"In This House We Obey the Rules of Thermodynamics!"

The Big Bang Theory (CBS, Mondays at 8:30): When we were in high school, my best buddy Misha was close friends with a girl named Katie Reid. They would often sit on the bus together--in the days before we had our licenses and prior to us pretty much writing off public transportation forever--and Misha would regale her with a series of (and I'll interject here: largely fictitious) witty tales and anecdotes. Katie was--and remains--a sweet girl and, as it happens, tended to laugh at pretty much everything Misha said. (Truth be told, this may have been Jackie Armstrong--I'm no longer certain. But let's try to stay on track, people.) This led a bunch of to observe that, should Misha ever become a stand-up comedian, he should stipulate that Katie been in attendance for every performance, so as to encourage the crowd. Alas, Misha's career followed a different trajectory, and the matter was promptly dropped. Well...I'm happy to report that Katie--possibly cloned 200 times over--is alive and well working as the laugh track for the ingratiating and thoroughly disappointing The Big Bang Theory, which premieres Monday, Sept. 24 at 8:30 on CBS, just after the wildly underrated How I Met Your Mother. More on that in a sec.

TBBT is the brainchild of Bill Prady (fun fact: he ran for Governor of California in the 2003 recall election) and Chuck Lorre (currently, a producer on the inexplicably popular Two and a Half Men), who appear to have met while writing for that paragon of comedy known as Dharma & Greg--and with that impressive pedigree, the sky is truly the limit for this show. It tells the story of physicist pals Leonard (Johnny Galecki, best known as Darlene's boyfriend and, later--who knew?--husband on Roseanne) and Sheldon (Jim Parsons, who was actually wickedly funny as Tim the pathetic pyramid scheme guy in Garden State) and their awkward encounters with the hot new neighbor, Penny (Kaele Cuouco--otherwise known as the hot daughter on Eight Simple Rules for Dating my Teenage Daughter). The lone other notable--because he's given the only funny line in the entire episode (a cruel, if funny, shot at Stephen Hawking)--is Howard (played by Simon Helberg--one of the MadTV guys and, unfortunately for him, a bit player on Studio 60).

Problems, suffice to say, abound. Lines and scenarios are cribbed directly, I assume, from the opening day seminar in Crappy Sitcom Writing 101. What if we make the girl next door really, really hot? And what if the guys are, like, super ordinary looking but really smart and one of them thinks he has a chance with her? As if! And what if the other roommate says what other people only think? He'll have, like, no impulse control. OMG, that is so funny! Who talks like that? No one, that's who. And what if her ex-boyfriend is like this big, burly guy and, for some ridiculously contrived reason, they're forced to confront him? Oh, man! He could totally pants them! Remember pantsing?? This is really good! Are you writing this down? You should be writing this down...

I feel like Elaine confronting the New Yorker editor, in that I want to grab these writers and shake them while shouting: "ADMIT THAT YOU DON'T THINK THIS SCRIPT IS FUNNY!"

Another major problem, which brings us back to my original paragraph, is that the laugh track is so thoroughly irritating, it detracts from whatever small amount of enjoyment you might get from the show. By way of example: What if [laugh] every sentence I wrote [laugh] was peppered with stray [laugh] roars from a seemingly [laugh] semi-retarded [laugh] studio audience [laugh]? You'd probably [lau--sorry] want to kill me pretty quickly, wouldn't you? (Admit it.) Well, it's just like that here. I can't count the number of times I turned to Carrie and said, "seriously, what the hell are they laughing at?" only to have her shake her head incredulously.

They've also opted to use the stairwell of their apartment building (complete with an out of order elevator) as a key set--the show's Central Perk if you will, except...it's a fucking stairwell and not a coffee shop. The audience is thus treated to not one but two shots of the two boys making the slllllowww trek up three flights of stairs to their apartment, which...why do this, exactly? It's actually even more boring that it sounds. I mean, I don't even like doing this in real life, so why would anyone think that people would enjoy watching fictional characters do it? Baffling.

Even the show's logo is lame, to the point where it pains me to include it. But here it is:

Seriously, was this a Grade 9 Graphics Design class project? Did they hold some sort of contest on the back of the paper napkins at Denny's to see who could come up with the best logo? Look how shitty it is! I'm at a loss.

The only form of pleasure I've derived from this show thus far--which I had to watch twice, by the way, because I was a little bit drunk the first time and couldn't really remember anything about it except that I hated it--is the joy I'm expecting from looking over the Nielsen numbers after the show's second episode, where it will no doubt show TBBT losing 98% of HIMYM's lead-in audience. This anticipated joy is, however, slightly mitigated by my concern that HIMYM will somehow get tarred by the same brush--NBC's Thursday Night Comedy Block this is not.

How This Show Can Be Saved: they actually fucking hire someone that writes something funny? Government-mandated mass lobotomies? Too obvious? Hmmm....I suppose if they actually recreated the big bang I would possibly tune in again. Short of that: good riddance.
How it Will Fail: just keep on doing what your doing, guys. It'll happen...
Likelihood of A over B: God...gotta be 100 to 1 against. Haven't you been paying attention? This show is awful! Don't make me resort to more tortured analogies...