Reviews Series / The Big Bang Theory

Well they have their own social quirks, but aside from Sheldon all the guys are perfectly fine socially, they have girlfriends, they have normal friends, they go to social functions. True they obsess over geeky things, but the way modern culture works those formerly "geeky" things aren't really that geeky anymore.

I'm not really sure what to think of this. Whilst some people aren't like them, lots of people like them do exist. Sitcoms always go for really exaggerated characters and that's where the humour has to come from. Their wide range of interests mean people who love that stuff love the show because it's full of cool references (and actual George Takei and Whil Wheaton!)

Finally the writers are clearly nerdy or else have done levels of research so deep they're Becoming The Mask. If anyone has right to write characters like these, it's them.

I just think maybe the shows aim shouldn't be to prove people who like Star Trek are cool and acceptable and maybe it should just go for entertainment. If you want validation maybe the validation is that the writers felt there was an audience big enough for a mainstream _sitcom_ that makes Feynman jokes

@Tomwithnonumbers

The writers are nerdy? Their jokes aren't anything you wouldn't hear in an introductory physics class. It seems to me that the writers have NO CLUE what physics is really all about.

Okay? Okay?! I think we can do better than that! *

@tomwithnonumbers Yeah, sitcoms always go for the exaggerated characters, but there's nothing really grounding these guys. They play to all the stereotypes, from the girl-phobia to still living in your mom's house to basically talking entirely in references. There's nothing grounding them, making them real, they're the same dipshits we see populating the backgrounds of high school sitcoms so the main characters have Butt Monkeys to make fun of.

And near as I can tell from most episodes, the joke isn't "Oh I get it because I know who Faynman is", it's "Oh it's funny because they're so nerdy they know who Faynman is." And as for the wide range of interests—here's an idea, let's have each character be interested in a different nerdy thing and have it reflect their personalities, rather than making them this sort of amorphous, pathetic blob of all that is nerdy.

They've actually shown a variety of people, some who are more sociable than the cast and others who are less as Drake Clawfang pointed out.

Maybe they don't and that's what David Saltzberg is for, who also manages the blog.

^^We've got pretty much the same reactions, then. It feels so generic but trying so desperately hard to get our attention. Like "take distilled essence of single-guy sitcom and mix with two cups DND player".

Well one of the writers is an ex-programmer, wrote on Star Trek (admittedly Voyager :D ), and is a honourary member of the Royal Canadian Institute for the Advancement of Science. I mean I'm not going to judge, but I would say he's got better nerd credit than, say, me.

But in all honesty if the jokes stay reasonably elementary it's only to keep it slightly open to the audience. I'm a fairly nerdy maths undergraduate, mores than most of the other maths undergraduates and I struggle to recognise all the references before they pass, if they got any more deep I wouldn't notice them at all. It counts as good because to my knowledge they've never screwed a reference up or got anything wrong. But it is fair enough that the joke in them is often 'gosh look how nerdy these people are'

The cameos on the other hand are excellent :D

But I can see where you're coming from, I don't idolise the show and I don't even like it enough to watch it if someone else isn't already watching it and I'm in the same room as them, but that's more because it's a cheesy american style sitcom than from any personal feeling of insult.

Yeah, good point on the cameos.

I've seen one episode and that episode came across the way the reviewer describes the show. But I have a couple of geeky friends who swear by it. Honestly Chuck and How I Met Your Mother do a better job with the geek references. IMO. Maybe I just didn't watch the right episode.

My parents are both science types (former chemists), and they fucking love the show. Same with my sister, who's a graduate chemist.

I don't watch it a whole lot, but for what it is it's funny and seems to have a decent cast and stuff.

I've watched more of it since my last comment and now would be fairly pained if I had to watch any more. I'm much more in Wackd and I hugely agree with the horribleness of the characters. Apart from feeling really stupid, there's an element of mean-spiritedness in a lot of the parodies and I've lost all my patience for Raj. Okay they're sort of making fun of the fact that he's a stock indian character, but they're still making jokes about being Indian that stopped being acceptable in the 1980's.

It doesn't feel like the Big Bang Theory loves any of it's characters. What it does is transplant their personalities to something completely different when they need someone sympathetic. You could roll dice for the degree they're nerdy/bad-with-girls/unconfident/blonde/indian personality traits in any episode.

And it's not even attempting to talk about people, it trades purely in stock characterisations. It's the sort of comedy an alien could write

I gotta agree with the indian jokes. They feel like jokes out of a much edgy late night show (AKA Seth Mc Farlen shows or shows on Comedy Central). At times it feels like they're haha we can get away with this because we have an indian character, specially considering that they're more tackfull with jokes about jewish people and the south.