The Big Bang Theory - Seasons 10-11 (2016-2017)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2016, 2017
	Creators: Chuck Lorre, Bill Prady
	Actors: Johnny Galecki (The Master Cleanse, In Time), Jim Parsons (Hidden Figures), Kaley Cuoco, Simon Helberg, Kunal Nayyar, Melissa Rauch, Mayim Bialik
	Country: USA
	Genre: Comedy
	Conditions of visioning: May-June 2018, VOD, 32" TV screen
Synopsis: Have some laughs following the eccentricities of scientists/physicists/engineers Raj, Sheldon, Leonard and Howard, and the women those nerds managed to get in their lives Bernadette, Penny and Amy.
Review: As I recently mentioned in my review of the tenth season of Friends, I wouldn't usually comment on every season of such a series format (20-minute comedy) but being one of the very few I follow, I thought I would use the opportunity of recently watching the two latest seasons to comment on them and the whole series in fact. Nowadays I have the feeling that a huge variety of series are being kicked-off, leaving room for as many goofy concepts as imaginable, but that only few of them pass the test of the first season, as cancellations are very common. It was not yet the case eleven years ago when The Big Bang Theory started, and it has always been a surprise to me how such a series could come to light. It does follow the life of a bunch of nerds! And the logical explanation I found is that nerds are not anymore a small minority of our population (we have more and more engineers, people working in computer science...) so that they can provide a steady audience to a series that talks to them. Indeed, who would you think could laugh at physics jokes? In fact one of the strength of the series is that you can laugh with them if you get the physics jokes, or you can laugh at them if you don't. Either way the characters are colorful enough to please many people, and they can relate as well to the day-to-day situations the characters find themselves in (love, work, fun...). And if you don't get the jokes there are websites that can explain them for you, as does explainxkcd.com for the popular nerd cartoon XKCD. At the same time, the launching of this series can also be taken as a proof that nerds came to power in Hollywood at the turn of the Century, a sentence I have heard at the time of the release of The Matrix in 1999. And its continuing success follows the one of super-hero movies (Marvel and DC), Star Trek and Star Wars revivals etc... as well as the rise of renowned scientists as pop-culture figures such as the regretted Stephen Hawking (subject of The Theory of Everything) or Neil deGrasse Tyson (host of the excellent series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey) But enough with context, what do I think of the series? I didn't watch it when it started, I only caught up a few years later but loved it immediately, of course I am one of those nerds it is talking to. And I as wrote, I was surprised that people who were not nerd at all liked it, and not surprised that some others didn't find what was funny about it. After a couple of seasons, I found the series less interesting, i.e. it "dropped the shark" around season 4 or 5. I attributed that to the fact that the main characters, known to be pure nerds afraid of girls, now all had dates or girfriends, which changed the concept of the series a bit. I was glad to see that in those latest seasons, even thought their commitments to female partners are stronger than ever, I found it again funny as it was at the beginning, maybe because the series embraced the change and let its characters evolve, Sheldon in particular, all for the best. Leonard, now married, faces new challenges, like his collection of figurines slowly put aside, which reminded me of a very similar story told by the king of the nerds Kevin Smith about his first years of marriage. And I feel that to get some of the early spirit back, more emphasis was put on the eternal single comic book store owner Stewart, and a new space given to the geologist/bear Bert. A constant in the series: famous cameos like Will Wheaton of Star Trek The Next Generation, Leonard "Spock "Nimoy or Stephen Hawking are more and more present, including an ultimate one at the very end of the season. The series keeps on thriving, so much that the five original actors complete the top six of the most paid TV stars (the first one being Sofia Vergara from Modern Family). But there is rumor that the 12th season will be the last...
Rating: 7 /10