I don’t really watch a lot of broadcast TV anymore (although that changes when baseball season starts). I don’t have Tivo. Too many shows go off the air nearly immediately these day, making one chary of getting hooked on another loser. And those programs that do hang around inevitably come out on DVD, a format television series I find highly congenial.
Of course, you get a completely different emotional investment in a show you watch a season at a time in a quick burst, as opposed to one episode a week over half a year or so. Watching a show on a weekly basis over a span of some years weaves it into your life in a nearly unique way. That’s TV’s main advantage compared to film, which packs its often extraordinary power into one short experience.
Even so, once you get out of the habit of watching TV, it becomes pretty easy to start missing episodes. And with so many of the best shows now being serial in nature (meaning the episodes must be watched sequentially, instead of be stand alone stories as was more common in years past), missing an episode can screw you up for the rest of the season. All things being equal, I in most cases am entirely content to wait until the entire season comes out I can watch the whole thing over a weekend or two.
Since this has been a golden age of dramas, albeit one perhaps running its course, it remains unsurprising that there has also been a comparatively dearth of good sitcoms available. NBC has it’s Thursday night line-up, but of those shows, 30 Rock is the only one I love. One of the few current sitcoms that reliably got laughs out of me was Two and a Half Men. We’re not talking Arrested Development by any means. However, it there are pleasures to be taken from your basic solid craftsmanship. Headlined by a couple of pros (Charlie Sheen and John Cryer), and bolstered by sharp, if not particularly ground-breaking, writing, the show is a pleasant time-waster.
However, humor is highly personal, and I’ll admit, shows that rely too much on sex humor—by which I mean every character seems to talk about little else—wear on me after a while. I’m not a prude, or a very big one especially, but I thought a show like Frasier hit the balance well. Sex was the main theme of some individual episodes, and a minor one in many others, but it didn’t seem to be the only thing the cast found of interest. Two and a Half Men, by contrast, pretty much goes with sex gags about 70% of the time. If nothing else, this approach just strikes me as a rather lazy crutch. Ha, they made a penis joke. Again.
Anyway, somewhere along the line Two and a Half Men‘s creator, Chuck Lorre (famous for his written text cards that flash by at the end of the episodes of his various shows), apparently had the bright idea of turning the reality show Beauty and the Geek into a sitcom. However, as I learn more and more the older I get, it’s never the concept, its the execution. And The Big Bang Theory (I was admittedly wary due to the fact that the show’s very title was a lame double entendre) is well executed indeed. This isn’t a great show, but it’s a very good one. And that’s OK, not every show has to reinvent the wheel.
The show’s strength is that its nerd protagonists are entirely convincing nerds. As a nerd myself—albeit not nearly one of the super-brain alpha nerds represented here—I often find such characters grating. Here, the recognition value is pretty high, barring again my own utterly inadequate grasp of science.
Again, the show isn’t notable for its premise, which is pretty basic. Again, though, there’s nothing wrong with that. Here two nerd roommates, physicists by trade, have a gorgeous, sweet but highly normal blond move into the apartment across the hall. Needless to say, one of the nerds, Leonard, immediately falls in love this exotic creature. And we take it from there.
As with Two and a Half Men, the show’s success rests on strong scripts and extremely good casting. Leonard is played by Rosanne’s Johnny Galecki, who seems to me to have studies the great Jack Benny for his body language, especially his head tilts. Leonard is the closest thing the nerd contingent has to an everyman, and his longing for neighbor Penny is entirely convincing, and happily not overplayed. For her part, lead actress Kaley Cuoco actually transcends her busty blond looks for me, since that’s not really my type. However, as I grew to like her character as things went along, I found Penny a lot more attractive by the end of the first season than I did in the beginning of the year.
Meanwhile, Jim Parsons as Sheldon, Leonard’s roommate, is a real revelation. He seems less to be playing the part than actually being a very real Sheldon, in the same way that Jack McBrayer on 30 Rock really seems to be the extremely specific character of Kenneth the Page. The rest of the cast is pretty great, but only Parsons so inhabits his character and makes him so entirely specific that I couldn’t imagine it being played by anyone else.
As indicated by that incident, if Leonard is our comparative everyman figure, Sheldon is the ultra-nerd, so incredibly brainy even compared to his companions that he can barely understand regular people at all. And indeed, that’s how Sheldon reacts to most of his fellow humans, the ways of which are utterly alien to him. A highly prickly but still successfully vulnerable character—a trait that luckily isn’t overplayed—Sheldon is basically a more likeable analogue to Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets.
In one episode, Sheldon reveals a childhood trauma to Penny. When he was 12, he wanted a centrifuge for his birthday. Instead, he carps, he got a motorized dirt bike. “What 12 year old boy wants something like that?!” he sniffs. A predictably incredulous Penny replies, “I don’t know…all of them?” On most shows, that’s the entire gag. Parsons, however, gives this exact little pause that somehow manages to communicate that, rather than just being surprised to learn this, he is instead taking the information into account in the complex mathematical formula he uses to grade his parents. The new bit of data is entered, and a longstanding debit against his ‘rents is changed into a plus.
The main cast is rounded out by two other nerds, Howard and Rajesh. Typically, these two are more ‘types,’ with Howard being the generally pathetically unsuccessful horndog and Raj’s main character trait being that he’s so paralyzingly terrified of attractive women that he can’t even talk in their presence. In lesser hands (by which I mean the majority of other sitcom runners), both in terms of acting and writing, these two would seem utterly stale clichés. Here, though, they’re entirely believable and likeable guys. Each is strong enough to occasionally have episodes built around them, which is really the mark of successful supporting characters.
Galecki, meanwhile, brings along fellow Roseanne alums for guest star appearances. (Chuck Lorre also worked on that show, so there’s that connection too.) Sara Gilbert, Galecki’s girlfriend on that earlier show, is fellow physicist Leslie. Herself both more socially centered and probably smarter than any of them save the otherwise hapless Sheldon, Leslie is character who pops up every once in a while and is always a welcome presence. (I have to admit, too, that I never found Gilbert remotely attractive on Roseanne, but she’s one of those women who seems to have grown into herself with time.)
Meanwhile, Laurie Metcalf appears in one episode as Sheldon’s mother. Again, Metcalf takes what could be a completely generic and unfunny character—Sheldon’s mom is a completely normal woman and a Christian to boot (the latter element isn’t as overplayed and tone deaf as it might be on other shows, but it’s still easily her most stereotyped character trait). She is so the complete common sense opposite of her son that he in a latter episode theorizes that he’s akin to a cuckoo eggs dropped into another species of bird’s nest. Even so, she’s the rare character we see during the first season that is capable of completely domination Sheldon, along with his beauteous but otherwise normal twin sister. Anyway, Metcalf is good enough that I can only hope she pops up again in the second season.
For me, though, it’s the complete credibility of the main cast as nerds that really makes the show work. These are Urkels, but the kind of people many of us are and know. This amazing verisimilitude was apparently achieved by getting *gasp* actual nerds to work on the scripts. Thus when the characters casually talk about, for instance, the Planet of the Ape movies, they actually get all the details right. I especially loved a gag about Raj’s costume for a party, to which he is dressed as Thor:
Sheldon, asked where Raj is: “Maybe the Avengers summoned him.”
Howard: “[Raj]’s not the Marvel Comics Thor, he’s the original Norse god.”
Other shows would maybe do a joke about Thor being in the Avengers (maybe), but only on this one would a character accurately call out the joke on such an eminently nerdy basis. Meanwhile, earlier in the same episode all four of them show up wearing Flash costumes. They agree to change, although not before Raj suggests that they just walk around in a line all evening, so that they look like one guy going really fast.
Just today I learned that the program has been renewed for two more years. I don’t think the show’s ratings are that great–it plays opposite both House and the also nerdtastic Chuck on NBC –but it seems to be doing pretty well on DVD. Amazon currently lists it as the #95 DVD they sell, and considering the set came out in September, that’s quite good.
Anyway, the renewal is good news. Now I just have to wait until September, when the second season set should be released.
