Peep Show was originally conceived as a sitcom in the style of Beavis and Butt-Head, revolving around two characters watching and discussing television, but this idea was dropped due to the high cost of licensing clips and fears that the characters would barely feature themselves.

Writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain met David Mitchell and Robert Webb while trying to revive an old unproduced BBC sitcom script called All Day Breakfast; that show was never made, but the collaboration eventually led to Peep Show.

The show's title is taken from the 1990s comic book series Peep Show by Joe Matt.

The distinctive point-of-view filming style, using head-mounted or hat-mounted cameras, was inspired by the 2000 Channel 4 documentary Being Caprice about model Caprice Bourret, which itself had copied the technique from the 1999 film Being John Malkovich.

The idea of using voice-over narration to reveal characters' true thoughts came from a scene in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, where subtitles convey what characters are really thinking.

Two pilots were filmed before the series began, allowing creators Armstrong and Bain to fully develop and finalize the show's unconventional style; in the original pilot, Olivia Colman's character Sophie also had her own voice-over, a feature later dropped.

For the first two series, Mark and Jeremy's flat scenes were filmed in a real property in Croydon, but when the owners refused further use of it for series 3, a replica set was built in a carpet warehouse in Neasden.

Many storylines were drawn from the writers' real-life experiences, notably Sam Bain's; the series 5 episode 'Burgling', in which Mark apprehends a burglar by sitting on him, was based on something Bain once actually did in a video shop.

The first series had an original theme tune composed by Daniel Pemberton, but from series 2 onward the theme became the song 'Flagpole Sitta' by American band Harvey Danger, though Pemberton's original composition still appeared briefly during scene changes.

In June 2020, a blackface scene featuring Jeremy from series 2, episode 1 was removed from Netflix due to concerns over racism.

In 2005, The Carsey-Werner Company produced a pilot for a US remake starring Johnny Galecki as Mark and Josh Meyers as Jeremy, but the pilot was never picked up; Galecki soon after landed his career-defining role in The Big Bang Theory.

Despite critical acclaim, Peep Show never achieved high ratings during its original run, with early series drawing just over a million viewers; it was kept on air partly due to strong DVD sales, and producer Andrew O'Connor argued the POV filming style itself limited the show's ability to reach a mainstream audience.