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.