I have never watched more than five minutes of the show, but all I've seen is things that might be kinda funny if left alone drowned out by wave after wave of deafening laugh-track. No jokes, just normal conversation and maybe a quip or two engulfed in soulless, unending laugh-track hell.
Well, I mean, are we going to just go off on the entire three-camera sitcom formula now? Because I'm totally okay with that but it's a much bigger net than this show.
Scooby Doo had a fucking laugh track for fuck's sake. How crazy is that?
It was nice when single-camera sitcoms without laugh tracks were the big thing for a few years there. NBC was really pretty instrumental in that, with Scrubs, Office, 30 Rock, etc. (And Fox had Malcolm in the Middle and Arrested Development.)
NBC's ratings look an awful lot like the Hindenburg lately. Scrubs is long gone, 30 Rock just ended, Office...has a few episodes left? I haven't been paying attention. And shows like Parks and Recreation and Community are critically acclaimed cult hits -- that and a buck fifty will buy you a cup of coffee.
You can certainly make good money off a cult hit -- but that's really more of a business strategy for basic cable and CW. The major networks want the easy money that comes with lowest-common-denominator pabulum.
I get that we're focusing on Big Bang Theory because it's something personal, it's misrepresenting a granfalloon that we're part of.
But as painful, unfunny, my-God-how-could-people-even-watch-this lowest-common-denominator sitcomming, it's not only not the worst thing on TV, it's not even the worst thing created by Chuck Lorre that airs on CBS on Thursday nights during the eight o'clock hour.
I think in the next few years we're going to see a lot fewer shows like Community and a lot more like Big Bang Theory or worse. At least, on network TV -- Netflix has Arrested Development and I think we'll see the more weird, nichey, actually-good stuff try the online route.
And I think the pendulum will swing back in a few years and we'll get good sitcoms on network TV again. At least for a little while. TV itself is on the verge of the biggest shakeup it's ever had; in the coming decade things are going to be a lot different, and within two decades it's going to be unrecognizable. Good riddance to the old guard.