I recently read this outdated article about what's wrong with Big Bang Theory, and it's kind of funny how they picked at Sheldon, saying that nobody would seriously be his friend. But what they don't get is how his friends were smart for hanging onto someone smarter than themselves. None of them ended up homeless or insane, though Raj ended up close to insane and Stewart close to being homeless. But somehow, everybody in Sheldon's sphere consistently works toward better versions of themselves.
Until his wife is accepting a Nobel prize with him, and his best friend is starting a family with the girl of his dreams. The entire point is that being friends with "a Sheldon" was the smart choice and everybody's luck improved.
My cousin Betty had a similar complaint, and she was one of the biggest gossips and church-woman type who would decide who or what is in or out. Though I think her biggest beef was how Sheldon was characterized as being from Texas, and she was from Texas. But it bothered her that such a person would even have any friends, because in those old-fashioned definitions of friendship, it was conforming that mattered. When conforming was all, then what they conformed TO had to be the mass-programming, not the guidance of one smart person.
The interesting thing is that his friends actually had moments of sincere cruelty toward Sheldon, there are several episodes where he is either the butt of a joke or viscously attacked.....and he just takes it without changing how he feels about them. He also takes the verbal abuse, fields it all and often with humor and a big heart. I'm not crazy enough to believe this is real, it's a TV show....written and staged. But what that means is that it's a scenario, for possible realities. It's the other road not taken by all those snotty and conforming clicks of friends, who abandoned the smartest people because it was easier to pick on them.
It was that road that wasn't taken, and those who had issues about Sheldon are likely those who saw his character as a repudiation -- a kind of reductio ad absurdum nailing all of that point home. That nobody and none of the smart nerds who were abandoned, were ever as impossible as Sheldon. And look what is gained by having smart nerd friends? So how stupid was it to NOT be friends with the smart ones who were much more agreeable? Yes it's about nerds versus popularity, but Chuck Lorre takes it a step beyond that. I have enjoyed the episodes over and over, and I'll tell you why...... They do my heart good. They do my nerdy bookworm-heart good, that friendship is happening somewhere for a nerdy-me in another dimension, or time. Even if you do need 22 of those dimensions just to make the math come out right. 
Btw.... the gay element of things, with Jim Parsons, fits the same mold as well......what kind of friends have they been missing out on, by eliminating gay men and women from their groups of friends? It's about those elements of inclusion and exclusion, and how the outside eventually becomes the inside. All it takes is a little bit of Sheldon, and a lot of love.
I have a gay friend who enjoyed the show, up until Sheldon got married. I think he was hoping for some kind of "coming out of the closet" episode that never arrived. But for me, that episode was the one where Sheldon confessed to having a storage rental with everything he ever owned....his secret that he shared with Amy. A coping mechanism that makes more sense the more you think about it! Lol. How many past things have you owned, that you wish you still had? What kind of world would it be, if you could just visit your past things in a storage locker, like a personal museum and tribute to the past? So it's his coming out of the closet on how crazy he might be, but what it's about is he's catering to his own needs, own gratification, rather than following societal norms. He's going with personal solutions that make him happy, rather than societal ones that don't. Having a clear designation for past things owned makes a kind of sense, in our throw away society. And maybe it's the throw-away part that's crazy, not the possible solutions for it.
Yet because of societal characterization OF that kind of tendency, he can pawn it off as a sickness or illness in himself that he realizes he must overcome. And he agrees to that....before he rolls the ball back into the garage. Solid perfection there, in that script.
How many years did we put up with movies, that characterized nerds as something that deserved to be on the outside of life? That championed them, but really were excuses to take greater digs and pokes at how every nerd deserved to be alone and unloved. And I feel like Big Bang was the resounding answer to all of that. It's like a doctoral thesis on sociological implosion. The thesis to prove that no justification ever existed to exclude nerds in the first place, and excluding them might have been a collective mistake of unbelievable proportions. Big bang, indeed.
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