Some of the show's best episodes include "The Nerdvana Annihilation" wherein the gang pools their money to buy a prop from the movie The Time Machine and "The Loobenfeld Decay" wherein Leonard makes up a lie to spare Penny's feelings and Sheldon feels the need to "improve" the lie by going to astounding lengths to make it "un-unravelable."
A neat convention in the show is that fact that the elevators in the apartment building are out of service, forcing the characters to have their conversations while walking up several flights of stairs, providing some unique and clever staging opportunities.
One downside of really letting the characters come into their own is accentuated by the DVD presentation in that watching each episode back to back really brings out the unappealing qualities in Sheldon. By the middle of the second disc it seems as though every episode deals with the other characters just having to put up with Sheldon's jerky behavior. In "The Pancake Batter Anomoly," Sheldon comes down with a cold and becomes the most needy and obnoxious person alive as he continually tests the patience of Penny (and the viewer) with his unending need for the kind of comforting things his mother did for him when he was sick as a child. What's missing for Sheldon is something that makes him vulnerable to balance out his obnoxiousness.
In the fantastic show Arrested Development, Gob Bluth is a character who does despicable, unethical things unceasingly, however he's one of the most loved characters on the show because of the constant manner in which the audience is reminded of how pathetically vulnerable he is. Only one episode in season one of The Big Bang Theory shows any kind of vulnerability for Sheldon and that's "The Jerusalem Duality" wherein a smarter, younger genius threatens Sheldon's top standing at his job, but it all feels resolved much too quickly and in the episode that follows, "The Bat Jar Conjecture," he's back to being a total jerk once again without seeming to have been humbled from his previous experience at all. I imagine that watching these episodes all a week apart would dull Sheldon's obnoxiousness, but the fact that they're all viewable one after another on the DVD really makes him seem all the more consistently unappealing and unrelenting. Sheldon has the snootiness of Niles from Frasier but without the charming awkwardness of his attraction for Daphne; instead Sheldon has the icy coldness of Lillith from Cheers.
Article comments
1 - Big Bang Fanatic
Great review. Readers can get more details on the DVD here.
2 - Ibrahim Itambo
quite a good review. keep it up !!