I agree with this for the most part, but The Big Bang Theory is a bad example imo. It is still laughing at geeks, not with them. I think that's why it rubs a lot of people (myself included) the wrong way.
There's certainly a reason Silicon Valley got away with duplicating the components of Big Bang exactly.
Like, they've both got the stereotypical awkward Indian engineer who can't talk to women, but SV took a novel approach by not hating him. SV's weird-by-engineering-standards characters are weird for reasons outside of their nerdiness (e.g. Jared's German-language night terrors), BBT just turned Sheldon's nerdiness up to 11. (And created a really nasty autism stereotype in the process.) And so on.
(Can anyone imaging BBT finding a stereotype as obscure as Gilfoyle's occultist thing? Because that's definitely a 'thing', but it's some serious inside baseball.)
If anything, you might argue that the transition from Big Bang to Silicon Valley is a display of the changing position of nerds. More realistically, though, I think they're just aiming at different demographics.
I thought the Indian guy on BBT was one of the more sympathetic characters. He is a bit sheltered, but seems to do significantly fewer stupid things than the rest of the cast. Also seems to be a good friend. But I've only seen a few episodes.
Nerd blackface with a stereotypical understanding of nerds.
It's usually a disaster when writers try to create characters smarter than themselves. You get word soup based on how the writer imagines smart people communicate, filled with weakly used jargon and unnecessarily long words.
My coworkers still accuse me of using complex language even though I have worked to simplify and clarify my communication.
It blows my mind that in an article about income inequality, someone who I’m perceiving as a white affluent male can paint themselves as the underdog and then cheerfully refer to The Big Bang Theory as “nerd black face”. Seriously?
Hmmmm... Especially in the earlier seasons, I'm not sure there's ever been a mainstream television show that incorporated so many technically nuanced jokes.
The jokes are validated by David Saltzberg, a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA.
I think if the jokes were superficial and lazy, I would perceive that as mean-spirited. But they seem to get the details correct.
It's a weird mix, because some of the jokes were pretty intricate and clever. The background stuff (e.g. writing on whiteboards) is also correct; a bunch of it is apparently equations pulled from old physics papers.
The characterizations, meanwhile... well, Howard and Sheldon both struck me as pointlessly mean-spirited portrayals, while Rajesh was just a really overwrought stereotype. It felt like the technical side of things ended at input on specific jokes, and in response everything else was hammed up to ensure it would maintain mass appeal.
Of course, that's a pretty common pattern - could-be-good works getting diluted to ensure they won't drive away any viewers. I wouldn't be surprised if it boils down to a good idea plus executive meddling. The later seasons also seem to have a really bad case of Flanderization, where writing novel jokes got hard so "hah, nerdy talk!" came to the fore.
I always just read it as dysfunctional people getting into comical situations. I see the show sometimes at my parents' house, and it doesn't seem that bad.
Like, they've both got the stereotypical awkward Indian engineer who can't talk to women, but SV took a novel approach by not hating him. SV's weird-by-engineering-standards characters are weird for reasons outside of their nerdiness (e.g. Jared's German-language night terrors), BBT just turned Sheldon's nerdiness up to 11. (And created a really nasty autism stereotype in the process.) And so on.
(Can anyone imaging BBT finding a stereotype as obscure as Gilfoyle's occultist thing? Because that's definitely a 'thing', but it's some serious inside baseball.)
If anything, you might argue that the transition from Big Bang to Silicon Valley is a display of the changing position of nerds. More realistically, though, I think they're just aiming at different demographics.