YMMV / Who's the Boss?

• Esoteric Happy Ending: Tony gives up what was practically his dream job (as a college baseball coach) because Angela was unhappy in the small college town Tony coached in, practically hitting the Reset Button.
• Genius Bonus: "Men Are People, Too," Mona seduces a guy using the Toreador Song from Carmen. Said guy, Ralph, was hired to install a skylight in the kitchen and didn't believe in mixing business with pleasure, so he had previously ignored Mona until she found out all of his likes (hard-working, family-oriented, opera lover) and pretended to be interested in the exact same things. They had one date and she dumped him for someone else, having only been interested in the challenge of a man who didn't immediately go running after her. This lead Ralph to temporarily leave the job half-finished as he was unable to be in the same house as Mona. The Toreador Song is the introduction of Escamillo, romantic rival of formerly honest, overly-dedicated soldier Don Jose. Don Jose was previously uninterested in Carmen, which made him extremely interesting to her. When he's tasked with arresting her for attacking another woman with a knife, she seduces him mainly in order to gain her freedom, convinces him to go AWOL and ultimately leaves him for someone more fun when he wants more of a commitment from her.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the episode where Jonathan's first girlfriend gets a crush on Tony, he utters the line "I never want anything to do with girls again". Cute then, but it becomes utterly hilarious since Danny Pintauro came out.
  • Just like Tony Miceli, the real life Tony Danza also dabbled in teaching.
  • Similarly, the episode where Jonathan is a ballboy and is distracted enough by two girls for him to pick up a fair ball is quite funny due to that fact.
  • One time, Tony invited Sam's English professor over under the pretense of authenticating an autographed copy of Jane Eyre. The autograph is a forgery performed by Tony himself and not done very well. ("Bronte does not spell her name with a 'y'.") Given that Tony Danza would later teach an English class in real life, it's unlikely he'd make this mistake himself.
  • Foreshadowing Alyssa Milano's other noteworthy TV role, there's an episode from Season 2 called "Charmed Lives" that also takes place in San Francisco. Ironically, Alyssa herself, doesn't appear in the episode.
• One-Scene Wonder: The "crazy Jets fans" in the Season 1 episode "Sports Buddies" clearly won the audience over with their chanting.
• Retroactive Recognition: Jeri Ryan made her TV debut as the swimming instructor Pam in the 1991 episode "The Unsinkable Tony Micelli".
• Shipping Bed Death: Though by the time Tony and Angela got together, this was more a symptom of the show's demise than a contributing factor.
• Testosterone Brigade: Coaelesced firmly around Alyssa Milano.
• Values Dissonance: These days the show's very title comes off as absurd; Tony is Angela's employee and their genders have nothing to do with it. This was mocked in Community when a professor in media studies devotes his career to analyzing the titular question, approaching it as some sort of philosophical conundrum, only for Abed to deflate him with a lengthy lecture about why Angela was, in every possible meaning of the word, unquestionably "the boss".
  • And on the Roundhouse episode "TV On Trial", where the answer to "the question America has been asking for nine torturous years" is actually an argument between Tony and Angela (played by David Sidoni and Shawn Daywalt) over who is the boss.
  • In "Mrs. Rossini's Uncle", Tony's issue with Sam dating Al is that he views Al as a hoodlum while Mrs. Rossini thinks it is cute that they might get married one day. No one seems to be bothered by the fact that Al is a full grown man around the age of 21 dating a child who is still in high school.
• Values Resonance: The show features a stay-at-home Parental Substitute, a non-sterotypical intellectual Italian man and a middle-aged woman with a healthy social and sex life. Not bad for something from The '80s.