Yes, Dear

On air from 2000 to 2006. A sitcom set in L.A.

Greg and Kim Warner, together with their offspring (Sammy; their daughter, Emily, joins the cast mid-series) led a well-to-do, if uptight and isolated, life, the latter of which started to change when Kim's sister and her husband, Christine and Jimmy Hughes, came knocking on the Warners' house door (with their own children, Dominic and Logan, in tow) asking for shelter. In stark contrast to the lifestyle of the Warners, the Hughes' attitude is far more outgoing and laid-back. Much of the show deals with issues relating to marriage, family, work and/or sex.

Tropes used in Yes, Dear include:

• All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles: When Greg's father becomes a comic book fan, the normally prudish Kim asked, "Normal comics like for kids? Or those Japanese porno comics like Overfiend, where young women are taken against their will by demonic monsters?" Later in the episode, it's stated he should hide his Japanese porn better.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Jimmy's dating advice to Dominic during the episode Dominic's First Date. Christine disagrees.
• All Men Are Perverts: Greg and Kim make lists of all the people they have kissed in their lifetime. Kim is horrified to learn that Greg has kissed 49 women while she has only kissed 7 men and calls Greg a man-whore before storming out angrily. Jimmy manages to calm her down by explaining that Greg's number is actually pathetically low. He didn't even hit 50!

Jimmy: You can't compare a guy's number to a girl's. Men are pigs. We're always trying to get our hands on something. While you were busy saying "No, no, no!", he was busy saying "Please, please, please!"
Kim: Well, forty-nine of them said "yes".
Jimmy: Yeah, but he probably asked about five hundred.

• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: At the end of the episode Headshot, Jimmy and Christine make amends with the Warner family by replacing things they broke: a blender, a laundry washer, and... Sammy.
• As Himself: Ernie Banks, Johnny Bench and Frank Robinson all turn up in the episode Hustlin' Hughes.
• Audience Murmurs: In Let's Get Jaggy With it, Greg's father is told by another actor to mouth "peas and carrots" in the background for his walk-on role of JAG.
• Back to School: Christine
• Benevolent Boss: Mr. George Savitsky
• Big Eater: Jimmy
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: The end of the episode Greg's New Assistant has Jimmy saying "How hot is that?" while looking straight at the camera.
  • Also the episode where Greg bought a new couch and had it facing away from the camera...it just didn't feel right somehow.
  • At the end of one episode, two people who won a contest for a walk on role for the show are just standing in Greg's house. Jimmy explains they won a contest, and Greg tells them to step off camera so they'll seen on wide screen.
• Breast Attack: Kim accidentally did this to Mr. Savitsky's then-wife in the episode Savitsky's Tennis Club while playing tennis.

"Ow! You broke my boob!"

• Book Dumb: Jimmy. Though he is bad at studying, in the everyday life he is much wiser than he seems to be.
• Bumbling Dad: Jimmy and his own dad, Big Jimmy. Greg's dad, Tom, is no Albert Einstein himself.
• Butt Monkey: Greg
  • Possibly worse with Sammy. Despite the fact that he was a baby, something bad seemed to happen to him each episode. He also qualifies as The Woobie.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Jimmy
• Closet Key: A retirement home nurse who grabbed an elderly Christine's ass and startled her into a fatal heart attack. Christine says she liked it, and thinks it's possible she was a lesbian but never realized it. Of course, this was All Just Greg's Dream.
• Compressed Vice: Greg's nasal spray addiction.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: During the episode The Premiere, Mr. Savitsky once told Greg, "Warner, if you keep talking, you're going to come to work in a thong and a beefeater hat." That shut Greg up right away.
• The Cutie: Kim is the closest, trying to understand and reconcile the family members.
• The Danza: Billy Gardell as Billy Colivita.
• Deadpan Snarker: Greg and Christine.
• Dream Sequence: The ending of several episodes include this.
  • In one episode, Greg is electrocuted into unconsciousness and dreams of lying dead with everyone in the joint burial plot Don had bought as a Christmas present.
• Duck Season! Rabbit Season!: Jimmy tries this once on Kim, only to be subverted by Kim calling Jimmy out on it with: "Jimmy, I'm not Elmer Fudd."
• Eating Contest: Greg mentions a time he and Jimmy had a contest to see who could eat the most butter.
• Freudian Couch: Lampshaded. Jimmy tells Greg that he doesn't need to see a therapist and spend time lying on a couch talking about how he feels, and Jimmy ends up telling Greg about his feelings while lying on the couch.
• Future Loser: Jimmy and Christine.
• Funny Background Event: Kim talks to Christine in the kitchen about how great it is that the men in the family are working together and getting along. From the kitchen window, Greg, Jimmy, and the wive's dad Don are in a fight in the backyard.
  • Greg's dad locks himself in a room full of monkeys in a rain forest themed casino. Greg and Jimmy are talking about trying to find him. The entire time, the monkeys are jumping all over Greg's dad, which can be seen from the window.
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: In one episode, Christine chews a large gob of gum to relieve stress. Kim comments on it, to which Christine responds in a muffled voice while giving Kim a furious look. When Kim asks Jimmy, who is also present, what Christine says, he replies: "She's telling you to love yourself."
• Girl-On-Girl Is Hot: Greg gets electrocuted and has a dream about being dead. Christine says in the dream all this time she was a lesbian, to which Jimmy says "How hot is that?"
• Groin Attack: An accidental version of this happens on the episode, Hooked on Comics, in which Greg's father, Tom, does this to himself... WITH A TOY AIRPLANE HE CONTROLS!
  • Another example is in Natural Born Delinquents, when Jimmy mentions how Logan once hit him in the "cherries" after he took a bite out of Logan's pudding pop. At the end of the same episode, Greg also suffered the same incident.
• Halloween Episode: Halloween
• Happily Married
• Henpecked Husband
• Here We Go Again: The ending of the final episode, Should I Bring a Jacket.
• Hot Mom: Kim and Christine.
• Hypocritical Humor: This show is full of them.
• I Ate What?: In one episode, Jimmy starts eating a bite of homemade play-dough. After finding out what it is, he asks if it could hurt him, and when told it couldn't, continues eating. Another time he tastes 'yogurt' that is actually Apricot Face Scrub. This time, he doesn't bother to ask if it's safe before he continues eating.
• I Have Boobs - You Must Obey!: In one episode, Kim does not want to stop breastfeeding Sammy so that she gets to keep her large breasts and this power to go with them.
• It Will Never Catch On: A number of critics predicted the series would be the first of the Fall 2000 batch to be cancelled. Oh, it did end - after six seasons.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Following a wrong phone number, Greg lies about having a dying relative in order to get out of a church function and does so in a church itself. Only Jimmy knows the truth and urges Greg to come clean. He doesn't, and it comes back to bite him in the end. Jimmy then says of God, "You sneaky little fella."
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: All of the things Greg's dad is taught about background characters in Let's Get Jaggy With it are used or made fun of by the actual background characters on the show, including a rule that states that actors can't be paid speaking role wages if more than six people say the same words together.

Crowd: Assholes!

• Line-of-Sight Name: Exaggerated. Greg is pressured by his family and a group therapist to explain why he hates Jimmy and Christine so much, so he makes up a story about how he was bullied at summer camp, all from things in the therapist's office.
• Lost Love Montage: It became a running joke to feature Greg flashing back to some character he became friends with but lost like they were an ex-girlfriend. Common activities included doing each other's hair, riding Razor scooters, playing checkers, and playing guitar with Chicago's "Hard Habit to Break" playing throughout.
• Making Use of the Twin: Both the twin actors for Sammy are shown toward the end of the episode Headshot.
• Mistaken for Gay: Greg and Jimmy were mistaken as a gay couple twice.
• Mushroom Samba: Greg on nasal spray.
• My Friends and Zoidberg: Broken by the Mold has Greg leaving a note that begins with this sentence: "Dear family, friends and Jimmy".
• Nice Hat: Jimmy is rarely ever seen without some kind of cap on his head.
• Oblivious Adoption: Tom
• Obnoxious In-Laws: For Greg, it's Kim and Christine's father, Don. For Jimmy, it's their mother, Jenny. For Kim, it's Greg's mother, Natalie. So, when you think about it, Christine is the only one of the four main characters who doesn't have any problems with neither her father-in-law nor her mother-in-law.
  • Of course, the series itself is built on this trope - with a number of plots built around disagreements between brothers-in-law Greg and Jimmy.
• Older and Wiser: Jimmy and Christine mentor Greg and Kim on how to deal with conflicts with your spouse.
• Only Child Syndrome: Sammy started out as this, but around mid-season 3, his baby sister, Emily, was born.
• The Other Darrin: Both the Hughes brothers were victim to this, though Logan had a lot more than Dominic. They even lampshade this in the episodes, House of the Rising Son, We're Having a Baby and Jimmy the Teacher.
• People Zoo: Jimmy wonders if fish would keep humans in air filled aquariums if they ruled the earth.
• Primal Fear: Logan's afraid of the dark, to the point that he would scream if the room he sleeps in is pitch-black, even with his eyes shut.
• Right Behind Me: Several times, most often involving an adult making comments about his/her son or nephew, only to turn around and realize said relative is standing right behind the speaker.
• Running Gag: Greg's attempt at work-related humor has managed to send his colleague, Mike, literally running in tears 3 times in total, always because one of Greg's jokes inadvertently reminded Mike of some relative of his who died under some accidental & tragic circumstance (for example, in one scene Greg set Mike off with a "penny squeezing" joke because Mike's wife was killed by a boa constrictor), with Mr. Savitsky telling Greg "there's no way you could have known that." In fact, Mike is basically a running gag character, as all scenes with him being mentioned involve this.
  • The episode, Headshot, shows Sammy accidentally bumping his head 5 times. Poor kid.
  • The Lost Love Montage trope above also qualifies for this show.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: Greg
• Second Place Is for Losers: Big Jimmy towards Jimmy. Jimmy on the other hand is proud of Dominic's third place trophy, but Dominic walks in while Jimmy is ranting about how Big Jimmy would have called third place "second fastest loser" and thinks Jimmy is talking about him.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Greg and Jimmy.
• Slobs Versus Snobs: The conflict between the Warners and Hugheses is kind of a mild version of this.
• Special Effect Failure: An in-universe example. When Greg records Sammy's first steps in a casino, Jimmy pays someone to swap the background with Stock Footage of a park. It looks somewhat convincing until Sammy starts walking on a lake.
• Spider Sense: Jimmy, during the episode Dominic's First Date, states that he feels a chill when, unbeknown to him, Christine realizes he had given advice she doesn't approve of (which sums up to All Girls Want Bad Boys) to Dominic. When his in-laws claim they feel nothing after he asks them whether they felt the same sensation, he thinks that he got nervous over nothing... until Christine walks in a second later to confront him.
• The Stinger: The show would feature a callback to an earlier joke made in passing. Arguably, the funniest part of the show.
• Strongly Worded Letter: Greg and Kim write one in response to a neighbor scaring Sammy in Halloween. It goes over as well as you'd expect.
• Tempting Fate: The flashback episode, When Jimmy Met Greggy, has Jimmy, Christine and Kim making comments that foreshadows the premise of the series.

Jimmy: (about Greg) Oh great. Now I'm gonna have this guy here all weekend mooching off me. Sitting on my couch, eating all my food. ^[1]

Christine: (about Greg) Jimmy, you're gonna see the guy once in a while at holidays, alright? I mean, its not like we're all gonna move in together.

(After Jimmy convinces Kim to keep dating Greg)
Kim: Thanks, Jimmy. I'll think about it. Hey and thanks for letting us crash here this weekend. If I ever have my own house and you need a place to stay for the night, you are always welcome.
Jimmy: Thanks for saying that, but I don't really like staying in other people's houses, you know. I just, uh, I just don't feel comfortable.

• The Thing That Would Not Leave
  • In Guarding Greg, the security guards are this to Greg, eating lunch and watching TV in his office.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Christine and Kim.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Greg, in the later episodes. A perfect example would be Tree Hugger.
• Tranquil Fury: After weeks of trying to get a contractor to fix a fireplace in Gordon and Kim, Kim sees the contractor's car in the driveway and vandalizes it with a bat while calmly whistling to herself.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Jimmy kicks Greg and his family out of his house after 4 days of eating his food and constant sex. There are several reasons that this makes Jimmy a terrible person:
  • He encouraged and had to convince Greg to engage in such behavior.
  • Greg put up with the same (possibly worse) behavior from Jimmy for years.
  • Most importantly, Jimmy owes Greg everything, without him Jimmy would be a homeless, unemployed utter failure as a human being, the quote "I've done everything short of breathing air into your lungs" comes to mind as it is entirely accurate.
  • Unfortunately The Reset Button is pushed by the next episode and it is never brought up again.
    • The main difference is, Greg turned down a great job offer in order to keep sitting around doing nothing, Jimmy was looking for a job from the moment he moved in. Still a bit of a dick move, but he had Greg's best interest at heart.
  • Jimmy accuses Christine of being this in Christine the Spy when she wouldn't reveal any secrets about Radford Studios' new projects to Greg and Mr. Savitsky, the two guys who provided everything for the Hugheses over the years.
• Unstoppable Rage: Played for Laughs towards the end of the Jimmy Sponsors a Vacation episode where Kim, having been fed up with Jimmy's antics, promptly snaps into this, knocking him down and pounding him silly.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Greg and Jimmy.
• Wimp Fight: Greg and a male recurring minor character fight this way.

1. ↑ In a way, this also foreshadows the season 6 episode, Greg's a Mooch.