Geek TV Shows

So I don’t think I should post things so close together, give people time to read one, and then wait the week or two or four before they have to put up with my wordiness again but I got to thinking about this and wanted to write it while I was in the mood for it, and while I still remembered.

While looking at something on Fark yesterday they had a headline, and comments to go with it comparing The IT Crowd with The Big Bang Theory.  There was some heated debate as people defended their favourite as being better, some asked “why can’t you like both” and others who’d never heard of one and after hearing the praise decided they should give it a try.  I am here to set things right, and by the end of this post I will have crowned a “best geek humour” TV show.

As someone who’s only seen bits and parts of one of those shows, and who gave up on the other about halfway through its second season/series (I’m trying to be ambiguous as to whether I’m talking about the British or the American show here for those of you who don’t already know which is which) I think I’m obviously the right person to make the calls I’m about to make.

So let’s get on to comparing these shows.  The first is a show about some “nerdy” guys and a leading “normal” woman who is totally out of place when around these guys.  There’s two kind of jokes that get told in this show, the “nerdy” ones which are often explained to the audience why they’re funny since the show is directed at “normal” people.  To someone with even a bit of background in the area though you’ll find the jokes to only require knowledge that maybe you picked up around the time you were in highschool or at the latest early years of university, otherwise the joke would take too long to explain.  It’s too bad too because you can tell that the writers want to tell more of these jokes, but can’t.  The details in the background also reveal this, there truly is some geekery at work in the background, but they won’t let it take over from the other parts of the show.

The other kind of joke told in the show is akin to one of the main characters looking straight into the camera and saying “Look at me, I’m being a nerd” followed by the laugh track playing so the viewers know that it’s supposed to be funny.  The show also teaches you the lesson that sure, being smart means you can know things, and tell jokes that people won’t understand without you explaining it, but also that you have to be socially maladjusted who would easily be diagnosed with many mental health disorders if only they’d go see a doctor.

Interlude: I suppose up at the top I said I was going to be comparing shows and said I would start by describing one of them.  I think with my general term use here it’s pretty obvious that I am in fact describing both of them I could have a better way of saying that, but I’m sure you’ve already figured it out, and want to focus more on things, so just pretend I did a funny or clever way of tying it together while I keep going.

This humour, which is why I can’t bring myself to watch the show isn’t furthering the cause of geekdom, or making it more mainstream, it’s still just making fun of it but unlike in the past, it’s doing it in a way that geeks don’t realize (partly because of some problems with social intricacies) and so they latch on and think it’s for them, not about them.  It shows the way the media treats people like me and my friends.  Sure, I bet if you found any group and asked “is the portrayal of <people in your group> in the media accurate?” the answer is no.  How often though do they make shows about a group that call themselves comedies where most of the jokes are based off of reinforcing negative stereotypes about that group?

So I said I was going to crown a “best geek humour” show up above, and now it’s time to do that.  Will it be physics grad students?  Will it be the tech department of some giant corporation.  Well the winner is…

Good news everyone, neither of those shows won.  Also, if you’re at all familiar with the show that wins then the three words at the start of this already gave it away.  Whereas those other two shows could be most kindly put as shows written by nerds for everyone, Futurama is a show by nerds, for themselves, and people like them.  No matter how smart you are there will always be jokes in Futurama that you have no hope in catching because they put them everywhere, even the plot.  After telling a joke, they don’t pause the entire show in order to play a sound of people laughing so that you know it was a joke, they treat you as smart enough to know whether something is funny or not.  They also don’t tell you why the joke is funny, if you don’t get it too bad, someone else did, plus they use that time to instead set up another joke, hopefully one that you will get, especially since as soon as you try to explain a joke it stops being funny.  Futurama treats its viewers like they’re intelligent, and that’s what makes it the best.  It also doesn’t try to say geeks are weird and different, and although they’re smarter than you, you’re still a better person than them.  Instead Futurama says “here’s some jokes that us geeky writers find funny, and think you might like too.”