If the continue to morph the adorable Bernadette into Howard’s mother, that will get old quick. The voice can be amusing in very small doses, but I do not want to see a lot of it.
Kinda makes you wonder what Howard’s mother looks like, hmm?
But at least Freud was a doctor…
Uh huh.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature! 
Getting drunk now and again != problem with alcohol
Raj is the least likable or probable character on the show. The inability to talk to women that goes away a fraction of a second after even the tiniest drop of alcohol is swallowed is ridiculous. The inability to stop drinking once that tiniest drop of alcohol is swallowed, even when his remaining in the United States depends on it is even more ridiculous. And of course being even a bigger asshole than Wolowitz is breaking the limits of credulity.
Okay that scene with the bugs crawling all over Sheldon gave me the hebbie jebbies to the 10000th power. Please don’t do that again.
Also CBS gave away the ending in the ad that aired during the previous episode, don’t do that again either.
I realize that many disagree with me, and I have no great desire to belabor the point.
Constantly drinking (almost every day and usually more than three or four servings), often by ones self, often to inebriation (binge drinking), doing things while drunk that you later regret like having sex with someone who you would not otherwise consider having sex with, and having no clear memory of events that occur while you drink. I’d consider that problem drinking. Here is a link to AUDIT, a screening tool to identify problem drinking. There is little doubt the character scores above the threshold.
Again, no need to debate that here. I was just wondering if anyone else thought that was going to be her epiphany. I had read it as being foreshadowed by her Dr. Jeckyll and Mrs. Whore comment. And I was wrong. About that.
Or what her personality was like when she was younger.
It becomes a problem when it is constantly repeating pattern. Maybe I’m watching a different show, but in the one I am watching the Penny character is not constantly drinking. She does not regularly do things when drunk she’d later regret, she does it very, very occasionally.
As do most people her age and have been doing for, well, centuries.
I think we may have a cultural perception problem. Penny’s behavior may not be extreme by European standards, but by American standards she has a serious drinking problem. You might want to review the episode The Robotic Manipulation where Sheldon analyzes her sexual behavior and the doubts that causes Penny to have.
She may not have a drinking problem in the sense that she is unable to stop drinking.
But based on a couple episodes (and in those her references to them not being so unique) she does appear to have a problem with controlling herself when she’s drinking. In real life I find people who have drunk problems much more annoying than people who have drinking problems.
Also, just from personal experience I think it is perhaps a little bit significant (to psychoanalyze a fictional character that is scripted to engage in extreme behavior for comedic ends) that she binges not for the pleasure of the binge but as a coping mechanism for sadness and/or anger. To me that is harder to control, the former you kind of just stop when it isn’t fun anymore. The latter, in the depths of a funk, may make the known negative outcomes acceptable for the short term relief and more easily lead to real drinking problems.
Thus concludes my psychoanalysis of a fictional character scripted to engage in extreme behavior for comedic ends.
I don’t think she has a drinking problem. She only drinks heavily and does inappropriate things when the writers need to move the plot in that direction. :smack:
Pretty blonde with self-esteem issues and a drinking problem?
Jackpot!
(Meant in a meta-commentary fashion on a fictional character in a comedy. Not to be applied to any real-life situations with real persons of either sex or any gender.)
Possibly true. I know by European standards she’s quite normal, but I’ll leave it up to the Americans to decide how it is over there. My two months in Atlanta in 1998 doesn’t exactly qualify me to make a judgement 
It’s normal in Europe for everybody to get black out drunk and have sex with people you otherwise wouldn’t?
Damn, I’ve been doing Europe wrong. Or my wife is not a good wing man.
My limited experiences have lead me to the impression that such is a false generalization of alcohol use in the EU. Indeed America has more abstainers but drinking to excess is not very common across Western Europe. Maybe two glasses of wine day very commonly. (Okay, lots of drunks in the U.K., but not in France or Italy.) This site fleshes it out in excruciating data based detail. Traditionally Europe has consisted of many “wet” cultures (alcohol commonly drunk to moderate amounts, most often as part of a meal), and America has been a “dry” culture (“[a]bstinence is more common, but when drinking occurs it is more likely to result in intoxication”). Those EU patterns though are, in reality, getting more complicated. (Some very surprising data on that site.) In any case, by American standards she exhibits a set of behaviors that are not too uncommon … among those with problem alcohol consumption. (About 8% of Americans.)
Yes, I think you must be watching a different show than I am.
And I apologize for the hijack. None was intended. My question was answered - others did not think as I did.
Or, to turn that around, what Bernadette’s will be like when she’s middle-aged.
That’s not what I said. If you read what I said I disputed the description of her drinking habits. What is see in TBBT is a woman that when she goes out, which is not anywhere close to daily, she might get a bit drunk. Utterly normal. She had one case where she got so drunk she screwed up. Again, for her age, quite normal. She sometimes drinks at home, but rarely to excess. Again, normal.
If you are seeing a show where Penny is routinely getting hammered, never mind so drunk that she passes out or doesn’t remember stuff, then you are seeing a completely different show to me.