I have been watching the big bang Theory ever since it first aired. Being an IT student at the time, the uncomfortable social situations and nerdy jokes spoke to me. However, much has changed throughout the seasons, more about that later.
We start out with our four nerdy main characters. There is the recognizable fact of the three people with higher degrees (PHD holding Sheldon, Leonard and Raj) who make fun and feel themselves better than "simple" engineer Howard. There is the desperate search for love coming from both Howard and Raj, and the differentiation between the confident yet single Howard and the timid, uncertain just-as-single Raj. Sheldon is the one who has no sense of what's going on around him, and is only interested in his own world. Leonard is the humble cute guy who manages to get a date from time to time, an inspiration to Howard and Raj, although his on/off fling with Leslie gives us the impression that he isn't really that successful after all.
Then we have the obvious babe, Penny, the complete opposite of our four nerds. She makes something stir in all three of them, but follows the cliché of going out with the "wrong" men, being dumb, and ignoring their advances.
Even though these are all cliche’s, the inside jokes and the disarming clumsiness of the four guys made the first seasons well worth watching. Gradually however, as the show became more popular, the writers started to abandon what once made it so.
With the introduction of Bernadette and Amy the female characters are drastically expanded, but they don't add any real value to the show. Bernadette is the caricature of Howards mother, where as Amy is an attempt to make Sheldon look more human. At the same time, we go from a show with it's own flair to a one-in-a-dozen sitcom. The laughing tape went from being an accessory to being the main engine of the show. The characters became aware they were going to make a pun and started smiling like idiots before they said it, and laughing like people high on weed after someone made it. The longer this series continues, the more painful it becomes to watch. The lines that are supposed to be jokes are simply not funny. The acting and stereotyping are more bearable in a highschool play. And, as stated in another review made before this one, the show changes from laughing with the characters to laughing at the characters. From a nerdy show to a show about nerds.
Conclusion: if you're looking for some nerdy fun, watch the first three or four seasons. After that, it gets the same illness so many American shows suffer from, namely that it becomes a cash cow for the producers and starts a long, painfully slow, continuously prolonged process of dying a silent dead.They never seem to know when to end something great instead of going on to make it something mediocre.
Let me preface this by saying that I have watched all of the Netflix Marvel shows and found numerous flaws in all of them. However, I still liked Jessica Jones and Season 1 of Daredevil to a decent extent. I really disliked Luke Cage and Season 2 of Daredevil. I have no words for Iron Fist; it was that bad.
Obviously, I did not have high expectations going in. But, in a similar fashion to Jessica Jones and Daredevil, I at least expected to be entertained, even if the plot doesn't make much sense. Moreover, the showrunners were writers on Daredevil. So I had some hope before watching the show.
And boy, does this show disappoint. Every scene in so cliched and predictable. The dialogues are lifeless. As pointed out in another comment, many conversations are about how they can't let the police help them and they need to stop The Hand alone. The show drags and drags and yet, nothing happens. The plot is so stupid and boring and predictable and riddled with cliches. For all the buildup about the teaming up of the Defenders, they all don't get together until halfway through the series.
Superhero shows need a great villain if we want to root for the hero. Season 1 of Daredevil had an amazing villain in Wilson Fisk. Jessica Jones had it with Kilgrave. I very much disliked The Hand as a villain in Season 2 of Daredevil, so it was not encouraging to see them be the villain again in The Defenders. And here, we are led to believe that Sigourney Weaver's Alexandra is a strong, all-encompassing villain. Even though Sigourney Weaver is a great actress, the character isn't written well enough for her to do anything other than look cryptically at people and speak ominously. Yet, all of this is wasted, because they kill her off (just like they did, stupidly, with Cottonmouth in Luke Cage) in episode 6 and now Elektra becomes the big bad villain. I never liked Elektra as a character, so making her the real villain and creating some cliched romantic/tragic tension between her and Daredevil was quite irksome.
In conclusion, this show convinced me to never watch anything ever again from the Netflix Marvel universe. Eh, who am I kidding? I'll probably watch the Punisher series when it premiers at the end of this year. And I'll probably regret watching it as well, considering their track record till now.
