game over, moonpie

[freckles_and_doubt]

Oh, dear. I tried, really I did. Several of you whose taste I esteem have been raving about Big Bang Theory, and in my plaintive and temporary Castle hiatus I hauled out the first couple of episodes last night and gave them a try. It's not the first time I've sampled the series: I lasted about four minutes into the pilot several months ago. This time I gave it fifteen minutes, then I uncurled myself from my foetal ball of pain and randomly sampled through bits of the next few episodes in the vague hope that it Got Better.

Um, nope. Still a newt. This is embarrassment humour. It's badly overdrawn, which I admit worked for The Middleman but doesn't work for me here. It has a laugh track. It's so not for me. I can't get through the embarrassment enough to access all the geeky references which I am perfectly willing to admit are there, adding intelligence and layering and complexity and what have you. I'm not even able to hang on in the hopes of seeing the Wil Wheaton guest appearance in context, although Wil Wheaton being a bastard in The Guild seriously grooved my ploons. I fear that Big Bang Theory and I have parted, as they say, brass rags. (Which, by the Mysterious Power of Google, I now discover is yet another of those weird idioms which comes from 19th-century sailing ships, although I cannot tell a lie, I got it from P. G. Wodehouse).

On the upside, scientific pollage reveals that smoczek's unaccountable fondness for soggy waffles is a personal aberration, not a cultural trend of which I was ignorant. Fans of Big Bang Theory are kindly to place my lack of enjoyment of the series under the "soggy waffle" heading and forgive me my sins as I do Jo's.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Funny, BBT is on tv right now and I've just been trying to give it another go while babytending. (Yes I sometimes do those two things, TV and babies, together. Bite me.) I only made it through a few minutes when it first came on. It's marginally more entertaining now, or maybe that's just the baby distraction effect, but still, eh? Why? It feels so dated and yes, overdrawn in a bad way. And sexist. But then I hate Two and a Half Men for the same reasons, and that's a huge hit also.

scroob

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

Babies and TV go together well, kind of like gin and dry lemon. Oprah was my Friend towards the end of maternity leave.

We didn't watch TV till becoming parents, now we're box watchers.

And I love both BBT and 2.5 Men :)

[schedule5.livejournal.com]

I like both of them too. Mainly, I like 2.5 men because one gets to look at Charlie Sheen. Also, by the end of the day of baby-wrangling one has no energy left for anything but watching TV :).

[confluence.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

I read somewhere that Big Bang Theory gets a lot better as it goes; the focus of the article was the character of Penny, who starts off as The Mundane Chick and gets funnier and more three-dimensional.

Or something. Because when I tried some S3 episodes, I didn't last very long either. Too much LOL NERDS (and mundane chick)!!, not enough nerd humour. I shudder to imagine what Penny was like in S1. The IT Crowd got this a million times better.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I agree that The IT Crowd is more grown-up, I lasted about half an hour of that, but I fear that I don't like it either. I think I need my nerd humour in a very specific flavour.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

The IT crowd, to me, had potential, but never quite got it right for very long.

The bits where Roy has a tape that answers any phone calls with "Hello ... have you tried turning it off an on again" or Moss talks about football are fantastic, but it wasn't sustained.

I don't know the precise issue- too geeky? Not geeky enough? Too many generic-office type scenarios? Plots just not strong enough?

[(Anonymous)]

I also wanted to like BBT, but humour always felt forced.

Sadly, it's easily beaten by any episode of "Extras", which just happened to be on TV recently. :-)

[khoi-boi.livejournal.com]

I love BBT, but I have lowbrow tastes. Both the wife and I watch it and share laughs.

It's not the undiluted maleness of its nerdity that gets to you, is it? I mean, in addition to the embarrassment humour aspect.