TBBT Series Finale: Saving Comedy One Joke At A Time
Fans of the mega success, The Big Bang Theory, got the send-off they were hoping for when the twelve season-long series was recently brought to an end; Shamy won the Noble, Penny and Leonard are pregnant, and the most shocking plot twist of all, the elevator worked.
Critics, however, chimed in almost immediately, claiming that not only were all of these conclusions predictable, but boring and expected from a series that’s failed to evolve over the years. Which sparks the question, should a sitcom evolve? Not just should the characters have an arc, but should the show itself transform, or should it stick to the guns it came out shooting with? To answer that, however, we first have to unpack the so-called problems TBBT has been accused of over the years.
Women as punchlines
When TBBT began, the female lead, Penny, was the standard ditzy blond in a tank top. It just so happened she lived across the hall from two geniuses who loved comics and D&D. And that was the joke. Almost every interaction from the first moving forward was about misunderstandings. Either Penny didn’t get Sheldon and Leonard, or Sheldon and Leonard didn’t get Penny. Easy comedy? Maybe, but it worked.
The token foreigner
From the start, Raj — the seemingly soft-hearted scientist from India — was the butt of many a joke. From his accent to his culture to the way he perceived his environment, Raj was the classic foreign guy the crew loved to poke fun at.
The theme
In 2007, when TBBT aired, it was a revolution bound in familiar packaging. It had the old world laugh track and the same camera fashioning that was going out of style, but the characters and premise we’re fresh enough. No longer were we following the coolest kids on the block like so many comedies before, we were instead following the least and the lost, the bullied not the bullies; the geeks.
The real problem
These aren’t all the failings TBBT has been accused of, but they’re the most popular so we’ll stick with them. And now that we know what they are, we can begin to see the real problem. And it’s not The Big Bang Theory.
From the moment TBBT aired until now, the show has been about friends. Friends who admittedly have a little Hollywood gloss behind them, but friends none the less. A not so serious comedy about a lovable crew you can hang out with every week and feel better than when you got there. These were the kind of people who were consistent. As marriage, kids, and careers came into the picture, Sheldon and Leonard still had everyone over for dinner. And there’s something beautiful about that.
So why, then, are we faulting them for this? Isn’t it perfectly acceptable for people to want that kind of friendship? And with that sort of true friendship, comes the taunts and jabs of real buddies, the picking at the stupid things that one friend always says, and of course, the way most groups stay exactly the same as years pass. But for some reason, we’ve forgotten that. As a people I mean. We’re exchanging true friendship for something fake. Something that better be politically correct and comfortable, even if genuine friends in the real world are everything but. And not only that, but for some reason, a show must evolve far past its inception to be considered great. Take The Simpsons, for example. Apu was funny once, but now he’s not. So for the Simpsons to remain worthy of our approval, they must adjust?
This dilemma, of course, isn’t reserved for TV. It’s been working itself through the ranks of politics, religion, film, and beyond for years. And it’s crushing creativity, forcing one thing to become all things to everyone, or simply succumb to the mockery of so-called experts if it doesn’t. You could say it’s political correctness run amok, but that’s been done. And besides, it’s worse than that. No, the real problem is that the critics outnumber the creatives and the list of what they decide is worthy is shrinking.
The real reason TBBT worked
Over the years, TBBT provided many memorable moments and lots of laughs. But more than that, they offered up characters as they were, and pretty much refused to change them. Oh sure, they had the standard character arcs and they dropped some old habits, but all in all, the same charming characters we met 12 seasons ago, along with the same brand of comedy, left us as is. Unchanged and unaltered by the world around them.
Yet somehow, we’re told there’s something wrong with that. That for today’s sitcom to be relevant, it must grow far beyond its original packaging. Worse yet, we’re so fast to change what we define as acceptable comedy, that if everyone else doesn’t immediately jump on board, we attack. It’s like we can’t laugh at ourselves anymore. Like we’re locking our feelings in a glass box and demanding that everyone respect our fragile little egos. I’m not the first person to say this, of course, more like just another voice of reason; It’s fine to make fun of people with an accent. It’s fine to pick on short people, tall people, black people, white people, gay people, and straight people. Basically, it’s fine to pick on EVERYONE because we’re all silly, stereotypical, ditzy, or slow at one time or another. The only thing that’s not fine, is thinking you and your people group are above the comedy. Simply put, if anything is funny, everything must be funny. Otherwise, comedy will soon be extinct altogether.
We call them tropes and we complain because writers pigeon hole characters and experiences into them. But here’s the thing, tropes are nothing more than typical human behavior we can relate to. Can you honestly say that it’s not funny when the cast picks on Raj for the way he says “mustache?” No. Does that offend you? If so, then are you also offended when they pick on Leonard for being a cry baby with mommy issues, or when Penny teases Howard for being horrible with women? Because you’d better be. The point is that we all do things that are stereotypical and quirky at times. Things that we should be totally cool with having the piss taken out of us for. It’s not that the classic jokes are broken, it’s that we are.
The Big Bang Theory is proof positive that what we call evolution in entertainment, is simple oversensitivity. We can’t just have fun watching people be how people really are, we have to find fault in all 31 flavors of comedy until it’s all vanilla. Today, if we’re not the one celebrating the so-called revolutionary indy flick that subverts all the typical conventions, then we’re considered old fashioned, backward, racist and worse. And for what, because we find certain jokes funny, and blatant attempts at gathering the support of certain political groups, or tiptoeing over everyone’s precious feelings, boring?
For twelve seasons, we watched the cast galumph up several flights of stairs, only to have that epic joke pay off in the very last episode. We saw Sheldon go from unbearable, to slightly less unbearable, get married, win a Noble, and give a lovely acceptance speech that felt more like Jim Parsons thanking the real-life friends who have tolerated him. We even were treated to Stuart, the often forgotten comic book loving troll, moving in with the love of his life. Did any of it change the world? Nope. Why should it? It’s a run of the mill comedy doing the same thing when it ended that it did when it began — true to its roots.
Now maybe that’s failing to evolve, or maybe it’s simply fearlessness. And maybe, just maybe, thanks to the success of TBBT, sitcoms can begin again to worry more about telling the jokes and stories they want to tell, instead of whatever it is society forces them to tell. Be it old jokes, new jokes, or no jokes at the all, the point isn’t that a sitcom must become something different than what it started out to be for it to be excellent. Rather, to be great, a sitcom only need tell the stories of the characters they’ve created.
