The Big Bang Theory is the last great American sitcom

Two male scientists – one wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with The Flash – arrive back at their Pasadena apartment. There they notice a glamorous young woman unpacking boxes in the next door flat. “Hi,” the two men say in awkward unison, to be followed, moments later, with a similarly synchronised “bye”. And so began the saga of The Big Bang Theory, which would last for 12 years, turning it in to the most popular show on American television – all while critics and armchair pundits derided the series for its lowbrow sitcom credentials, reliance on lazy stereotypes, and fawning indulgence of nerd culture. And yet…

Half a decade on from the show’s finale in 2019, nothing has arrived to take its crown. No single show is dominating the airwaves like Sheldon and Co in their pomp. And so, for comedy lovers the world over, the question must be: is The Big Bang Theory the last great American sitcom?

For a large portion of television’s short history, sitcoms dominated the ratings game. The traditions of the format are simple: a multi-camera set-up, distinctive recurring locations, a live studio audience, and a three-walled set. “A timely premise,” says Evan S Smith, author of Writing Television Sitcoms, plus “compelling story arcs that skip past worn tropes” and “jokes that surprise but ring true” – that’s the “recipe for sitcom success”. Done well, it is a formula that has turned shows – from Seinfeld to Will & Grace to Everybody Loves Raymond – into TV gold.

But in recent years, single-camera comedies have predominated. Where classic sitcoms, like Big Bang, are essentially filmed theatre, these newer shows are glossy and intimate, utilising close-ups to convey emotion in a way that sitcoms never could. They eschew the live audience and the three-walled set in favour of a composition that mirrors the best of drama programming. And critics and industry professionals have gone all-in on this trend. The last multi-camera show to be nominated for the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series was – you guessed it – The Big Bang Theory, back in 2014.

It is hard not to think that, at the start of the 21st century, shows like Ted Lasso, Schitt’s Creek and Only Murders in the Building would have looked and sounded more like Big Bang. But, in this post-sitcom era, they have opted for something more modern, to great acclaim.

So, is the age of the sitcom over? The Big Bang Theory’s 2019 finale drew 18 million live US viewers – a staggering figure, but one that pales in comparison to shows like Cheers, where 80 million fans watched Sam and Diane reunite, or M*A*S*H, where 121 million Americans waved goodbye to the 4077th.

Joanna Hagan, author of Friends and the Golden Age of the Sitcom, would argue that the dominance of the format was over before The Big Bang Theory had even begun. “In 1995 there were over 60 sitcoms airing on American network television,” she says. “Ten years later, that number had been cut in half.”

And so Big Bang came in to the world prematurely outmoded. Its creator, Chuck Lorre, was already a veteran (and would ultimately have to endure the “king of sitcoms” tag) and so he was trusted by CBS, the major American network, with a premium slot. The cast included Johnny Galecki – a sitcom mainstay after five years on Roseanne – as the show’s straight man, perpetually downtrodden experimental physicist Leonard, and the largely unknown Jim Parsons, who would go on to win four Emmys for his role as fussy theoretician Sheldon. Alongside Kaley Cuoco’s Penny, Simon Helberg’s Howard and Kunal Nayyar’s Raj, they formed an improbably winning central unit. The cast was rounded out by character actors populating the high science world of CalTech, among them John Ross Bowie as theoretical physicist Barry Kripke.

“No one is getting the numbers that Big Bang Theory got any more, because of streaming and the Balkanisation of television,” Bowie tells me, referring to the way that expensive subscription services have eroded the ability of programmes to reach audiences in the high millions. “No one is going to get those numbers again.”

It is not just sitcoms that are suffering. Linear TV has been in a doom-loop since the early days of cable. “Every decade or two, some experts declare that half-hour comedies are dead and everyone piles on,” says Smith. “Then a zeitgeist-perfect series pops up and suddenly sitcoms are hot again.”

The streaming services that have experimented with sitcoms have found the results unconvincing. Netflix has just cancelled That 90s Show after two series (That 70s Show ran for eight seasons on Fox). Amazon has never attempted a proper sitcom. And yet, less than a decade ago, the biggest English-language show on earth featured four nebbish scientists trying to talk to their pretty neighbour, all filmed in front of a live studio audience.

For all that the show has become a byword for mass-market trash, it was an extremely effective, and affecting, long-running saga. While each episode is a miniaturised farce, usually involving the show’s breakout character, Sheldon Cooper, getting into social scrapes, these form a tapestry of character development that stands alongside the best of the genre. And yet the idea of a network investing in a show like Big Bang now feels highly unlikely. How did so much change, so quickly?

Eric Kaplan was a writer and executive producer on the show from 2008 to 2019. “It was one of the first shows to tackle ‘geek culture’ in the mainstream,” he tells me. “It spoke to this sense of social exclusion.” For Kaplan this is the nub of the show: the classical sitcom “problem” that it was looking to solve. Where Frasier was about reconciling intellectual pretensions with family dynamics and The Odd Couple about the friction of cohabitation, Big Bang was about marginalised guys trying, often desperately, to achieve some status. It is a struggle that the show has inadvertently mirrored.

“There was certainly a sense that we were a popular show, but we were not a cool show,” says Bowie (when I put this idea to Kaplan, he remarks that he had never considered that the show might not be “cool”). By the time it ended in 2019, the show had become the punchline to a joke in itself. My girlfriend, back in the mid-2010s, sent me a Valentine’s card bearing the simple slogan: “I Love You (even though you laugh at The Big Bang Theory)”. It wasn’t just the format that felt passé; the frequently misogynistic depiction of dysfunctional nerdom alienated more progressive viewers.

Sitcoms are notorious for ageing badly. They often rely on stereotypes and the punch-down mores of their day. Even while Gen Z – the incumbent setters of popular taste – champion Friends and The Office, they also label them problematic. “I pitched jokes that seem transphobic to me now, as my thinking about trans rights has evolved,” Kaplan confesses. “I personally pitched things about trans people which I don’t think are good and I think the current audience wouldn’t like.” He refers to this as a “mea culpa”, stating that his “thinking on trans rights wasn’t great 15 years ago”. But The Big Bang Theory is not alone here. The Simpsons, Futurama, Friends, The IT Crowd, How I Met Your Mother, Arrested Development and many more have all been accused of making transphobic jokes.

Aside from its gender politics, Big Bang was often criticised for its depiction of the character Raj, who has selective mutism around women in the first few series. “Kunal [Nayyar] has spoken, both publicly and personally, about that idea of a South Asian man being less of a sexual being,” says Bowie. “The problem is that none of them were particularly sexual beings.” And Nayyar – who was born in the UK – was a rare presence in the sitcom world, as both a person of colour and a performer with a strong accent. “There was very little representation at all of South Asian people on TV in 2007,” says Bowie, “and the character dimensionalised over the years.”

Viewers are not obliged to forgive The Big Bang Theory its sins, though the context is important. Alongside Nayyar bringing visibility to the Indian diaspora, Parsons was an openly gay headline act in an industry that still struggles to give gay men tentpole roles, especially when playing heterosexual characters. And, in 2017, the original cast took a significant pay cut to raise funds for their female co-stars, Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch, who had been promoted to starring roles. “The writers are empty heads open to the world,” Kaplan remarks, when I suggest that the show became more progressive through its run. “Consciously or not, you’re probably right. As society changes, the writers, who are part of society, change too, and the show changes with them.”

But will the cycle ever return sitcoms to their place at the top of the great wheel of television? The pandemic changed protocols on studio audiences, and it seems unlikely that set-up will predominate again (it’s an arrangement that, in Bowie’s words, evokes the feeling “that you’re in the Colosseum, watching one of Plautus’s comedies”). In the age-old Emmys vs eyeballs debate (critical vs audience success, in other words) there has been a sense that writers and commissioners are increasingly privileging the former.

“When the classic sitcom format stopped being popular,” says Hagen, “writers became more innovative, and some of the best and most interesting comedy of the last couple of decades came from toying with new formats”. Shows like Hacks, Atlanta, even Succession have pushed the emotional range of modern comedies into realms usually reserved for prestige drama. During our conversation, Kaplan playfully compares Big Bang to James Dean, to classic French literature, and to James Joyce’s magnum opus, Finnegan’s Wake; and yet the joy of the show is distinctly its own.

There is still a simple pleasure to The Big Bang Theory, which keeps audiences coming back. As I am writing this, nine episodes are scheduled to be broadcast today alone on E4, interspersed with the back catalogue of Modern Family and The Goldbergs. Sitcoms like Big Bang still have a lure for viewers: 23 minutes of comedic call-and-response, all played out on a canvas of calming familiarity. Observing that it is not high art does not diminish its value as entertainment. All 12 series of The Big Bang Theory are available on Netflix, whilst the perpetual motion of the show’s reruns continues to line the pockets of its cast. The fashion might have changed, commissioners might shirk the genre, but there is little evidence that audiences have turned their back on the classic sitcom.

“I prefer Pepsi-Cola to wine, but people don’t want to admit that,” says Kaplan. “It’s just sugary water. It means you have the same taste as an ant. And nobody wants to interview an ant.” And yet, deep down, sitcoms tap into that same primal impulse. Whether they’re being compared to great modernist literature, Roman theatre or a can of soda, the instinctive appeal of sitcoms means they’ll always be popular, even if they’re never cool again.

‘The Big Bang Theory’ is streaming on Channel 4 and on Netflix