Chuck Lorre, the creator of Two and a Half Men, has sold a pilot to CBS
called The Big Bang Theory. The show will center on two theoretical physicists and a woman who proves to
them they don't know everything.
I don't think it's bad to create a show where the woman is the "smart one," but it is a cliche. The rule most sitcoms adhere to is that the woman must always be grounded and intelligent while the man is pretty much a bumbling moron. When sitcoms first started to do this, it was a righteous response to the shoddy roles women had previously been given in television. Now, however, I think it's time to take the next step, to not try and make each character a representative of an entire gender and instead treat each character as an individual. Arrested Development springs to mind as one show that I think did this fairly well. Characters were driven by their own selfish desires and everyone, male and female, had plenty of shortcomings. When you try to force an absolute onto a character, it stifles that character's ability to come across as real.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-02-2006 @ 7:02PM
kyle said...
wow.
that was an incredibly well written blog entry.
and i completely agree
Reply
3-02-2006 @ 7:16PM
Evadne said...
Yeah, but who gets to be the theoretical physicists? Take a show like Numb3rs--the only woman you find at CalTech, Amita, is a supporting player, and her job appears to be to enter things into the computer. It's incredibly rare that women get to be the "smart" ones on television with the credentials to back it up. I don't mean smart in a "long suffering wife of lovable slob" way, either, which I agree is a pretty irritating male character type. A certain kind of "smart" is privileged--the kind of smart that leads the character to help resolve complicated/artificial dramatic plots, but generally, it seems necessary to "prove" time and time again that "book smart" people can't function in the real world.
Reply
3-02-2006 @ 7:32PM
David said...
I can't wait until she beats them at a sport too. You know that episode, it's a sitcom requirement.
Reply
3-03-2006 @ 1:07PM
Shalabi said...
Another sitcom requirement: She gets asked out to a date and then has to go to the bumbling guys to learn how to act like a woman on said date. The guys feed her lines through a walky-talky while she is at the restaurant, she gets exposed, they share a tender moment and then she decides she's not ready for a relationship. The date guy is never seen again.
Reply
3-03-2006 @ 2:42PM
Dottore said...
Evadne, in her comment above, leaves out the fact that Amita, on a recent episode of NUMB3RS, was awarded a prestigious prize. Though she is a secondary character and is not in every scene, she is portrayed as a top intellect.
Reply
3-03-2006 @ 2:50PM
Urbey said...
In order for a posting to be an "incredibly well written blog entry" it must be well-written, which means that it must be in correct English. Too bad that Adam wrote, "it stifles that characters ability to come across as real," using the plural of character instead of the correct possessive "character's".
Reply
3-03-2006 @ 3:32PM
Lisa said...
It's about time someone noticed that all the males in sitcoms are all bumbling morons and all the women level-headed and smart. Also, the women are all super skinny and the men out of shape. I guess that's the norm nowadays :(
Reply
3-04-2006 @ 10:36PM
Adam said...
Forgetting the apostrophe was an oversight on my part.
Reply
5-12-2006 @ 12:17PM
Tim said...
I think you're totally missing the point of the show. I'm hoping this one gets picked up ? it's about time we got away from the family sitting around the couch sitcom, and explore some new characters. And these guys & gal seem interesting to me...
Reply