Casual Cogitations

Sitcom veteran Lorre, the executive producer of Two and a Half Men, co-created The Big Bang Theory, but apparently his sizable sitcom fortune hasn’t blunted his anger at the world in general and intellectuals specifically. The Big Bang Theory takes as its premise that people who are super-smart will never have sex, and what’s more, those geeks who attempt to emerge from their socially awkward shells should be viciously attacked. In a funny way, ha-ha-ha.

I'm not sure what Chuck Lorre has against smart people, but with the foul sitcom The Big Bang Theory he tries to have his revenge against anyone with an IQ above room temperature.

CBS is openly aspiring to make itself cooler and to hang with the hipsters, so to speak. What the network fails to realize is that, these days, the nerds are the hipsters. Many far superior fall shows and a host of successful recent movies take as their premise that geeks are gently mockable but also kind of cool and attractive.

Never mind all that. In the eyes of Lorre and his co-creator, Bill Prady, every nerd deserves to be given a wedgie and shoved in a locker.

The unfortunate stars of this show are Johnny Galecki, who plays Leonard, and Jim Parsons, who plays Sheldon. They are undone when a shapely blond neighbor, Penny, moves in down the hall. She is a waitress at the Cheesecake Factory, so, according to the logic of the show, she must be stupid.

Yet Leonard still wants to chat with her.

“But we don’t chat, at least not offline,” Sheldon hyperventilates.

If you have trouble telling Sheldon and Leonard apart, by the way, the former has plaid pants and the latter has thick, black glasses (because apparently geek fashion hasn’t changed a whit since “Revenge of the Nerds,” which came out in 1984).

Big Bang is the kind of comedy that is so proud of a non-funny joke that it trots it out twice (sorry, but the idea of Klingon Boggle is not exactly gut-bustingly hilarious the first time around).

And it crams as many geek stereotypes into the pilot as it possibly can: There are references to Stephen Hawking, all manner of mathematics and Darth Vader shampoo. And of course the closest anyone gets to an actual request for a date is when one of the nerd duo’s friends asks Penny if her avatar can hang out with him in an online game.

The one ethnic character, a nerd of apparently Indian descent, is so flummoxed by Penny that he can’t even speak to her. Raise your hand if you find that even remotely amusing.

Even if the jokes on this show weren’t tired and mean-spirited, it would be hard to care about any comedy that hates its own lead characters so much. It's just the same joke endlessly repeated--the everyday translated into geek-speak, and the obscure and difficult treated as if it were common knowledge.... These are perilous times for sitcoms, and Lorre & Co. may want to think up another.

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

Everyone involved in creating this show should be forced to immediately seek other forms of employment. This business is not - repeat, not - for you.

It would seem that the networks thinks it time to resurrect the groan-inducing cliches of stinky sitcoms to remind us of just how truly rancid the genre can get.

This show, my good friends, is about as witty as a pocket protector.

Arrested Development is the funniest show on television in recent memory, and, in my opinion, bows only before Friends as the funniest show I've ever seen. How dare I make such a brazen claim? I challenge you to acquire watch the first season by any means necessary and watch it. If you sit stone-faced throughout these episodes, I would submit you are either (a) in a coma or (b) wouldn't know what funny is even if it sat on your head and peed on you.

Granted this strong language is frowned upon in our post-modern society of self-esteem bolstering and back-patting, where tastes are deemed relativistic and subjective—but screw it. This show is a breath of fresh air, Actually, strike that; it's a typhoon of goodness that blows away the mildewed, formulaic flotsam that poses as thirty-minute comedy these days. If you're offended when I call you stupid for not liking Arrested Development, tough. That's what you are—stupid!

Well, in this age of decaying television, where a sewage-ridden onslaught of half-assed reality shows seems to be slowly overtaking quality, innovative scripted television—oddly enough this show didn't top the ratings, I know, something is rotten in Denmark.

What separates creator Mitchell Hurwitz's baby from the rest of the pack is the premise of the show: it doesn't play by the rules. There is no formula. There is no laugh track. There are no sweet, sappy-song-driven morals at the end (though they are lampooned).

What you do get is:

The best ensemble cast working on television

From Bateman's deadpan-perfect timing, to Arnett's supernatural sleaziness, to Cross's self-effacing nebbishism, the cast is money. Portia de Rossi's Lindsay, though quite funny, is the only weak link; her character is too one-dimensional. But she would nonetheless be the stand-out in any other series. And that's the most illustrative comment I can say about this cast—each character is so great, they could individually anchor shows. Besides Gob, my favorite is Michael Cera's George Michael. The hardest gut laughs always come from scenes involving this clueless kid.

Multi-layered comedy

Repeated viewings of Arrested Development reveal new gags and jokes. The writers pack so much stuff in their 22 minutes, you might miss something the first time through. They do this by sloughing off the sitcom formula—the show is filmed like a documentary, a creative approach that just opens up the options for the creators to go wild.

Ludicrous narratives

Anything is possible with the Bluth Family. How about a faux drug bust featuring male strippers dressed as cops? An on-the-fly marriage resulting from a series of dares? A "blind" attorney who's faking being blind—but her seeing-eye-dog really is blind? Each episode introduces outlandish plots. Some carry on for several episodes—Buster's relationship with the vertigo-stricken best friend of his mother, the shady dealings of the family attorney, the impossible crush George Michael has for his cousin—and some wrap themselves up by episode's end. Again, a testament to the innovative style.

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

"I think that the seal with the yellow bow-tie might be the one that I released into the sea after giving it a taste for mammal blood..." muses a very serious Gob on Arrested Development. It's not just lines like this that make this show brilliant, it's lines like that combined with celebrity cameos, brilliant dead-pan acting, running gags that go throughout the entire season, and some of the best pop culture references outside of Family Guy. In short, if you're not watching this show, you should be arrested.