Big Bang Deflated

I haven't had a sitcom that I enjoy watching since Friends ended. Obviously I'm not asking a lot out of my light comedy entertainment. And yet I do need a little something. Unique and enjoyable characters, less-than-obvious choices, and maybe a few funny moments along the way. But most sitcoms violate all three of these. Characters are unloaded directly from the stereotype warehouse. The situations and plots are dead-on obvious. And the jokes are stale retreads, usually based on either stereotypes behaving stereotypically, or vaguely sarcastic comments that try for biting wit.

Unfortunately I saw all these faults in the first episode of Big Bang Theory. I watched it with friends on Monday, and they found it to be hilarious. Now these are people who generally have sophisticated and iconoclastic tastes, and I respect their opinions enormously. But in this case I just could not see it. I would love to enjoy a geeky sitcom, but so much of this episode was just mind-numbingly dreadful. Just off the top of my head:

• All of the geeks are rendered insensible by an attractive woman...
  
• ...and they do anything she wants just because she's pretty.
  
• None of the geeks know how to talk to non-geeks.
  
• The blonde girl who's rather vacant and has a limited imagination.
  
• Geeks who get their pants stolen by a stronger bully. That's the one that really horked me off... could you be any less clever about it?

Geek humor is frankly a major source of enjoyment for me; I love how it plays out in everything from Jonathan Coulton to xkcd. It's not like there's a dearth of material out there... and the subject is very ripe for humor. But the level of humor that showed up on this episode was just weak retreads of old Revenge of the Nerds jokes. It would be crushingly disappointing if it weren't so predictable.

Now, that said, it's possible that this is just a starting point. Frankly the first episodes of most sitcoms are rather stale; they're working so hard to establish the characters that they resort to broad stereotypes to define them. The initial episodes of Friends give you no hint that there would actually be something interesting about these characters down the road. As the plots grow in complexity and the actors begin to establish three-dimensional characters, they can grow into life. There were a few moments that give me hope; for example the incipient OCD of the #2 geek has some potential, and if they can add some balance to the misguidedly-social geek he could be a fun character. I'm going to try watching a few more episodes to see if it goes anywhere.

But as it stands, it's a singularly horrible example of why network TV is just about doomed.