Big Bang Theory

Why I’m a Fan of 2 Broke Girls

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , ,

So I had a Monday free from work this week and, in the absence of anything pressing on the writing front, I elected to spend the day flaked out in front of the Teev in a blatant attempt to recover from the worst of the GenreCon hangover. My televised tipple of choice – the first season of 2 Broke Girls, newly acquired on DVD by virtue of the fact that my local DVD store didn’t have season 2 of Castle on the shelves.

I wasn’t really expecting much from 2 Broke Girls – it’s been routinely panned by pretty much everyone I’ve seen discussing it – but after mainlining all twenty-two episodes of Seasons One I think I’ve come to adore the show, just a little.

Lets be clear – my adoration has nothing to do with the quality of the humour. There are sit-coms that I actually find consistently funny and worth-while (Community, Rosanne seasons two through four), sit-coms that are occasionally brilliant but often problematic (glares daggers at Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother), and there a sit-coms that I regard as a guilty pleasure for reasons I don’t particularly care to examine (early seasons of The Nanny).

2 Broke girls fits into neither category. Instead, the quality of the jokes in 2 Broke Girls is pitched at the level I’d associate with, say, Everybody Loves Raymond or Two and a Half Men, where everything is largely based on the clash between stereotypes that range from the clichéd to the outright insulting. Not  really my thing, or the thing of most TV critics, but you cannot deny the smashing numbers those shows do in terms of drawing an audience.

If this is all the show did, I would have turned it off after the second episode. Instead, I kept watching for two reasons.

One: Kat Dennings

For a long time I kept stumbling over films that Dennings had been in and, almost universally, they were both better and more interesting than I’d expected. Not always brilliant, mind, but they pulled off the mix of entertaining and surprising that usually endears me to a creative work.

Thus, somewhere along the way, she became one of those performers whose presence in a film or TV show was usually enough to spark my interest.  The fact that she’d become a regular in a sit-com meant I was at least a *little* interested, especially once I learned that the series also featured Jennifer Coolidge (who has been increasingly typecast in recent years, but is still awesome).

I have a friend who, when we discuss my (many) problems with The Big Bang Theory, will point out that the main reason for watching the show is the cast performances. Good performers can make even average things watchable, even if you spend the entire time wishing they were given something with a little more substance (or, in the case of BBT, less ass-hattery) to work with.

Two: The Meta-Plot

The first episode of 2 Broke Girls features a disgraced rich girl and a snarky waitress meeting and becoming friends, deciding that they’re going to start a business selling cup-cakes. It’s your classic odd-couple pairing, and I quickly expected the business to quickly disappear into the background – a conceit to keep the character’s together while they went off and had whacky sit-com-esque adventures that would inevitably, feature a string of disposable boys and dating and romantic entanglement.

And sure, that happens, but…less than you’d think. Maybe one third of the series is about that, kinda, and even then it’s only really a concentrated theme in a handful of episodes.

Throughout it all, the dream to start a business remains front-and-centre and is actually charted by the recurring motif at the end of every show, where the last thing you see before the show goes off the air is a running total on how their attempts to gather seed money has fluctuated as a result of the episode’s events.

And that…that charms me. I mean, yes, there are many things that are horrible about the show and plenty of reasons to find it classist, racist, sexist, etc. Even the methods with which the girls attempt to make money are kinda farce-like and forced, especially since one of the character’s knowledge of business seems…well, haphazard and utterly at the service of the plot.

On the other hand, 2 Broke Girls is a sit-com aimed at a wide-spread audience that features two young women who are actively trying to build a business. Where the genre teaches you to expect the characters to be defined by their relationship to the men in their lives, they’re increasingly defined by their relationship with each other and the friends/mentors/co-workers that surround them.

It’s a show with two female leads who passes the Beschedel test and shows characters whose lives don’t revolve around romance.

And seriously, that’s kinda awesome, even if there are other parts of the show that are problematic. Much as I’d like the world to make a wholesale change and embrace a future where misogyny is gone, I’m also a fan of small battles getting fought on contested ground. After years in which sit-coms have kinda relegated female characters to some fairly reprehensible character roles, there’s a part of me that’s pleased to see this small battle being fought.

There are times when I find myself hoping this is much like the first season of Roseanne, another series with a rocky start that blossomed when they ejected the original show-runner and gave it over to Roseanne Barr. It’d be really fucking nice to see something awesome stomp the hell out of the various shows run by Chuck Lorre the devil on our airwaves.

Why I Have Problems With the Big Bang Theory

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I frequently find myself watching The Big Bang theory, finding it funny, then  hating myself for it. I mentioned this on the twitters and facebook yesterday, which immediately had a group of people saying, in essence, why, dude, it’s actually funny? And, yes, it is. There are times when it’s absolutely smart and entertaining, and I watch it for these moments because they’re a kind of humor that makes me happy and speaks to me as a man who self-identifies as a geek and enjoys being part of an active geek subculture. It’s a show that’s very, very good at doing that, creating little in-jokes among the broader strokes.

It’s also a who willing to play to deeply entrenched cultural myths about geeks and women, which makes me less happy, and in some points outright angry.

The default narrative of the show is generally one that posits all geeks are children looking for a mother figure and the bulk of the female characters with any depth are either caring mother-replacements (Penny, Leonard’s girlfriend from season two, Shelton’s actual mother) or emasculating shrews (Leonard’s mother, Raj’s mother, Howard’s mother – are you seeing a theme here? – Leslie Winkle, and ironically, Shelton’s mother due to her ability to countermand Shelton’s self-built idea of masculinity based around intellect).

The remaining female characters that appear in the series are generally there to be gratuitously objectified and competed for by the male cast, thus serving as a means of proving their masculinity and “growing up” (see Shelton’s sister and Penny’s friend from Nebraska) or non-idealized sexual partners who are characterized by their non-threatening naivety (Howard’s girlfriend Bernadette in season three).

The core cast of Male characters don’t actually fare much better: they’re infantilized by their interests, by their inability to get women (problematic, in and of itself), by their heights, by their familial relationships, but their inability to do their jobs correctly (Leonard’s research is derivative, Raj’s hypothesis is disproved, Howard fucks up every engineering prospect he comes up with), by their lack of knowledge about non-geek popular culture (I mean, really, geeks tend to know radiohead is a band). They’ve been neatly cut off from any traditional notions of the masculine, which would be fine if 90% of the show’s narrative wasn’t focused on three of the four trying to prove their masculinity through having sex while the fourth is determined to prove it through constantly being right.

Essentially the show strives to create a contemporary tribe of Lost Boys adopting a Wendy as a mother figure, except that only works in the case of Sheldon who actually is a childish innocent because the others all have deeply fucked up relationships with women (Which is not to say Sheldon doesn’t, but at least his relationship with women isn’t defined by sex).

We won’t even speak of the Howard-and-Raj-Are-a-dysfunctional-gay-couple thing they’ve started playing with. It was unpleasant-but-tolerable when it was a joke being played out in the episodes featuring Leonard’s mother, it was less tolerable when it became a recurring part of the narrative.

Yes, there are individual episodes where they seem to get it right. I breathed an audible sigh of relief the first time they introduced Stuart the comic shop guy, who spent his first few appearance being self-assured enough to flirt with Penny even if he exhibited signs of nervousness about the actual date. “He runs a successful small business,” Leonard opines, “he’s a talented artist. Not all geeks are like Captain Sweatpants over there.”

And I was like, “man, finally, it’s about fucking time.”

Of course, Stuart serves his narrative purpose, getting Penny together with Leonard, and the next time he appears he’s a lonely and isolated man who obsesses over Penny and  shares his Friday night meals with a stray cat.

And really, fuck that shit. All of it.

The show is largely redeemed by solid casting, the episodes where the writing is genuinely smart and interested in laughing with the geeks rather than at them, and very occasionally by the presence of guest stars from the cast of Roseanne (lets face it, any television show that puts Laurie Metcalf back on television gets something of a pass).

But beneath it all is a series of narrative assumptions I find deeply, deeply uncomfortable, and it seems to be getting worse rather than better. Sooner or later they will hit the point where the stupid outweighs the smart, and then I’ll be forced to stop watching lest I throw things at the television.

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Friday night I went to check my PO Box and discovered a cheque I forgot was coming, which was kinda nice, then got home to the news of the Japanese earthquake and Pacific Ocean tsunami’s, which was less nice and kinda put a downer on the evening overall. There’s news on the latter everywhere at the moment, so I won’t repeat what’s readily available. There is, as always, Red Cross donations that can be made to help those affected.

Later, after absorbing the news via twitter, I paid far to much for the least appealing take-away Butter Chicken of my life, but ate it anyway ’cause, well, it was butter chicken. Then the news of the explosions in the nuclear reactor started filtering in.

I don’t watch television anymore, nor to I read newspapers, so world news and I have a very strange relationship. Information tends to flow in through the communication in online mediums – twitter, facebook, blogs, etc – which means simultaneously seem better and worse than they appear to be depicted in traditional media. There are portions of my friends list that are all lo, the nuclear Apocalypse is upon us, and there are those linking to things like this post over at Genki English.

I expect that if I were watching traditional media, I’d be a nervous wreck right now. At this point, I’m just watching the internet and waiting further developments.