The Big Crunch

I have a love-hate relationship with The Big Bang Theory.

On love, I feel like someone out there gets me. Many of the conversations on the show echo conversations I've had with friends - I quoted Picard one weekend, and the next week's episode used the same quote. I felt the same twinges of familiarity when the characters discussed whether or not they would be willing to use a Transporter. I can't cite other specific examples right now, but there are many of them and they cover many more areas of geeking than Star Trek. I like how the show depicts people eating so much - it makes them seem more relatable and acts as a story reason for the characters to all be in the same place.

But I have a lot of hate. I think it might be the most representative tragedy of our time.

I feel like it's a show about getting worn down.

I feel like it's a show that will do damage to the long-term image of scientists.

I feel like the show is fundamentally about how great it is to disengage from broader society when you have the company of other outcasts, even as it recognizes the good they could do for society as a whole. While it's a free choice, it's one that hurts a lot of people in a lot of little, insidious ways. It's a mode of belief I've been fighting, and I think I'm better and a better person for doing so.

I feel like the show tells the people who inspire it - the nerds, geeks, outcasts - that they have two possible lives: perpetual frustration at the world, like how Leonard was, even when he was with Penny, or like how the guy who owns the comic store hates his life, as he works 70 hours a week for $1.65 an hour doing something he ostensibly loves, and ultimately, that staying in that comfortable place full of resentment and entitlement to something better by virtue of your intellect is OK... or that you can try to move beyond it, but the only alternatives we see are a classist presentation of the service industry like Bernadette and Penny and the unhappy comic store guy.

But by far the most troublesome thing about the show is Penny's narrative arc. In early seasons, Penny's shock and anger at what the boys do is played as being unreasonable - that she should accomodate their ignorance of basic social norms, that *she* is in the wrong for being angry at their late-night rearranging of her appartment as she sleeps. This is victim blaming.

But now, as the show gets into later seasons, it gets worse. It's difficult to read Penny's slow-burn reignition of her relationship with Leonard, and more broadly, her growing accomodation of the rest of the cast, as anything but Penny settling - and validation for Leonard's every-episode creeping presence and mean-spirited, dismissive snarking. Leonard is a 'nice guy' and he'll probably win. Being a 'nice guy' is not a good thing. This show seems like it's saying it is.

and of course, that the show spends a lot of time laughing at someone with pronounced traits correlating to Aspergers and OCD.