I am starting this thread in anticipation of tonight’s episode.
Nice to see a tribute to Debbie in the Vanity Card (and it stayed on the screen for more than a fraction of a second)
But I think it said “Mrs Wolowitz”. It should have been “Debbie Wolowitz” IMO.
I set the over/under on the number of comments before someone mentioned Penny’s Hair at one reply. Looks like I was right. 
Frankly, I was so annoyed at Sheldon’s behavior I was glad at what happened to him.
Before I saw tonight’s episode, I was watching “The Benefactor Factor” episode. And before that, I watched a couple episodes of The West Wing. I was surprised to see President Siebert was played by the same actor who played Will Bailey, Joshua Malina. Is anyone else surprised at the all the very successful actors who are willing to appear on TBBT for a guest shot? Come to think of it, on The West Wing also. Who’d ever think of Dan Connor as POTUS, huh?
Well, I thought Sheldon was annoying but sweet - in a I-would-kill-him-if-he-were-my-friend kind of way. The Howard/Bernadette sarcasathon was sad and not funny.
Yeah, he does care for Leonard in a very annoying, Sheldon-esque manner.
I didn’t care for Howard’s and Bernie’s interaction, either.
No, I’m not surprised at all. TBBT is consistently one of the most viewed shows on TV. So they get exposure, and get paid. Why wouldn’t a successful actor make a guest appearance?
And The West Wing was both successful and critically acclaimed (26 Emmy Awards, including four consecutive awards for Outstanding Drama Series). What actor would turn that down? For that matter actors are actors. They like to act. Few of them would claim that television is beneath them.
Actors who are “artists” are a pain. The vast majority are working stiffs like the rest of us who go where the jobs and money are. Why wouldn’t an actor jump at a guest role on the most popular show on TV?
Loved Raj’s description of his parents’ breakup.
On the one hand, maybe Howard and Bernadette’s problems will put the kibosh on any children showing up.
On the other hand, the writers would love to whipsaw the viewers: I envision an episode where Bernadette is all set to separate from Howard when she discovers she’s pregnant.
On the gripping hand, it is a comedy, and the writers would still be playing it for laughs rather than pathos, so I don’t think we’ll get any “Special Episodes” in the future.
Joshua Malina was successful before being on The West Wing as he was on Sports Night, which was a critically-acclaimed show, before that. Sports Night was another Aaron Sorkin show.
“Gripping Hand,” huh?
You’re clearly in the target audience for this show. Although I haven’t seen a Niven/Pournelle reference yet. Their SF references seem to be more media-based rather than literary.
Joshua Malina pops up all over the place. I remember him on *House *(as Wilson’s annoying friend) and on the first season of American Horror Story (as a dentist who worked in the murder house). And of course he was a regular on In Plane Sight.
Staying on topic, I *knew *that the couples therapy they referred to was going to have been with Raj.
I thought Sheldon wasn’t very credible in his concern over a minor elective surgery. One chance in 700,000 doesn’t seem enough to frighten a mind as rational as his.
Howie and Bernadette seem to be together just for the sex. Maybe they should move on. Yes, the Raj-Howie couples therapy gag was pretty obvious.
Sheldon isn’t all that rational. He’s scared to drive, he learned to swim on the Internet (and to the best of my knowledge, has never been in the water), his germophobia has been a plot point in more than one episode, and he faints at the sight of his own blood.
Besides, Leonard is taking an unnecessary risk, which could lead to great inconvenience for Sheldon.
I was just thinking, since Laurie Metcalf is now on a different sitcom on the same network (and the same night), I wonder if we’ve seen the last of Mary Cooper.
I thought it was with his mother. :smack:
As for the Howie/Bernie couples therapy thing, they should have limited it to 2 or 3 “compliments” each. Going open-ended like that is just asking for trouble.
I’m surprised Raj didn’t skype his sister to talk out his parents’ situation. Though he’d still need to seek commiseration from his friends.
Was probably a cost-cutting measure… his parents don’t show up either, and you think that’d be natural for an episode about their separation. Instead, it’s just Raj talking about them second-hand.
I wish Howard and Bernadette would just get a divorce already.
Malina and Sorkin apparently go way back. I knew Malina was (very briefly) in A Few Good Men, which was written by Sorkin (IMDb shows it as Malina’s first acting credit). According to Wikipedia, he was in the play even before the movie, and moved from a smaller to a larger role over the course of the show’s run.
I don’t know how unusual it is for writers to have input during the casting process of a movie, but Sorkin must have some. Sorkin wrote The American President and Malina’s in that. (A Few Good Men and The American President were both directed by Rob Reiner, so there was a bit of a collaboration there, too.)
From a nice article in EW- ‘Sports Night’: an Oral History:
and
As for being on TBBT, it was a network show on during prime time. No one is saying no to that.
Good point. I wonder if we can expect more of the same now that Parsons, Galecki and Cuoco are pulling down their rumored one mil per episode.
Yeah, his paranoia over Leonard’s surgery wasn’t the weird part of the episode, it was his sticky hands after eating the french toast sticks. You’d think he’d have wet-wipes to clean his hand off after every bite…