Revenge of the Nerds
The Big Bang Theory (8pm Mondays on Channel 9 and in repeats on GO!) is your standard American sitcom about human opposites living in an apartment block opposite each other. In one apartment are two socially awkward physicists, Sheldon and Leonard (author reference noted), and their collection of nerd-spawn buddies, and in the apartment across the way is the not terribly bright, but totally hot, actress/waitress Penny. The synopsis reads like a template for mind-numbing, laugh-tracked clichés, but The Big Bang Theory embraces the nerd clichés and then goes one step further – Klingon Boggle, anyone?
Leonard, played by Johnny Galecki, who was David in Roseanne many moons ago, is a lactose-intolerant, glasses-wearing geek physicist, who is endearing through always striving for what he can’t attain: that is, Penny. Penny, played by Kaley Cuoco, is vivacious (and sometimes I can spend an episode just looking at her flat tummy), bubbly, and not backward in coming forward. Her demolition of the hopes and dreams of the geek boys when any of them puts the hard word on her is withering and succinct, and often done just with a look. Leonard’s flatmate, Sheldon, played by Jim Parsons, with a Buster Keaton po-faced dryness, is where the show delves deep into geek weirdness. Sheldon, a comic masterpiece of arrogance, phobias and intelligence (‘I’m polymerized tree sap and you’re an inorganic adhesive’), is like Billy Bibbit crossed with Truman Capote. His lack of empathy and his inability to change make the avoidance of Sheldon’s neuroses a mainstay of the show (‘All I need is a healthy ovum and I can grow my own Leonard Nimoy!’).
The cast is rounded off by Raj, played by Kunal Nayyar, an astrophysicist from India who can only talk to girls if he’s plastered; Leslie Winkle, played by Sara Gilbert, Leonard’s on-off girlfriend, who can’t reconcile with him because she believes in loop quantum gravity; and engineer Howard, played by Simon Helberg, who thinks he’s a ladies man, but still lives with his mother (who is never seen, but has a voice that sounds like someone pulling feathers from a parrot).
What distinguishes The Big Bang Theory is that the characters are so finely honed that there is even a pecking order of intelligence amongst the nerds. Sheldon, the former child prodigy who conducts string theory research at Caltech, is at the top; Leonard and Raj are somewhere in the middle; and Beatle-coiffured Howard (who bears more than a passing resemblance to Ringo), only has a master’s, and so is way down the bottom. Penny, who should be cowered by their combined brainpower, sits atop the tree because she has street smarts; she’s attractive in the real world, where the geeks want to fit in... and get girls.
It helps to have a passing knowledge of Halo, modems and Klingon to watch The Big Bang Theory, but even without it you can sit back and enjoy the wittiest nerd dialogue on television (‘Widen my circle? I have 216 friends on MySpace!’).
Matt Quartermaine is a Melbourne-based writer and comedian. With Matt Parkinson, Tim Smith and Andrew Goodone, he produces ‘The Chat’, a weekly podcast in which ‘four grown men in comfortable chairs spill their guts’. Click here to download it for free at iTunes.
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