Fan favorite and perennial Emmy nominee, The Big Bang Theory, was recently renewed by CBS for an additional three seasons. This is hardly surprising, given the show’s ratings, but I do confess I reacted to the news with a degree of regret. Whatever merit the show once had (and that was modest to begin with), it has long since departed and I would prefer to see it gone. If I’m being honest, though, I fail to see what CBS would replace it with that would be substantially better (the sitcom landscape is a dry and desolate wasteland), so whatever. Let it persist.

My issue with The Big Bang Theory is not really related to its portrayal of geek culture. Yes, it’s an unfair caricature of nerds and gamers (and often inaccurate for the purpose of deriving plot), but I would honestly challenge you to find anything in sitcom-land that isn’t a caricature of somebody. Caricatures are easy to mock and easy to write jokes for, and therefore they populate the television at its lowest echelons with all the same density that phytoplankton populates the oceans. Do I find it occasionally insulting? Yes, of course. Does it actively bother me? No, not for that reason. What bothers me about the show is its overriding cynicism. It is a show that thinks the worst of its characters, its audience, and the world in general.

Pictured: sadness in my heart

Let’s begin with the title, shall we? It is a crass pun and little more. It’s the kind of joke told by seventh grade boys in damp locker rooms whilst they speculate about female genitalia. Indeed, much of the entire theme of the show is oriented around such sophomoric, insulting puns, often at the expense of the female characters on the show. If anybody should be offended by The Big Bang Theory, it should be women. The basic premise of the show is that a woman can be attractive or she can be smart, but she cannot really be both. Penny, the most attractive, is also consistently displayed as an airhead with a poor memory, a disinterest in learning, and a history of poor life choices. Amy, the least attractive, is the only one able to match intellects with Sheldon Cooper. In the middle is Bernadette, who is not as attractive as Penny, but more attractive than Amy and is, therefore, somewhere between the two in terms of raw IQ. She is displayed as socially awkward and ditsy on the one hand, but also competent and rational on the other. This binary idea of women is beyond insulting; it’s a willfully ignorant display meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

This demographic, by the way, is no more friendly to ‘nerds’ than it is to women. Geeks are likewise displayed on a similar binary scale – intellect is also governed in inverse proportion to social grace and physical prowess. Because the nerds are smart, they are also weak. Sheldon, the smartest, is also the weakest. Howard, the one whose intelligence is most often ridiculed, is the only one in the end to actually achieve the presumed goal of all involved: marriage to a beautiful woman (though not as beautiful as Penny, as though the show is saying “let’s be realistic, here, nerds”). He also becomes an astronaut.

As if this weren’t enough, the show’s humor is exclusively hostile to its characters. We are never laughing with these people – we are laughing at them. Sheldon is the constant butt of jokes that demonstrate him as weak, unwise, and improbably clueless about the social world not because Sheldon is in any way realistic, but rather because the audience prefers to see the so-called genius put in his place. We are watching a crew of highly educated, presumably intelligent men involved in important fields get torn down and mocked for the purpose of appeasing an audience that doesn’t like eggheads and finds it implausible that attractive women would find scientists interesting or that scientists could at all manage to attract women on their own merits. To this end, characters in this show do not give each other compliments, relying instead on a litany of insults that are typically too juvenile to be funny beyond their simple shock value.

Towards the beginning of the series there was a point where the show was cynical but also novel – I watched it, laughed at some of the jokes, and identified with a couple of the plotlines, etc.. That point, however, has been smothered by the incessant recycling of the same five jokes over and over again. Leonard is ashamed of his geekery, Sheldon is clueless, Raj is awkward, Howard is skeevy, Penny is dumb and, right there, I’ve covered ~85% of the show’s humor. On a basic level, the show isn’t substantially different from Chuck Lorre’s other cash cow, Two and a Half Men, which is every bit as cynical and miserable. There is no joy in the lives of Charlie and Alan and there certainly isn’t any joy to be had amongst Sheldon, Raj, Howard, and Leonard. They are hamsters in wheels, running in their stereotype-dictated tracks, never to escape or to really grow.

The Big Bang Theory is like a poorly run zoo – go a few times and find the lions and the elephants interesting. Go every day, and soon you start to wonder why the lions look so sad and why the elephant never plays with that big rubber ball. You feel like you and the animals are rehearsing some kind of perverse play, wherein you watch and they exist and nothing changes or improves, and yet for some reason everybody still expects you to applaud.