I recently watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory in which Sheldon does a guest spot on NPR’s Science Friday show of Talk of the Nation. As a prank, the coworker with the speech impediment (Kipke? Kripke?) pipes helium into Sheldon’s office, making his voice get really high while he’s explaining about monopoles.
The prankster then plays the broadcast live on a portable radio in the lunchroom, to the delight of all of Sheldon’s friends.
But the series takes place in Pasadena, CA, and in southern California TotN only airs in re-broadcast form between 9 and 11 p.m. They couldn’t possibly have heard it live on a transistor radio (and no, it wasn’t a shortwave multi-band capable of picking up signals from Phoenix)
Did the show’s producers take (and respond to) any heat about this issue?
I think you’re nitpicking a sitcom, but even so I believe this can be explained. There are numerous live broadcast PBS stations that simultaneously stream their signal over the internet, and there are devices you can purchase (some that resemble radios) that will receive WIFI and play internet audio streams. He could have been playing a stream from an east coast station.
According to the Talk of the Nation web site, KCLU out of Thousand Oaks has it on at noon. KVCR out of San Bernardino also has it on at noon (and does both hours).
I’ve no idea where their towers are and how well they’re received in Pasadena but they’re within 60 miles or so of there. Sufficient fanwanking for me.
But I’m sure the real answer is that Chuck Lorre (and none of the other writers as well) really would give a damn even if it were pointed out before it was made.
I cannot imagine that enough people would notice or care about something like this to warrant a response from the producers.
Incidentally, this sort of thing isn’t a “plot hole”. A plot hole is something inconsistent or unexplained within the fictional world of the story, not an inconsistency between the fictional story and the real world. It isn’t a plot hole to have characters listening to a live broadcast of Talk of the Nation unless it was stated on the show itself that you couldn’t listen to TotN live locally.
discussions on this board prompted me to start watching this show currently and now in syndication. it seemed funny enough to watch it. now my whole appreciation of the show has been shown to be based on little substance.
some checking shows that KVCR is line of sight and would be at -46 dBm there. it would be received.
my ability to appreciate humor about nerds has been restored.
"Oh, damn! The floppy failed. Well, whoever was in charge of quality control of the Verbatim corporation in 1989, congratulations - you just made the list. "
You need to understand the difference between a plot hold and dramatic license.
Dramatic license is when you ignore minor trivia in order to make the story more entertaining.
A plot hole is when issues involving the plot are unresolved. If the plan were to pump the helium into the studio, and it was never done – without an explanation – that’s a plot hole.
Any dramatic work takes dramatic license with nitpicks. They are not important.
I lived in Pasadena for years, and I had a pretty good radio. No, you can’t get those stations. The NPR stations available over the air in Pasadena are KPCC (out of Pasadena itself, and excellent reception), and KCRW (out of Santa Monica, with spotty reception in Pasadena, and I do not think it even carries Science Friday). No way will you get stations from Thousand Oaks or San Bernadino on an ordinary radio.
I honestly thought this was a joke OP. There must be hundreds of similar implausibilities on every sitcom ever made.
What’s next? “Lucy and Ethel would NEVER have been allowed to work unsupervised on the chocolate wrapping assembly line! I sure hope someone got fired over that one.”
Sitcoms are joke delivery systems, not documentaries.
Lack of suspension of disbelief. You can’t honestly expect a non-trivial portion of the audience to have an intimate understanding of the NPR schedule in Pasadena, as well as them simultaneously not being able to casually dismiss it as creative license.
Exactly. The Big Bang Theory is a work of fiction, and a work of fiction by definition involves things that didn’t really happen. Dr. Sheldon Cooper also never appeared on Talk of the Nation’s Science Friday, is not actually employed at CalTech, and indeed does not even exist, all of which strike me as bigger deviations from reality than characters in Pasadena being able to listen to TotN live.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a big deal about his, considering the show’s demographic. And I bet someone somewhere came up with a way to pull it off.
I personally wonder what would happen if you mixed it with the same amount of oxygen that is naturally in the air. A Star Trek book posited using this in underwater domes instead of nitrogen.
Just want to say that I watch every episode on every channel that I can.(Record them, I do have a life), but the theme tune has got to be the biggest load of crud ever inflicted on the human auditory system.
Did they use up all their money making the programme and were forced to hire someone with writers block to write the T.T. ?
The Barenaked Ladies were a pretty big band in the late 90s/early 2000s. They also have a bunch of geek cred (only They Might Be Giants have more), so it makes perfect sense from a producer standpoint.
My wife has the theme song as one of the ringtones on her phone.
Last week, just for kicks, since I’ve started re-playing Sid Meier’s Civilization IV (yet again - with the Beyond the Sword add-on it’s the best computer game ever made!), I slowed down the opening montage with our DVR and clicked through frame-by-frame. It’s like watching your game of Civ IV play out in 30 seconds, from building the Pyramids at the dawn of civilization* to the Eiffel Tower, flight, electronics, and rocketry towards the end.
You need Masonry to pull this off. “It is from their foes, not from friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls.”