Chatter Of The Squirrel

TV: The Big Bang Theory

January 12, 2010 on 9:29 am | In TV | 1 Comment

Been getting a number of good props for this series, from oft trusted and credible sources. But yet when I sampled a few random episodes from the end of season 2, I was largely unimpressed.

Founded on the timeless formula of 2 neighbouring apartments with quirky room-mates. The gimmick here is the 4 geeks being an extreme condensate of the worst stereotypes of Otaku, MMORPG junkie, Trekkie, comic geek, science geek, sci-fi geek, video-game geek and all other manners of geekdom that the writers never lived and poorly imagined.

Yar, it’s quite amusing that many jokes incorporate random geek stuff. The Picard-Kirk debate. The Hadron Super Collider. MMORPG Raid-speak. Comic book superheroes.

Other elements the writers THINK are funny: the chronic shyness and social awkwardness of nerds, their cluelessness about sports, their lack of appeal to the opposite gender, etc.

The characters and writing is quite juvenile and unimaginative. The jokes are predictable. Admittedly, there was a hilarious ROFL moment when Sheldon divided mitotically, completely blindsided me. But one good laugh like this in 1.5 seasons… Needs More Effort. It’s like, Garfield hates Mondays but love lasagna. Alf likes to eat cats. Good gags. But it gets old.

I enjoyed the early episodes. But towards the end of the first season, it had become evident that the schizophrenic C-3P0 (ie. Sheldon) is the show-stealer. Whereupon the Kramer of the show outshone the Seinfeld. And that’s also where the writers & producers took the path of least resistance, pushed the whole show to C-3P0, and gave up developing any of the other characters beyond their offensive geek stereotype.

It’s like producing Scrubs, with one J.D., a half dozen Todds, and nobody else. The Todd is a gag character deliberately written to be one dimensional for comedic effect. Many of the other characters in the show slowly developed depth as the years went by. Not so with Big Bang. They accidentally found their Kramer, and are so excited about him that they’ve allowed him to be the entire show henceforth. After so many episodes, I can only remember the names of Sheldon and Penny.

I have lots of geek friends. Several of them socially awkward characters. I’ve been mired in borderline neurotic geek conversations many times. Any of them are more animated and more interesting than the writers’ narrow perception of “Geek”.