The Big Bang Theory of NEEEERRRRRRDDDDDSSSSSSSSS!!!!

People have been telling me to watch The Big Bang Theory for four years now.  I’ve been avoiding it because I didn’t care for the few episodes that I’d happened to catch on at random times (and because I tend to have a little bit of resistance to a lot of people telling me to do something, even when it’s a good idea).  I had a gout flare up start last week, and as a result had a lot of downtime on my hands, so I finally put on the first season to check out why the show was so popular.  I discovered that I was both right and wrong to avoid it.

The show is definitely funny.  Whoever writes the jokes is pretty talented, and the actors have a great sense of comedic timing.  As making people laugh is the primary function of a sitcom, the show deserves the success that it’s gotten.  The characters have good patter, and recycle jokes regularly (though not as successfully as How I Met Your Mother or Arrested Development).

It also does contain some nerdy content.  The characters regularly talk about physics and math, and play some games that you might recognize (Talisman, though it’s never named).  The show manages to keep the nerd content from being completely ridiculous or off base, though it can get frustrating to watch characters play a super-simplified version of DnD that bears very little resemblance to the real thing.  In addition, the nerd cameos abound.  Katee Sackoff, George Takei, Brent Spiner, Neil Degrasse Tyson and many, many more appear in the show.  Wil Wheaton even gets a recurring role as the dickish nemesis of Sheldon.

Above all, the writing is actually pretty tight.  Not many wasted words, they pack a lot of story into twenty minute episodes, and the storylines generally keep you interested.  They manage to expand the main cast several times without needing to reboot the show in any way, which is a fairly impressive feat in television, and the show actually improves with the new characters, which is even more rare.  There are no completely bunk characters (Pierce, Deanna Troi), and even the irritating ones have sympathetic moments that aren’t cloying.  Actually the quality of the writing really frustrates me, because it keeps me watching this TERRIBLE FUCKING SHOW.

While the writing is good, it is all done from the perspective of Stan Gable.  The main characters of the show (4 men and 1 woman for the first 3 seasons) are all suffering from the lack of a 1980’s definition of masculinity.  Sprinkled across the characters are afflictions of asthma, being small of stature, allergies, living with parents, terrible with women, and cases of premature ejaculation multiple times over the course of the show – this is where much of the humor of the show comes from.  In the beginning of the series, the one female character is sort of a terrible, selfish person, whose presence in the group is only tolerated because she is attractive.  She is made out to be far less intelligent than the average person, but her lack of intelligence is shown as a social asset, as she can get dates whenever she likes.  Overall, I feel like the writers of the show want to shove me into a locker because I’m interested in the “boring” trivia some of the characters rattle off.

NEEEERRRRDDDSSSSS!!!

In the fourth season they add two more regular female characters, both of whom are scientists.  Their addition definitely improves the show, but in no way does The Big Bang Theory ever pass the Bechdel Test.  There are no plots between the female characters that do not involve their relationships with the male characters of the show.  Even though the new characters have as much or more possibility of winning a Nobel Prize as the male characters, this is only ever played as a stereotypical joke about how weak the male characters are.

But, for me, the final sin of the show is this: the nerds on the show don’t want to be nerds.  They are self-loathing, constantly sitting around talking about how terrible they are with women and how they wish they had better things to do than watch Star Wars or play fantasy games.  The only character that is proud of his nerdery and intelligence, Sheldon, is portrayed as being so far out on the autism scale as to be non-functional in normal society.

I am a nerd, and I am unashamed.  I live with several people who, like me, understand things like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and the Schroedinger’s Cat thought experiment.  We understand the scientific method, the difference between a theory and a hypothesis, and we constantly sit around the table playing board games or DnD.  And not a single time were we ever doing nerdy things because we lacked the skill set to go out to a bar and get lucky.  We do these things because we want to, because they make our lives feel fulfilled.  Hell, sometimes we even do these things to get lucky with other nerds.  You know why?  Because intelligence is fucking sexy.

I don’t know whether or not I can recommend The Big Bang Theory, or if I should tell you to skip it.  The writing is great, and it IS funny, but I am so disappointed that in 2013 this is all we can offer.  The show is immensely popular, and has become such a household franchise that it is going to be informative for how the average person views nerds.  Because of that, the show runners bear a responsibility to showcase nerd culture with some amount of respect, not with the sensibilities of the fucking Marlboro Man.  I know that they, much like Charles Barkley, did not set out to be writing role models, and I don’t know if I can hold them accountable for that.  But, hell, I am anyway.  I am disappointed.  We can do better.