Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett covers the explosion of The Big Bang Theory.

Believe it or not I actually hesitated before writing about The Big Bang Theory two weeks ago (see "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--The Brotherhood of the Broken Toys"), automatically assuming something of interest to me was only interesting to me, but in the last two weeks the series is suddenly all over the zeitgeist.  Like the piece by Lesley Goldberg in The Hollywood Reporter which revealed Mayim Bialik (who is not the granddaughter of famed Broadway producer Max Bialystock), who plays the character Amy Farrah Fowler, is one of us.  While talking about the character Sheldon she reveals, "For someone like myself who grew up in comic book stores and grew up as a misfit, he's the nerd hero."

Then there was the piece from Heidi MacDonald's The Beat titled "He said, she said: Are girls ruining The Big Bang Theory?"  While no fan of the series MacDonald writes positively about the addition of female characters to the cast and refers to the show as "the nerd comedy of our times."  To give counterpoint she also refers to a review by John Doyle in Britain's The Globe and Mail titled "When good shows go bad; Big Bang Theory's decline" who, apparently in all seriousness, is horrified by this development and the fact that now on the show "...there are even feelings being tossed around.  It's like watching Friends!"   But then, genuine human feelings have always spooked the British.

I definitely had no plans to mention TBBT (as I now plan to refer to it to help move things along) again, let alone every time the gang made a trip to their unnamed comic book shop, which they did again on last week's episode "The Flaming Spittoon Acquisition."  I would have let it pass without mention if it hadn't have been for a piece on it that appeared on Bleeding Cool entitled "The Television Show That Hates You."  I won't concede it hates us exactly but it sometimes can demonstrate a particularly rough brand of tough love.

Last week's episode seemed particularly harsh, perhaps because usually the jokes about fannish stuff are glancing blows but here the abuse was highly concentrated.  There were lines like "For a lot of these guys the weekly trip here is the only chance their mom has to go down to the basement to change their sheets."  And much fun is made of the shows fictional card game system "Mystic Warlords of Ka'a" and the way Stuart, the store's owner, convinces the guys to buy packs of a new expansion set they were badmouthing only seconds earlier ("Like shooting nerds in a barrel").

But Stuart gets his comeuppance in a plot which has him trying to date Amy where he’s never seemed quite so pathetic.  While asking her out, via text, he writes "It's OK if you say no.  It might be the kick in the pants I need to start taking Zoloft").  And finally we're introduced to Dale, Stuart's before unseen assistant who when it comes to creepy buries the needle ("I don't do returns, they are hard").

The Bleeding Cool piece ends by invoking the supposedly superior British sit-com The IT Crowd which coincidentally enough, also concerns two nerds who have an attractive woman enter their lives.  Of course in this version the guys are computer techs, she's their incompetent boss and the results are a whole lot darker and surreal than we usually get with an American television series.  I've always found comparing the two to be inherently unfair because The IT Crowd was able to take a lot more chances because it went out to a smaller audience while TBBT has to appeal to a much larger one.  And we're not really supposed to always "like" any of the characters on The IT Crowd, at least not in the conventional American sitcom sense where "likability" is treasured above all other things.

TBBT invariably gets compared to The IT Crowd by those who don't like the show, which has always struck me as being more than a little unfair, seeing as how one is a hand crafted artifact and the other a mass produced production.  As amiable and desperate to please as it is like all American sitcoms TBBT is entertainment second and an engine designed specifically to make enormous amounts of money first.  And if you do one of them just right it can make that money all over the world for generations to come.

So, now we've established that TBBT neither hates nor loves us (but only wants our money) I suppose the only question really is the one asked by Ed Campbell over at the Comic Book Daily website, "Is The Big Bang Theory's Influence On Comic Culture Positive or Negative?"  My answer is that it's probably enough that it has become a part of world culture.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.