The Human side of Sheldon

[Louise]

But what gets unfair (at least to me counting as lazy writing) is when writers include things that are not seen in the 20 minutes we do see and incorporate the off-camera parts as canon. If they're going for the joke and reset that's fine but it's the seemingly arbitrary choices tptb make regarding what does continue beyond the current episode (the Lenny being the obvious candidate but we also get it in terms of how the Shamy relationship had 'evolved') that irk me because as a viewer I don't 'get' a lot of their choices for beyond-the-episode plot progressions.

But really that is part of sit com logic; the 20 minute reset. The happy ending, (ubiquitous, throughout media). Everyone flirts with the possibility of being with everyone else. There are no consequences to actions.

I think we're looking at two separate concepts here, and therefore I agree with both Ricardo and WPP:

"Amy and Sheldon became a couple during the hiatus and the audience doesn't get to see how or why"* is cheating. You can hand-wave *small* things but you can't hand-wave *big* things.

Character development (or the development of a relationship) cannot happen off-screen. TPTB are basically telling us "Because I said so, that's why." We keep being literally *told* how great these couples are, all the nice things they've done for each other, but we have no proof.

And if the writers are telling instead of showing, it makes one suspect that they CAN'T show these things in a convincing way, and that's why they're telling, instead. Presenting these big changes in characterization, in relationships, in the emotions and psychology of the characters, would be too hard, because these ideas are bad ideas and they don't work. They're not sound. TPBT are telling, not showing, BECAUSE these ideas are not plausible and not workable. They're cutting corners.

Major changes of this kind, even if they were handled well instead of poorly, are also too time-consuming for the sitcom format. TPTB have chosen themes and plots which are simply not suitable for a show of this type. The extremely slow development of someone's internal psychological state is not exactly zippy and jazzy material for a mainstream primetime comedy. So, they leapfrog over the middle part and say "Ta-da! We've arrived!" And, now back to the pratfalls.

It's like someone giving you a book with several pages missing.

You can't gloss over important, game-changing, show-changing, character-changing things. That's bad story-telling, it's emotionally and intellectually dishonest, and it's lazy. It's asking the audience to suspend their disbelief to an unacceptable degree.

"Raj can talk all of a sudden, for some vague reason!" is another example of TPTB skipping over the actual hard work of showing us these subtle emotional processes, and just pulling the rabbit out of their ass...I mean, hat

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Ricardo is talking about the episodic nature of TV. This is a somewhat different issue. Personally, I'm *in favor* of the type of sitcom where nothing ever really changes and there's more or less a "reset button." Maybe not to extremes, but to some degree. IMO you should be able to watch the episodes of a sitcom in any order and not miss much. This is not to say that there should be no continuity. I'm actually kind of a stickler for continuity. But the more changes you make, and the bigger they are, the more issues you'll have with maintaining continuity.

I believe long-term changes and "story arcs" are not appropriate to the half-hour sitcom format. That's a very unpopular opinion nowadays, when seemingly everything is structured like an hour-long HBO drama.

"Penny gets a *slightly* better job than the CCF" is a level of change that I would find acceptable. "Raj can now talk to women he already knows, like Penny, but still can't talk to strangers." Ditto. "Howard has to try living without his mother *temporarily* Ditto.

When you start having permanent long-term changes, that's when you run into this argument of "if these characters don't mend their ways, they'll end up alone and miserable, blah, blah." Well, if they mend their ways, they lose the very things which made them funny and the very things which drove the plots of the episodes, and you end up with characters who have no motivations because everything's been resolved.

"People's actions have no long-term consequences" is one thing. "We're showing you the consequences WITHOUT showing you the actions." is another.



*I have not watched most of S4, but I've been told that's what happened.