Tag Archives: TV Shows

The Big Bang Blog: The Toxic Relationship Comedy

By Veronika M. Heinrich

The Big Bang The­o­ry is pure poi­son in a soci­ety that just got a wake-up call.
Just yes­ter­day, I saw anoth­er post reveal­ing its prob­lem­at­ic themes. What tru­ly shocked me were the com­ments – most of them in defence of their beloved series. “Don’t get your feel­ings hurt. It’s just a fun­ny show!” they claim. But it’s not.
Like many oth­ers, I also enjoyed watch­ing The Big Bang The­o­ry in my teenage years. I was hap­py that there was a show that por­trayed nerd cul­ture and ref­er­enced it. I didn’t ques­tion the harm­ful themes the show relies on. To be hon­est, I didn’t even see them. Now that my eyes are opened, I can’t unsee them. I can bare­ly stand to watch an entire episode. The char­ac­ters’ behav­ior around women and each oth­er is just too painful.
I can’t wrap my head around why this show ran for so many sea­sons and wasn’t can­celled ear­li­er. Sheldon’s quirk­i­ness is so fun­ny after all, isn’t it?
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505 Hours and 45 Minutes of Comfort in Times of Uncertainty

By Caroline Densch

“Make Em Laugh : Sit­coms” by Austin Kleon is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

505 hours and 45 min­utes – that’s how long it takes to watch all of my favorite TV shows. Ever since the first nation­wide lock­down began in Ger­many last March, I’ve been doing some seri­ous re-watch­ing. Among the shows I’ve been bing­ing is the entire sea­son of Friends (10), Parks and Recre­ation (7), The Office (9), Mod­ern Fam­i­ly (10), How I Met Your Moth­er (9), New Girl (7), and Brook­lyn 99 (8) – and some more than once.

Accord­ing to The Huff­in­g­ton Post, watch­ing some­thing famil­iar trig­gers a feel­ing of nos­tal­gia, which has a pos­i­tive effect on your men­tal health. For instance, your mind may recon­nect with the set­ting, the peo­ple you were with, or the feel­ings you had when you ini­tial­ly watched a cer­tain episode. In my case, re-watch­ing TV shows trans­ports me back to the time before the pandemic.

I’ve always been some­one to watch a good TV show mul­ti­ple times or read a good book more than once. At this point, how­ev­er, the rate at which I re-watch a film or show has reached a new height. Why is that? And what do all those TV shows have in com­mon, apart from being suc­cess­ful Amer­i­can sitcoms?

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