I had to stop watching The Big Bang Theory

When I was growing up, The Big Bang Theory seemed like a pretty cool show. As a member of the “nerd” group at school, I was happy to finally seem some characters to whom I could relate. 

That said, I actually never saw the end. Before the last 2 or 3 seasons, I moved away to university. My habits changed, my access to TV disappeared, and I never got around to finishing the show.

At the time this didn’t bother me much, but I recently saw it recommended to me on Netflix and thought, “Okay, maybe it’s time to finish this.”

So I started watching from the beginning. But I immediately started to struggle.

In my opinion, TBBT has aged more poorly than Friends. And Friends didn’t age particularly well.

In my most recent watch-through, I realised that so much of the humour in TBBT is centred around:

In the first episode, there is a running joke about the “200 pound transvestite with a skin condition” who previously occupied Penny’s apartment.

I have come to realise that almost every single joke in this show is poking some type of fun at a stereotype. In many cases, the fun is being poked at a marginalised group by engaging in sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, body-shaming, and other forms of discrimination.

In some cases, the discrimination is the joke (e.g. Raj does sometimes call out the racism in the jokes made about him). But these are few and far between; most of the time, the jokes are plain discrimination.

It’s pretty telling that a reviewer spotted this vibe after seeing the pilot episode. In TV Club, Scott Tobias wrote:

Really bad television shows tend to pander to the mean: In affirming the superiority of Joe and Jane Average, they mock both the egregiously stupid (e.g. Kellie Pickler, Jay Leno’s man-on-the-street bozos, and other adults not smarter than a fifth grader) and the hyper-intelligent, who are struck down for the arrogant, unpardonable sin of… um… knowing stuff. The new CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory is a broad example of this principle—really broad, like Amazon basin broad. It’s hard to believe that anyone’s even making a three-camera sitcom this mothballed; only an offhand mention of the word “blog” suggests that it takes place in the present-day.

I really am not usually the type of person who would stop watching a TV show based on language which could be seen as a product of it’s time. Do I cringe at old episodes of Doctor Who? Absolutely. But I still glean enjoyment from old movies and TV shows.

But I think the biggest disappointment with TBBT is that, as a show which first aired in 2007 and ran all the way to 2019, it should have known better. I made it to Season 7 before I decided I could no longer look past these glaring issues; it’s simply unwatchable in 2025.