Fraser was a well-known radio host, but a local one; no idea what the going rate is for such a gig.
I know literally nothing about the show. I’ve never watched more than five minutes of it. But that sort of money wouldn’t be out of the realm of reality in many branches of physics.
I just looked through the faculty pages of the Physics Department at UC Berkeley, one of the most prestigious public universities in the country, and then checked on the salaries of a dozen or so faculty members.
Assistant Professors (the lowest rung on the tenure-track totem pole) seem to all make more than about $90K, with a few into the six-figure salary mark. At the top end, Professors with named chairs seem to pull in around a quarter-million. While my investigation was not exhaustive, the highest salary i found was $272K. The median, in my unscientific little survey, was somewhere around $140-160K.
And this is salary through the state alone. Quite a few of these people no doubt make money on the side through other work.
I chose Berkeley because the salaries of public employees are public information. I can’t find out the same sort of stats for institutions like CalTech or MIT. Also, while public universities often pay less than prestigious private schools, Berkeley is one of the top schools in the country, and if it wants to compete with the private schools, especially in areas of study like economics and the sciences, where there is also government and industry demand for labor, it has to compete on salary. I don’t think the numbers i found would be far out of line with private schools.
Thurston Howell III was supposed to be very rich.
I just watch the reruns and haven’t seen any new episodes, but Penny is a waitress, right?
Mr. Drysdale was probably making a very comfortable salary as a bank president.
I don’t know about The Big Bang Theory, but there are plenty of tenured professors who don’t make “well over” $100k.
These days she’s working as a pharma rep, and making really good money.
You two need to talk. 
mhendo, Penny is a first-year sales rep for a pharmaceutical company with no college education. For the first six seasons she’s been shown as someone who can’t understand or even pronounce the words she’d be using every day in every sales call. Her being an instant success because of the size of her breasts is a joke, but it’s not clear how literally the show is playing that.
Boyo Jim, some tenured professors aren’t but these are guys at the highest levels of their fields in a hugely competitive environment at a top private university. They’re making the big bucks.
Pharma reps are normally hot women since most Drs. are men. In fact for a while a lot of pharmas hired former college cheerleaders to sell drugs to Drs.
I wouldn’t dispute that but I was responding to the tenor of comments suggesting that of course tenured professors made that kind of money.
But the guys on this show aren’t tenured; they hold non-tenure track positions.
Believe it or not, Forbes magazine came up with a list of the 15 richest fictional characters with Scrooge McDuck at the top of the list.
One character everyone seems to have overlooked is #4 on the list: Mom, head of MomCorp from Futurama.
median income for Physicist is $106,000
Postdoc research associates make ~$43,000
Though more for more experience (Stanford table)
The episode where the cute upstairs neighbor moved in she asked Penny how much a Physicist makes and she said “not a lot”. $43,000 is a lot closer to “not a lot” than $106,000
Brian
Uncle Bill on Family Affair. Huge engineering company owner with NYC lux apartment, gay butler etc. Adjusting for 1960’s to 2015 dollars he would have to be making many millions per year to have that kind of lifestyle.
Tom Arnold had a short-lived sitcom where he played the star of a hit sitcom. As such his character was probably making well into a six figure salary.
Hayden Fox on Coach would be in the running. College football head coaches are often among the highest paid positions in sports. Assuming his fictional college was a top-flight football team, he’d have been bringing home a very high six-figure income at the very least, possibly even into the seventh figure.
Craig T. Nelson played Hayden Fox on Coach. He was the head coach of a Division I college football team and, in later seasons, an NFL team. He must have had a pretty high salary.
ninja’d!
Does Ashton Kutcher’s character on 2 & 1/2 Men count? He sold his software and made shit-tons of money that way (I started watching the show when they added the lesbian niece character-- don’t know much about it before that), but he did work for it, so it isn’t quite in Beverly Hillbillies territory. He also continue to develop more software, and run his company, from what I understand (I didn’t catch every episode).
There was a one-season show called Love and Money with Paget Brewster, Swoosie Kurtz and David Ogden Stiers (remember that for playing “6 Degrees”). Stiers character was filthy comfortable. It was family money, but he did go to work every day. One presumes that if he didn’t work at the family business, he might be cut off, or it might all fall apart.
None of these guys is a post-doc. They are all professors.
A post-doc is typically a charity position offered by the institution to give PhD graduates money to live on while they look for a real job. They are notoriously low paying.
The estimate of 100, 000 plus for the guys on this show are obviously on the low side if the medianis over 100, 000. That median figure means that half of all physicists make more than that. 90% of physicists will only have undergraduate degrees and will be working as lab rats for electronics companies, sunglass manufacturers and so forth. The guys on this show are all PhDs at top tier universities. They will all be earning more than lab rats with undergrad degrees.
As already noted, the show is inconsistent at times. However IIRC the line was “I don’t think it’s a lot”. She didn’t actually know.
Howard doesn’t have a doctorate (as Sheldon frequently pointed out). And they’re not at “universities” but at one university. They’re all employed at Caltech.
Really??? Your country is fucked up.