Is TBBT really The Sheldon Show?

[Tuesday Pajamas]

I've seen a lot of comments on the other site about how Sheldon is taking over the show, so I thought I'd investigate further. Who is star of the TBBT? Is it really an ensemble show? Where are the stories focused and how much attention do each character get from the show.

In my opinion, Sheldon Cooper has always been the lead character on BB with a great supporting cast. He wasn't intended to be but the outstanding performance of Jim Parsons made it so. But how long have fans been aware of this?

I did a bit of digging. Here's a post I found from 2008 on the fansite.

“Thank you. Very refreshing to hear that this episode won't be almost completely Sheldon centric, which the last 4 episodes really were.”

This post was written on April 22 2008, and the fan is talking about Season One Ep 14!!!! here is the link.

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It is my opinion that the TBBT became Sheldon's as early as 1.04 with The Luminous Fish Effect. But the recent dissatifaction with the airtime split got me wondering if there was something more going on. Are they sick of him? Has Molaro's attempt to dumb him down gone too far?

Going throught the plots of the show, I put together the following graphs to illustrate my point, (I do love a graph).

These graphs shows how many plots each character has been primary, from S1-9 (I am yet to do the current season). I have not counted plots that include everyone and do not have a central character. The dark blue are single-character focused A plots, the dark red are single-character focused B or C plots. The A plot is the story most central to the episode. It usually pairs with the name of the episode. The lighter colours are joint A or B plots which require two characters. Sheldon/Leonard, Leonard/Penny, Howard/Bernadette and so on. I have tried to make it as accurate as possible from the original descriptions of the episodes.