When I first watched (or perhaps I should say caught sight of)
The Big Bang Theory in daily early-evening repeats on E4, my initial response was simply to write it off as a cross between
Friends and
Frasier - those two 1990s stalwarts of America's sitcom export market, who taught us between them that it's OK to jump into bed with anyone you feel like provided you're young and attractive, make lots of arch, quippy remarks about everything, and somehow make enough money in your dead-end job to live in a palatial high-rise apartment.* It took a while for the penny (
ahem!) to drop that this was actually quite a good formula for a sitcom - tried and tested, and only eventually (i.e. after a decade or so) becoming tired and testing.
The oddest thing for me about
The Big Bang Theory in retrospect though isn't even its longevity, so much as its particularly peculiar brand of conservatism. For all its obsession with making up-to-date references to geek culture and "real world" science, there was actually something strangely old-fashioned about the multi-camera/studio-audience format. In fact although the sexual mores were 21st century,
The Big Bang Theory was pretty much hawking the same American Dream as its sitcom predecessors had in the heyday of comic-books and astronauts in the early 1960s. The characters all live in clean and tidy houses and apartments. Religion, it has to be said, doesn't get much of a look-in, but at the same time when married female characters get pregnant "choice" is not even mentioned. And by the end of the series it turns out that friendship and family, intelligence and hard work, and eventually marriage and children - in that order, unusually enough - are the important things that make for personal fulfillment and happiness.
What made it feel even more old-fashioned in the dying days of the Obama era (not to mention amidst the woke hysteria that greeted Trump's election) was that it was a survivor from the time of Dubya. Back in them thar days, for example, it was still acceptable to have dark-skinned comedy characters like Apu and Rajesh in mainstream TV-shows. (Once the One become President, interestingly enough, it became politically incorrect to make fun of such people: for all their talk about not punching down, it was only once they finally had an opportunity to punch up that America's comedians stopped punching at all. I suppose it's funny how nakedly political political correctness can be!)
In actual fact the sub-textual racism of the way Raj's character was treated
is quite troubling, dramatically at least as much as politically. Yes, it's lamp-shaded from time to time. Raj does occasionally call out his friends' ignorance about his culture. But it never changed the fact that the show's writers' fundamentally didn't know anything about people like him or indeed know what to do with him in particular. Even Enoch Powell thought that to all extents and purposes Indian people are basically like white people, but as far as the
The Big Bang Theory was concerned they may as well be from Mars. So for most of the show's run Raj says and does comparatively little, and when there's a female character in the room he doesn't say anything at all (because he has
selective mutism - hilarious!) and by the show's end he's the only one of the main cast who's still single (but he still has a Felix and Oscar-style relationship with Howard - hilarious!). In short, that Rajesh Koothrappali was only ever in the show as the token ethnic was definitely "problematic", and not just in the hip modern sense of the word. (The only other non-white regular character in the series is a black lady who works in HR. I'm not quite sure what that means, but just saying.)
Even more absent than unwanted pregnancies and ethnics, oddly enough, were gays. Perhaps one underestimates how spoiled one was for gay gags when watching actual
Friends and actual
Frasier (not to mention
Ellen, or indeed their 1990s contemporary series on this side of the pond
Absolutely Fabulous), but so far as I can remember there were no gay characters in
The Big Bang Theory to be laughed either at
or with. Indeed, most of the "comedy" of Raj and Howard's relationship depends on the ancient gag that they're not gay but they behave as if they are. Jim Parsons, who plays Sheldon, actually came out of the closet during the show's run, but his character on screen remained fussily heterosexual. And if there was an episode when one of show's character's started questioning his or her sexuality (like Frasier did one time, as did Malcolm and Reese, etc. etc.) I certainly don't remember it.
A legitimate question then I suppose is
Why? Until he started fornicating with Amy (and he'd use the word himself), Sheldon Cooper was arguably the most moral character on American television (at least since Capt Janeway returned to Earth) - hardworking, clean-living, generous to a fault and (for all his annoying quirks) utterly loyal both to his friends
and to non-optional social conventions. One possibility is that an old-fashioned format leads to an old-fashioned sort of show, complete with old-fashioned characters and golden oldies-type humour. After all there's only so much in-depth character development you can do when you have a studio audience always waiting for the next gag, and so the tendency is to cleave to perennial archetypes (or, if you like, the same sorts of stock characters who have been serving comedy for literally thousands of years). And so the show's first episode started with the original straight man joined with the idiot savant with a heart of gold, who were then in turn joined by the blonde bimbo with hidden strengths (the chief of which ends up being an ability to hold her liquor), the quippy Jew-boy with hidden weaknesses (especially his mom and his blonde Catholic wife), and, of course, the token ethnic.
By the end of the series, interestingly enough, all the important story-arcs have been tied up. Having started their first episode with a single timeless male-male relationship†, the show then built outwards eventually to include suitable female partners for all its male characters (apart from Raj, of course, but even including Stuart!). Penny meanwhile has given up drink (because she's up the duff), and Raj and Howard have accepted that their friendship is special but in a non-gay way. Most importantly though, Sheldon has got a Nobel Prize and used his speech to thank and apologise to his friends and to tell them he loves them. If this is "conservatism" then it's both old-fashioned and unapologetically elitist to boot.
Wisely though, the show's writers end the final episode with a final scene that is a return to the show's beginning. Nobody gets on a 'plane to LA. No one goes off to become President. No one gets married who wasn't already. We see the same group of friends, albeit with their relationships deepened and their circle expanded, returning to the same apartment and to their same positions, eating together around the same table and implicitly (slightly
Simpsons-style) in front of the same TV-screen. And so even the show's ending is comfortingly conservative: a reminder that true growth and prosperity are ultimately spiritual in nature, and that "change" is not always either necessary or desirable.
*The Simpsons at the same time could somehow afford to live in a similarly palatial suburban villa, though their show at least had the sense to hang a lampshade on that from time to time.
†Apparently the only thing that worked in the show's ill-fated pilot episode was the relationship between Parsons's Sheldon and Galecki's Leonard.
