Tuesday, February 17, 2009

"He is one lab accident away from becoming a supervillain"

The above quote comes to one of the most tragically underrated sitcoms in TV, the nerdtastic (and really, really, really, really funny) Big Bang Theory. The set up is quite conventional, with four hopeless nerds playing the crazy role with a slightly dumb blonde as straight woman, but the execution is pretty much flawless.

For starters, the nerds are strangely realistic. Although they are a hard-science, physics and stuff brand of nerds and thus come from a different origin than a social science, statistics and game theory nerd like myself, they definetely speak the language of geekdom fluently. The writers are definetely members of the tribe that understand that playing Rock Band is simply awesome, speaking Klingon is fun (although in my nerd-clan we only had two Sindarin speakers -yup, LOTR elvish) and robots -speacially killer robots- are just cool.

What really makes the show, however, is Sheldon. Sheldon is the father of all nerds; the one nerd to rule them all. Socially akward, incredibly intelligent, ridicolously petty and able to break down in tears at the sight of the napkin of Leonard Nimoy, Jim Parsons makes his character one of my most beloved TV heroes; the nerd that I always aspired to be but never had the balls (or the insanity) to become.

To top that, so far the creators have been really good at keeping history archs tight (they avoided turning the show to one of those endless on and off romances) and they have kept the screen time for each character well balanced, without anyone really hogging the spotlight too much.

This is coming from someone that really though that multiple camera sitcoms were dead to me, by the way. Big Bang Theory and the (even better) How I Met Your Mother proved me wrong.

7 comments:

  1. We, the nerds of the world. I really miss one game theorist in the series, like my Technocrat character in WoD :)

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  2. WoD? Argh, what is that? Argh! Acronym malfunction! Nerd points lacking... Arghhhh!

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  3. OK, Google saving throw passed. World of Darkness? You had a frackin´ vampire addicted to game theory?

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  4. No! I had a Technocrat (in Mage vs. Technocrats)! from New World Order, Ivory tower section :P.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_World_Order_(Mage:_the_Ascension)

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  5. I am just re-reading "The precepts of Damian" in wikipedia and suddenly I am really missing running after reality deviants in order to reform them, nif nif, so nostalgic.

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  6. We need to run a campaign of two one of these days. When are you moving to New Haven? :-).

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  7. Love this show it's about time they started writing comedy for us physicists

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