The potential downfall of the show would be to go with the flow of its more common reading. If it stops these asides, it will be all that you have said. For now though, I am interested what else is between the lines…

As for the girlfriend, I suspect that the juvenile question driving all of season 4 may be “when are they going to do it?” So, a la Foucault, the no sex thing will really be about sex completely. But you are absolutely right that, if they can avoid the pitfalls of the Penny/Leonard relationship that you have so aptly explained, things might turn out alright!

As for the girlfriend, I’m intrigued enough to put away my concerns – while his queerness is certainly a key part of his character, I think that as long as the relationship remains built around companionship rather than sex (in other words, the precise opposite of Leonard and Penny’s relationship) I think it could work out alright.

It really makes one long for the dearly departed Freaks and Geeks. Remember when the boys sit on the curb with popsicles and wonder why the hell girls would like stupid, athletic boys who will never, ever get into a good college? They decide that the librarian type is what they need to find–like Bailey, on WKRP in Cincinatti. When one of them briefly does get a cute girlfriend, she turns out to be terrible, boring, vacuous–and a Republican! There were certainly attractive people on Freaks and Geeks (Franco), but it really was such a brilliant, short-lived moment when TV dealt with outcast nerdom in a real way.

Of course, even when real studio audiences are present, laugh tracks are mercilessly tweaked by producers. Euphemistically, this is known as “sweetening,” but one might less generously call it utter fabrication of audience response. I am reminded of Andy Kaufman’s horrified response to learning he had been cast on Taxi. A sitcom? But the laughter is a recording of dead people! In any case, I suspect that when we like a show, we interpret the laugh track as more real than when we don’t like a show.

Like you, I am interested to see what will happen in season 4, though I am also nervous. Season 3 ended with Sheldon being matched up with a girlfriend. I like the actress a lot, and it was a great cliffhanger. However, as I briefly mentioned in my initial post, Sheldon is compelling in large part for his queerness, and, on this front, the new girlfriend could take things in more or less interesting directions. Season 2 often infantilized Sheldon (as in his trip to Disney world, his attendance at a mixer with a Green Lantern lantern), and it wasn’t very interesting, as the implication was less that his sexuality was strange than that he was simply pre-sexual. However, season 2 also contains a brilliant moment in episode 6. Earlier in the episode, the boys wonder how Sheldon might reproduce, and they hypothesize that it is likely that one day he will simply eat too much Pad Thai and undergo mitosis. This is precisely what happens in the show’s coda (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00lRB2oP08A) Now THAT is some strange sexuality! One cannot help but worry, then, about how this new girlfriend plot might turn out…

I have to say — and this may be an unpopular opinion — this is almost the exact same problem I have with Glee. As a former high school outcast with a passion for musical theater, I was excited for a show that might capture that experience. But no matter how many Broadway guest stars they throw into the mix, all I can see is a show that seems to revel in focusing on its conventionally pretty, straight, white, able-bodied, at least semi-popular characters and pushing all of the actual outcasts into the background — literally, in he case of the musical numbers. And that’s not even counting the reliance on crude stereotypes and a pervasive characterization of almost all women as shrews. It feels like another show that seems like a niche show come to a mass audience (singing! dorks!) but is actually a mass show pretending to be niche for a sense of edginess.

I’ve got a whole lot of observations to make from that experience which would be too much here, but I will extend an argument I made about the pilot while catching up with the series (which can be found here). What struck me on returning to the pilot is that the (live) laugh track is part of the problem: because we’re being instructed on what is funny, there is no way to capture the nuance of whether we’re laughing at the characters or with them. The laugh track is the result of a mass audience, and so it can easily come into conflict with niche viewers and their readings of particular scenes. It’s why I found the “geek” moments in the premiere so problematic, and why it turned me off the show for too long.

However, over time this would change: the studio audiences would be fans of the show, and they would either have a knowledge of the geek culture being discussed (thus getting the jokes) or would have watched enough of the show to understand how the characters revere geek culture. And so the studio audience’s laughter better reflects the unique convergence of mass and niche culture, which helps the series balance out its approach to nerdom.

Perhaps what happened in Season Three was that the writers took this balance for granted, forgetting that their audience was still from two different worlds and that storylines like Leonard and Penny’s relationship would still need to carefully negotiate those different perspectives. It seemed as if Penny became less knowledgeable about comic book culture in order to emphasize their lack of connection, while Leonard seemed at times to ignore his geeky routes entirely and at other times act as if nothing had changed. In the end, their odd chemistry became a story point which resulted in their breakup, but the series could have achieved that breakup without fussing with an all-important balance.

As I say, I could go on forever, but there’s a quick observation – thanks for sharing these thoughts Heather, as they’ve got me excited for another year of anaylzing the series in all of its flawed glory.

It was an unexpected and amazing storyline for a sitcom that up to that point had pretty much subscribed to the “I look hot and will insult you a lot and that will indicate that we have sexual tension” school of writing/casting romantic interests for its male leads.

(I just searched YouTube for visuals and sure enough, there are Irene/Berg vids! Oh my goodness–I had forgotten just how big Jillian Bach’s grin was as Irene, and how vulnerable Ryan Reynolds allowed Berg to be with her. They were so adorable together. )