Big Bang seems bombproof
Canadians can’t get enough of sitcom about nerdy friends
The most-watched TV show in Canada — by far — is The Big Bang Theory. It has been topping weekly Canadian ratings charts for years.
The six-year-old CBS sitcom regularly draws between 3.5 and four million viewers a week Thursdays on CTV. The Canadian network also airs reruns of The Big Bang Theory weeknights. Those reruns outdraw much of what is seen in prime time across all networks in Canada.
CTV is even using the series to sway viewers away from CBC during the hockey stoppage. Saturday marathons of the comedy were being billed as Big Bang Night in Canada until CBC complained. They are currently outdrawing CBC’s Your Pick classic hockey reruns by more than a five-to-one margin.
The series is also a popular draw on CTV’s specialty channel, The Comedy Network.
Usually when a network overuses a series to this extent it drives it into the ground. The famous example is Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, a runaway success in the 1990s until ABC started airing it four nights a week across its schedule.
Yet Big Bang remains bullet proof. Why can’t Canadians get enough of it?
The question was put to an actual neuroscientist: Mayim Bialik. She also happens to star on the series as Sheldon’s brilliant but frustrated girlfriend Amy.
“I think they’re laughing at us, that’s the problem,” she deadpanned at a CBS press party held at the most recent Television Critics Association gathering in Los Angeles.
Doing deadpan is a Bialik specialty. The 36-year-old has been using that acting trick ever since her days as a child star on the early ’90s sitcom Blossom.
Bialik really has no idea why the series gets a bigger bang in Canada.
“The Canadian and United States sense of humour is similar,” she observes. “I don’t think there’s anything mystical about that.
“Maybe,” she speculates, “people are more inclined to like nerdy people in Canada.”
It may also help that the series’ theme song is performed by the nerdiest of Canadian bands, the Barenaked Ladies.
Bialik joined The Big Bang Theory at the tail end of Season Three as Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler, playing the “friend that’s a girl, not a girlfriend” to brainy fusspot Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons). At first a recurring character, she became a regular half way through the fourth season. Last season she earned a best supporting Emmy nomination. “I was not at all thinking I was going to be a regular on a TV show,” says Bialik.