STUDIO PRODUCTION: BIG BANG THEORY (RESEARCH)

The Big Bang Theory is an American Sitcom about roommates Sheldon and Leonard,  living in a small flat in California. They are both Physicists working for the California Institute of Technology. The series was created by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady and first aired in 2007 and completed it's eleventh series this year (2018). The programme focuses on the characters Sheldon and Leonard but also their neighbour 'Penny' who Leonard falls in love with. As well, we have Sheldon and Leonards colleagues and friends Howard Wolowitz, a engineer and Raj Koothrappali, an astrophysicist.



The Set
The Big Bang Theory is a studio sitcom. All of the programme is filmed within a studio environment. From an interview with the creators of the programme, this was done because their was a very specific style they wanted to have with the show and the location they wanted, was easier to create in a studio than try and find in real life. As well, certain shots they wanted, such as the walking up the stairs and between flats, simply wouldn't be possible in a real life location. Below are photos of the flats, where the majority of the sitcom takes place.

The hallway with the lifts is used well. Sheldon and Leonard live on the third floor in the Sitcom, so the set designers change little parts of the two doors either side and change the tape on the lift to look different, small changes which make you think it's a different set. But this shows how much can be done within a studio environment. The only outside locations are street shots which are rarely used in the programme unless needed.

The story
The programme follows the lives of Sheldon and Leonard. Through series 1-5 we have them and their friends Howard, Raj and the love story between Penny and Leonard. Later, we have 2 new characters enter into the sitcom and become main characters, Bernadette Rostenkowski, a waitress who works with Penny and is introduced to Howard and later becomes his wife. There is also Amy Farrah Fowler, a Neurobiologist who meets Sheldon via online dating and later becomes his girlfriend.

The series has comical gags mixed in with Science reference humour. As well as reference to nerd culture such as Superheroes, Science Fiction, action films, video games, card games such as Magic the Gathering, etc. makes the sitcom very popular in the current day and age as these are hugely popular, especially the reference to superheroes with the amount of films and TV programmes that're being brought out lately.
The Big Bang Theory has also had many special guest stars for episodes with the popularity of the programme which has been written into the scripts. Guests such as:

- Bob Newhart
- Buzz Aldrin
- George Takei
- Katee Sackhoff
- Mike Missimino
- Stan Lee
- Professor Stephen Hawking
- Adam West
- James Earl Jones
- Carrie Fisher
- Elon Musk

Running gags
The Big Bang Theory, as well as other sitcoms, has running gags throughout it's series which will come up through episodes. One which has gone on and on throughout the series is the lift in the apartment complex being broken, so we would always get funny gags when walking up and down the stairs as you can see from the clip below:

Another example is that Sheldon isn't an average person and is a very strange man. But this plays to the comedy. One of the comical things that Sheldon does is when he tells a joke (or what he classes as a joke) he will say the word "Bazinga". A compilation of this through the series is below:

These gags follow the classic tradition of Sitcoms which is that there is meant to be gag after gag after gag, over and over to constantly bring comedy to the programme. However, these gags only work well because of the characters in the programme.