Before their antics, nerds and scientists were only good for one thing in TV land. And one thing only.
Think of the countless films and telly programmes where the main muscled hero would turn to his nerdy IT colleague for an explanation and what would follow is a massive info dump about stuff we didn’t care about as long as it gave the hero enough information so he could take his muscled frame to the next scene where he would repeatedly smash a few more goons around the head before getting the girl and giving a little twinkly smile at the camera as the credits rolled and the world was safe once again, ignoring the fact that the real hero was the IT geek who had fed him the information just so the hero could get all the glory.
They were background characters. Something used to explain things.
Then came The IT Crowd. Suddenly they were human. Funny and human. And they hated us norms. Us people who just go about our lives not understanding how anything around us works from our smart phones to our television. Switch it off and again etc.
If that wasn’t enough, along came The Big Bang Theory which once again put a bunch of nerds front and centre and became the biggest sitcom since Friends (to which it is remarkably similar even down to their flat set-up).
Talking about Friends, Ross, the smart one, was always the butt of every joke. But that wouldn’t happen any more. Nowadays Ross would be the hero leaving those Jocks like Joey in their dust as they nab the girl and still get to talk about paleontology.
And this all leads us to the smartest, funniest sitcom on television today - Silicon Valley, which is now in its fourth season and is still as fresh as ever.
The show is put together by the ever brilliant Mike Judge, of Beavis and Butt-head and Office Space fame.
And damn that show is good. Intelligently poking fun at the Googles and Facebooks of this world whilst celebrating people with smarts.
With a mish-mash of characters with every human flaw under the sun you follow the internet start-up Pied Piper as it rises and falls and rises again. Erlich is my personal standout character played by TJ Miller who you might recognise from Deadpool and, my God, is this guy immoral but loveable at the same time.
With society seemingly sliding towards ignorance at the moment it’s great that there are still some corners of tellyland celebrating brains.
