The Hilarity of the Nerds: Big Bang Theory Ignites Hope for TV Sitcoms

[Zoneboy]

Link

VANCOUVER - The Big Bang Theory has gone boom all of a sudden. The sophomore sitcom about two social misfits who happen to be brilliant physicists jumped more than 30 per cent last month over its most recent numbers, disproving the TV axiom that says traditional sitcoms are dead.

Smart is the new sexy. It's hip to be square again. And The Big Bang Theory is going boldly where few second-year TV comedies have gone before — into nerdvana.

Big Bang Theory features Johnny Galecki and Jim Parsons as "beautiful minds" who know how the universe works, but haven't a clue about how to navigate the world of dating, lovemaking or social interaction in general.

It's a throwback to the dinosaur age of TV comedies, when live studio audiences laughed at the antics of seemingly ordinary, everyday people wrestling with ordinary, everyday problems. The Big Bang Theory is an old-school comedy for a brave new TV world.

In just its second season, Big Bang has bucked the trend of diminishing returns for second-year TV series. Big Bang's cumulative audience has grown, from 9 million viewers last September to 10 million in November. It reached a series high last month, when it popped at 13 million for an episode featuring Christine Baranski as Leonard's brainy, not-entirely-there mother, "Mrs. Hofstadter." Those viewers put The Big Bang Theory in heady company for a TV sitcom, just behind comedy-ratings leader Two and a Half Men and well ahead of Emmy winners The Office and 30 Rock.

In Canada, Big Bang Theory has fared almost as well; it has averaged north of 900,000 viewers since it started airing on CTV in December. That places it just behind Two and Half Men and Corner Gas as the network's most-watched comedies.

The evolution of TV comedy can be summed up in a simple equation: Slapstick (I Love Lucy) + Realism (Roseanne, Mad About You) = Realistic Slapstick (The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother).

Comedy got smart again. Big Bang Theory is full of clever, inside jokes, from the names of its lead characters — Sheldon Leonard was a legendary TV producer who created the groundbreaking I Spy, among other culturally defining series — to its wacky-but-brainy episode titles like The Bad Fish Paradigm and The Panty Pinata Polarization.

Big Bang's co-creators, Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady, came by their pseudo-scientific project honestly. Prady was a computer programmer in a previous life, and has an astrophysicist check every Big Bang Theory script to make sure its jargon is scientifically accurate. Lorre, meanwhile, wanted to apply the warmth and humanity of the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind to the time-honoured formula of traditional sitcoms like Two and a Half Men, his other TV creation.

The character of Sheldon (Parsons) is unusual for a sitcom character. Far from being warm, fuzzy, inviting and non-threatening, Lorre and Prady made him snooty, arrogant, hostile and judgmental to a fault.

They took pains not to make him irritating, though. Like another brilliant-but-arrogant TV character in a certain medical drama, the writers were careful to give Sheldon an underlying neediness and vulnerability that makes him more human somehow, if not always easy to like.

Sheldon is a Star Trek fan — a popular Big Bang episode from November was called The Lizard-Spock Expansion — but he's leery of the medium of television. He's of a similar mind to Al Gore, who noted in The New York Times Magazine last summer that TV induces a collective trance state, "because the brain's fear center, the amygdala, receives only a fraction of electrical impulses from the neocortex."

If Sheldon were ever to find the secret to happiness, he might verbalize it as a scientific equation: Happiness = (Reality + Flexibility) — Expectations.

Sheldon may be a dweeb, but he's not a dork.

"There's an innate charm and sweetness to Jim (Parsons) that allows us to make Sheldon as obnoxious as we want, and we can get away with it," Lorre told Canwest News Service during a visit last month to The Big Bang Theory's set in Burbank, Calif. "There's an innocence there that comes through."

With Leonard, Lorre and Prady crafted a character who is smart but grounded. Leonard is loyal, generous and fiercely protective of his friend and roommate, even as he tries to find his own way in the strange world outside his comfort zone.

For the proverbial girl-next-door, Lorre imagined a seemingly naive young woman who's sharper than she lets on. Penny, played with a winsome charm by Kaley Cuoco, has some of Big Bang Theory's best lines.

As with all good TV comedies, the humour comes from the human situations. The snappy comebacks, ripostes and one-liners evolve from real-life, human situations, Lorre insists — not the other way around. Funny is funny.

"I've always resisted the notion of just calling them 'nerds,' because it doesn't define who they are," Lorre said. "They're human beings. They have parents, and they have brothers and sisters, and goals and fears. 'Nerd' or 'geek' doesn't begin to describe who they are. In fact, they're probably the people who will change the world. They could even blow it up."

Parsons, for his part, said playing Sheldon is about being willing to take risks, while knowing where to draw the line. The studio audience helps, he admitted.

"We have to walk up to that line, but we cannot cross it," Parsons said. "We've gone through scenes in the past where we had to correct it on the spot, where we found ourselves saying, 'We've gone too far; we need to bring it back. The audience doesn't like the way you're talking to Penny.' He can be biting and he can get snarky, but he can never get malicious. It's a fine line."

Parsons has known a few Sheldons in his life.

"No one ever says they're just like Sheldon, and neither do I. They always say they know someone like Sheldon. 'I have this friend.' It's anal."

Making a TV sitcom is not rocket science, Lorre said — not even a sitcom as brainy as Big Bang Theory.

"We're just trying to make a show that we laugh at ourselves, and hope that somebody else out there laughs with us," he said. "That's really all there is to it. If it's not funny to us, we don't do it."

The Big Bang Theory airs Mondays on CTV and CBS at 8 ET/PT.


The episode-title conundrum

What's in a name? Plenty, according to The Big Bang Theory. Here are some of the popular sitcom's more inspired choices for episode titles.

The Big Bran Hypothesis

The Luminous Fish Effect

The Hamburger Postulate

The Middle Earth Paradigm

The Dumpling Paradox

The Grasshopper Experiment

The Cooper-Hofstadter Polarization

The Loobenfeld Decay

The Pancake Batter Anomaly

The Jerusalem Duality

The Bat Jar Conjecture

The Nerdvana Annihilation

The Pork Chop Indeterminacy

The Peanut Reaction

The Codpiece Topology

The Barbarian Sublimation

The Griffin Equivalency

The Euclid Alternative

The Cooper-Nowitzki Theorem

The White Asparagus Triangulation

The Bath Item Gift Hypothesis

The Friendship Algorithm

The Financial Permeability

The Maternal Capacitance

The Cushion Saturation

The Terminator Decoupling

[Mr. Television]

I hope the success of BBT can ignite a return for the traditional sitcom.

[tv star collector]

Great show. I love it!