I want to see myself on television, and so do you. So does the person sitting next to you in class, and your old friends from high school. Your professors, too. Never before has this been as readily obvious as with the rise and endless proliferation of reality television, growing ever closer to a perfect one-human-being-to-one-show ratio.
With that in mind, turn on your TV. Skim through your favorite shows ““ let’s shift our focus to the scripted ones. Pause for a few minutes longer when one of your favorite characters appears on screen, and enjoy that warm feeling you get when he or she does something that rings absolutely true for you. Yes, you think, I would have run after her just like that. I’ve used that exact phrase before, or at least I’ve thought about it. Absolutely, I would have jumped out of a helicopter without a parachute, just like that, for her.
Okay, now listen to yourself. You’d jump out of a helicopter ““ really? But this is my point ““ this is The Great Paradox of Television Realism, if you will. We don’t really want to see ourselves on screen, we want to see a more interesting version of ourselves.
We could draw a bell curve, and at the left extreme we would have characters who are too much like us, making them boring or uncomfortable to watch, and at the right we have those who are too fantastical. In the middle, in the sweet spot, we find our favorite alter egos.
If anyone understands this math, it’s Chuck Lorre. His ode to extreme nerdiness, “The Big Bang Theory,” has expanded like our universe from cult favorite to mainstream popularity; the show’s fourth season began last Thursday, attracting nearly 14 million viewers. And his newest project, “Mike & Molly,” starring Billy Gardell and Melissa McCarthy as an overweight couple who meet at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting, drew more than 12 million viewers with its series premiere last Monday.
With minimal scrutiny we can see that these shows are built from the same basic conceit; that is, a group of people defined only superficially by a token flaw. In each episode the stereotype is reinforced, but also complicated as the characters develop human complexities and backstories.
In “The Big Bang Theory,” for instance, experimental physicist Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki) demonstrates his requisite love of Star Trek and comic books, but also struggles with a long and realistically confusing relationship with his neighbor, Penny (Kaley Cuoco). “Mike & Molly” follows the same formula in its pilot: Officer Mike Biggs (Gardell) endures a cruel number of fat jokes, but finally gathers the courage to ask out Molly (McCarthy) as he’s filling out an incident report.
The physics students among us, and those of us dealing with body image issues, might relate in a very direct way to these characters. But it is statistically unlikely that from those two groups come 12 and 14 million viewers; rather, it seems that the Lorre brand of sitcoms has established a deeply populist method of character-building.
In other words, “The Big Bang Theory” is not a show about nerds, and “Mike & Molly” is not a show about fat people ““ although it helps that those are two demographics typically underrepresented on television, enhancing their underdog status. More broadly, though, they are shows about multifaceted human beings whose less popular traits tend to precede them. Taken this way, it’s hard to imagine who wouldn’t see a bit of himself on the screen.
And of course when we do see ourselves on television, we want to see us succeed. So when Officer Biggs finally gathers the gall to ask Molly on a date, we at home can sit back and smile to ourselves, and say, “Yes, I did it.”
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If you’ve ever secretly taken credit for a TV character’s triumph,
e-mail Goodman at agoodman@media.ucla.edu._