Don’t get mad at me, but not every aspect of “The Big Bang Theory” has aged perfectly. Stop booing! Please!
Let me lead with this. There are definitely things about “The Big Bang Theory” that aged well enough, and clearly, the show is still a massive hit; at the end of 2024, it was still one of the most-streamed programs around. Kaley Cuoco’s Penny may have gotten a raw deal in the pilot — which isn’t conjecture, because the show’s creative team literally admitted that it’s true — but by the end of the series, there’s zero doubt that Penny is extremely smart and capable and not just another stereotypical ditzy blonde character. Adding Amy Farrah Fowler and Bernadette Rostenkowski, played respectively by Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch, was a great idea and gave the show a fresh point of view when they joined the cast at the end of its third season. While the show’s main men — namely, Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki), Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg), and Raj Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar) — do evolve and grow a lot throughout the series, they certainly have some very irritating moments as well, and we’ll cover a lot of those here. Out of all the show’s supporting characters, I have a weird soft spot for Stuart Bloom (Kevin Sussman), the downtrodden comic book store owner who’s getting his own spin-off.
I’m not saying those are the only aspects of “The Big Bang Theory” that manage to stand the test of time; they’re just not what I’m here to discuss. With that in mind, here are 8 things about “The Big Bang Theory” that don’t hold up particularly well as time ticks on.
1. The way Sheldon Cooper treats women is … not great
Sheldon Cooper is, to put it lightly, a very flawed individual … and unfortunately, this is a part of him that’s often on full display whenever he’s faced with a member of the opposite sex. Let’s look specifically at the season 6 episode “The Egg Salad Equivalency,” where Sheldon ends up with a complaint filed against him at his workplace, the California Institute of Technology. At this point in the show, the very pretty doctoral student Alex Jensen (Margo Harshman), who’s been working with Sheldon for a little while, asks Leonard if he might like to spend time together outside of work, which deeply irritates Sheldon. (Also, Leonard is dating Penny at this point and is extremely smug about the whole thing, which isn’t a good look.) As a result, Sheldon starts trying to bully Alex into concentrating harder on work and criticizes her for pursuing Leonard, at which point he drops this gem: “A woman is like an egg salad sandwich on a warm Texas day. Full of eggs, and only appealing for a short time.”
All of this behavior lands Sheldon in the HR department, where he sits down with CalTech’s HR administrator Janine Davis (Regina King, who should receive a second Oscar and second Emmy for getting through this entire guest arc). Not only does Sheldon repeat the egg salad line, but he makes it worse. “Well, according to Ms. Jensen, you said that she was a slave to her biological urges and called her an egg salad sandwich,” Janine says to Sheldon. “I don’t even know what that means, but I’m gonna go ahead and tell you you can’t say it.” So how does Sheldon respond? “Oh! I see the confusion here,” he says. “No, no, Alex thought I was singling her out. No. I meant that all women are slaves to their biological urges, you know? Even you. You’re a slave.” He then brings up menstrual cycles. Do I need to keep explaining why this is bad?
2. The offscreen character of Howard’s mother still manages to be fatphobic
Poor Mrs. Wolowitz, voiced by Carol Ann Susi and never seen directly on screen, catches a frankly inordinate amount of strays throughout her time on “The Big Bang Theory.” (Susi died in 2014, and Mrs. Wolowitz died on the series in season 8.) Again, we never see Howard’s mom — despite the fact that Howard lives with her until he marries Bernadette — but the entire topic of discussion when it comes to Mrs. Wolowitz is that she’s really overweight. Here are just a few examples of the random, passionate fat-shaming Mrs. Wolowitz faces while literally never being visible to the audience. In “The Hot Troll Deviation,” Howard says she’s spilling out of her “girdle” like the pastry mascot the Pillsbury Doughboy, and in “The Engagement Reaction,” the overprotective Mrs. Wolowitz takes news of Howard’s engagement to Bernadette so badly that she has to go to the hospital, and nobody believes it was possible for Howard to physically get his mother there (you know, because she’s fat). In “The Hawking Excitation,” Sheldon complains that he got injured helping Mrs. Wolowitz “lift her bosom” to try on clothes. Do you get it yet? (Also, she gets dinged a lot for having a mustache.)
This isn’t unique to “The Big Bang Theory,” honestly. Shows like “Friends” and “How I Met Your Mother” also feature seriously iffy jokes about anyone who’s above a size 0. Still, it’s frustrating to see an invisible character get fat-shamed over and over again on “The Big Bang Theory.”
3. Howard uses technology to spy on women
Until Bernadette becomes a part of his life, Howard is, to be very blunt, a huge creep towards women. As soon as he meets Penny, Howard basically turns into Pepe Le Pew, constantly dogging Penny and making deeply offensive comments to her on a regular basis. He also gives her a teddy bear with a camera in it and uses a camera on a remote-controlled car to upskirt her, and at a certain point, all of this reaches a boiling point where Penny straight-up punches Howard in the face in the season 2 episode “The Killer Robot Instability.” Worst of all, the punch comes after Penny, upset by Howard’s constant creepy comments, tells him that he’s going to die alone, causing him to take to his bed and sulk. When Penny is bullied into apologizing by the rest of the gang, Howard takes full advantage of the moment and gets her to cuddle with him, trying to kiss her … at which point she sucker-punches him in the face. Honestly, he had it coming.
There’s also the time that Howard, using a drone, gets the exact location of the house used as a home for aspiring top models on the now-defunct reality competition show in the episode “The Panty Piñata Polarization.” After expressing his hope that he might catch some of the models sunbathing nude, Leonard tells him — and Raj, his cohort on this mission — that they’re both really creepy. “You know what? If it’s ‘creepy’ to use the internet, military satellites and robot aircraft to find a house full of gorgeous young models so that I can drop in on them unexpectedly, then fine, I’m creepy,” Howard replies. You got it, man! You are creepy! (He later shows up at the house pretending to be a TV repairman, by the way.)
4. Raj’s selective mutism is a real condition — but the show handles it poorly
According to an article from the NHS in the United Kingdom, selective mutism is a real affliction. It’s categorized as a mental health condition that prevents a person from freely speaking in uncomfortable situations due to anxiety; specifically, “The expectation to talk to certain people triggers a freeze response with feelings of anxiety and panic, and talking is impossible.” The fact that this is a real problem people are dealing with makes it all the more frustrating that, on “The Big Bang Theory,” it’s played as a joke when it happens to Raj, and his “solution” for this condition makes the entire situation even worse.
Right from the start, we learn that Raj deals with selective mutism but only around women; this in and of itself isn’t a problem, because someone dealing with selective mutism could get extremely anxious around members of the opposite sex. Again, Raj’s problem is played exclusively for laughs, which is just an incredibly weird choice on the part of the writers, but this all gets ickier when we learn that Raj can “overcome” his selective mutism by getting so drunk that he loses all inhibitions (like, drunk enough to the point where he can barely remember anything afterwards). Really? Again, Raj’s anxiety around women is one thing, but adding in the “fun” running gag that he can only speak to women if he’s so inebriated he forgets everything is gross … both for Raj and for any of the women he’s talking to. To add insult to injury, Raj gets weirdly misogynistic when he’s drunk and talking to women, so basically, this entire situation is massively disrespectful.
5. Being a nerd is just … cool now
The entire premise of “The Big Bang Theory” is that the four guys who lead the show are unpopular “losers” because they like “Star Wars,” “Star Trek,” comic books (and the movies they spawn), and so on and so forth. If you’ve already spotted the problem here, good job. These are … normal interests. Being a “nerd” wasn’t even really that niche by the time the show started running in 2007; bear in mind that the movie that launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Iron Man,” released in 2008 and was an immediate hit.
Even some of the guy’s arguably dorkier interests have gone fully mainstream since the series started running. The tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons gets featured on “The Big Bang Theory” from time to time, but even the show seems to recognize that it’s a pretty popular pastime considering that it ropes in famous D&D lovers like Joe Manganiello, Kevin Smith, and William Shatner to “play” (with the entire joke being that the guys are flat-out desperate for invites). The point of all of this is that Sheldon, Leonard, Howard, and Raj aren’t uncool because they’re into “nerdy stuff” — in fact, all of the stuff they like is pretty mainstream. They’re uncool because they have off-putting and bad personalities. Just wanted to clear that up.
6. The Big Bang Theory features several questionable celebrity cameos
To be absolutely fair, a lot of shows feature cameos or guest arcs from famous figures who later turn out to be, to put it politely, “giant sacks of crap.” Unfortunately for “The Big Bang Theory,” they chose some real “winners” to appear on the series throughout its run, and the episodes featuring these particular people are pretty hard to watch today.
The least offensive of the group I’ll talk about here is Ellen DeGeneres, who shows up in the series in both the 10th and 12th seasons as herself when some tertiary characters appear on her eponymous talk show. You probably know that, in 2020, Buzzfeed News reported that, despite DeGeneres’ public embrace of kindness, that turned out to be more of a branding attempt than anything else … and she spent her time off-screen creating an extremely hostile work environment (allegedly). Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson plays himself in season 4 and season 12; in 2019, Tyson was accused of sexual assault, which he denied. Neil Gaiman, who authored books like “The Sandman” and “American Gods,” was the subject of a bombshell piece in early 2025 in New York Magazine that accused him of truly horrifying sexual misconduct and assault, allegedly aided and abetted by his former partner Amanda Palmer. He also appeared on the season 11 episode “The Comet Polarization.”
This is all pretty bad, but the worst guest star in the history of “The Big Bang Theory” — and the hardest to watch today — is probably Elon Musk, who plays himself in the season 9 episode “The Platonic Permutation.” Not only is Musk working at a soup kitchen for Thanksgiving, something that feels straight-up impossible if you know literally anything about him, but he’s a void of charisma and comedy, making the whole thing hard to watch even if you ignore the fact that this guy made a pretty wild heel turn in the years after this episode aired.
7. The entirety of The Big Bang Theory is, to be honest, wildly sexist
Even fans of “The Big Bang Theory” can’t really deny that the show is, at its very core, deeply misogynistic. I already mentioned that even the show’s creative team knows they gave Penny a totally rough deal in the pilot, but throughout the show, another problem arises — even after Bernadette and Amy join the fray. The men of “The Big Bang Theory” are routinely awful to their partners.
Leonard is arguably the most devoted boyfriend-turned-husband on “The Big Bang Theory,” but he’s definitely far from perfect; not only does he secretly rewrite one of Penny’s papers she wrote for a community college class because he basically thinks she’s too stupid to do it herself, but he objectifies her a lot, like in the season 10 episode “The Fetal Kick Catalyst” where he brags about bagging her to a whole group of guys at a convention. (She is literally on display at said convention because she’s signing autographs for her low-budget horror movie, and said guys only want said autograph because of the shower scene in the movie.) Howard treats Bernadette like the next coming of his mother, assuming that she’ll just do all of the chores and hard work around the house while he contributes basically nothing. Sheldon is by far the meanest to his own partner. As Amy tries to initiate basic physical intimacy, he treats her like a psychopath and shames her for wanting to hook up with her own boyfriend, and he never misses an opportunity to make it clear that he thinks her career in neuroscience isn’t nearly as important as his work in theoretical physics.
In fact, here’s something really weird I noticed while watching “The Big Bang Theory.” Multiple episodes throughout the show feature fights between the three major couples, and a lot of the time, those episodes end with Amy, Bernadette, or Penny basically telling their partner that they’re hurt by their behavior. The episode then ends, and it’s never addressed again. Cool! Glad they worked it out, I guess!
8. Raj catches a lot of heat for being the only main character of color
There is exactly one (1) major character of color on “The Big Bang Theory,” and the show sure does want us to think about the fact that Raj Koothrappali is Indian all of the time. This would be one thing if the series had any interest in embracing Raj’s heritage. It does not.
Throughout the show, audiences — and Raj, by extension — endure endless jokes about how much Raj hates his home country of India, how he doesn’t like Indian food (the writers always make sure to throw in a jab about it causing digestive issues to boot, which just feels particularly rude), and how his Indian parents are super-strict. Along the way, the show trafficks in stereotypes and mean jokes; Howard is always ready to toss out an insensitive barb directed at Raj about his heritage. (Just one example: regarding an Indian version of Monopoly, “Actually, Indian Monopoly is just like regular, except the money’s in rupees, instead of hotels, you build call centers, and when you take a Chance card, you might die of dysentery.” Just because he acknowledges that it was “pretty racist” afterwards doesn’t help.) Howard is constantly running his mouth about how India is a primitive and, to him, horrifying place, and Raj doesn’t ever stick up for himself, basically agreeing with him. Sure, this is all played off as just a bunch of silly jokes, but it feels pretty gross to constantly riff on Raj’s heritage … and the less said about the dream Bollywood dance routine between Raj and Bernadette, the better.
