: Patrick finally falls in true, monogamous love with Sally, even proposing to her in the finale.
• Landline Eavesdropping: The episode "Nightlines" revolves around a particularly chaotic instance of this. Susan calls Sally at Patrick's flat in the middle of the night, upset after an argument with Steve. During the conversation it turns out that Steve is listening in on the other handset at their flat and joins the conversation. Later in the conversation Patrick turns out to be listening in on the other handset at his flat and also joins the conversation. Then Jane enters the conversation at Patrick's flat as she still has keys. Finally, just to complete the loop, Oliver calls Susan's mobile and pretends to be his ex-girlfriend Tamsin, and she handles that conversation on the side.
• Lazily Gender-Flipped Name: Jeff returns^note in Steve’s dream in the finale in female form, preferring these days to go by "Jeffina".
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In the episode "Split", during Steve's unsuccessful attempts to call Susan after they broke up, the characters realize that they can confirm that Steve is the one phoning Susan by dialing 1471. Before they come to that realization, Sally asks, "Shall we say it together?", after which even the men say it with Sally and Susan.
• Left Hanging: The finale of season 2 ends with Susan discovering that Steve gave his number to another woman he met in a bar and breaking up with him as a result; Steve chases after her to try to make amends. Cue end credits.
• Life Embellished: Moffat calls the series "my life as told by a drunk". In a specific example, he says that he wrote "Inferno" based on a similar situation where he was caught with porn in his VCR; however, he admits to adding the "spanking" part because it made the whole thing just a little more twisted.
• The Loins Sleep Tonight: As personified by the Melty Man, whom Steve and Jeff explain to Patrick after he and Sally first attempt to sleep together, only for Patrick to have a "failure" for what he claims is the first time ever.
• Love Epiphany: After Sally and Patrick unsuccessfully try to sleep together for the first time, Sally visits again and the two get worked-up to try it again. As the two privately think about it, the two have imaginary conversations where they both realize that they fancy each other. The revelation also "fixes" Patrick who suddenly has his "partner" ready.
• Magnetic Girlfriend: When Jeff gets a girlfriend, he is offered a hookup on a silver platter.
• Mars and Venus Gender Contrast: Plot and humour both tend to rely heavily on this, particularly Steve's Character Filibusters.
• Master of the Mixed Message: Played with; one episode revolves around Jeff, who has a girlfriend, being convinced a work colleague is one of these, when she's really very up-front about the fact that she wants to have an affair with him. Gets to the point where the whole gang, sitting on the other end of an Earpiece Conversation (with the women there to "translate"), hear the following:
  Wilma: OK, before we go any further it's cards-on-the-table time. I fancy you like mad, and I think you fancy me. Am I right?
  Susan: [listening in] Need any help translating that one?
• Messy Hair: Jeff. Lampshaded in "The Cupboard of Patrick's Love", when Jeff reminisces about his obsession with the television:
  Jeff: One day, I lost control in front of my whole family during Songs of Praise!
  Steve: Lost control?
  Jeff: Completely wrote off the television!
  Steve: So you're telling us that as a young child, and despite the obvious electrical dangers, you sexually assaulted the television set? During Songs of Praise?
  Patrick: Is... is that what happened to your hair?
• Metaphorgotten: Some of the humorous bits of the show are of this nature:
  • From "Size Matters":
    Steve: This pause is just expanding and expanding like, this out-of-control... thing!
    Jeff: Yeah, like in The Blob!
    Steve: Yes, like in— What?
    Jeff: The Blob! Fifties horror movie. This Blob comes from outer space and just keeps growing and growing.
    Steve: Right, thanks...
    Jeff: It eats people. And in the end they kill it by electrocution. (beat) But that bit really doesn't apply here.
  • Steve himself gives one in "My Dinner in Hell":
    Steve: Well, if music be the food of love, then masturbation is just a snack between meals!
  • Happens twice in "Her Best Friend's Bottom" after Steve inadvertently sees Sally naked, and she insists he stop thinking about her bottom:
    Steve: You keep bringing it up! I can't get it out of my head... it's expanding!
    Sally: Expanding!?
    Steve: Like... space jelly!
    Sally: What's space jelly?
    Steve: I don't know!
    Sally: My bottom is not expanding space jelly! I'm just big-boned! (the towel she is wearing slips, showing Steve her breasts)
    Steve: Oh, great! Now I've got breasts!
  • Later in the same conversation:
    Sally: As Susan's best friend, I am, to you, a bit like Australia.
    Steve: Australia?
    Sally: Very distant, largely uninhabitable, and with areas of great danger.
    Steve: Oh, right! I see!
    Sally: Good.
    Steve: I thought it was about having a lot of convicts. [winces]
    Sally: I was trying to say, Steve, that there are very few areas of me where you can go in safety.
    Steve: Right, good, yes. Very delicate way of putting it.
    Sally: Thank you.
    Steve: You mean, I can visit your Sydney, or your Melbourne...
    Sally: Exactly.
    Steve: But I'm not welcome in your bush.
  • Patrick makes a strange one in "Dressed":
    Patrick: Thing is, Ivan, I don't share my woman. It's like finding the right tennis racket. Once you've got one you really like using, you keep on using it until it falls apart and you have to get a new one... only more emotional.
  • Sally gives one in "Split":
    Susan: It just seems like a needy thing to do. I don't do needy.
    Sally: You're a woman. Needy is our golf!
    Susan: What does that mean?
    Sally: I don't know. I didn't think it through...
• Minor Flaw, Major Breakup: Patrick dumps Linda by voicemail because she ruled out the possibility of a threesome. He admits that he’s never had a threesome, and like Steve doesn’t believe anyone has in reality, but says that a relationship can’t survive without hope.
• Miss Conception: Jane apparently believed that you couldn't get pregnant 'if you didn't really know the man'. Subverted as even she realises that was wishful thinking.
• Mistaken for Gay:
  • Sally, by Patrick's girlfriend, probably because Patrick told her "that Sally is the sort of woman who...is a lesbian." She is oblivious to this, however, and it leads to a wacky misunderstanding, of course. See One Dialogue, Two Conversations.
  • Happens earlier in "Inferno" when the gang mistakes Jane's therapist for her lesbian lover and the therapist mistakes Patrick for gay due to his haircut.
  • Also happens to Patrick in "Gotcha", when an old flame seemingly mistakes him for an old friend of hers who's gay. Jeff is perhaps a little too quick to play along by pretending to be Patrick's boyfriend. It's eventually revealed that said old flame knew all along that it was Patrick, and she was just messing with him to get back at him for the fact that he shagged her mum as well.
• Mood Whiplash: Pretty much Susan's specialty. She frequently goes from faking outrage (as an impish prank) to genuine outrage, which is especially awkward when the thing that she's now actually angry about turns out not to be the case and she's angry for no reason, but stays angry. Several of the series finales end with one of the couples seeming to break up for real (killing the comedic atmosphere) only to have them come back together with such speed and ferocity that it can make your head spin.
• Most Writers Are Writers: No reference is made to Steve's job during the series, but in a invoked DVD Commentary, Moffat mentions that Steve is, like him, a writer.
• Musical Pastiche: In the intro to Jane & Oliver's segment of the episode "Nine and a Half Minutes", shortly after Steve elaborates on "the John Hurt scene", the show's jazzy score quotes the eerie, echoing, siren-like Leitmotif from Alien.
• Must Make Amends: Steve does this a lot. He's actually pretty good at it; even while drunk, as seen in "Split".
• Naked People Are Funny: Jeff appears naked a few times throughout the series. Usually in imagined situations, like his fear that if he imagines his interview panel naked they will retaliate in kind; and sometimes for real, like at his surprise 30th birthday bash where, blindfolded, he thinks Julia has invited him for sex and strips off in anticipation, only to be made aware of the presence of his colleagues, friends and family by his mother saying "Oh, Jeffrey".
• New Old Flame: Julia's scary squaddie ex shows up while Jeff rather unfortunately has her tied to the bed. After the episode resolves, Julia says the two of them have a lot of stuff to work out, and that ends up being the last we see of her. Apparently they moved to Bolton together.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!: The Melty Man, who holds his Evil Gloating speech to Patrick, not knowing that Patrick hasn't realized his feelings for Sally yet.
• Nice, Mean, and In-Between:
  • Jane and Jeff are nice. While Jeff is a socially inept Cloudcuckoolander and Jane is an eccentric Attention Whore, both are actually very sweet and typically kind if a bit blunt. Hapless nerd Oliver also eventually falls into this category.
  • Sally and Patrick are mean. Patrick is often oafish and rude, treats women like playthings, and has very low emotional intelligence, while Sally is incredibly catty and superficial and snaps at people at the slightest provocation.
  • Steve and Susan are in between. Steve has his moments of surly, aggressive behavior and Susan can be an emotionally manipulative control freak, but both are capable, grounded people who care about their friends and are committed to making their relationship work.
• Noodle Incident: Jane's "long story" about her crazy twin in the season 2 finale.
• Office Romance: Late in Series 2, Jeff starts a relationship with his and Susan's new boss Julia. While Julia expresses concern about the ethics of this, forcing them to keep it a secret, the other girls don't see an issue with it, with Susan in particular becoming a Shipper on Deck from them.
• Oh, Crap!: Patrick and Jeff have this reaction on realising that they are part of the same threesome.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: Moffat loves this trope. There's dozens of little tidbits in this and other scribblings that rely on One Dialogue, Two Conversations; here it's used to cement the "Fawlty Towers" Plot.
  • The award-winning episode "The Girl With Two Breasts" is a variation, showing Jeff's cross-linguistic conversation with an Israeli woman from each of their perspectives.
  • Combined with Multitasked Conversation with Jeff in "Faithless" when his co-worker asks him if he fancies her, while Julia asks him on the phone if he loves her. He simply answers, "Yes."
  • Happens in "The Girl with One Heart" to Sally with Patrick's Girl of the Week Jennifer - Sally thinks Jennifer was fooling around with Jeff, but that she's aware that Sally is in love with Patrick. Jennifer thinks Sally is a lesbian and is coming on to her. Which is something she's totally okay with.
• One-Hour Work Week: Neatly averted, as most episodes either take place in the pub where the characters meet in the evening after work, or (more rarely) in one of their workplaces.
• One-Word Title:
  • The show itself, about couples becoming couples.
  • Episodes:
    • "Inferno"
    • "Faithless"
• OOC Is Serious Business: Steve normally rolls his eyes at Jeff’s bizarre concepts, so when he tells Patrick “there’s nothing funny about the Melty Man” with a dead-serious face, Patrick stops laughing and worriedly asks what the Melty Man does.
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: Jeff when he talks to any woman always inserts two feet (even when claiming to only have one) and then some.
• Pass the Popcorn: Jeff is clearly very used to Steve's rants. In "Inferno", he's not only sitting back and enjoying the show, he actually applauds at the end.
• Person as Verb:
  • From "The Cupboard of Patrick's Love", when Sally complains that if Jane sleeps with Patrick, she (Sally) will be the only one who hasn't slept with him:
    Sally: This isn't fair! I was gonna have Patrick!
    Susan: Sally, please—
    Sally: (to Jane) Now you're having Patrick! (gesturing to Susan) And she's had Patrick lots of times! I'll be the only one who hasn't been Patricked!
    Jane: You're the only one who hasn't been Steved!
    Sally: Oh, Jane. Steve's nice. But Patrick's enormous!
  • Jeff does this in "My Dinner in Hell", and Patrick follows suit after Jeff explains:
    Jeff: Did she ask? You know, ask...
    Patrick: If you still... you know...
    Jeff: Frostrup.
    Patrick: Frostrup?
    Jeff: Yeah, Steve's whole fantasy life revolves around Mariella Frostrup.
    Steve: Jeff, please...
    Jeff: If he ever meets Mariella Frostrup in person, his right hand will shout, "Mother!"
    Steve: Jeff!
    Jeff: It'd be like, you know, the end of E.T. when he saw the spaceship. There'll be organ music, you know...
    Steve: Thank you for clearing that up, Jeff.
    Jeff: Hey! Organ music!
    Steve: Yes, Jeff...
    Patrick: (to Steve) So did she ask, about your, you know, um... Frostrupping?
• Pizza Boy Special Delivery: In the season 3 finale, Jane does this in Jeff's flat.
  Jane: He works in pizza delivery, which just answers all your prayers, doesn't it? Man, motorbike, has own food.
• Playing Cyrano: Subverted when Jeff is out on a maybe-date with Wilma, and the girls stay on the phone with him to ensure he doesn't inadvertently woo her (since he has a girlfriend and doesn't want to seem interested, but also doesn't want to hurt her feelings).
• Plug 'n' Play Friends: Oliver is introduced as a blind date for Jane at coincidentally the same time Jeff leaves, and immediately after his introductory episode starts hanging out all the time with Jeff's oldest friend Steve and more recent friend Patrick.
• Porn Without Plot: Discussed at length in "Inferno" when Steve is grilled by the women over the discovery of a tape of lesbian porn in his possession, which he gamely tries to defend as artistic "erotica" before eventually conceding that it's this.
• Put on a Bus: Jeff is Put On A Plane... to Lesbos.
• Quote Overdosed: Case in point: this very page.
• Rant Comedy: When Steve is allowed to break out of Deadpan Snarker mode, get ready to Pass the Popcorn.
• The Rashomon: Several times.
  • "The End of the Line" is divided into several sections: "The End of the Line", where Susan tells off her French client Giselle and hears that there's a bar named after her owned by an Australian; "The Other End of the Line", where the Australian that Susan talks to is revealed to be Steve; "The Beginning of the Line", where it turns out that the Frenchwoman Susan was talking to in the beginning was actually Jeff's girlfriend Julia; and "The End", where all the misunderstandings of the episode are finally clarified for everyone.
  • "Remember This" elaborates on the story of Patrick and Sally's first meeting (and first kiss) at a party in Susan's office:
    • From Patrick's recollection of the story:
      Sally: How did you get to the party, then?
      Patrick: BMW M3. Midnight blue. Nought to 60 in five seconds, on to 100 in another six. Sequential semiautomatic gear box, traction control, and black leather seats.
    • From Sally's recollection of the story:
      Sally: How did you get to the party, then?
      Patrick: Car.
  • "Nine and a Half Minutes" tells a nine-and-a-half-minute-long story from three different perspectives: Sally and Patrick, Susan and Steve, and Jane and Oliver.
• Ready for Lovemaking: In anticipation of a threesome with Linda and a "playmate", Patrick gets himself ready by spraying whipped cream on himself and handcuffing himself to the bedposts. Cue a mutual scream when it turns out said playmate is Jeff.
• Reality Has No Subtitles: Played With in the episode "The Woman with Two Breasts". The Israeli woman that Jeff is talking to speaks no English, and no subtitles are provided because he, like we, has no real idea what she's saying. Then, in the second half, when the whole sequence is run again with her speaking English and Jeff speaking nonsense, we again get no subtitles, and have to rely on our memories of what his side of the conversation was. Plus, we get to find out that some of his assumptions about what she was saying were... less than accurate.
  Jeff: I was looking for Shadayim.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: The girls react this way when they nitpick at the appearance of the Israeli woman in "The Girl With Two Breasts":
  Susan: (referring to the woman's breasts) Yeah, but the point is, are they fake?
  Sally: Of course they're fake; they're so realistic.
  Jane: Yeah, they're so pert and firm. Are we supposed to believe that?
• Real-Person Cameo: Mariella Frostrup and Angus Deayton appear in a weird, possibly imaginary sequence in "Size Matters"; Mariella appears in a later episode ("My Dinner in Hell") for real. Later, Mariella reappears in another dream of Steve's in "Split".
• Re-creating Musical Shout-Outs: "Sex, Death, and Nudity" sees Steve, Jeff, and Patrick heading to a funeral dressed in black suits and sunglasses, walking in a line in tune, the song "Little Green Bag" playing in the background, until Susan calls to them from the walkway, "Stop playing Reservoir Dogs!"
• Refuge in Audacity: Jane has to resort to this after ending up trapped in a bathroom with no clothes at a party hosted by a man she has recently started dating (she went there wearing an overcoat with nothing on underneath as she thought he was inviting her over for a romantic evening with just the two of them, whereas he was in fact inviting her to a party he was hosting, attended by about twenty other people). Having lost the overcoat, she opts to brazen it out, and walks out of the bathroom naked, says she has to go home and then chides one of the men present first imagining her naked.
• Retargeted Lust: Jane doles out (possibly fictitious) stories of her past encounters with women in order to interest men.
• Right Through the Wall: From "Her Best Friend's Bottom":
  Sally: I hate having sex at home. I've got a listening flatmate.
  Jane: Oh no, I hate those. Do you have to be really quiet for her?
  Sally: No. I have to be really loud, we're very competitive.
• Scenery Censor: Used by Steve in "Sex, Death and Nudity" to hide his erection when Jane starts talking suggestively about threesomes during her aunt's funeral. Namely, he stands behind the aunt’s coffin.
• Serious Business: The Sock Gap, as explained by Jeff in "Size Matters":
  Jeff: Okay. Have you thought through your foreplay yet?
  Sally: (overhearing, to Susan) They know about that?
  (Susan and Sally hide from the men)
  Steve: What do you mean, foreplay?
  Jeff: What do you think I mean? I mean, when exactly do you take your socks off? My advice is to get them off right after your shoes, and before your trousers. That's the Sock Gap! Miss it... and suddenly you're a naked man in socks. No self-respecting woman will ever let a naked man in socks do the squelchy with her!
  (Susan and Sally nod to each other)
  Patrick: That's your foreplay tip? Socks?
  Jeff: (turning to Patrick with a grave expression) Many men have fallen through the Sock Gap, Patrick. Under the sexual arena of earthly delight, there lurks a deadly pit of socks.
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: When Jane and Oliver finally open up to each other and Jane suggests that they watch some porn, while he's looking for something to watch she announces that she'll go and make tea, and leaves the room. When she returns, she stands in the doorway completely naked, and he is temporarily robbed of the power of comprehension. She talks to him casually for a couple of minutes, inviting him to her flat the following day, and when he's recovered his wits she smirks at him and saunters out to get dressed and go home, saying "You didn't have any nice tea anyway."
• Shirtless Scene: Every male lead gets at least one, though Steve's are rather conservative.
• Shout-Out:
  • Steve Taylor almost shares a name with Steven Taylor, a companion on Doctor Who. Oliver also has Doctor Who merchandise in his bookshop, and when going to a dinner with the gang in "Bed Time", wears a sweater reading "Bring Back Doctor Who" on the back. Which became hilarious in hindsight after Steven Moffat started working for the Doctor Who TV series (although he was already involved in its Expanded Universe) and eventually became its Show Runner.
    • Moffat also used the surname Taylor for Mark, the lead character of his earlier sitcom Joking Apart. Both characters are intended to be an Author Avatar.
  • From "Her Best Friend's Bottom":
    Steve: But Susan, Sally, Jane, this... is a sofa. It is designed by clever scientists in such a way so is to shield the unprotected user from the way of skin abrasions, serious head trauma, and of course - [he collapses behind the sofa and reemerges] - Daleks!
  • The Melty Man in "The Melty Man Cometh" is referred to as "Darth Vader without the helmet." In an imaginary scene with Patrick, another more specific Star Wars reference turns up:
    Patrick: Melty Man!
    Melty Man: Join me.
    Patrick: Never! You killed my erection!
    Melty Man: No, Patrick. I am your erection!
    Patrick: No!!!
  • The whole show is laden with these, all highlighting Moffat's geeky nature: Steve describing the deep meaning of Alien to men everywhere, the Melty Man being shown as a Darth Vader parody, as well as various references to comic book superheroes.
  • In "Sex, Death and Nudity", the boys, dressed in black suits and ties for a funeral, walk along the pavement in slow-motion wearing sunglasses and smoking cigarettes, before Sally and Susan tell them to hurry up and stop playing Reservoir Dogs.
• Single Malt Vision: Subtly done in one of the many sequences involving a Perspective Flip; Sally is at a party and some people, especially Patrick, are acting in an odd or annoying fashion. However, it's eventually revealed that Sally is actually completely trolleyed and Patrick and his friend are actually the same person.
• Snark-to-Snark Combat: In "Sex, Death and Nudity", Sally gets into this with an old woman who claims that Sally looked like her when she got married:
  Sally: And look at my neck. Look at the under-hang of my jaw. No way is that a forty-year-old under-hang.
  Old lady: It's getting a bit... segmented.
  Sally: What do you mean?
  Old lady: That's how it starts, you know. (reaches out to touch Sally's neck)
  Sally: (recoils in terror) Don't touch me! I'm full of moisturizer, you might drain it all off!
  Old lady: What?
  Sally: It'd be like rain on a desert; it would all get sucked away. You'd probably reflate.
  Old lady: Forty-five.
  Sally: What?
  Old lady: I was forty-five when I got married, when I looked just like you.
  Sally: And what age are you now?
  Old lady: Ninety-two.
  Sally: You must be pretty nervous then.
  Old lady: Nervous?
  Sally: Let's be honest. This has got to be your last funeral standing up.
  Old lady: You use a lot of face cream, don't you?
  Sally: Yes.
  Old lady: So did I.
• Speak Ill of the Dead: At Jane’s aunt Margaret’s funeral, her living aunt Muriel starts eating before the service, saying that she’s hungry now and anyway that she “never liked the bitch”. She follows up by mockingly offering the deceased a bite.
  "Sausage roll, Margaret? Oh no. You’re dead."
• Spit Take: Both the women and the men do a spit take in "The Naked Living Room" when Jane/Oliver tells them Jane and Oliver were taking a stroll toward Oliver's apartment and Jane asked: "Can I come up?"
• Splash of Color: In "Faithless", Jane has a black-and-white flashback to the first time she saw James, in which he's driving a bright red, very phallic convertible into a very tight parking space. Freud Was Right; Jane intends her ice-breaker to refer to his car, but instead, this happens:
  Jane: You've got a fantastic penis.
• Split Screen: Done beautifully in the episode titled, well, "Split". The two screens follow the women and the men, managing to keep the conversation and the story going on both sides even while focusing on only one group at a time. In the latter part of the episode, the split screens follow Steve and Susan an hour apart at the same place.
• Stop Being Stereotypical: In "Size Matters", Sally gets mad when Howard, a gay friend (whom Jane believes to be her boyfriend) agrees with Jeff's eccentric views on the advantages of homosexuality, and exclaims "That's homophobic, you stupid queen!" Howard may well have just been winding Sally up anyway, because she got really snarky about him being a Tory earlier in the scene.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Jeff is completely socially inept, especially around women. When Richard Coyle left the series, he was replaced by Oliver... who is completely socially inept, especially around women.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial:
  • Jeff has many, the funniest of which is:
    Steve: I don't know, Patrick - I don't keep some sort of self-abuse diary.
    Jeff: Well, neither do I.
  • A non-verbal variant is explained by Jeff in "Her Best Friend's Bottom" with "the prickles, the blurts, and the head laugh".
  • Patrick and Sally once spent over a minute explaining to Jane's boyfriend how they weren't a couple. The comment that prompted this? 'Hello'.
  • Also this, from "Unconditional Sex":
    Susan: How exactly did you pass your driving test?
    Jane: Morally.
• Swallow the Key: Done accidentally in "The Freckle, The Key, and The Couple Who Weren't", when Jeff Murdock holds the key to his girlfriend's handcuffs in his mouth and then does his best Darth Vader impression. He spends the episode trying to find a way to get it out before she realizes what's gone wrong.
  Jeff: (on laxatives) If I take all of them at once, do you think there's a danger of liftoff?
• Team Power Walk: Parodied in "Sex, Death and Nudity": "Stop playing Reservoir Dogs!"
• The Tell:
  • Steve, to Susan; "You only say 'apparently' when you're annoyed about something."
    Susan: Well, there's a useful clue!
  • In "Her Best Friend's Bottom", Jeff discusses the pattern when someone is lying; "The prickles, the blurts, and the head laugh."
• That Came Out Wrong: Some of the humor in the series comes from the characters falling into this trope.
  • From "The Cupboard of Patrick's Love":
    Susan: God! What is it with you lot? Why do you all have this desperate desire to see me naked?
    Steve: Oh Susan, no one wants to see you naked! (beat) Okay, that came out wrong.
  • Happens to Sally in "Her Best Friend's Bottom":
    Susan: Okay. So Steve saw your bottom, so what?
    Sally: So? My relationship with your boyfriend has been thrown completely off-balance by the weight of my bottom! (beat) Can I please rephrase that?
• Three-Way Sex: The one-man-two-women version is the dream of all the male characters, but Patrick and Steve at least think that it never actually happens. Patrick seems to be about to get it with Linda, until it turns out that the "playmate" she had in mind was Jeff (who also thought he was going to get this as he was under the impression that Patrick had dumped Linda). Otherwise, Jane teases it to titillate Steve.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Jeff finally getting a girlfriend in Julia (averting Minor Flaw, Major Breakup after their first date is a disaster), which even manages to avert invoked Shipping Bed Death by mining the comedy of this poor woman having to manage a relationship with Jeff.
• Twice Shy: Jeff and Julia in "Naked". We even see their respective Imagine Spots of the terrible things they thought would happen if they kissed in the stationery cupboard.
• Unexpected Positive: In the season 3 finale, Sally buys three pregnancy tests because she doesn't know what a negative test looks like and asks Susan and Jane to take one each. The entire episode builds up to the reveal of whose test is positive. Susan is the unexpected positive, having thought she was unable to conceive.
• Unexplained Accent:
  • Richard Coyle (Jeff) doesn't have a Welsh accent, and he was never asked to do one for the show. Jeff's mother has a very RP English accent, though we never hear his father speak. According to Steven Moffat in one of the commentaries, Coyle simply showed up on set doing the accent, and since he wasn't a well-known actor, no-one noticed for ages until they got to know him better, by which point the first episode had been filmed and there was nothing they could do. Most likely Rule of Funny - while it sounds pretty authentic and so isn't really a 'comedy accent', there is no denying that it gives a certain something to Jeff's bizarre sexual metaphors.
  • Conversely, Jeff's replacement, Oliver, was played by a Welsh actor (Richard Mylan) who had to do an English accent in order to avoid the character being too similar to Jeff.
• Unusual Euphemism:
  • Jeff has one for everything sex-related. In the first episode ("Flushed") he introduces "The Boyfriend Zone"^note the stage of a relationship where the man is entitled to certain sexual favors from the woman and "Unflushable"^note a person who just can't seem to be dumped in the opening five minutes. There's also the Sock Gap^note the point where a man who's undressing has to deal with removing his socks lest he end up naked except for them, the Nudity Buffer^note the time period between seeing a woman for the first time and getting stuck with the mental image of them naked and the (non-sex-related) Giggle Loop^note a thought during a mandated silence where you contemplate the awkwardness of you laughing in the midst of the silence, and every time you suppress that thought, the laugh you're holding back gets bigger and bigger.
  • The others got in on it, too. Susan explains "The Fuck-me Fork"^note a man's dilemma of either agreeing to sleep with a woman he isn't supposed to or implying to her that he doesn't find her attractive in the episode "Unconditional Sex".
  • In "My Dinner in Hell", due to Steve's very awkward reaction to a BBC show explaining how men continue masturbating even while in a relationship, the characters refer to his habit as "whistling".
• Verbed Title: The episode, "Flushed."
• Waking Non Sequitur: In "Circus of the Epidurals", when Susan attempts to have a frank conversation with Sally about how the doctors may need to make an incision to facilitate her giving birth, Sally tries to retreat to her Happy Place. A giant scalpel intrudes on her serenity, and she snaps out of it screaming, "Mummy, I'll be good!"
• Wife-Basher Basher: Julia's soldier ex doesn't like men who hurt women, which creates a problem when he walks in on her and Jeff's bondage-session-gone-innocently-awry and mistakes it for something else.
• Your Little Dismissive Diminutive:
  • Sally has a tendency to use this a lot.
  • Susan does this a few times, usually when annoyed at Steve talking about something with his friends.
• Yuppie: Patrick is the British equivalent: a City Boy. His job is not explicitly stated but is implied to be in finance, and he has a lot of the stereotypical traits: a swaggering attitude, competitiveness with his colleagues over status (including desirability of partners), golf trips, a car that he’s very proud of, and of course voting Tory. He is the most obviously wealthy of the friends, and has the nicest flat.