Oh yes, 'The Big Bang Theory' aka "Primetime's most watched comedy, winner of (insert #) Emmy awards!", or better yet, 'the most overrated piece of network tripe that has managed to spew out from the ass of Chuck Lorre' aka "The man who killed formerly prime times most watched comedy: "Two and a Half Men". Not a lot of positive things can be said about TBBT but if I was pressed to compliment an aspect of the show it would be as follows:
1. Yes, Jim Parsons is a good actor and is seemingly made for the character of Sheldon Cooper, which can either be a pro or a negative depending on how you look at it.
2. Kaley Cuoco is hot.
That's it.
Now for the bad. What I find irritating about the TBBT it's the type of show that you could watch once, get whatever entertainment you're going to get out of it and never watch again, like most of Chuck Lorre programs. It's a program that relies on gimmicks, not good writing, and brings to mind that annoying friend who does the Steve Urkel impression or the Uncle who makes the same tired crack at dinner to get a laugh out of the younger kids. The humor is lazy and uninspired, it perpetuates the growing trend of picking a clique from society, writing stereotypical dialogue and beating it into the ground. "Two and a Half Men" does the same trick BUT was funny because it essentially could be called "The Charlie Sheen Show" and maintain the same comic edge, as the show is more or less a parody of the real Charlie Sheen's playboy lifestyle. TBBT right from the get go seemed to be a limited engagement, a daring attempt from the CBS executives to touch upon an audience that hadn't really been done yet: Nerds, really annoying ones.
I am confident that the conversation when coming up with show was about as inspired as a Seth Rogen comedy, with frat boys sitting around a table drinking and eating cheetos "brainstorming" how to devolve American comedy even more. In fact it probably went a little something like this"
"So let's see, what do we need in order to make an easily accessible comedy about nerds that won't be viewed as a too science oriented or too dorky? I know! Let's think about every nerdy kid in high school who we used to tease and compile them into the most stereotypical caricatures so that the audience can get the jokes without even having to think! We need the straight laced nerd, who the audience can relate to on a very limited scale (Leonard), we should have an ethnic nerd with a funny accent who we can kind of relax with, because foreign people are funny (Raj) oh, and the super creepy nerd who thinks he's a casanova with women (Howard) but let's make have him live with his mother and Jewish, because who likes them anyway right? Hmm and finally we need somebody who we can market to death and use to sell t-shirts/cups/posters/etc. Who could it be? I got it! Let's all brainstorm the worst things we hate about nerds and what we think they're really like without consulting any actual geeks and make like a 'super nerd' with no social skills (Sheldon)....Oh yeah, and a pair of boobs too, we need that because no one is going to tune into these four clowns without some tits to look at. But we can handle that later...who's got the tylenol, boy that was a rough meeting!"
So yeah, that's probably (definitely) how the show was written, and like my 8th grade teacher told me, "the quality of your work is equal to the amount of effort you put in", and it definitely shows. So what is it about these anal retentive individuals that somehow clicks with so many viewers, other than the fact that they're such an easy target for ridicule? Is it the fact that the show is just so passively written that it reeks of sophomoric humor and one liners? Or perhaps the fact that we like to watch people less socially adept than ourselves fail in the most simple social interactions on a weekly basis? The sad truth is probably all of the above. It reminds me of the kid who hikes his pants up to his armpits, throw on a pair of glasses and a goofy lispy voice and make fun of the nerd in the corner. But as we all know, not all nerds are geeks and not all geeks are nerds. The show likes to pretend that the two are indistinguishable , further illustrating their ignorance on the subject matter. If you were to ask Chuck Lorre what the definition of a nerd was he'd probably tell you the following, "A nerd is like, a guy who is obsessed with star wars, star trek and lord of the rings and likes to pretend lightsaber fight with his friends and play Halo til all hours of the night. Oh, and doesn't get any girls, because the only girls that like guys like that are butch and weird...because they're nerds yuk yuk".
Yet despite this obvious affront to the nerd community, which while I am not a part of that group, consider myself somewhat well versed on the most accessible of pop culture science fiction lore and terms without ascribing it to social awkwardness or being a 'dork'. The show at heart is mean spirited as the audience is always at arms length from the characters just due to the fact that they're caricatures, you never really connect with them and even the non nerd characters are stereotypes, so there is nothing for you to relate to, just laugh at, not laugh with. Characters like Penny are very one dimensional, she's the 'pretty, ditzy blonde', who along with the audience, gets to poke fun at the main characters short comings and social awkwardness. There are no in between or real characters, they're all either nerds or jocks.
It's a shame that TBBT is so well received because it continues the trend of doing a disservice to the comedy genre by dumbing it down to nothing more than high school humor based around lazy writing and uninspired characters which are used as nothing more than to sell t-shirts and posters. It's no wonder why many are turning to BBC for their comedy or abandoning network television all together.
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