It just doesn’t make sense. Intelligent design is a much more plausible theory! *insert laughter here*

Jokes aside, though. I do have a bit of a beef with The Big Bang Theory and it’s not because of it’s huge appeal with people outside its given demographic. Yes, it’s become increasingly watered down with each season – less focus on nerd-type-jokes, more focus on “Raj (Kunal Nayyar) knows stuff about clothes. That’s funny because it’s gay”, and that’s the kind of catering to the most common denominator you can expect after a certain level of success. It’s a decent show – don’t get me wrong, I still watch it – but it isn’t great.

And here’s why:

While the show does, in fact, do a great job exploring the ins and outs of male geekdom, it’s horrendously bad at exploring the female counterpart. It’s a show by geeks for geeks, and yet the female geeks you see on the show are awfully one-dimensional. Again, don’t get me wrong; I love Penny, Amy, Bernadette and Leslie Winkle (Kaley Cuoco, Mayim Bialik, Melissa Rauch and Sara Gilbert) - but I can’t relate to them. In the world of The Big Bang Theory women are either;

1. Fellow nerd girls. You can spot them cause they all wear glasses and ugly cardigans.
2. Normal girls, who aren’t always smart but are always pretty. And totally uninterested in everything “nerdy”.
3. Mothers. All overbearing and controlling in their own way.

I understand that writing comedic characters without turning them into caricatures is difficult, but it’s not impossible – like shows such as Parks and Recreation show us on a weekly basis. I refuse to believe that girls with a taste for roleplaying, comics and sci-fi are so rare in the geek community that they shouldn’t be included. They exist. I am friends with several of them.

So after five seasons of feeling left out, enter Alice (Courtney Ford) – a comic book artist who picks Leonard (Johnny Galecki) up at the comic book store. She doesn’t wear glasses. She functions well socially and is sexually assertive. She stays with us for – brace yourselves – an entire episode. Yeah; major bummer.

This frustrates me so much, because – a lot of the time – the satire of male geeks is so spot on. Take, for example, the demonstration of casual misogyny (mostly dished out by Sheldon (Jim Parsons) and Howard (Simon Helberg)) only to demonstrate how inately stupid it is. So why does a show that obviously has what it takes to write a nerd that’s neither antisocial nor too weird and with a fair amount of smarts (and boobs) not do so? They do it just fine with Leonard (minus boobs). And I think it’s in their interest to do so – as the show’s becoming increasingly popular – to give us (teh wimminz) a character that’s just slightly relatable. For more than one episode.

Because, the reason why this show is so popular is that there’s a geek living in most of us and that geek is the common denominator you should be catering to. Things is, though; she’s probably not wearing an ugly cardigan.