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I'll be honest, TV series, sitcoms, dramas, and what-have-you don't really excite me much. At the mere thought of not being able to skip an episode and being tied to the systemic order of the current season without having to rehash loves, acquaintances, engagements, events, deaths, and resurrections, my hand compulsively grabs the remote (or any other similar on-off switch device), turns off the talking box, and opts for alternative activities that can be done regardless of chronologies, hierarchies, and sequences. It's precisely in the ineffable mathematical order of individual episodes that the worst flaws of multi-season dramas lie, prone to frequent losses of popular interest and disastrous slips into clichés and banalities due to the exhaustion of ideas and creativity by the production companies.
Sometimes, however, these annoying burdens do not exist, and studios manage to give us cathodic storylines that not only don't lose their effectiveness over time but progressively increase it. Certainly, you won't find all this in centuries or millennia-long romantic escapades, in soaps like Beautiful where the wrinkles of the performers bid farewell to the lost youth of the various Ross, and especially in lucrative brand names meant to be immortalized in terms of marketing and revenue (see the various Sex And The City). The perfect quality-quantity balance of TV series should indeed be sought in scripts that favor the individual episode, making it unique and standalone, not a poor piece of an apocalyptic and unreal neverending story. An episode that can be watched and rewatched, skipped, and then caught up with without major shocks of linear coherence super-partes.
It's the case - in my humble opinion - of The Big Bang Theory, a typical American sitcom that pits intelligence and culture against aesthetics and ignorance, a sort of "beauties and nerds" for laughs. The historical background is very simple: in sunny Pasadena, Los Angeles, four nerdy and geeky friends (Sheldon Cooper, Leonard Hofstadter, Howard Wolowitz, and Rajesh Koothrappali) of high cultural caliber come into contact with the attractive girl from Nebraska, Penny, the perfect archetype of the "ditsy blonde" with an intense social and sexual life. One day - specifically the pilot episode - Penny moves in next to roommates Sheldon and Leonard, disrupting their apathetic, boring, and antisocial lifestyle, almost entirely dedicated to science, video games, science fiction, and comics, but never to opening up to society. Also characteristic are the unique traits of the four boys, researchers at the University of California: Sheldon, a theoretical physicist with a very high IQ (187), is a young, hyper-rational, sociopathic, asexual individual unable to identify, recognize, and engage in "non-scientific" social rituals and behaviors - such as the exchange of Christmas gifts or the practice of expressions of affection and compassion. Leonard (an experimental physicist) is perhaps the only one who shows a certain embarrassment for his "loser" condition and somewhat connects decently (or almost) with the opposite sex. Aerospace engineer Howard embodies the fake playboy still living with his strict mother, while Rajesh "Raji," an Indian astrophysicist, exactly reproduces the man scared of the female gender. To crown their already funny and amusing attributes, the scientist-protagonists boast further "malfunctions" and congenital defects, with Sheldon unable to lie and allergic to cat hair, Leonard lactose intolerant, Howard vulnerable to peanuts, and good Rajesh suffering from a rare case of selective mutism preventing him from speaking (while sober and without experimental drug assistance) with women.
Every single episode of The Big Bang Theory is a small, yet dynamite-packed burst of laughter that's rarely containable. The enormous potential of the series indeed lies in the simple, effective, and exemplary exchange of lines between two polar opposite worlds (the rational scientific nature of the "geniuses" and the standard social confusion of the "others") whose apparent irreconcilability creates a sequence of sketches with immediate hilarity. It's the case of the encounters-collisions between Sheldon, the jealous custodian of his irreplaceable spot on the couch (calculated based on variables like temperature, humidity, air movements, and various pleasantness) and a maniac of order and even classifying objects with labels, and the disorganized-chaotic Penny, in whose residence the string theory advocate will intrude to tidy up (!!!); again, Leonard's infatuation with the twenty-two-year-old neighbor, typical prey (consenting) of unlettered macho men, or Wolowitz's failed advances, and finally, Raji's embarrassing mutism, necessarily drunk when he manages to utter a few words with the fairer sex.
Could the cathodic theory of The Big Bang - now in its fifth season with dizzying events that I don't intend to spoil here - rise to become the new frontier of the amusing, interesting, and at the same time not exhausting TV series? Can four nerds plus the girl next door succeed in retiring Beautiful, defeating Hannah Montana, and stealing scepters and thrones from the sappy Disney and the limping Doctor House? To contemporaries (scientists and common people) the difficult verdict.
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