Episode 1, Season 1: “’Pilot”
This is the episode that sold the show. It is the first episode to which viewers were treated back in 2007. I don’t have this luxury – I have over four years of family and friends haranguing me with ‘did you see the part’, basic character sketches, and snatches of episodes across all seasons. I’m trying to ignore that information, and go at this as empirically as possible.
So let’s get started. Cold open: Two nerdy gentlemen enter an office, probably doctor or dentist or some such. We know they are nerds by their costuming, and on this particular point, I will give the show some credit. The mismatched clothing and shoulder bags have a certain geek flair to them, and seem reasonable if hyperbolic. While they enter, they are technobabbling away about particle/wave issues, and the punchline’s putting that on a t-shirt. Trouble has already started. As best I can tell, there is no joke in the particle/wave comment – the joke is only present for the viewer laughing at the nerd. Internally, there’s no impetus for the comment. Why the t-shirt? This isn’t like Fraiser’s high-brow kibitzing with Niles: in that case, there were always two levels. The accessible level, where it’s funny to hear two yahoos yammering about their favorite topics, but there was also care taken to include a high level, contextual joke, like that it’s a pun on opera titles. No, this show doesn’t bother. This is no ‘There are 10 kinds of people in the world…’ it’s just asinine.
