YMMV / Gayle

• Alternative Character Interpretation: For a comedy webseries, there's actually room for a lot of this.
  • Why does Gayle gradually become nicer over the series? Is it Character Development and her actively becoming a better person? Or did Season 1 essentially not happen and the series really did undergo a Continuity Reboot? Evidence for the former lies in a short Season 3 flashback to character defining moments in Season 1, and that Gayle only becomes nicer after significant moments: her children leaving her for her incessant cruelty, realizing that her gentle husband is a much better alternative to whatever Bonnie has going on, and being brutally humiliated in front of the entire town. But evidence for the latter can be found in the fact that, with the exception of said flashback, Ira is never mentioned again after hitchhiking back to his actual parents. Many other aspects of Season 1 are lost later on, such as the SAT tutor kept in Terry's room, Gayle's criminal charges, and the first season's much more cynical tone. Episode 35, "The Wedding", outright conflicts with previously established history of Bonnie and her husband, and particularly their relationship to Gayle, further implying that the series hit a Continuity Reboot at some unspecified point.
  • Does the world of Gayle function on Blue-and-Orange Morality or is it just Gayle and Bonnie? Dr. Bruce seems at least bewildered by the strange things that Gayle says and does, but at the same time he's totally Oblivious to Love. Terry (and Ira, in Episode 8) seems aware that something is wrong with how Gayle approaches her family, but doesn't seem to bat much of an eye of her mother casually mentioning a manslaughter charge, or successfully impersonating a famous figure, despite her awful, awful disguise. The series also reveals Northbread to have some Denser and Wackier elements later on, such as bizarrely co-ordinated schoolgirls, Lizard Folk, and strangely hostile backyard wildlife.
  • A certain theory Fleming himself reposted essentially posits Gayle as a deeply closeted gay woman struggling with the life she ultimately chose for herself, finding her only true satisfaction in spiting a former love interest. While she does reach few-and-far-between moments of care and compassion, she's a Tragic Hero (one usually closer to Tragic Villain), constantly struggling with the fact she settled for a being a suburban housewife, despite any-and-all of her Womens' Studies education.
• Cargo Ship:
  • According to Gayle, Lisa was in "a three-year on-again-off-again relationship with a jetty."
  • Gayle herself would have a brief love affair with the Common App.
    Terry: Please, stop moaning with my Common App, Mom! You better not be eating chocolate covered strawberries with that thing, Mom!
• Crazy Is Cool: After Bonnie tampers with her cooking appliances, Gayle cooks a pie in seconds by electrocuting herself. The epic rock music just makes it more awesome.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Gayle often gets aroused when thinking about competing with Bonnie.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In 2013's "Letting Off Some Steam with 'the Park,'" Gayle accuses Linkin Park of lyrical Wangst, claiming that the members of the band have to settle for "vague complaints" in their songs (such as that of being "numb") because they "don't know hardship," a joke that obviously predates lead singer Chester Bennington's suicide in 2017.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In "Code Bega" Gayle gets in out of her depth with a conversation about technology and starts blurting out a string of totally made-up apps. "FaceApp" would later become the name of a real app.
  • Terry's crush on a "Lizard teen" has drawn retroactive comparisons to The Shape of Water.
• How Unscientific!: While the series runs on high-octane Surreal Humor, most of it satirizes recognizable commonplaces of suburban culture by exaggerating them or otherwise taking them to bizarre conclusions (i.e. Gayle holding an SAT tutor captive so her daughter will have around-the-clock access). Then there's the plotline in episode 38 about Half-Human Hybrid Lizard Folk with 90s sensibilities, which is neither foreshadowed in any prior episode nor ever mentioned again afterward. It particularly stands out because it's casually woven in with two Gayle-typical plot threads (Bonnie ingratiating herself with the preteens from the New Development and Gayle hosting an open house); in fact, the episode is the source of the famous "COMPANY IS COMING" clip, leading many commenters familiar with the scene out-of-context to express surprise at the nonsensical sci-fi turn the plot takes from there.
• Ho Yay: A (male) Mall Teen makes out with 'Brad' before he discovers 'he' is Gayle in disguise.
  • While thinking that they're on the verge of death, Gayle and Bonnie impulsively confess their love for one another. They are seconds later saved by Rick Gaussman.
• Memetic Mutation: "We gotta clean the house now!"
  • "Get rid of the couches, we can't let people know we SIT!"
  • "Okay, was anybody going to tell me that ____ or was I just supposed to read that in ___?"
• Misaimed Fandom: In-universe, Gayle thinks that Glenn Close's character is the hero of Fatal Attraction rather than the villain.
• Retroactive Recognition: Matty Cardarople, who plays SAT tutor Marty Taylor, has since appeared in several popular films and television shows, most notably as the Henchperson of Indeterminate Gender in A Series of Unfortunate Events and Keith in Stranger Things.
• Signature Scene: See Memetic Mutation above; the most famous scene is probably COMPANY IS COMING.
  • Following that could be the opening to Episode 7, where Gayle assaults the mailbox in order to retrieve a package.
• Squick: Gayle describing how she uses a milk frother to 'have fun'. Despite Terry's protests, Gayle keeps talking.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Many lines and gags of the series, particularly those centering around cross-generational culture shock, end up dating it to the Obama Era in general.
  • A non-exhaustive list of examples:
    • One episode (Episode 31: Code Bega) centers around how Gayle doesn’t know what an iPad is, and ruins her luncheon as a result. In 2020, it would be extremely odd for someone in Gayle’s position to not know what an iPad is.
    • In Code Bega alone, the depiction of a glasses-wearing, beard styling, self-brewing white dad from Brooklyn ends up echoing hipster stereotypes that would end up becoming irrelevant in the second half of the 2010’s.
    • Terry (a high school senior at the time) mentions her “guy friends” (presumably also minors in high school) joining Tinder, Tinder becoming exclusively 18+ later in the decade.
    • Gayle mispronounces "Facebook" as "Faceapp," which came to be as a real face-editing app in 2016.
    • Episode 28 and 29 center on the making and theft of Terry’s (physical) Common App, online applications becoming the only method in 2013, only a year before the episode's release. (Given, it's possible that Terry was writing her application on paper before digitizing it— the Common App's digital transition was also notoriously rocky.) Adding on to that, Gayle has trouble even understanding what the College App is at first, probably owed to the fact she had gone to college before its existence— any college obsessed mother like her would know all about the Common App by the end of the decade.
    • Episode 29 jokes about Aeropostale and mall kid fashion, with Aeropostale filing for bankruptcy in 2016.
    • Terry tries to hit up a crush on Facebook in Episode 38, a platform that would soon lose popularity with high schoolers as a primary method of communication not long after the episode’s release.
    • Gayle’s primary concern about Episode 38’s “lizard people” is them suffering through the tension of post-9/11 America and the stress brought on by the Second Iraq War. The controversial campaign and presidency of Donald Trump, and the multiple crises surrounding the onset of COVID-19, that began in the last year of Trump’s presidency, seem to massively dwarf the issues of a new development, scooter-riding preteens, and misunderstanding Spotify that Gayle muses over.
    • With 2020’s pandemic forcing many online, the thought of any member of a upper middle class American family having Gayle’s degree of unfamiliarity with social media seems totally unthinkable.
    • And the list goes on!
  • Lessened by the apparent time frame of the setting, as one of Terry’s early birthdays explicitly takes place in the 90’s, ultimately implying that the span of the series (as it is) intentionally takes place somewhere between 2012 and 2016, during Terry’s senior year at high school. Gayle invokes the current year as 2015 in Episode 35, but this is more to invoke the Present Day.