Does everyone hate The Big Bang Theory?

I thought it was touching, in context. The premise of the show starts with the idea that Penny is a non-geek outsider, and that Sheldon is hopelessly contemptuous of her. He also has Aspergers or something, his social graces are just hopeless, and he never does PDA of any sort with anyone.

Flashforward, and they’ve reached the point where Penny “gets” Sheldon enough to get him a gift that would be more or less meaningless to her, but which practically gives him a seizure of happiness, and drives him to hug her.

I mean, it’s a broad show about silly people, but I can’t call that terrible.

I can’t stop laughing at this.

I can get this. It’s like Will & Grace, but with flaming sitcom nerds. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly how it was pitched.

I’ve had a lot of people recommend Big Bang Theory to me, but once I set the Tivo to record a few episodes and sat down to watch them, I really didn’t enjoy it much. I’ve never tried to put into words exactly why, but I don’t have to…it’s been done (found via PA Report). I found myself agreeing with just about every word.

The humour in The Big Bang theory relies on the audience siding with and relating to Penny, the character coded as “normal” in comparison to the main four guys. It also relies on the audience having a sense of superiority over Leonard, Raj, Sheldon and Howard. We’re supposed to feel like we’re cooler than them and that we’re better than them. This then prompts us to laugh at the things which make them nerdy, which stop them being cool, which make them lesser.

That blog post also mentions Community, which I haven’t tried. Maybe I will.

Community is a billion zillion times better than Big Bang Theory.

And we all know there can only be one sitcom.

I disagree that the show relies on the audience relating to Penny. There are plenty of situations where she is the butt of the joke. One of my favorite episodes is the one where she gets hooked on Age of Conan.

Of course the audience is going to feel superior to the characters - that’s pretty much par for the course for your traditional MTM-style sitcom. We laughed at Woody’s hyper-innocence in the same way as we laugh at Raj’s inability to see why his comments are inappropriate. You laugh at George Costanza because he’s a complete and utter idiot and loser. Why is Big Bang being held to a different standard, with respect to its genre (which is not “modern” sitcom ala Arrested Development/Community/whatever)?

I think the show is funny, but it is running out of material and will be (if it hasn’t already) jumping the shark. At it’s best it is a very funny show, at it’s worst it is repetitive and very stereotypical.

Actually, that’s probably the main reason why I don’t like it. Despite everything else lobbed it’s way, the show is a 90’s sitcom and that’s what makes it hard to watch.

I loved 90’s sitcoms back in the 90’s, but nowadays most are terrible. I don’t care for BBT for much the same reason I never liked most of Lorre’s other shows, in that it is a lazy interpretation of the 90’s sitcom, not because of the geek (or faux-geek) milieu.

I’ve seen a bunch of episodes and it’s not quite as bad as that article states.

What Chuck Lorre wants us to find funny is not the jokes which the characters are making, it’s the characters themselves. At one point Howard mentions playing Dungeons and Dragons. There is no joke attached to this, it’s not the punchline to any set up, however it is treated as one. Howard says the words “Dungeons and Dragons” and the audience laughs. They’re not laughing at a joke, they’re laughing at the fact that Howard plays D&D. And this kind of thing happens all the time throughout the show. How many times has a joke been made out of Leonard owning action figures or Sheldon collecting comics?

Some of these problems are just crappy sitcom writing. BBT does the same thing with Jewish references. Or Redneck family jokes with Penny. It’s like, JEWISH THING, <laugh laugh laugh> and there really isn’t a joke there. Stereotypes are easy punchlines.

Community is a vastly better written show. Can’t argue with that.

The way that even the three guys laugh at Sheldon seems especially cruel. Yes, he’s painted as annoying, as an inconvenience and as just plain rude, however he is also read by many as autistic. So much so that my friend who works at a school for autistic children believed he had Asperger’s Syndrome and once asked me how they got away with ridiculing a character with special needs. I explained to her that no, Sheldon is not canonically autistic and she was shocked. She told me that he was a totally accurate portrayal of someone on the autistic spectrum and had many characteristics of someone with Asperger’s – specifically the inability to recognise sarcasm or understand human emotion as well as the obsession with “his spot” and his distress when routine is changed. Sheldon is consistently positioned as someone to be laughed at. It’s made to seem ok by the fact that his friends are laughing at him too and, of course, he isn’t technically autistic he’s just almost indistinguishable from someone who is.

Does bother me a bit. He’s not just eccentric he’s got some semi serious issues. I don’t know if that show has ever ‘hung a lampshade’ on this but it would help. Perhaps an episode where the characters stop making fun of Sheldon and Sheldon feels worse for not being treated like everyone else.

Everyone on the planet tells me I should love this show and when I tell them I simply do not find it funny, they are shocked. I am not sure if they think I will dig the nerd-y references and the supposed hilarity that accompanies them or what. To me, it is just another sitcom that simply pulls nerd references out of a joke box as their favorite go-to schtick.

I like BBT and get a chuckle out of it. I can watch it with the kids, which is important. While we all watch Communit together, they don’t get most of that humor (being 10 and 12) but they get MOST of the BBT stuff, though the laugh-track probably helps.

I have to pause and explain a LOT of Community. Community is my favorite sit-com (perhaps even more than Arrested Development) but I can see why BBT is more popular.

It’s the laugh track. I can’t take it.

Yeah, Arrested Development ruined traditional sitcoms for me, especially with laugh tracks. Ugh. Only one with a laugh track I can watch now is Titus.

I don’t hate it, but I don’t go out of my way to watch it. I sat through a mini-marathon on some cable channel on Christmas and I don’t think I laughed out loud once. But it wasn’t groan inducing, thankfully.

Community and Arrested Development, on the other hand…I sometimes couldn’t draw a breath while watching either of those shows.

QFMFT.

Last night’s episode had some serious LOLs for me.

And then in the blurb, at the end, Kaley Cuoco goes out of her way to prove that she’s nerd-catnip. Holy moly.

There is certainly worse and part of my issue is the way people look at me when I say I do not think it is funny. The “You of all people should love it” look. That reaction probably makes my neutral attitude toward the show shift to a more negative one.

If I were younger and had more time to watch TV, I would be more forgiving and may even enjoy the show, but when you have watched excellent sitcoms such as the ones folks reference when debating the pluses and minuses of BBT (Community being a prime example), it just compares so unfavorably. I do not have the time to sift through the show for the occasional chuckle.

By this point, the irritations about the show have built to a point where when I do attempt to give it another shot, which I have done several times, I get a sour look on my face and the dialog actually starts to irritate me. :)

As someone above said this is a show you can watch with your kids. There is a little bit there with one of the girls but not very much on average.

I don’t remember if I posted this here or not but I happened to be walking by the TV while Two Broke Girls was on. They were discussing anal sex, blow jobs and whatever else. A few days later I was talking to a friend who had almost the exact experience, he had heard the exact same five minutes of the show that I had. We both experienced WTF moments. How can they put that on TV?

Aside from that rant, comedy is personal. I hated Friends, my wife loved it. We both loved Cheers. We both like BBT, although I do find the re-runability of the show isn’t to good, especially since it is on several hours a day on a couple channels in the evening.

That’s because Cheers is a very, very good show. My wife and I started re-watching it recently (we’re a little too young to really remember it’s run when it was new), and it’s a shining example of the fact that multi-camera laugh track sitcoms don’t have to be bad or stupid.

I would put Taxi, Barney Miller and Soap in the same category of great, classic sitcoms that can withstand the test of time. The writing on all of those shows makes most modern sitcoms look pathetic.

I don’t know why but I was never a Taxi fan, but I loved Barney Miller and Soap. MASH is an old comedy that hasn’t aged well. It’s early years were very good but the later years are not nearly as good. It became very self indulgent. I thought Friends was like that. How could 5 friends end up sleeping together in almost every hetero combination and still remain friends?