Yet amazingly, I'm currently halfway through season two and I've yet to come across Sheldon utter even one instance of his supposed catch phrase "Bazinga!" (Apparently, again says GGAHMM, that first comes up soon for me in the final episode of the season I'm currently on.)
Yes, yes, of course I haven't lived under the proverbial rock during the latter aughts and all of the tens (sad decade names, guys, really sad). I've certainly caught an episode here and there over the years. But the show's runtime oddly coincides with the severing of the cord for me so I never needed to suck the teet of the Big Four (traditional broadcast networks if you include FOX) like I did in my lifetime prior to the Big Cut. Now though, the entire catalogue, all 12 SEASONS, are available through Max (soon to be HBO Max again). Commercial free makes these 25 minute babies a breeze to zip through - but will that be their downfall?
The show is a sit-com after all. And already I'm having to hold back my eye-rolls for such banal repetitions such as the constant tropes pushed in our faces seemingly every episode. Yes, we know Raj (or whatever his name is) can't speak in front of girls unless drunk or drugged (does he keep this up the entire decade?). Yes we know Howard is cringe AF (were either of those terms a thing yet when this show began?) and I'm sure he keeps this up the whole run, it's his only shtick. And all of Sheldon's quirky quirks, spectrum-esque qualities and irritating mannerisms aside, Leonard's faux "everyman" (in this group) sensitivities and supposed social awareness combined with that squishy mamby pamby "cute" face he makes all the time just grates on me to no end. Sheldon may be most people's "love to hate him" character but to me Leonard just makes me nauseous (or "nauseated" as Sheldon grammatically corrects in one episode - thank you Sheldon).
I also know that, for my tastes, especially sit-coms, but all shows in general, plots that delve too heavily into straight sex relationships and their attending straight people idiosyncrasies about them tend to make me sleepy-sleepy. And, again according to the above "Abbreviated One" (not the "Acronymed One" as you might think unless you can awkwardly sound it out as a Klingon-like word "Gah-hum!" You know what, in the context of all this nerdyness, and coupled with the grammatical mass murders this post has committed thus far, it may just actually fit!) the show (yes, we're just fucking nonchalantly picking up where we left off before the parenthesis - got a problem Mrs. Morin? Oh, what, you're dead, quel dommage, oh shit, that's Mr. Branchaud's class!) does go there more and more each successive season. I know Mayim Bialik joins the show eventually (which is funny since Raj mentions, I think in an episode in the first season, that they needed a fourth for their Physics Bowl competition and he would have loved to have "that girl from Blossom." Was Bialik associated with the show already in some way yet? I'm sure this is mentioned in the forums but, like all my binges, of course, I'm avoiding them lest there be spoilers and, God forbid, I stumble upon spoilers for this "Masterpiece Theater" of TV shows <sarcasm>) as, I think, Sheldon's "hook-up." But as I'm in mid season two with an episode that just happened to include Penny outright cornering the guys (sans Sheldon) in the ubiquitous hall (with the eternally broken elevator...I know there's got to be something about that but it's so far unexplained) about "his deal" and they all are under the totally honest assumption that he's basically asexual, or maybe he'll eventually split to propagate ala mitosis, I find him having a "girlfriend" as believable as the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism is to Standard Model adherents.
Whatever.
I'll keep watching and if in some future season I have to start fast-forwarding, well, it wouldn't be the first binge I've had to do that to. But at this juncture so far, I'm invested and hunkered down in my favorite seat on the sofa, perfectly heated edible at the ready and clicking the remote like it was a time machine control, transporting me back to the late 2000s decade when blogs <snif, snif> and flip phones ruled and an 80-gigabyte iPod was implied to be high-capacity and thus valuable.