[Neil Jones]

I think it also doesn't help that many people weren't going to get that it was a parody combination of domestic 50s American sitcoms like I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners and 60s sitcoms with bizarre premises. People just saw a sitcom about Hitler without understanding the shows it was parodying.

Problem with subtlety is that most people just don't get it so they miss the overarching point of what the show is trying to achieve so it becomes a case of "Ooh look it's Hitler, we're not having that" but as above, the viewership wasn't massive anyway so its probably more hindsight and talking head fueled than anything else.

Not that subtlety is a new thing, I mean Charles Dickens wrote it in spade loads during his time about social conditions and what not, though I suspect most of the film and TV adaptations of his books over the years probably missed most of that...