Numerous people have encouraged me to watch The Big Bang Theory over the years, but since I don't have access to current TV shows I never got around to checking it out. Then while traveling a couple of weeks ago I watched a bunch of syndicated episodes on the motel room TV. (This was also how I got into The Golden Girls a few years ago.) They were entertaining enough that when I came back home I got the first-season DVDs from the public library, and I just finished watching the second season. Eventually I expect I'll go through the whole set.
So, The Big Bang Theory is fun; it's a standard situation comedy, well-written and excellently cast. It's built around four scientists -- or three scientists and an engineer if you're a purist, as they are -- based in a university near Los Angeles, plus a pretty blonde, young actress/waitress, newly arrived in LA from Nebraska at the beginning of Season One, who lives across the hall from two of them. That the protagonists were scientists excited the show's fans, who celebrated the arrival of media representation for Sciento-Americans on a major network. A physics professor was enlisted by the show's creators to fill in jargon for a veneer of authenticity. According to an interview with him featured in the Season Two DVDs, the writers would write the script, with "[Science coming]" at key moments for him to fill in.
Not all the nerdiness is science, though. The program is peppered with references to videogames, Star Trek, Star Wars, comic books and their spinoff media, paintball, and other such cultural artifacts. Without these elements I think the show would have had less mass appeal. But it works, and it ran for thirteen years. Looking at the full cast listing from IMDB, I see that a lot of nerd magnets had cameos, from George Takei, William Shatner, Carrie Fisher and James Earl Jones to Bill Nye, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Buzz Aldrin. And more.
So, is this representation? I haven't hung around with enough scientists to say. What I see is that the characters are a collection of stereotypes, which is to be expected in a comedy, but I'm intrigued that scientists and nerds evidently embraced their depiction as stereotypes, even caricatures: Sheldon the former child prodigy and Spock imitator from Texas, probably on the Spectrum; Howard the Jewish horndog engineer who lives with his mother and has a peanut allergy; Rajesh the Hindu who can only talk to women when he's drunk and must fend off his parents' nagging to get married; Leonard, Sheldon's lactose intolerant roommate but still kinda Everyman, who has more romantic success than his buddies but lusts hopelessly after Penny.
Compare Will and Grace, another landmark of minority representation on network television. Most of the gay men I know professed to hate it, mainly because of the flaming, flighty Jack, and it was widely attacked for its use of stereotypes. That I recognized the justice of these complaints didn't keep me from enjoying the show. The Big Bang Theory surprised me by its use not only of nerd stereotypes, but of ethnic ones. I thought Political Correctness and Cancel Culture had destroyed comedy?
To me the guys in The Big Bang Theory seem to be normal TV sitcom guys, with their scientific pursuits and nerdy cultural consumption mere superficial details; they could be on Friends or Seinfeld, for example. Their incomprehension and frustration with women is standard, as is their assumption that ordinary shlubs like them have the right to date and sleep with the hottest women. (One variation I like is that Kunal Nayyar is not only the best-looking of the bunch but, when he has a couple of drinks and is able to talk to them, the most successful with women until the alcohol wears off. Sheldon's hot sister Missy, for example, rebuffs Howard and Leonard but is very interested in Raj and frustrated when his voice cuts out in mid-encounter. The actress Summer Glau also responds to him warmly in her cameo, but is also frustrated. I'll be interested to see how this pattern continues as I watch more of the series.)
I've said before, in connection with Will and Grace, that great comedy characters like Jack or Karen Walker, or Sheldon and Howard, aren't supposed to be role models or positive images. Just because they're fun to watch on the screen doesn't mean that you'd want to spend much time with them in real life. For that matter a real live physicist, George Smoot, has a tiny scene putting Sheldon down in one episode of Season Two; he's terrible, even for a non-actor. (I wonder how many takes they needed?) Jim Parsons, who plays Sheldon, is a marvelous physical comic, exemplified by a scene in which Sheldon realizes he owes Penny a hug and delivers it with hilarious and yet touching pathos. It's not reality, it's writing and acting.
