The Big Bang Theory: The Complete Fifth Season

The first few seasons of this show were as funny as they were different from other TV shows. A group of ultra-nerds whose humor often involved actual scientific jokes made for wicked comedy for people who like cerebral humor. But the show had enough good acting and physical humor (think of Sheldon's expressions and voice) that just about anyone could find it funny, even if they missed the "inside" science jokes. Well, that could only last for so long as the show both started using up that kind of material as well as starting appealing to a broader audience. So in the fifth season, we see a move towards more traditional humor, while still keeping some of the great nerdness of the show.

The ultra-nerds are now mostly just super-nerds, as they are "normalizing" with girlfriends, more normal problems, and in essence, turning this show more into Friends than it was at the beginning. Don't get me wrong, the fifth season is still very much a creative and hilarious show that is full of science and nerd jokes that are sure to make you laugh out loud. Only the show is no longer purely about how awkward and unusual its characters are. Leonard is learning about women, Howard is mellowing out his creepy/bizarre "romantic" ideas, and Raj is increasingly able to speak in front of women (often thanks to a convenient drink in his hand). Sheldon is still mostly Sheldon, although his new girlfriend takes some of the edge off him. I quite like the addition of Bernadette who fits well with the existing cast. Amy isn't quite as good of a fit, largely because I think Sheldon was at least as funny, if not funnier, when he was single. Penny is still an excellent counterbalance for the group, although she now is starting to get, or at least know, some of the science jokes. Her relationship with Leonard is made more interesting by last season's addition of Priya, Raj's sister and sometimes love interest of Leonard. This makes Leonard a little less desperate than in the past.

So all in all, this is a very funny season to watch. Maybe not as funny and fresh as the original few seasons, but it's still my favorite current sitcom (yes, I hope it keeps going strong in season 6). If you are new to the series, I'd highly recommend you start with either season one or two, so you can get a sense of how the characters have evolved over the series. If you're a fan of the show, then this is a strong addition to any collection. I'd like to give it 4.5 stars, but seeing as how I think it's not quite as funny as the first seasons, I decided to give it four stars. It's still great comedy, just different from the original seasons that launched it. TBBT season 5 might no longer be a pure nerd-fest, but that might be a good thing insofar as broadening the appeal of this show, and it's still whole lot funnier than most of the other shows out there. An easy recommendation.

In the cult tradition of SPARTACUS, the halls of every science department now echoes: "I AM SHELDON"!

Currently into its fifth season, THE BIG BANG THEORY proved to be one of the most funny TV sitcoms ever aired. Even if the show seems to have slowed down form its initial explosive impetus, I had not laughed out loud this hard ever since the best days of FRASIER and SEINFELD - and BIG BANG is **consistently** brilliant!

Sheldon Cooper is unavoidably the king of the show - the massive black hole this Universe revolves around if you will. A child prodigy, now a 24 years old theoretical physicist PhD with absolutely no social skills or known sexual drive. Sheldon may be on the verge of unifying the fields but cannot drive a car to save his life or break a smile even remotely resembling that of a mere homo sapiens.
His equally super-intelligent (yet sexually confused girlfriend), Amy Farrah Fowler, (which Sheldon finally claimed) received a far more enlarged role this fifth season. However, she was not a very good addition and she unbalances the show. Her character only manages to blur the focus form Sheldon (there is only room for one idiosyncratic genius!), diffuse a number of comically charged situations and gum up the show's flow.

Leonard Hofstadter is Sheldon's roommate and primary ...keeper. An experimental physicist himself (who Sheldon tries to "help" by steering him towards a teaching career), he juggles Sheldon's idiosyncrasies with his personal neurosis - not to mention his crush on his neighbor Penny. Which crush, like lunar eclipses, follow a predicted yet unavoidable periodicity.
Leonard tried his hand in a long-distance relationship this season with his friend Raj's sister, Priya, but he seems to be gravitating back towards Penny once more.

Howard Wolowitz is the only one with no PhD (and Sheldon will never let him forget it). An engineer (whose crowning achievements were a mechanized arm that is used in the space shuttle and a liquid waste management solution), he also managed to wreck the Mars Rover in hopes of landing a girl (but he made sure no one can prove anything).
The fact that he is a short man with a severely outdated and misguided sense of fashion, still lives with his mother, insists on using a collection of pickup lines straight from men's magazines advice columns - and yet carries himself as God's gift to women is just hilarious.
Howard used to be the show-stealer. Whenever he entered the scene you just knew he would offer such an outrageous perceptive that would render you speechless. Now, if only Howard's character was allowed to continue in its stellar trajectory. He has been weighted down by his fiancée, Bernadette, who is very likeable, but also is cramping his style. Not to mention that she, slowly yet inescapably, is turning into his scary mother.

Rajesh Koothrappali is a particle astrophysicist with a fashion sense close to absolute zero and a severe case of shyness - to the point that he cannot speak in front of women unless inebriated. He keeps using the "poor Indian" defense although his father is a rich doctor who drives a Bentley. His character, even in the fifth season, remains underdeveloped.

Then there is Penny. She is the proverbial good girl next door who came to California with stardom aspirations but so far works as waitress and suffers a sequence of bad boyfriends (Sheldon has in fact calculated the exact number of them, extrapolated from a bell-curve that started at 14)- and, obviously, from her neighbors.
One of the best fifth season moments: slipping in the "Who is the greatest?" cheer between Sheldon's patented knock of repeated "Penny!".

The show unavoidably makes use of previous sitcom combinations (the odd couple, the unfulfilled love-interest mismatch) but even if one manages to discern them they are used in such a fresh manner that all that is left is great entertainment!

The way to truly enjoy this is to own it on DVD. The writing is so smart and the jokes fly so fast (many of them non-verbal) there is just no way to savor it during its weekly air time. Well, may be Sheldon could but then again, who can compare his intellect with his?

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

This show was wildly funny, original and inventive in its first three seasons, still funny in its fourth, but it has gone flat and stale now. It used to be about four science nerds and the sweet "normal" girl across the hall. There used to be great science jokes, nerd in-jokes, geek in-jokes, sweet and funny moments when we really cared about the misfits, and side-splitting original wild comedy (rocket fuel in the elevator, nerds high on hash brownies in the desert courtesy of the nice Baby Boomers one campsite over, Kripke and the battle of the 'bots). Now it is tiresome, coarse and vulgar. There is no wit, there's just a stupid laugh track and unfunny situations and dialogue. Every now and then there's a flash of the old creativity, but those don't happen even once per episode. We used to laugh WITH the nerds, now we are supposed to laugh AT them. They've become the "normal" people's stereotypes of nerds. Sheldon not catching the prolonged references to wood in his role playing game while Raj and Howard can't stop giggling is the level of the humor now, and that is light years from what it used to be. This show has lost its way. The DVD packaging is good, sound and imagery fine.