List of ''Black Books'' episodes

The show's pilot was decidedly darker, revolving around Bernard's, and later Manny's, decision to commit suicide. It featured Manny (surname Zimmerman in reference to Bob Dylan) as a professional depression-o-gram, and the Fran character as Valerie, a philosophy lecturer.

After his accountant flees from the police, Bernard is faced with the daunting prospect of doing his own taxes, and resorts to pairing his socks, getting drunk with door-to-door evangelists, and trying to seriously injure himself since it will allow him to defer his tax return. Manny, an accountant, enters Black Books for the first time to buy the The Little Book of Calm on his way to work and somehow manages to swallow it. Fran is distracted from being on-call as a friend's birth coach when she's bedevilled by a weird, unfathomable sphere that isn't actually 'a bald furby'. Naturally, chaos ensues. At the end of the episode, Manny demonstrates that Fran's sphere is a lighter.

Bernard wakes up from a boozy night to discover he's accidentally given Manny a job at the bookshop, then spends the day trying to get rid of him. Manny proving to be a charming, sociable and extremely competent employee, apparently unaware that it's 'not that kind of operation'. An offering of wine from Manny and the threat of physical violence from Fran persuade Bernard to keep Manny on board.

When the sheer filth of the bookshop overwhelms him, Manny calls a creepy cleaner, and Bernard reluctantly agrees to house-sit for a friend. Unfortunately, the two manage to drink a very expensive bottle of wine that was due to be presented to the Pope, and have to figure out a way to replace it. Meanwhile, Fran goes on a date with a very nice man which is nothing short of disastrous. She ends up dating the cleaner.

After celebrating his birthday fueling an all-night The Sweeney marathon by drinking espresso, Manny thinks he's a 1970s cop and manages to go from eyeing old men suspiciously in the bookshop to being trapped at the local police station helping a real detective put the 'good cop, bad cop' routine on a local villain. Bernard explains how going to a dinner party eventually led to a broken arm while Fran describes the steps from seeing her boyfriend having dinner with another woman to being in hospital with a neck injury.

After being burgled, Black Books gets a new alarm and security door fitted, but Manny fails to listen to the unlock code, distracted by a little Subbuteo player in the installer's hair ("there was a little man ... in his hair"). This quickly results in Manny being trapped alone inside with only a quickly emptied bottle of Absinthe and dead bees for company and Bernard locked outside with just enough money for popcorn and a cinema ticket. Meanwhile, Fran has taken the phone off the hook to listen to silky-voiced Howell Granger read the shipping forecast on the radio, leaving Bernard to wander the streets of London penniless, cold and wet, with only an adult video-shop and the allure of fast-food employment between him and freezing.

Bernard finally breaks the last straw with his constant bullying, and Manny leaves home, but doesn't even manage to let Bernard know about this without being attacked by a bee in a telephone box and finding himself on the streets. He is soon picked up by a photographer with a beard fetish and is treated to a glamorous life of expensive clothes, satin sheets and crinkle-cut chips in silver bowls, but such high living comes at a high price.

Fran decides to learn the piano and enlists the services of an elderly blind Russian tutor. His harsh methods and her inability to master it in 5 minutes inclines her to quit. Manny discovers he can play the piano purely on instinct, and against all odds Bernard gets a date with an attractive woman. As a result, Fran and Bernard bribe Manny to hide inside the piano, armed with only spoons, in an attempt to make themselves look good.

A heat wave sweeps London, causing Bernard to obsess about beautiful girls and to seek a "Summer Girlfriend", Fran to suffer from insomnia, and Manny to panic about his 'Dave's Syndrome', a curious condition that purportedly triggers at 88°F (31°C). Naturally, Bernard refuses to believe a word of Manny's "attention seeking nonsense" and tries to get Manny as hot as possible. Fran discovers the walls of her flat are literally closing in as her unscrupulous landlord creates another flat from the stolen space. Bernard pretends to be her lawyer in an attempt to rectify the situation but quickly falls for the new lodger, Summer Girl Alice. At the end of this episode, Bernard asks Fran when they will admit they are deeply attracted to each other. Fran will not 'Until at least one of us is dead'. The scene returns to Manny's condition having been triggered with disastrous consequences.

While Fran is in desperate need of a job, Manny gets a call from old friend Gus, a diminutive underworld figure. Gus agrees to get Fran a job working for a guy named Nugent in exchange for the bookstore hosting a reading of his nephew Danny's new book. Alas, Fran hasn't a clue what her new job involves, and Danny is a hulking great illiterate whose ghostwritten autobiography describes the pain he's inflicted on many others in great detail and which he will happily inflict on Bernard and Manny if they can't teach him to read within 2 days. Fran gets promoted. Bernard worries about his thumbs.

Fran delves into genealogy to uncover her Eastern European roots, but upon meeting her newly discovered family, she soon wants to get rid of them. Meanwhile Manny and Bernard try to re-invent the shop, firstly as a trendy upmarket café-bookshop (with sofas that swallow you) and then, apocalyptically, as an upscale restaurant. However, the shop is overrun by a horde of unseen creatures that Manny and Bernard must make an effort to destroy.

Fran returns from a holiday in Cornwall to find Bernard living amongst mouldy books and dead badgers and Manny working next door at the extremely glossy Goliath Books following an incident involving Manny's hand and a sandwich toaster, where he is decidedly out of place amongst creepy micromanager Evan and his army of hyper-efficient pastel-shirted followers. Armed with only a "duty to do" card (a card that elicits a "doo-ti-too-doo" sound when inserted into the corresponding slot on a computer) and an endless supply of muffins, Manny manages to resist Fran's rather self-serving attempts to drag him back to Bernard so that she has somewhere to hang out. Bernard's physical condition deteriorates rapidly without Manny's care ("I feel like I've been beaten up, underwater"), but Manny is soon questioning his choice of career as Evan demands an unthinkable sacrifice.

Fran leaves for the weekend to go to her friend Becky's hen party while Bernard and Manny, inspired by their latest children's-book event, decide to write and illustrate a book for children. Bernard's first effort comes to over 1,000 pages, covers Joseph Stalin, a lens grinder, a broken marriage, and a truth-seeking journalist – a bit complex for kids. The subsequent masterpiece, The Elephant and the Balloon, could bring them international fame—and all its problems. Meanwhile, Fran's hen party is a disaster: the booze starts flowing, and a game of truth stirs up tears and recriminations.

Manny's irritating parents, 'Moo-Ma' and 'Moo-Pa', unexpectedly come to stay after Bernard deletes Manny's answerphone messages. Bernard is instantly infuriated by their mere existence, not to mention their annoying quirks and songs, but his patience and Fran's nerves are tested when it's revealed that Manny's letters home have greatly embellished his actual accomplishments in life.

After a small win on the Grand National, Bernard becomes addicted to gambling, leaving Fran and Manny in a bitter competition to sell as many books as possible. Soon horses aren't enough and Bernard lands in an illegal poker game against a group of ruthless, successful gamblers, including Dave 'Mouse Ear' Smith. Being utterly hopeless at cards, Bernard (now nicknamed The Gold Mine) loses everything, and Fran and Manny need to hatch a plan to obtain the money before Bernard's debtors "evict" him from his shop, £20,000, and/or his legs.

Manny organises a book launch party at the shop with charismatic-but-smug travel writer Jason, and everyone starts falling for him and his stories of far-away adventure. Meanwhile, Bernard's landlord has died and a small cat now owns the building. Driven to destroy the cat's burgeoning real-estate empire, he attempts to persuade an animal-loving pest exterminator to turn kitty hitman. His attempts fail and cause the exterminator to commit suicide. When Bernard tries to finish the job, Manny is injured.