> The Big Bang Theory 420,400,000
That is just depressing IMO.. I don't understand the appeal to that show..
The initial pilot featured a more conniving Penny played by a different actress. The focus group feedback was "Someone keep that mean girl away from those sweet boys".
Think of it as a show for moms / grandmothers / aunts of nerdy men. They want to see them get up so some shenanigans but generally be OK.
It's also a low effort show to watch so you can throw it on in the background while you're doing other things.
Nobody asked, but my thing to watch like this is everything-Star-Trek (TOS, TNG, V, Ent, etc. including the movies)
I mean, personally I love the early episodes just as much. But trying to get other people into it hasn't been successful for me.
Also I love starting on a long binge. There are hundreds and hundreds of episodes to watch! Peak Star Trek for me is DS9 when they start to get heavy into the Dominion war. Sisko is such a badass. He's my favorite Captain.
I always felt the stereotypes were truly making fun of geek/nerds, and somehow fooled folks into thinking they were in on the joke.
Warm is a word I have a hard time using.
So you're saying it's the same as just about any other sitcom?
Besides joking at one another's expense, a super common trope in US sitcoms is the lie to avoid embarrassment which builds up tension throughout the show, inevitably leads to exposure/confrontation and then resolution (forgiveness) near the end.
So many situations would be resolved quickly if the characters just 'fessed up immediately instead of trying to deceive the others to save face.
But then, there'd be no show with cheap laughs.
I don't know if that was representative but I decided it was not for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3-hOigoxHs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L7NRONADJ4
I don't know how to mesh that with Wil Wheaton speaking so fondly of his time on the show in his book. Even the updated one where he talks about his past views and behavior with exceptional self-awareness.
I like that show, but no, it is not warm show about caring. It is fun show about mutual abuse. Like I said, fun and all, but in kinda cruel way.
So TBBT is a part of the overall zeitgeist, an example of a show of its type that was very successful.
You bet if a sci-fi show was number 1, than other sci-fi shows would be being made and better funded.
America doesn't know how to make comedy anymore. I blame Twitter.
I think this sort of talent development really is just about giving chances to new folks, its the risk averse large networks only re-hiring the same older folks that stifles an artistic sector, be it movies, shows, music, games, comedy etc
If anything, Netflix comedies are the opposite of TBBT, there's no audience laughter, it's all single-camera like Arrested Development, The Office and other 2000s-era neo-sitcoms.
Money they take out of their budget to keep TBBT in their library is money they can no longer spend to keep shows that I, personally, care for alive.
It's the same thing as cable: by paying for a Netflix subscription, I'm partially paying for them to keep TBBT on their network, and I don't think it's a stretch to say if they didn't have TBBT they'd have a (or more than one) different show instead, that I might be more interested in.
TBBT isn't specifically the problem. But it's pretty emblematic of the lowest-common-denominator chaff that's currently clogging up streaming services. I don't even think it's a bad show, necessarily, in of that people do get joy from it. But I think broad-appeal, low risk, low effort content is horrendously overvalued in our society compared to more interesting, creative work, which is honestly not that hot of a take.
Tl;dr I want more people to like the sorts of things I like so that they get more financial support and become more prevalent compared to the sorts of things I care for less. This is not an unusual take.
On the same token, money spent keeping TBBT on the network reduces customer churn and increases earnings, which can be invested in other shows.
TBBT is the symptom, not the problem. Netflix would be delighted to not pay CBS a fortune every year. The problem is that Netflix doesn't have enough customers whose tastes skew towards your own.
And another way of putting that is "I find it depressing how many people watch TBBT (compared to shows I prefer)"
And that's between January and June 2023.
If we say the typical working day is 8 hours and the week is 5 days and a typical full time worker works 42 weeks a year (factoring in holidays and sick leave), based on this report 55,628,095 or about 56 million years of human productivity spent staring at Netflix in the 1st half of 2023
Looking at it another way right now we have almost 8.1 billion people on the planet. The total hours reported in this spreadsheet averages to about 12 hours per person on the planet for the 1st 6 months of 2023.
Pretty mind boggling, especially when you consider this is only part of the story, compared to all the other entertainment media we spend time on (TikTok, Instagram etc.)
Overall, I believe the show is a terrible role model for how men who are in STEM fields should behave to others who do not fit the stereotype.
The problem is context, it's Lenny Bruce mocking the cop who is reading back his skit in court. It's Dave Chapel pointing out how people quoting him on twitter without the context miss the point...
These are made up people in a make believe world doing made up things. They aren't meant to be taken seriously on any level.
Love the sneaky word play! Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?
> ... reinforcing the stereotypes present in the world
The whole point of comedy is to take away the teeth behind these things. The act is meant to reshape culture and conversation. Stereotype, beauty, the perception of color, were very fungible and its just another tool!
Also, one of the main features of the show seems to be to point out the fact that, with respect to women: That's Not How To Do It. So, to claim that the show's writers are "doing it wrong" seems to be missing the point. It'd be like criticizing the writers of All in the Family for imbuing Archie Bunker with working-class conservative values. The whole point of the show was to illustrate how wrong he was.
The comments Sheldon makes are misogynist in the literal sense of the definition you gave, too, self-evidently so, IMO. The first video starts listing examples at 10:45. Again, the humor is just in the juxtaposition of average people's attitudes with his open contempt for women, with his bigotry acknowledged but never really addressed.
I probably wouldn't like the characters or watch the show if they didn't make the jokes or have the quirks and shortcomings that they do.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is not an educational show about how to manage a pub.
Big Bang does nothing like that, you’re supposed to like the characters.
Suddenly I found them relatable and amusing, the exact kind of escape I needed
then other things I valued became accessible again and took up my time again and I don't find shows like that appealing
Its really just to say to consider revisiting it in a different phase of your life
I enjoyed it, but I enjoyed it the same way I enjoy Seinfeld. It is an equivalent of chips and icecream. Filling, but ultimately bad for you.
How about Big Bang and Scrubs? Both are kinda silly and both kinda got bad the same way.
I actually like to be productive, and I suspect you do too. But if people don't, that's fine too. I do wonder if we might be addicted to productivity, though.
Thinking about what that implies about how these people engage with art is kind of wild. It's like speedwalking through an art gallery to see more paintings per hour. There's something about that optimization/productivity mindset that seems strangely pathological. Like insisting on eating exclusively vitamin gruel because it's optimized for nutrition per minutes.
I don't know where this compulsion starts, but it's a little disturbing.
That is actually a thing and perhaps a growing industry called "meal replacements".
It's not surprising given that meals for many people are already just plastic wrapped matter heated in a microwave and slurped up from their laps on the couch.
Part of it is politicians who seem insistent on treating productivity as a primary goal. If we were struggling to produce enough food then, sure, productivity would be a big problem. But we produce an excess of food. So much so that obesity and diabetes are a problem now. This goes for everything: I can't think of a single thing in life where I think "if only we were more productive I'd be happier". At some point we really have to learn to just be happy.
The other part is the tendency of people to focus on simple metrics and neglect anything with nuance. Things like number of books you've read this year, how many people you manage, how much money you earn. All simple numbers, all essentially meaningless outside of a much broader context, but all pursued with laser focus for no particular reason.
At this point in my life I earn more money than ever, I have more stuff and, yes, I'm more productive. But am I happier now than when I got my first cheap car (that I could now buy every month without even sacrificing anything)? Am I happier than when I first had sex? Am I happier than that day I cooked a splendid boeuf bourguignon for my student house? Of course not.
But those other ones, are freaky - the ones that are designed to be allround [food] for humans, in the same way that a dog can eat exclusively a specific type of dogfood indefinitely. Why the need/desire to do this? It's like something out of classic dystopian sci-fi, only it's chosen voluntarily by people with access to real(ish) food, and they pay a premium for it.
I think you're correct about this effort to cram more 'stuff' into life instead of taking our time to engage with less in a deeper way, being counterproductive to the things that make us happy. Maybe some internalized mindset of productivity for its own sake, completely unmoored from the managerial context? Some kind of cargo-cult type performance to attract what - prosperity? Happiness?
I don't really have a good answer for why this happens, but it's certainly interesting.
That said, for me it has nothing to do with productivity. I just want a single meal I could repeatably consume to maintain a healthy diet. (Ideally, with as little effort as possible on my part because it all taste the same to me)
However Suits is insufferable to watch.
Not really thinking it’s a big problem personally, lots of shows follow very similar formula, but I did end up stopping to watch after a few seasons as I did get tired of it.