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A Critical Look At Walter "Scorpion" O'Brien
1729 (581437) writes Back in August, there was speculation that the "real life" Walter O'Brien (alleged inspiration for CBS's new drama Scorpion) might be a fraud. Mike Masnick from Techdirt follows up on the story: "The more you dig, the more of the same you find. Former co-workers of O'Brien's have shown up in comments or reached out to me and others directly — and they all say the same thing. Walter is a nice enough guy, works hard, does a decent job (though it didn't stop him from getting laid off from The Capital Group), but has a penchant for telling absolutely unbelievable stories about his life. It appears that in just repeating those stories enough, some gullible Hollywood folks took him at his word (and the press did too), and now there's a mediocre TV show about those made up stories." Masnick's article is a fascinating look at a man who appears to have conned both TV executives and journalists into believing his far-fetched Walter Mitty fantasies.
Holy hell is this post ever going to come off as smug and condescending, but I have a point I want to make, and I can't express it less awfully.
Entertainment and intelligence are basically oil and water, most of the time. You can take brilliant writers who are very smart people, and they don't write "intelligent" stuff for mass market entertainment. They just focus their intelligence into making good writing that is evocative to everyone. I wouldn't expect a brilliant screenplay to expect everyone in the audience to make the kind of deductions I know some people are capable of, to tie everything together super subtly as some kinda cleverness test(though the occasional piece like that is nice).
In the same way, writers of all stripes(though mostly bad ones) write "smart" characters by filling their lines up with appropriate jargon. In some cases most familiar to slashdotters that means technobabble, but in others legalbabble, moneybabble, or psychobabble. They do this because actually coming up with intelligent things to say is hard and requires a lot of in depth knowledge of an appropriate field(there's an anecdote out there about the director of "A beautiful mind" expecting their math consultant to fill a chalkboard with genuinely intelligent math equations in an hour, as if that were no problem). And in the end that hard work doesn't come off to most people as nearly as intelligent as a bunch of nonsensical jargon.
That brings me to my thesis: real genuine genius is only interesting to people equipped to break it down and understand how it's novel. And that has a lot more to do with field-specific domain knowledge than intelligence. For example, anyone versed in math can tell you that the triumph for a brilliant idea comes when you have an new notion of where to start deducing things, not when you write the final calculation down. And the formulation of a clever computer program comes way back in the architecture phase, not a few lines of coded jotted out at the last moment.
You don't want it in most entertainment. It's nowhere near as satisfying as coming up with the right thing at the right moment to solve the problem facing you. It doesn't fit with the narrative format.
I enjoy BBT.
While the idiosyncrasies of the characters are grossly exaggerated, and while Sheldon's character is rife with contradictions, I still find the show enjoyable for exactly what it is -- simple comedy. 22 minutes a week, most weeks, where I get to have a laugh with some familiar faces who stumble through the same sort of tried-and-true TV comedy tropes of shows past -- except this time it happens in places and settings and over topics I'm intimately familiar with. I've sat in a game store and had conversations about girlfriends over comic books. I've seen friends that needed rescued from 96 straight hours of WoW. Putting your basic "Cheers" comedy in this setting makes it something I can relate to.
I can put aside Sheldon's conveniently-ignored-when-inconvenient logic as part of my suspension of disbelief.
The show used to be about the "triangle" between Sheldon and Leonard and Penny. The show has evolved to a compare-and-contrast of the relationships of Shedon/Amy, Leonard/Penny and Howard/Bernadette. Even now we explore the relationships of Raj and his new girlfriend, and minor character Stewart and Howard's mom. I've grown up in the nerd world. I'm watching my younger friends get married now. I see the same compare and contrast.
It's not perfect, but it's an enjoyable 22 minutes.
Aside: If you enjoy Chuck Lorre's comedies AT ALL, I suggest tuning into "Mom." It's surprisingly dark with a wonderful cast who deal with real problems -- teen sex and pregnancy, alcohol and drug dependency, infidelity, money....real problems. It's not intended to be literal-serious, of course, but it's a wonderfully refreshing twist on what Chuck gives us.
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