The Sitcom is Alive!!!

Stop the presses! Tear up that death certificate! The television situation comedy has a pulse.

Faint, for sure. And what I have been seeing this season, the patient could easily suffer a relapse. But, I sample them every year because it is my business to know what is out there for our consumption. Oh, sure, NBC's got those Thursday night comedies which continue to be lost on me. I have no use for "My Name is Earl" as I find it impossible to like a show that features some peckerwood as the main character. "The Office" has little charm and my office tends to be much funnier. Molly Shannon is in some new junk that had such a jerky camera movement I was convinced it was filmed on the San Andreas Fault. And, despite periodic attempts to get into this media darling, "30 Rock" remains not my cup of tea.
Moving to CBS, I have no use for Julia Louis Dreyfuss' either old or new adventures of either old or new Christine. There's something called "Worst Week" which poisoned my vision after five minutes. Note to producers: don't put a negative word in your title. The viewers will automatically agree.

CBS Monday nights? I have trouble following "How I Met Your Mother" and ultimately don't care how you met anybody, thank you very much. I still watch "Two and a Half Men" only because I want to see Conchata Farrell's weekly three lines as the housekeeper. The humor and subtlety on that show has completely escaped and each week is now as inviting as a bus station toilet.

But "Two and a Half Men" producer Chuck Lorre has a winner about an hour earlier. In its second season, I heartily recommend to you "The Big Bang Theory."

Okay, it's not perfect. But it is a sitcom shot with four cameras in front of a live audience that is truly and heartily laughing like I used to hear on "Everybody Loves Raymond." The dialogue is smart, the casting is impeccable, and it brings you some characters you have never seen before on TV.

I watched from its premiere last season and the early episodes were bumpy as the writers searched long and hard for the character voices. But, now, everybody has their chops down and this show is humming. The true proof of the pudding is that American Airlines is now airing episodes and the laughter around the cabin is deafening.
"The Big Bang Theory" brings some new folks to television. Leonard and Sheldon are two mensa geniuses working in some scientific think tank. Their friends are also hyper-intelligent: one of them is a kid from India whose parents communicate with him from New Delhi via Webex. They are all geeks and weird and the type of people you find at comic book stores and sci-fi conventions. In one episode, the four of them dug down into a game of Klingon Bobble. It made no sense. It was hilarious. The protagonist in all this is their next door neighbor Penny, who is hundred times less smart and works as a waitress at the Cheesecake Factory. In a way, this becomes a family comedy. An unrelated, terribly strange family, but a family nonetheless.
As Leonard and Sheldon, Johnny Galecki and Jim Parsons channel younger versions of Frasier and Niles on steroids. More specifically, Parsons (pictured) is just about set to run away with this show. His delivery and timing is so spot-on that the writers are now gravitating toward him. He gets more and more of the plots and could be to this series what David Hyde Pierce was to "Frasier" and Michael J. Fox was to "Family Ties." This sometimes is not a good thing. You never want one character to upset the complete balance of the series. My fear is that this might happen in Season 3 or 4. But, until then, Parsons is gold and should also win some at the next Emmy Awards ceremony.
More importantly, "The Big Bang Theory" raises Lazarus from the dead. It brings back to our living rooms a traditional situation comedy that is really not as high concept as is written on the page. At the end of the day or the episode, it's funny. And that's all I want.
Dinner last night: Chopped salad from the Dressing Room.
Tomorrow from NYC!!