The Big Bang Theory aired on CBS from September 24, 2007 to May 16, 2019, twelve seasons and 279 episodes, and it was one of the most watched comedies of its era. Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady created it. It made stars of its cast. And it is, with as much fairness as we can manage, a sitcom whose central joke is that smart people are ridiculous, told to an audience invited to feel superior to them.
Trailer, via Warner Bros. Rewind.
Pasadena
The show originally centered on five people in Pasadena. Leonard Hofstadter, played by Johnny Galecki, and Sheldon Cooper, played by Jim Parsons, are physicists at Caltech who share an apartment. Penny, played by Kaley Cuoco, is the waitress and aspiring actress across the hall. Howard Wolowitz, played by Simon Helberg, is an aerospace engineer, and Raj Koothrappali, played by Kunal Nayyar, is an astrophysicist. Later, Melissa Rauch’s Bernadette and Mayim Bialik’s Amy joined and the show became an ensemble about three couples.
Parsons
Jim Parsons is the reason the show worked, commercially and sometimes comically. Sheldon is a character built entirely out of rules and tics, and Parsons plays him with a precision that turns a cartoon into a rhythm. The performance won him a shelf of awards and deserved some of them. The problem is that the show’s affection for Sheldon never extended to letting him be a person, and twelve seasons of the same tics is a long time.
The Joke
The laugh track tells you where the jokes are, and the jokes are almost always the same: a character says something about physics, comics or science fiction, and the audience is cued to laugh at the fact that he cares. The show’s view of its own characters is contempt dressed as fondness. Penny exists to be the normal person who finds them absurd, and Cuoco, who is genuinely funny, spends years delivering eye-rolls.
What It Got Right
The cast had real chemistry, and the later seasons, when the show became about couples rather than nerds, found a warmer register. Bialik and Parsons together were the best thing the series ever did. The writing could be sharp when it stopped pointing at its characters and let them talk.
Where It Falls Short
The formula never changed. The characters barely grew. The women were written thinly for years before the show noticed. The references that stood in for jokes dated fast. And the show’s enormous success made it lazy, because there was no reason to be anything else.
The Verdict
The Big Bang Theory was a hit, and hits do not have to be good. This one had a great central performance and a mean streak it never examined. We do not score it well, and we do not think that is a controversial position anymore.
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