‘The Big Bang Theory’ is cancelled: good riddance, it shouldn’t exist in the era of #MeToo
Did you know The Big Bang
Theory was still a thing? I certainly didn’t.
So it came as a surprise to hear that the show will go out, presumably with a bang, after season 12 – yes, you read that right, 12 – which will begin broadcasting in the US in September.
The sitcom, essentially a geek-friendly version of Friends, follows the lives of Leonard and Sheldon (Johnny Galecki and Jim Parsons), two nerdy theoretical physicists who share an apartment and their equally geeky scientist friends Howard (Simon Helberg) and Raj (Kunal Nayyar). Penny (Kaley Cuoco), a waitress and aspiring actress lives across the hall with her fellow Cheesecake Factory waitress Bernadette (Melissa Rauch). In later seasons, Sheldon’s girlfriend and eventual wife Amy (Mayim Bialik), a microbiologist, also becomes a central character.
All the classic Hollywood geek tropes can be found within
The Big Bang Theory. The guys obsess over comic books, are socially awkward and get excited by mathematical theories. They’re all into Star Trek and, of course, there’s a predictable “opposites attract” on-off romance that develops over the seasons between Leonard and the cute blonde waitress across the hall, who usually dates muscular jocks, of course.
What’s surprising in the era of #MeToo, however, is how The
Big Bang Theory hasn’t updated the “nerd genre”, considering what we know to be unilaterally unacceptable in 2018. It’s surely the only show in popular culture today where a man can get away with sexually assaulting a woman, and it is considered comedic. Somehow, the geeky, unthreatening nature of non-alpha males in the nerd genre makes it OK to spy on the object of your affection’s bedroom with binoculars while hiding in a tree (Back to the
Future) or, in The Big Bang Theory’s case, use remote control cars fitted with webcams to film up your neighbour’s skirt, as happened in 2017 to 2018’s season 11, or hack into military satellites to spy on the America’s Next Top Model house. Even when the male cast aren’t actively abusing the women in the show, female roles outside the central cast are rarely given more depth than “hot chicks,” a commodity the guys are constantly in search of. The hot chicks are
invariably stupid, and the guys’ behaviour towards them is rarely anything but creepy, and often full-scale misogynistic. This is exemplified in a scene in which Sheldon tells a female colleague that women are “like an egg sandwich on a hot Texas day. Full of eggs and only appealing for a short while.”
The show is fully aware of its own sexism, and periodical racism, usually aimed at Indian nerd Raj, but it never criticises it or offers a solution. It merely acknowledges it and asks that we laugh at it. It’s surprising that the show has even survived long enough to be referenced in relation to the #MeToo movement. Yet by 2013 to 2014’s season seven it was the second-most popular show on US TV with more than 16 million viewers. It topped the charts outright with season 11.
At least the show is going out on a high. It would be nice to think that it is set to end thanks to its producers and writers realising it is living in the past, but that seems unlikely.
No official reason for the show’s cancellation has been given as yet, but reports out of Hollywood claim that negotiations were already underway between the show’s maker, Warner Bros TV, and broadcaster CBS for a further two seasons of nerd-themed anachronistic comedy. However, the show’s star, Jim Parsons reportedly announced to top brass that he was leaving after season 12, in the process turning his back on a million-dollar-an-episode fee, and bringing the curtain down on TV’s longest-running multi-camera show.
Will it be missed? Perhaps by the 18.5m US viewers that tuned in to watch season 11.
In my own personal universe, however, not in the slightest. The show’s demise will be the cultural equivalent of a single quantum particle being thrown out into an infinite universe. I certainly won’t be mourning the passing of this tragically unfunny show’s final episode.
In fact, it’s highly unlikely I’ll be watching it at all.