In defense of Big Bang Theory
The relationship between how long a television show runs and how good it is is, at best, not very correlated. The longest-running scripted series in America include Lassie at fifth-longest, American Dad at ninth, and Two and a Half Men at 25th.
If you were somehow tasked with ranking every single U.S. television series of all time (and good lord, whoever gave you that assignment would be a jerk), I would wager those three wouldn’t be anywhere near the top 100. But people watched, so they survived.
So when I say The Big Bang Theory is unfairly maligned, know that I’m not using “But it ran 12 seasons!” as part of my argument. That’s a result, not a cause.
Got that? Okay.
The Big Bang Theory is unfairly maligned.
Among the general viewing public, Big Bang was a champion of a show; from its third season to its last, it never ranked worse than seventh in ratings in the 18-49 demographic. From its seventh season until the end, it ranked second or first in total viewers every year. (It ranked lower in its first season — not uncommon — and second, but there was a writers strike throwing everything off.) Among the internet intelligentsia, however, it was considered gauche to even watch the show, let alone enjoy it. It was an unfair depiction of nerds, playing hard into the tropes of socially awkward smart guys and their difficulties in being remotely normal.
The criticisms? Well, they’re fair. The show wasn’t exactly turning conventions on their heads so much as it was turning the stereotypes up to 11 and hitting them head on. (It’s different when your secondary or tertiary character is the “struggles with girls” nerd than when it’s every single main character at once.) It turned the nerd kids into the popular kids in terms of bullying (check out just about any plotline with Zack, the hot-but-dumb guy who popped up 11 different times to be oblivious and get mocked by the smart guys). It played into some very problematic tropes in terms of its treatment of women. It was not, despite pretending to be, progressive.
That’s all true. But do you know what Big Bang was? It was funny. It wasn’t as funny as the viewing public appeared to believe sometimes, but it was funny.
Part of that comes from Big Bang’s approach. In Big Bang, the jokes rule all. I briefly, in 2012, made plans to move to Los Angeles and try my hand at writing for TV. I was putting together as many spec scripts as I could, and reading about tips and tricks for writing them. I found one article about spec scripts for comedy that gave a shorthand for a bunch of different shows. “Writing a spec for How I Met Your Mother? Play with timelines.” “Community? Spoof a genre.” It was not in-depth advice by any means, but then it wasn’t meant to be; it was just trying to put you in the same ballpark as those shows.
The advice it gave for Big Bang was “jokes upon jokes upon jokes.” In other words, an episode of Big Bang involved throwing a thousand jokes against the wall to see what sticks. If you made it a metaphor for basketball, some shows were Steph Curry, accurate and deadly. Some were Shaq, overpowering. Big Bang was Kobe. It was never going to rank that high in shooting percentage, but man, by sheer raw numbers, it was going to make you laugh. And if you stack up all the laughs and ignore the misses, well, Kobe had the fourth-most points in NBA history.
(I ended up not moving to LA — obviously — because my dad’s health took a downward turn right around when I was making my plans and I was more needed around here. He held on for another four years, but I still felt I was needed around here for a while and ended up never making the sojourn. I probably never would have made it anyway, just because any individual person will probably never make it. My spec for Big Bang was good, though. I had a few different shows I wrote specs for, and a couple partial scripts for original ideas, but the Big Bang one was the best. I still believe that.)
No, Sheldon and Leonard and Raj and Howard were not perfect examples of nerd culture, any more than Barne7 Stinson or Cosmo Kramer or Ron Swanson were exactly believable as humans. The guys in The League weren’t remotely believable as fantasy football players, either, because the show cared more about making them funny than making them believable. But I won’t lie; when they played Catan in the episode were Leonard tried to get back together with Penny, I perked up at the appearance. Every time there was a cursory reference to Hitchhiker’s Guide (I can distinctly remember three and I’m sure there were more), I got excited. Everybody has some form of nerd culture they are passionate about, even if it isn’t all-encompassing like it was for the characters on the show, and seeing your particular niche of nerdhood on the TV screen is exciting, sort of a (very, extremely) poor man’s version of seeing your race or other minority status represented. (Lord, that sentence is risky. I trust that you know what I mean and I’m not actually comparing “I like X board game” to being black.)
In many ways, Big Bang was an utterly traditional sitcom that tried to pretend it was something else. It still had the laugh track. It was pasty white across the board, with the lone minority main character being there for comic relief (Raj was the only character not to find love by the end of the run), and it was predominantly about the efforts of the main character to find love in this crazy world.
The purest form of a successful sitcom is “X people exist in Y place.” It’s very difficult to pull off a high-aiming premise in sitcom form. People work in an office. Friends spend time in a coffee shop. Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place. If you can’t get your premise across in a phrase, your sitcom isn’t likely to live very long. Some shows require an elevator pitch. The best sitcoms boil that down to, like, the “passing a guy in the hall” pitch. Big Bang, for all of its pretending to the contrary, fit that perfectly: “A normal show, but with nerds.” That was it. It did not rebuild the sitcom. It did not reimagine any paradigms. It just took a fairly simple conceit, packed it with as many jokes and references as it could, and let the general public react. I don’t believe it was a top-five show in TV history by any means. But it didn’t have to be that to be worth its run.
What a sitcom needs to do is be funny. And what Big Bang was, was funny.