Jim Hacker loses every battle, wins the occasional war, and ends up just as corrupt as the system he fought. And yet, we love him. We see ourselves in him. Because the final, unspoken lesson of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister is that we are all Jim Hacker. We enter the arena hoping to do good, and we leave it hoping to survive.
Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister are comedies, not documentaries. But their genius is that they reveal a fundamental truth: The laughter comes from recognizing that, usually, the second group wins. Yes Minister And Yes Prime Minister