Well, him not having a PhD has been a running gag for some time, I gather.
I just don’t get how someone like him could pass a battery of NASA physical and psychological tests.
Oh Jesus, not this shit again. There is no such thing as a “fake” geek and it’s really getting tiresome that this is a thing. Hot girls go to Comic-Con and your meathead college roommate plays Minecraft. The geeks won, enjoy it.
That said, there was a moment that stuck with me as proof that this show does more than pay lip service to geeks. Sheldon has set up an N64 emulator on his computer to play Super Mario 64. Penny walks in and starts talking to him and he has to pause the game… and the sound guys actually got the correct pause sound. They didn’t just reach into the public domain video game sound file. They pulled out an N64, hooked it up, got a copy of SM64, and recorded the pause sound.
In the words of Sheldon, that’s fascinating.
I disagree on the loser part (although the Jewish stereotypes in the show are kinda cheap). The “loser” works for the JPL on the International Space Station engineering team, went to space, and married a very smart/very hot woman (admittedly a shiksa, but then that was not one of his criteria). Losers can only dream of such achievements.
Um - no, he’s not a PhD. Which is pointed out in almost every episode 
I wonder whether the standards have dropped a bit since the heydays…
I have a vaguely related BBT question. Why do they seem to dress like they’re from the '70s? The nerdiest/geekiest people I’ve ever encountered in real life tended to be into metal/goth styling. The main people I ever saw dressing the way some of the lads in that show do were retro mod/60s rock band types.
So before it was offensive, but now you just aren’t into a particular type of joke.
*"What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back?
A stick"*
Australian with English/Irish roots.
Aren’t all of them incredible losers at least on one level?
An Aussie retard, a British faggot, and Irish Jew walk into a bar with a boomerang.
Offensive enough?
These are post-docs and physics research PhDs. And an astrophysicist and a JPL engineer. I don’t think a realistic portrayal would be using metal/goth styling.
As with the show, I abandoned the page half-way through.
Written dialogue is even worse than the show; without the raucous canned laughter, I have no clue as to when I’m supposed to be amused.
Argh, I’m such a loser. (And I’m Jewish)
A thread about Big Bang stereotypes that hasn’t mentioned Mary Cooper? Sheldon mother’s is the biggest southern Christian fundamentalist that ever has been on TV!
Sort of. I’m still amazed that the producers haven’t been burned for heresy yet, simply because the show isn’t called “Intelligent Design.” But it’s poorly written. Not in a “Two Broke Girls”-style, “every joke is like a corpse hitting the floor” way, but in an annoying, “Every character is a hard-core stereotype” way.
Sheldon is a terrible human being. He has shown that he can learn to follow “non-optional social conventions,” yet he can’t utter a sentence without mentioning how very little EVERYTHING and EVERYONE other than himself and his work is utterly meaningless. And his friends don’t help him learn, they accept his shit and roll their eyes. He seems to think of women as truly unworthy of anything other than reproduction. He is destined to be beaten to death.
Raj is a terrible human being. he’s given the most childish lines, using words like “wee-wee” and “doody,” with no follow-up as to why his character says way more stuff like this than the others. Not only can’t he talk to attractive women, he can’t utter a word to ANY woman. Except when alcohol touches his lips (literally - he goes from mute to Casanova in the space of time it takes to raise the glass and put it down once). And then, he becomes supreme douchebag #1, and frankly a borderline date rapist, after a molecule of alcohol.
Howard is a terrible human being. He despises his mother, despises living with her, yet cannot even think of moving out. When Bernadette suggests it (going on memory, here), he not only assumes that she will literally wait on him hand and foot, as his hated mother did, he doesn’t even pretend to consider her feelings, in the slightest. She’s Hollywood gorgeous, “So round, so firm, so fully packed,” as Bugs Bunny might say, and fucking brilliant, but settles for this repellent personality?
Penny is a terrible human being. Not in relation to others, but in how she treats herself. Sheldon dismisses her completely, without a moment’s thought, because she’s a non-academic (unintelligent, as he has literally stated), and a woman. Raj can’t talk to her, but CAN whisper jokes about her pussy to Howard, right in front of her. Howard is a complete lech toward her, and she’s lucky he hasn’t tried to finger her in her sleep. And she is BESTEST BUDDIES with them.
Leonard is the only character that seems to written as human. He has emotions, and desires, and the capability for deep introspection (as much as a sitcom character can).
The other regular female characters are inconsequential - a female Sheldon in Amy, and a beautiful doormat in the aforementioned Bernadette.
They dress in geek shirts (many of them originating from thinkgeek.com and the DC Comics online store). I don’t remember who, but someone a few months back actually suggested that the producers dress the characters the way they do because geek shirts are “hip” right now.
I live in Texas and thought that was the documentry part of the show.
I started a thread about this once… I watched one scene of BBT, and couldn’t manage to suspend my disbelief. Honestly, that thread is one of those rants where in retrospect I’m thinking “I really cared enough to write all that?”, but that doesn’t mean I was wrong.
Regarding the question in the OP, though, I guess based on the examples in this thread I’d say “no more racist than a lot of sitcoms…” YMMV on how big a sin that is.
I’ve never really watched this show. If there is any truth to your synopsis here, I’m glad I haven’t.
“Let’s make fun of racism/misogyny by using it as comedy fodder!” was an edgy and funny device back in Archie Bunker’s day, but it’s played out now.
TIL meta-satire about pop culture = geekdom.
Seriously, BBT is an absolute flop of a show, but I think the two are pulling from completely different wells.
Excuse me? BBT is the most watched network TV show. It is hardly a “flop.”
You can have your own opinion that you hate it. But you cannot have your own facts.