That's my wife, dropping fifteen posts on us in rapid fashion, knocking herself off the front page five times in one afternoon. She even told me, "you're welcome for getting us to 400 posts." Wow!
Anyway, this is the sixth season of The Big Bang Theory. No one needs any in depth analysis on The Big Bang Theory. A lot of people actively hate The Big Bang Theory. All the same, I'll offer one quick criticism of The Big Bang Theory.
Episodes of The Big Bang Theory just sort of end. They don't really conclude themselves as much as they run out of time and just sort of stop. This hardly matters, since so little of The Big Bang Theory is plot-driven. Still, The Big Bang Theory is a multi-camera sitcom in a world increasingly dominated by newer formats. You'd think it would adhere rigorously to the classic episodic structure of so many sitcoms before it, with an A story and a B story and sometimes a C story, all of which introduce some sort of conflict and ultimately resolve it in some way. But that's not the case with The Big Bang Theory. I'll provide a simple example in the form of this season's Christmas episode, "The Santa Simulation."
In this episode of The Big Bang Theory, Leonard has set up a Christmas-themed game of Dungeons & Dragons, largely because Sheldon hates Christmas and Leonard would like to infuse some holiday cheer in him. Meanwhile, the girls go out for a night of drinking, and take Raj with them in order to find him a girl. Now, there a number of ways for each of these plots to play out and for various hijinks to ensue, but there are really only a few ways each plot can conclude, given the limitations of the half-hour sitcom format.
We'll start with the B story. Raj can either succeed in finding a girl to hook up with, or he can fail. Now, he will fail, and most of the audience knows this, because that's the kind of sad sack character he is. The only reason he shouldn't fail is for the joke to be on someone else. If he does succeed, he can show up back at the apartment with a girl in tow while the rest of the guys are playing Christmas D&D and then the joke's on all of them. Because there has to be a payoff somewhere, right? If he fails to pick up a girl, the joke is on him, and if he succeeds, it's on everyone else, because it has to be on someone, right? An alternative outline is possible, in which Raj succeeds in spite of the efforts of his female friends. Like, maybe they go about things all wrong, and only by being himself can he succeed, or something, and then the joke is on the ladies who thought they knew better. Instead, this is The Big Bang Theory, so Raj fails right away off screen at the bar and the rest of the B story focuses on him telling the girls how he used to have the hots for each of them, except for Amy, the token awkward nerdy one. None of this is new information - we've seen Raj lust for both Penny and Bernadette in the past. All this B story is doing is reiterating what we already know, with a few easy jokes thrown in. Penny and Bernadette are attractive, Amy is not, and Raj aims unreasonably high and sometimes for his friends' girlfriends. There's no guest casting stunt where some "celebrity of the moment" fills in as a girl at the bar for Raj to pursue. There's no subversion of roles in any of this. Nothing really happens. The arc ends with the group leaving the bar and Raj making the joke that even Amy seems attractive to him now that she's unavailable. Nothing ever comes of this and no attraction is teased again at all for the rest of the season. It's just a completely dead B story. Nothing happens and no one changes. The whole thing was shot around a table at a bar.
Now, back to the A story. Again, though the paths here are infinite, there are really only a few ways this can end. The stated goal is for Leonard to get Sheldon to like Christmas. If he succeeds, there's no real joke, unless he succeeds to such an extreme extent that Sheldon is now unbearably enthusiastic about Christmas and suddenly Leonard is the grouchy one. At the same time, there's no real reason for him to fail, unless the joke is that he's succeeding so well until something goes awry - perhaps a bad roll of the dice or something - that totally saps any budding excitement Sheldon had mustered up. As it turns out, Leonard does initially succeed in getting Sheldon excited about Christmas, and Sheldon seems like he's really getting into it. Instead though, Sheldon waits for the climax of the game - the party has found Santa chained up in the corner of a dungeon - before trolling his teammates by paralyzing them and killing Santa. It's sort of darkly comic, and it's enough of a twist ending that it should work pretty well. Except it doesn't, because Sheldon justifies the move by explaining that his hatred for Santa stems from an incident when he was a young boy and he asked Santa to bring his dead grandfather back to life and Santa couldn't do it. It just rings so false. Sheldon has often been described as a genius from birth, and someone fervently opposed to all the religious beliefs that pervaded his upbringing. For him to have been holding a grudge against a mythical creature all these years over a biological impossibility seems untrue to the character. And the joke doesn't even really land, either, since once Sheldon ruins the game, the story just ends with Leonard upset over how he wasted his night. Finally, in the episode's coda, Sheldon has a nightmare in which Santa is angry at him for leaving him chained up in a dungeon. Again, no payoff. The nightmare doesn't leave Sheldon liking Christmas any more than he did, and it's not like the game had succeeded in making him like Christmas only to have a nightmare later to ruin it.
So in the end, the A story ended in failure, but very little comedic payoff, and the B story ended in immediate failure and no comedic payoff whatsoever. The characters at the end of the episode are exactly who they were at the beginning of the episode, and no one has succeeded at anything or been made the butt of any jokes longer than a one-liner.
And that's more than enough words to spend on The Big Bang Theory.
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