Reba / YMMV - TV Tropes

Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Is Reba a wise, caring mother and grandmother, looking out for her kids and suffering her friendship with B.J.? Or is she a bitter and meddlesome control freak? (As with most things, the truth is most likely somewhere in the middle.) Several episodes throughout the show addressed this, with people telling Reba she had to let go and let her kids make their own decisions.
- Is Kyra a Bratty Teenage Daughter who gets off too easy? Or is she suffering from Middle Child Syndrome because of her parents divorce and her lashing out is the result of feeling like the Only Sane Man in her incredibly dysfunctional family?
- When Kyra moves out of Reba's house in season 3, is she in the wrong for moving out of her mom's house or is she a smart teenager getting away from a controlling neglectful parent, and a self-absorbed, attention hogging sister?
Aluminum Christmas Trees: In the episode "For Sale, Cheap" Barbra Jean suggests that they should do Donkey Basketball at the next school auction, this is portrayed as another one of her crazy ideas, but as it turns out Donkey Basketball does in fact exist.
Anvilicious: The Season 5 episode "Parenting With Puppets" is little more than a half-hour anvil drop about discipline in parenting.
Base-Breaking Character: Kyra is hotly debated within the fandom as to whether her actions and - bordering on snotty - sarcasm makes her an ungrateful brat prone to disrespecting her mother for not prioritizing her first or whether it's justified given her being in the middle of not one - but two - dysfunctional families.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In Season 3, Barbara Jean's crazy drunken antics after failing miserably to teach Cheyenne how to cook. Even Reba finds it weird.
- In Season 5 where the Hart-Montgomery family visits a therapist and go down memory lane, one random flashback shows Van dressed up in 1980's workout gear and dancing to a Jane Fonda workout tape. Despite that this never happened in previous episodes.
Creator's Pet:
- Some have accused Kyra of this, especially in the later seasons. While she's always been a Deadpan Snarker, later seasons take it up to near Jerkass levels, and she rarely ever gets her comeuppance for some of the stuff she does.
Harsher in Hindsight: In a later episode, Reba is trying to convince Van to go into business with her flipping a house. Van repeatedly refuses and, in an out-of-character moment of intelligence he gleaned from watching the news (Van's Motto: "When an old geezer in a suit talks about money, I listen") states his reasons why as "the housing market is falsely inflated right now, and the bubble is ready to burst." The episode aired in 2006, and less than two years later, a massive recession (fueled at least in part by a collapsing housing market) clobbered the US economy.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- "Don't Know Much About History" deals with Van having to choose between football and his commitment to a school play. Van's football team is called the Wildcats, which brings to mind another story about a high school jock who is torn between sports and the theatre.
- In "Locked and Loaded", Reba makes a crack involving Kelly Clarkson. Guess who guest-stars in literally the next episode, "As We Forgive Those...".
Les Yay: Barbara Jean can come off as this towards Reba. Especially in later seasons, as Brock and Barbara Jean's marriage imploded; at that point she truly did like Reba better than Brock.
- Reba and Barbra Jean's "friendship" is filled with this as the seasons progress.
- In Season 4 when Reba and her family meet Sadie Owens (Van's agent), Sadie mistakenly believes Reba is also gay and asked her out on a date.
- In Season 5 when Reba starts dating again, Barabra Jean becomes very jealous and comes off acting like a scorned lover. And she goes to great lengths to find out where is Reba and her date are so that she could tell him off and even tells him that if she couldn't have Reba, no one could. After which, she tells Reba in a desperate subtext "call me!".
The Scrappy:
- Some fans dislike Cheyenne for being vain and bitchy.
- Additionally, some fans are not fond of Kyra in the later seasons either, mainly because her Deadpan Snarker tendencies get taken up to near Jerkass levels and she rarely receives any comeuppance for most of her actions. Making Van one of the frequent targets for her insults and abuse doesn't help, either.
- Really, all of Reba's kids can fall into this trope at points. Even though he's Out of Focus for most of the series, even Jake can wear on people's nerves during most of the episodes focusing on him. The fact that his few storylines in later seasons all made him out to be obnoxious (stealing money from Reba, lying to get both Kyra and Henry in trouble, selling sodas at his school against the rules, pretending to be disabled to play on a wheelchair basketball team) probably doesn't help.
Tear Jerker:
- In Season 1, as her marriage ends due to Brock's infidelity and her daughter falling pregnant at 17, eventually Reba snaps at Brock: "This is a wedding and you're ruining it! You ruined everything! We were supposed to grow old together!". She's angry, near tears and there's an audible crack in her voice as she screams that at Brock. Then she storms up to the stairs while her family is left in an uncomfortable silence.
- 7-year-old Jake getting mad at Brock for ending their father-son time early to take his new family home. The way he shouts "You're leaving?!" before running outside is heartbreaking. Later, Jake admits he is really mad at his dad, not his new baby half-brother as was previously believed, and tells Brock that he misses him. Any kid who has gone through a parental divorce can relate to the heartbreak of not seeing their parent.
- When Reba starts dating again, Kyra starts pushing Jake around telling him that when their mom marries her new boyfriend, they'll forget all about her and Jake. Kyra does it just to mess with Jake out if sisterly boredom but Reba figures out that Kyra must be really upset about the divorce and her dad marrying his new girlfriend so suddenly must be so hard for her to handle. Kyra denies it but she breaks down crying as she does so, leading Reba to comfort her. She may be smart and mature but she was still just a 14-year-old girl at the time. It was a sad yet heartwarming moment between mother and child.
Unintentional Period Piece:
- Certain episodes make it pretty clear it was made during the Turn of the Millennium. Not only do the characters occasionally refer to what year it is, George W. Bush is mentioned to be president at the time, one of the major characters during the first couple of seasons gets a lot praise from Laugh Track audience because she was on American Idol, and game systems such as the GameCube, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and Xbox get mentioned semi-frequently. (Though oddly there's no mention of the PlayStation 2. Apparently Reba's not a Sony fan...)
- In the handful of episodes where Kyra asked for her own cell phone, it can be almost shocking to hear Reba so strongly refuse. When cell phones first started to really proliferate during the early to mid-2000s to the point they were accessible enough for teenagers to have them, the initial reaction of many parents was reluctance, for most of the reasons listed under Phoneaholic Teenager (obnoxious behavior, constantly chatting, being distracted from other responsibilities and ignoring people they're in the room with, etc.) with the added frustration of now also being mobile, which added on the risk of losing the device, the dangers of talking while driving and insanely high phone bills. However, when mobile phones continued to proliferate, and companies started marketing cheaper phones and billing plans specifically to families, many parents had their opinions change and decided being able to be in touch with their kids at all times in case of emergencies was a good idea. Even just a few years later, Reba might be more adamant about Kyra having a cell phone than Kyra is.
Unintentionally Sympathetic:
- Brock did cause a lot of grief to his family with his affair and getting BJ pregnant but he's still tried his hardest to be a good dad to all four of his kids and a good grandfather to Elizabeth. Trying as hard to be a good father shows that no matter what selfish act he does, he cares about his family and feels guilty for not being the best dad and grandpa he can be. His main problem is being unable to be truly satisfied with the way his life turned out on a personal level despite being a dentist with a good practice and a better father than his own chauvinistic father. When it's revealed that he's actually depressed to the point of needing medication, it becomes even more sympathetic.
- Barbra Jean, despite being the other woman, is hard to dislike as well. She's had a tough, God-fearing childhood but tries hard to be cheerful and make friends with Reba despite her attempts being quashed most of the time. Her marriage problems with Brock cast her into a far more sympathetic light since she starts to fall apart and show that she isn't as cheerful as she seems to be.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic: This applies to Kyra in later seasons. It's easier to sympathize with Kyra in the first two seasons, because she's a child in the middle of a messy divorce and has to deal with her sister's teen pregnancy constantly making her a lesser priority, but later seasons allow her to be a Dead Pan Snarker, be blatantly disrespectful to everyone around her, and lecture other people about things that are none of her business. This is all depicted in the show proper as being justified because of her being the middle child in a divorce and having to go through everything that comes with it. But on the flip side, while everyone in her family has their eccentricities, can sometimes be selfish, and - in Reba's case - control freaks, it's pretty clear she's not undergoing any kind of emotional or physical abuse at home. It's certainly not an ideal family but there's still plenty of real-life victims of parental abuse who would gladly trade places for that kind of setup.
Values Dissonance:
- Reba once had an episode where her adult children went on food stamps and Reba went ballistic (accidentally getting herself put on them as well). This is portrayed as them being parasites on the state and looking for a handout when, in fact, in the first case they're students trying to improve themselves with a young child while Reba is raising three children by herself with her adult children raising their own baby. Outside of the South, it would be sensible and what foodstamps are for to help them.
- This series, like many others that aired in the 2000s, tended to poke fun at homosexuality. Several episodes had characters freaking out over being Mistaken for Gay, and it's all Played for Laughs. Though the show does take place in the South.
The Woobie:
- Kyra, of all people, surprisingly qualifies as this, due at least partially to suffering from the Middle Child Syndrome. It also helps that her actress is a bit of a real life one herself, especially in Season 5, due to her anorexia battle.
- Reba also counts, especially any time her failed marriage with Brock comes up.

YMMV / Reba

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