The Big Bang Theory Ran 279 Episodes, Which Proves Only That It Ran 279 Episodes
Twelve seasons, ten Emmys and an ocean of viewers. A thing can be enormously popular and still be wrong, as anyone who has studied the history of hats can tell you.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min read
Let us begin with the facts, which in this case are very impressive, and which I'll ask you to keep handy so you can throw them at me later. The Big Bang Theory ran on CBS from 2007 to 2019. It made 279 episodes, the most of any multi-camera sitcom in television history. It won ten Emmys, four of them for Jim Parsons. Tens of millions of people watched it, many of them on purpose.
Now, I was raised to respect a majority, the way you respect a bear. It doesn't mean the bear is right. It means the bear is large.
The joke of the show, and there was mostly one, went like this. A very smart young man would say something very specific, like the name of a particle or a starship, and the audience would laugh. Not at a joke. At the word. They laughed the way a man laughs when a foreigner orders soup, which is to say, they weren't laughing with anybody.
A show that loved these fellows would have let them be funny. A show that merely employed them let them be funny-sounding. There's a difference, and it is the whole difference. Around the same time, Community and Parks and Recreation were making shows where the oddballs were the heroes and the jokes came out of who people were, not what they knew. Those shows got smaller audiences and better jokes, which is the usual trade, and the reason the Lord made reruns.
Jim Parsons, I'll say, was very good. His timing was exact, the way a good watchmaker's is exact, and he earned every one of his trophies. But his character was mostly a list of rude habits that the show presented as charming, and everybody else spent twelve years orbiting him, like he was the sun, or a very difficult uncle.
To be fair, and I try to be at least once a column, the show got warmer as it got older, which is more than you can say for most of us. Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch came aboard and the thing started to feel like it was about people. But popularity is not proof. The most popular food in America is whatever's closest. Bazinga, as they say. Though I wish they hadn't.