Wishful Thinking...

[Louise]

I think Sheldon would be horrified by the older version of himself.

It occurred to me: the idea that the characters have "grown" and that the changes in them are "character development" is a form of retconning. People are re-interpreting the early seasons in light of the later seasons, viewing everything from the early seasons as merely the set-up or the prologue to what comes later.

If this show had ended after S2, I don't think anyone would be saying "where's the growth? where's the change? why hasn't XYZ happened?"

Nobody could ever, ever, ever have predicted that the characters would turn out the way they have. I don't think anyone would watch S1/S2 and predict the current state of affairs. I really don't.

The idea that there's been a natural progression from S1 to S8 and that all of this happened organically and was part of some well-planned long-range plotting is false. IIRC, the showmakers have admitted on the record that they do not plan very far in advance at all and are making it up as they go along.

These were artificial changes, imposed by an external force, by fiat, for the purpose of making the show more commercial and more palatable to a wider audience.

You can only accept these changes as "growth" if you believe TPTB had some kind of master plan or some idea of where the hell they were going with all this, from the start.

I'm struggling to explain what I mean, here, but it's like a type of "confirmation bias" or self-fulfilling prophecy.

"Sheldon used to be cold, now he's more human" or "Howard used to be creepy, now he's sweet" make for nice, digestible, easy-to-understand sound-bites. An idea like that is a lot more user-friendly than "the characterization on this show is inconsistent" or "a TV show is just a commercial product and the makers can change it whenever they want."

What am I trying to say, here? It's a lot more comforting for the Canons to believe that there is method in the madness and that all these changes fit into some type of logical narrative, than for them to acknowledge that sometimes the writing just plain sucks, or that this show was changed in an intentional and calculated way in order to make more money.

If this show ended after S2, nobody would be saying "where is the part where Sheldon kisses his girlfriend, where is the part where Howard gets married?"

Hindsight is the only thing that would cause you to think that way. It's natural to want to impose order onto chaos, so instead of acknowledging that the writing is just plain sh*tty or that this is a malleable product which changes at the whims of TPTB, they apply a traditional story-structure to it.

"A*shole redeemed by the love of a good woman" is one of the oldest romance-novel plots in existence, and it's a lot more digestible than "quirky and edgy characters were de-clawed so as not to scare John Q. Public."

I don't know much about the Shamy, but I'd almost say it's an extremely twisted and degraded version of "Jane Eyre."

"Cold, haughty, aloof gentleman is humbled by falling in love with a plain and simple girl" is the theme of pretty much *every Regency romance novel EVER.*

And a very close relative of it is "promiscuous and immoral "rake" redeemed by the love of a good woman."

Sound familiar?

This is old, old, OLD stuff, told and re-told thousands of times.

TL;DR: what's happened on this show is not "growth" unless you're viewing the old seasons through the lens of the new seasons and you're ret-conning.