The Big Bang Theory is despised well beyond its significance due to its reductive portrayal of “science geeks” and “mass media nerds.” If you observe it casually you’ll see that it portrays a group of wealthy young people, who are mostly idle, that fill the long hours of their existence with jokes and light insults revolving around sexual innuendo. I can’t speak for its accuracy in its portrayal of “science geeks,” but its portrayal of “mass media nerds” is straight out of the lost era where it was shocking to find a young woman in a comic book store.
To hate this show is to hate every minor sitcom made over the last 20 years – its structure is modular and can be reapplied endlessly to any subculture that isn’t entirely made up of working poor people (because who wants to come home from your underpaid, unfulfilling day job and watch people watch rich people on TV?).
In theory, it’s something i should enjoy given the setting, but i find it approximately 25% funny and 75% cringeworthy/annoying. And then there’s the canned laughter*… shudder
*Not sure if it’s just me, but i find it highly condescending, as if the show has decided the audience is too thick to know what’s funny and so it needs to be pointed out to them…
Peter Chakos, the editor of TBBT, also edited every episode of Will & Grace, as well as its gag reels. One of the things he would sometimes do in the gag reels would be to take a short, very serious section of a dramatic scene (Will finding out his father just died, or something), and putting one of the season’s most rollicking laughs behind it. Or taking a funny exchange and replacing the audience laughs with crickets. The dissonance was both amusing and illuminating.
FWIW, when TBBT does work, a whole lot of credit goes to Chakos. His work is thoughtful and even musical. I just wish he were given better material these days.
Go back and watch an episode or a bit – maybe (read: certainly) I’m an old stick in the mud now, but it’s hard to enjoy the bits. It’s much worse than you remember.
It’s certainly of its era, but I think it holds up. I appreciate that it never relied on catchphrases or really stupid gags or unnecessarily cruel putdowns. The meanest character, Karen, was essentially Archie Bunker as a rich overmedicated socialite, but still managed to be sympathetic.
One thing that I miss about the show is that it was overwritten. Every episode’s first rough cut was uncommonly long… sometimes by as much as 4 or 5 minutes. A lot of very funny jokes hit the cutting room floor just so we could keep enough plot points so the story would make sense.
The premise is the thing isn’t it? It’s not just nerds say the darndest things, it’s two (now tenured) faculty at a reputable SoCal institution couldn’t afford to live on their own? Or that an aerospace engineer with multiple successful NASA projects and an ISS flight under his belt is shamed by a salary compared to a PI for a pharmacorp? (Or that (for that unsuccessful NASA project) a rover control center wouldn’t be monitored 24(+40min)x7?) Not to mention the sexism, misogyny, and racism. ITA that The IT Crowd was laughing with and punching up.
BBT does revolve solely on “Things nerds do that we don’t understand” as the set up and punch line, and being someone nerdy/intellectual i find the premise for those jokes to be borderline insulting since it perpetuates a stereotype about awkward unrelatable nerds that cant talk to girls. IT Crowd reads more office humor to me.
I’m pretty sure he’s supposed to have Asperger’s, but they won’t come out and say it. Personally, I find that his quirks tend to make him more charismatic and relateable than the other characters, who are otherwise pretty two dimensional.
I’m not a fan, but my wife watches it constantly and I’m surprised by some of the character arcs. Penny starts out as an aspiring actress, then “grows up” to become a pharmaceutical rep, and so far the show has never acknowledged just how evil a profession that is. Likewise the male leads are all working on a device for the military, having gotten over their qualms about doing so as soon as they realized the money involved. The writers seem to equate maturity with selling out your principles.
Erm, like the time Roy went on a date without realising he had shit on his forehead? Or the time Roy and Moss tricked Jen into presenting a shoebox painted black with a red light glued on it as “the Internet” to a meeting of shareholders?
The IT Crowd was brilliant, but it was quite definitely laughing at.
Yeah, it kind of explains what Chris Morris was doing in series 1 of The IT Crowd, doesn’t it?
Jam was proper dark. The only bit I can remember is the sketch with the cot death and the plumber – tbh, I think that was the only bit I saw full stop. Genius, but a bit too dark for my comfort.
'Twasn’t shit, it was chocolate sauce. I really liked that one because it showed he could be quite a nice date… just perhaps a nervous or unlucky one. If anything, it’s making fun of people’s expectations on dates.
Sure the episode about “the internet” was laughing at somebody, but it wasn’t the nerds, it was the non-nerds who fell for their prank en masse. In general I think everybody comes in for a ribbing in The IT Crowd at some point, but the characters remain relatable when they’re the butt of the joke because they’re not just stereotypes spouting nerd-flavoured clichés.
