I noticed this as well, it’s pretty annoying. But it’s just all for the gags, I suppose. Which is extra dumb because it’s not a very funny show compared to shows (like those mentioned above) that put some effort into making the characters stand on their own, without a laugh track.
Add The Good Place, and sort of Brooklyn 99…
The change I hated most was what they did to Radar’s character. In the movie and first season he was, if not worldly, at least capable of almost anything, in the TV show he got whimpier and whimpier with each season.
As for the Big Bang, we record it and watch it from time to time. There is some good and also some bad. I do think it has pretty much played itself out as they very rarely do anything original anymore.
I think it depends on where you draw the line of “plot”, but most long-running sit-coms had major changes.
Even Leave it to Beaver, kind of an ur-sitcom, had some major changes that spanned multiple episodes: The family moved houses, Wally got and broke up with girlfriends, Beaver had crushes on teachers, etc. Few of these were as complicated as the sub-arcs in Big Bang, of course, but they were there.
In the 70s, Happy Days advanced their characters’ relationships and lives fairly radically. Heck, over the course of eleven seasons, Richie Cunningham graduated high school, went to college, joined the army, got married, had a son, and got a career-level job.
By the 1980s, this kind of thing was pretty much expected. All the long-running “Must-See TV” shows like Cosby, Seinfeld, etc. had characters grow up, get go off to school, acquire partners, etc. Rosanne in particular did a lot of that. Certainly you’d have “blocks” of episodes where a particular girlfriend/boyfriend was introduced, hung around, and then was broken up with.
And there were plenty of examples of single-season arcs. Let’s take Jo’s character from The Facts of Life: this character grew and changed a fair amount in the course of a single season from a shoplifting punk at odds with all the other characters to a reasonably settled member of the cast with “frenemy” relationships. Over the course of the long-running show, her character does a full 180 and ends up deciding to become a teacher to help other troubled girls like herself. She had a long-distance boyfriend who popped in once or twice a season, and that relationship was kind of a long-running, low bandwidth arc itself.
But much of what you are describing is because the main characters “grew up” on the show. You couldn’t keep them in high school for 11 seasons. Any show with kids must have some sort of progression for those kids.
Yes. And while Seinfeld did have some running plots (George and Susan, for example), Seinfeld and Larry David both very specifically said (I believe) that they did not want there to be lessons learned, character growth, etc. in the show. It was intentionally set up so that the characters would not change (because they did not want to do one of those sitcoms where the characters all learned something about themselves and grew as people).
Right, and that worked for Seinfeld because they had fantastic writers who could weave multiple interlocking stories that would come together in the most unexpected and hilarious way possible. Whereas the Big Bang Theory…does not.
And they killed off his brother.
I think the idea that sitcoms don’t have story arcs dates back to the 70’s and earlier.
Speaking of story arcs. Just watched the episode where Penny brings Sheldon to a psychic. She tells him that when he finally gives himself to the woman that he is in a relationship with, he will finally become what he wants. Or something like that.
Then when he is getting married they discover super asymmetry.
The psychic was right!
Did you see the finale yet?
We have the last 4 episodes to watch recorded. We might get thru a couple this weekend. I guess the final is an hour so that will be one sitting.
We kind of have a love/hate thing going with the show at this point. We like the characters, but the writing and story quality vary so much from show to show. We like one, we hate one.
I hate TBBT. That’s all.
Yes I did.
I generally enjoyed the stories, the characters, any themes they carried through to the end, how they added new characters and they worked really well, most of them… but yeah the ending felt satisfying to me for a number of reasons. Well loved series for me.
So that’s you and me, right? :) I know it was cool to hate it. Some episodes fell flat. But all together I quite enjoyed it.
Haha, sure feels like it doesn’t it?
Yeah there were some characters, story lines and ideas that were blah but for a series that ran that long and touched on some of my favorites hobbies and idea, high on my list of favs. I am just glad they ended it as well as they did and while still relatively doing well.
… sadly a few other shows of mine went or are going down hill and will likely be yanked or end meh.
Sheldon was sorta okay, I guess.
I like all those characters!
I’ll just say that a wildly popular show mocking the educated is probably not what the world needed at this particular moment in history.