An Ode to Big Bang Theory (the TV Show)

The day before yesterday as the final episode of the final season of Big Bang Theory rolled to its conclusion, I capitulated to what the makers of the series would have wanted me to do — I let my eyes get just a bit moist.

BBT could also be charged of stealing hundreds of hours from our family mealtime. It had quite undesirably shifted our meal venue from the dining table to the living area in front of the TV. Guilty as charged!

But BBT had also given us countless moments of laughter. While many jokes were cheap, mean, racist, mildly profane, most were truly witty. The main characters were designed with enough craft, psychological insight and variety of traits that it hadn't grown monotonous watching them. Though I don't possess the knowledge to evaluate, I think there's enough mathematics involved in optimising the ensemble of traits visible in all the characters and how they are distributed among the characters to maximize the comic effect. Much of the humour in the series lay in its dialogues and how they were delivered. Again, the dialogue design exhibited phenomenal access to knowledge in human psychology and various branches of sciences (astrophysics, neurobiology, microbiology and of-course physics).

One of major ticklers of the theme was the presence of contradictory traits in Sheldon — a genius level IQ contrasted with a nearly absent EQ. Undoubtedly, the focus was mostly on his low EQ as instances of his genius would be mostly inaccessible to most viewers and would have little comic value. It provided an excellent contrasting backdrop on which to paint glorious pictures of his goofiness. I also feel that the makers mayn’t have shied from capitalising on the fact that people on average love to hate brilliant people. That a genius level scientist can completely fail in social settings isn't just funny but even comforting in a sadistic way to an average viewer.

Of course, there are many instances of contradictions in the show. Amy with high IQ and EQ but bad body image. Penny with physical attractiveness and street smartness but low textbook intelligence. Leonard with his maturity but emotional vulnerability. Howard and Rajesh both with impressive academic background but low self-esteem and creepiness. Bernadet with her tiny height and cute face but with a dominating and aggressive personality. Howard with his creepiness but attachment with his mother. The impressively high intelligence of all four boys contrasted with their social awkwardness and love for comic, videogames and superhero tales.

Placing complementary characters side-by-side maybe another of those design tricks. For instance, Amy (high EQ) against Sheldon (low EQ). Penny (low IQ) versus all the others (high IQ).

Probably complementarity of various types is a standard comic tool.

In the jungle of slapstick, there were plenty of examples of genuinely witty and high-class use of language. If not anything else, I am sure that all three of us learned a lot about clever use of language, English in particular, because of watching BBT.

And I think one of most comforting and endearing aspect of this show was its light-heartedness. We are academicians ourselves. And, while we love our profession, we know how gruelling it can be with more its share of stress, anxiety, ego, competition sometimes amounting to bitter rivalry and even hatred, insecurities, manipulation and corruption, powerplay, bullying, abuse and harassment. However, these characters, academicians themselves, when they sat down together in the living room of Sheldon's apartment, eating always out of their ordered in packet, they would always be exuding a sense of relaxation. There may be dashes of sarcasm, anger, frustration and all sorts of negativities, but all adding up to create an atmosphere of cosiness and camaraderie, devoid of overwork or overwhelm. Having my meals in their company would transport me into their world for those few minutes, and my life would lose its bit of burdensomeness for a while.

So there! That little mist that appeared before my eyes wasn't just because of Sheldon's emotional speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony, but because I had also already started missing these fictional friends of mine, with whom I had spent more lighthearted and quality time than with many other so-called real characters in my life.

News Channels, Movies and Books

I mostly do not watch TV. Well, sometimes I do. I flip lazily through movie channels (in search of a highly gory action scene or a sci-fi or fantasy scene), music channels (old movie songs, ghazals, bhajans), travel/cookery/documentary channels (some NatGeo documentary on space/physics/computers, or some fat chef cooking something unhealthy and delicious, or rich, beautiful women in skimpy clothes talking about spirituality and world welfare holidaying in expensive resorts in South Pacific where I will never go), entertainment channels (soap operas, reality shows, just as a preparation to switch off the TV).

In that order.

Mostly, a fairly cursory pass through all these channels exhausts the 15-20 minute window of mentally vegetative state that allow myself.

My behaviour while going over the newspaper is similar: I start with the glossy supplementaries, I feed my morbid side by lapping up a few items reporting suicides, murders, accidents, rapes and robberies. Then, past all news on international politics, commerce, sports ... I jump straight to the editorial page.

If I really have some time in hand and am looking to spend it with myself while enriching myself, I pick a book. If I want to watch a movie (I love movies), I get a DVD or go to a threatre. I don't find it worth trusting the movie channels to telecast the movies I would like to watch, where they decide the time, and also the number and duration of commercial breaks.

An interesting observation is: I don't remember myself ever having sauntered into one of the numerous news channels. Not even when looking for information. In the days of Doordarshan, I remember having sat through the 20 minutes newscast where the very beautiful, elegant and impersonal-faced Salma Sultan would monotonously read out headlines worded crisply, impartially and lifelessly. Though I was still a kid, I would appreciate that those newscasts were talking about something important. And though I was still a kid, I was grown up enough to admire Salma madam's beauty (of course, there were others: Manjari Sahay, Avinash Kaur, J P Raman, Ved Prakash ...)! But never in the current days do I remember having survived a single news channel show.

There's plenty said about how the news channels have become sensationalised, loud and biased. So, I will not go there. I will sign off by just mentioning that however much I rationalise with myself, I haven't been able to motivate myself to keep up with current affairs, particularly by the way of TV news or newspapers. I do pick up magazines like Frontline and India Today sometimes. But I find keeping up with the day to day updates beyond my capability. In other words, my interest in certain current affairs gets aroused only when they lose some of their currency.

For me, a chunk of time devoted to entertainment or enrichment is often scraped out with some effort. I can't bring myself to squandering it. If it's entertainment, I would like the taste to stay in my mouth long after that. If it's for knowledge building, it can't depend on raw nuggets of information/rumour/gossips dished out to me in loud voices, sensationalised wordings and fake emotionalism, but on crafted/distilled/verified pieces of work with a direct connection of it to things I hold dear to my thoughts.

Whether entertainment or knowledge, I can accept only things which have a dash of timelessness in them, not anything with false claim of quality but essentially volatile.

The Unreality of Reality Shows

Yesterday, I was watching Indian Idol - 5. My wife likes it a lot, and dotes on some of the competitors. But for her thriftiness, nothing stands in her way to send zillions of SMSs to make some of them go ahead in the competition. I am not jealous of those competitors. And that's definitely not the reason for my writing this article

But this article is indeed with the motive of expressing my disgust with the reality shows being aired these days. That's a tacky topic to write on. But I will be more specific in things which I disapprove of.

First, a mention of things which I approve of. I think the competition has risen to unprecedented heights. Competitors are awesome. They are superbly talented. And more than that, they generally show tremendous grits in handling stress.

But beyond that, everything is a minus. Firstly, the way things are judged there is really aweful. SMSs sent by by and large a section of population with nothing better to do are far from representative of the public opinion. More serious listeners (assuming it's a music-based show like Indian Idol) will send a few SMSs under the influence of disgust that's caused by the feeling that undeserving candidates may win because of good looks and other gimmicks. But they can't continue to do so. The scepticism of the knowledgeable and judicious portion of the population about these SMSs mattering is pretty much of the same nature as in democracy -- when people think that there are far too many morons voting for a junk candidate for our votes to count

This pressure of impressing a very thoughtless majority audience brings out startling acrobatics on screen. In the opening episode, a girl is hailed as a simple village based contestant who has struggled her way to the competition against general opposition of her traditional village patriarchs. Some million votes (and SMSs). A couple of episodes down the line, she is found draped in all sorts of dresses which don't fit in well with her village background which was such a strong sympathy earning factor for her in the first episode. But, it doesn't matter if those who voted for the upliftment of an underprivileged talent in the first episode turn up their noses now. A few episodes' survival in the show has already earned the lady a semi-celebrity status. Now there's another -- bigger -- section of the audience for which the co-effecient of reflection of her bare shoulders and calves wins far more support than her underdog beginnings. Millions of votes again. As many SMSs.

Similarly, singers are made to dance, act and make faces. Dancers are made to fight with each other in well-rehearsed manners. Judges applaud and insult competitors in such melodramatic ways! Often they engage in verbal broils with each other which look supremely unbecoming and unnatural. It sends shivers thinking what kind of incentives make these great people behave in such artificial ways in the sets.

On the one hand, these days, judges' participation in the actual fate of the competitors has been drastically reduced by SMS competitions. On the other, during the performance, and in the few critical minutes that follow the performance, the judges bias the audience's judgement critically by making faces and hailing applauds and insults of their choosing. I am sure that most of the people who send their SMSs are impressionable enough to be seriously affected by minor twitches in the face of the judges. The whole thing appear like a setup where people are made to pronounce the judge's opinion. Additionally, it appears that the bias that the judges sometimes show during the performances aren't merely their personal opinion; they could even be pre-fabricated verdicts of the entire strategy of the organisers geared completely towards maximising TRPs.

Overall, the gaudiness of today's reality shows far outweighs the increased levels of talents. I'm not ready to believe that exposition of talents is critically dependent on fake spices of melodrama being played in the name of 'reality.' They stink of a systematic manipulativeness that arbitrarily alters the mass behaviour, and creates business models around them, thus closing the gates of redeaming oneself once the negative aspects start surfacing. In this world of mass-production, there has been little knowledge created on ramping down industries. They have just learned to grow bigger and bigger. And by the time the justifiabilty of their existence becomes questionable, it's too late to wind it up gracefully. The only way is to stretch them, at the cost of manipulating the consumption patterns of the population in unnatural ways. Companies keep getting bigger first devouring other companies, then governments, and then entire nations; soaps keep running for ever and ever, news programmes keep reeling the same sensationilsed coverage of a news item for hours, days, weeks.

Heck! What am I writing?!

I have equally disgusted thoughts about news channels, soap operas and the way the experience of TV viewing has become off late. But, I will speak of it some other time, if I do.



Related post:
SMS Competitions