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'The Big Bang Theory' Is Finally Ending (theguardian.com)
"The Big Bang Theory is dead. If you need me, I'll be dancing on its grave," writes a TV columnist for the Guardian:
The inexplicably popular geek sitcom has announced that its 12th season will be its last. Its demise should come as a relief to everybody... Producers have promised an "epic creative close" when the series ends in May. After that, The Big Bang Theory will be dead, and nobody will be sad. Except, of course, they will. Because, inexplicably, The Big Bang Theory is still one of the most-watched shows on U.S. television. It regularly gets more than 15 million viewers an episode, and, statistically, not all of them can be incapacitated to the point of being unable to change channels whenever it comes on.
Nothing confuses me more than The Big Bang Theory's success. It has always been markedly less smart than it thought it was; the TV version of someone wearing a "GEEK" T-shirt because they liked a Facebook post about the moon once.... Watch any recent episode of The Big Bang Theory and you'll see that it is barely even a sitcom at this point. It has been going on for so long that the writing, presentation and performances are more or less autonomous. Everyone is just glumly going through the motions, stuck in the tracks they've carved out for themselves over the years. It's like watching a museum exhibit of a sitcom made with mannequins and miserable circus bears.
The actor who plays Sheldon will be 46 when the show ends, the columnist points out, adding that for 12 years he's been playing "a weirdly ageless man-boy trapped in a developmentally arrested closed-loop flatshare scenario more suited to somebody half his age." The Guardian titled their piece "Our Long Nightmare is Finally Over" -- but leave your own thoughts in the comments.
How do you feel about the ending of The Big Bang Theory?
Update from msmash: Two suggested readings, one from The Guardian itself, Critics be damned -- here's why The Big Bang Theory is an unstoppable force with fans, and this four-year-old article from Vulture, Why Are 23.4 Million People Watching The Big Bang Theory?
Nothing confuses me more than The Big Bang Theory's success. It has always been markedly less smart than it thought it was; the TV version of someone wearing a "GEEK" T-shirt because they liked a Facebook post about the moon once.... Watch any recent episode of The Big Bang Theory and you'll see that it is barely even a sitcom at this point. It has been going on for so long that the writing, presentation and performances are more or less autonomous. Everyone is just glumly going through the motions, stuck in the tracks they've carved out for themselves over the years. It's like watching a museum exhibit of a sitcom made with mannequins and miserable circus bears.
The actor who plays Sheldon will be 46 when the show ends, the columnist points out, adding that for 12 years he's been playing "a weirdly ageless man-boy trapped in a developmentally arrested closed-loop flatshare scenario more suited to somebody half his age." The Guardian titled their piece "Our Long Nightmare is Finally Over" -- but leave your own thoughts in the comments.
How do you feel about the ending of The Big Bang Theory?
Update from msmash: Two suggested readings, one from The Guardian itself, Critics be damned -- here's why The Big Bang Theory is an unstoppable force with fans, and this four-year-old article from Vulture, Why Are 23.4 Million People Watching The Big Bang Theory?
Or the caricatures of geeks presented by the sitcom do not resonate with actual geeks because they are fake.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Laughing at yourself is great when one of your own is doing the joking, not when some smug outsider asshole is making fun of you. One is fun self-reflection. The other is just being a dick.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I liked this show for the first few seasons. Then it turned into Friends...and I didn't like it so much.
From the article: How do you feel about the ending of The Big Bang Theory?
Sad.
Say whatever else you want about the show, it showed an oddball coolness to geekdom.
Howard gets jerked off by a robot arm... and gets stuck. This would be lame lonely geek turf, but who owned that arm? NASA.
Raj can't talk to women until he's drunk... hmmm... maybe why that's my workplace sells several million dollars of beer every year.
Penny is the struggling waitress wanna-be actress turned pharmaceutical rep - sales is sales, and sometimes you just have to move onto what you're good at.
Sheldon makes semi-functional Aspergers cool in its own infuriating way.
And Leonard somehow is the leader (despite the Roommate Agreement) and keeps the place from falling apart.
Chuck Lorre is a genius.
I suspect that geeks generally lack the part of the brain that allows them to laugh at themselves. Kinda like reptiles lack that area of the brain that would allow them to experience emotional attachment.
And that's precisely the problem, and what made Chuck Lorre's show such a hit for so many years.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I used to like it, partly because it didn't take itself seriously - the characters were caricatures, but I could see aspects of myself and geek friends in the caricatures and laugh at them. Somewhere around season 5 all the characters started getting girlfriends and having semi-normal relationships and it wasn't funny anymore.
When people learn that I have a degree in Physics, they almost instantly assume that I am a fan of The Big Bang Theory". Alas, it is painful to watch, it never was very written, and the obviously fake laugh track makes me cringe.
Yes, I tried to get into it, but even early on, it was, well, awful. As in unwatchable for me. I am surprised (or perhaps I should be surprised) that it lasted as long as it has.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
I suspect that geeks generally lack the part of the brain that allows them to laugh at themselves. Kinda like reptiles lack that area of the brain that would allow them to experience emotional attachment.
Elementary school probably wasn't fun for most of us who wear the geek label with pride.
We grew up having to be defensive. Defensive of our interests, our property, our lunch money.
Why would I learn emotional attachment when I'm being called a freak by people who are more interested in kicking a ball around than doing something intelligent like reading a book?
I'm a nerd. I'm a four-eyes. I'm smarter than you, I'm tougher than you, and I'm proud to be who I am.
But what we experienced on the playground must never be forgotten. It has, I believe, damaged the social skills of a lot of us.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
That show was never laughing *WITH* us. It was laughing *AT* us.
More likely that the portrayal of a given group in an entertainment setting rarely sits well with the group being portrayed. It is why there are doctors who refuse to watch ER and House, cops who refuse to watch NYPD blue, etc.
The artistic license required to make something entertaining is what makes people knowledgeable about that something scream, "that's not how it works!" at the screen when they are watching. For example, police work is not all high speed chases, kicking down doors, and arresting suspects. It is like 95% boring paperwork. Medical diagnostics is not some sociopath verbally abusing a group of medical students into committing crimes because they are too afraid to stand up to him.
To look at two movies that I think most people just assume all geeks like, take Hackers and Sneakers. Both were based on somewhat flimsy premises, thought Sneakers was more believable. Hackers was all about hacking itself and showed that activity like it was some sort of real-time battle between the attackers and the defender. It normally doesn't work like that. Sneakers was all about the social engineering. It turns out, that hacking tends to be far more about social engineering that actual technical exploits (though those do play a role). That is why, to me as a geek, Sneakers was so much more appealing. Despite the plot holes and other flaws, it felt more believable than Hackers.
Probably why shows like Star Trek and Firefly were much more appealing to geeks that BBT. They go off into territory where believability is much less important and they generally do a good job of making the unbelievable believable.
If you don't like it, don't watch it. Works for me. No need to get all melodramatic.
You are dismissing people who dislike it without actually understanding WHY they dislike it.
1. Wisecrack recently did an analysis of WHY the humor in TBBT is so bland:
* The Big Bang Theory: What Went Wrong? - Wisecrack Edition
My bold emphasis added.
@2:33
@3:24
2. TBBT without the laugh track shows just how bland and boring the show really is:
* The Big Bang Theory - No Laugh Track 1 (Avoiding the Shamy)
Does that mean I "hate" TBBT ? No. I just find it over-rated.
But please keep:
* placing people into a False Dilemma / dichotomy fallacy -- "You don't like the show so you MUST hate it.", and
* using Ad Hominem fallacy -- "Haters going to hate"; whining about how people hate X without taking the time to LEARN _what_ and _why_ specifically it is they dislike about it.
---
There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness. -- Josh Billings
"It was laughing *AT* us."
It was laughing at the characters, because it is a sitcom. Are you familiar with the genre?
It wasn't laughing at geeks, because it was pointing out that the problems that geeks have are the problems that *everyone* has[1] sch as:
Spouses with significantly different earnings.
Involuntary career changes.
Self-sabotage of relationships
Dealing with parents as fellow adults.
Workplace rivalries.
Note that the only character who has not had at least one long term relationship in the show is the guy with the art degree who had a business that failed once.
It was also laughing at you you.
[1] One exception: how PhDs view those with a terminal masters. But even there, that's just because a PhD is a requirement and still it includes any field where PhDs are awarded.
This was a shitty show, they actors were little more than mean caricatures of nerds and geeks. They were doing the equivalent of wearing 'geek blackface'. If the show was focusing its humor on black people instead of nerds, the studio would be firebombed the day the first episode aired. It was a shitty show, and it belongs in the same category as 'Song of the South' - if not actually truly offensive, pretty tasteless none the less.
But, it is hugely popular in America, because for the past 20 years, we have been going through a profound cultural and economic shift. The nerd has gone from the mocked and outcast spaz of the 80's comedies (Revenge of the Nerds, various John Hughes movies) to ruling every aspect of modern life. (The founders of Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc.) The common blue collar worker has been utterly crushed by nerds and geeks, his work is being threatened by automation and disruptive startups, and he is slowly being gentrified out of house and home as the middle class is crushed by the new class of tech workers made up of these strange spastic twerps that he picked on in high school. This is no less than a dimly veiled mocking of geek culture, and emasculation of their threat to middle class America.
"Oh look, they aren't going to create a new start-up that shuts down the plant and puts me out of work, they are just a bunch of stupid gits that are scared of girls"
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!