Dear "The Big Bang Theory": It's Over.

I hate you, The Big Bang Theory.

I've not always hated you. (I've always criticized you a lot, with good reason, but I've not always hated you.) A couple Decembers ago, when my relationship was falling apart and winter was doing its usual number on me, I marathoned your first three seasons. You've never been a good show as such, but you were an adequate guilty pleasure.

I mean, I was always troubled by your broadness, your reliance on lazy stereotypes, and your tendency to invite the audience to laugh at your characters rather than with them. (NERDS LIKE TYPICALLY NERDY PURSUITS! AHAHAHA!) But I put up with all that for the same reason my queer sisters suffered through five seasons of The L Word: when mainstream representations of people like yourself are so rare, you take whatever crumbs you can get. And also because Sheldon was awesome.

(Remember when Sheldon was awesome?)

Last year, though, you were in serious decline. The twin headlights in the darkness of season four were Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch, both criminally underserved as Penny's friends Amy and Bernadette. And now you've completely lost the plot.

You've always kind of mocked your characters, but it used to be in an affectionate way; now it's just outright contempt. It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia this ain't – you're not a dark, edgy show about horrible people doing horrible things; you're a fluffy three-camera sitcom for mindless entertainment, and You're Doing It Wrong.

Look at How I Met Your Mother. It's always been better than you, of course, but the comparison stands because it too is a show well past its prime, coasting on its six prior seasons of audience goodwill. (Again, not like Always Sunny, whose seventh season is completely killing it and, if it continues like this, might just be the best thing to happen to television ever.) HIMYM has gotten lazy and is spinning its wheels, but – ideological problems aside – is still a pleasant, unchallenging watch, because it doesn't hate its characters.

You seem determined to make your viewers hate all your central characters. You've stripped them of every non-loathsome characteristic, reducing them to cartoonish bundles of broad tics, unfunny running gags, and unbelievable interactions.

And you're just so fucking offensive.

I've put up with so goddamn much of your shit. For four seasons I've overlooked your dumb gender essentialist stereotypes, your constant racism, your sneering at nerd culture; and I just can't take it anymore. The four episodes of season five that have aired so far turn the racism and slut-shaming up to eleven, but it's the most recent episode that was the final straw for me. It was so irredeemably loathsome on every level that I no longer feel even the slightest pang of regret in saying:

Fuck you, The Big Bang Theory. I hate you and will never watch you again.

Geek Identity

“What are you doing this weekend?” my coworker asked, as she wiped down the bar.

“My Dungeons & Dragons group is meeting for the first time in ages,” I replied – whereupon she collapsed into a fit of laughter that lasted for about five solid minutes. Each time the giggles seemed likely to dry up, she would take another glance at me, patiently waiting for her to finish, and a fresh wave of uncontrollable mirth would strike. Eventually, staggering upright, wiping away the tears, she hiccuped out,

“I suppose – you still have – a few more years...”

Most of the people I regularly spend time with, online or in real life, are, like me, nerds. The ones who aren't tolerate my nerdiness, to the point that they don't tend to laugh uncontrollably at me (to my face, anyway). I had forgotten that the world is full of people who react to forthright declarations of geekery the way my coworker did.

If geek culture – as signified by markers like Dungeons & Dragons, devotion to cult TV series, paperback doorstoppers with dragons on the covers – is an adolescent pursuit we should all outgrow by our mid-twenties, what does that say about those of us who are lifelong geeks?

You're never supposed to admit this, but I haven't always been devoted to Firefly and Mystery Science Theater 3000 and China Miéville. These things are merely the current trappings of geekdom. Being a geek is a lot like being gay: anybody can latch onto the external behaviors and signifiers of the subculture, but externals do not a geek make. Geek is something you always have been and always will be, whether you like Star Trek or not.

Geekdom is the eight-year-old who sneaks away from the birthday party to spend the afternoon hiding in a closet with a book. It's the kid who works so hard in school that even the teachers write “Swotticus mingicus” on her report card (that's neo-British-East-African for “Dorkus malorkus”). It's the teenager who enjoys exams and spends her free time writing a novel.

Geeks are, I think, almost all introverts. It's not that we're friendless social misfits, though many of us have been at some point in our lives, but we thrive on our own company. The defining characteristic of geekdom is a love of minutiae and depth – the enjoyment of overthinking for its own sake – and that necessarily entails time spent alone with one's interests.

That's why we're all internet-diagnosed aspies (I score 34 on the AQ Test, yo), and that's why we all love Dr. Sheldon Cooper. The Big Bang Theory is probably the most popular mainstream representation of geek culture, and Sheldon is its best character by a parsec *audience laughs because I geekified a common idiom*. The other characters engage in the recognized cultural currency of geekdom – they read comic books, play videogames, watch sci-fi shows – but none of them displays that single-mindedness that is the hallmark of being a geek.

I realize that watching people be introverted would make for terrible TV, but there's no indication that Leonard or Howard or Raj gives to anything the time and attention that Sheldon gives to his work and his fandoms. Of course, in his single-minded devotion to his own interests, Sheldon frequently misses social cues and acts like an ass to people, but we like him because we wish we could do that too.

The Big Bang Theory, for all its claims to be representative of geeks and geek culture, buys into the idea that geekery is adolescent. Although lately it's improved its portrayal of women, adding several strong (and geeky!) female characters to the regular cast, the show is still beholden to its initial premise of laughing at the geeks' failures to interact with the pretty normie girl. Just last week, Priya (the other pretty normie girl) spoke disparagingly of her brother's nerdy hobby from when he was little, “but not as little as you'd want him to be.”

This coding of geek activities as immature plays directly into the heteronormative patriarchy. Yeah, I just wrote that sentence, and I believe it. Because “you'll outgrow geek culture” sounds to me a lot like “you'll get broody before you're thirty”. It's a way of delegitimating non-mainstream identities and assuming every life has to follow the traditionalist model of “growing up” – leaving behind all your interests and ambitions in order to have a spouse and children and a house in the suburbs and Tupperware parties and a mortgage. Which is fine if you want it, but not everyone does.

People tell me that one day I'll want to “settle down” and bear children; people tell me I'll “outgrow” my geeky interests. I say: God, I hope not.