Thespian said:
To me, the whole show is just Chuck Lorre and everyone on his payroll going "Hey! Look! These guys are losers! Look at how the losers like to spend their time! Am I right? Am I right?"
This is a lot of it. It is a Chuck Lorre sitcom first and foremost; if someone wanted to know if they would enjoy
Big Bang Theory, you would not ask "are you a nerd?", rather, you would ask "do you like
Two and a Half Men?"
And being a Chuck Lorre sitcom, it suffers from the typical problems:
- Shitty stereotypes. (At the time that I stopped watching (season 3 or so), half the characters were no more developed than 'an ethnicity + 1 character quirk.')
- Jokes that can be predicted several minutes before they are made.
- Use of the laugh track for lines WHICH ARE CLEARLY NOT JOKES. I MEAN COME ON!
Furthermore, it has a whole set of nerd-specific problems:
- The main joke is often 'character x uses nerdy word/concept, character y explains nerdy word/concept'. Cue laugh track.
- (This also means that each joke potentially takes twice as long to tell; no joke that relies on some piece of arcane knowledge is simply left to the nerds of the audience, but is explained until the most braindead of the audience can understand it.)
- It gets things wrong. E.g. Sheldon says that the reductio ad absurdum is a logical fallacy. This would be forgivable for other shows, but not those directed at an audience that might be expected to know these things.
- Being one of the few shows on mainstream television that is "for" nerds, people who identify as nerds often feel obliged to like it (and quote it, unfortunately), instead of accepting it for what it is--a mediocre and formulaic sitcom that might have a handful of funny moments, but is mostly '
Two and a Half Men with nerds'.
