After watching the pilot episode last night, it's now clear to me one of two possibilities are true:
1. My friends have a very low standard for what constitutes comedy
2. I have been the butt of a joke told by everyone who recommended the show.
In short, the show is utterly horrible. It's a formulaic sitcom: implausible awkward situations, sexual innuendos, deliberate miscommunication, and canned laughtrack to cue you when to laugh. What apparently sets is apart among those who like it, however, is the heavy dollop of sciencey-sounding dialogue slopped over the cartoonishly cliched characters.
The primary characters are all super-genius types who have achieved stellar academic success or engineering accomplishments. Yet, they all live in what appear to be the same style apartments lifted from any sitcom of the 90s and beyond. The super-geniuses all have poor fashion sense and inept social skills, yet are as horny as pubescent males staring at their first Playboy magazine.
The love interest of the primary super-genius character is a "new neighbor" who just moved into the building. She's blond, perky, socially skilled, and from Nebraska. She's not a super-genius by any stretch of the imagination and she works as a waitress while pursuing an acting career. Naturally.
The plots are pretty much what you would expect: underlying sexual tension between primary geek and hot new neighbor, lots of veiled sex jokes, and hijinks by the supporting cast of geeks brought about by their terrible social skills and too-smart brains getting them into awkward positions.
And that goddamned laughtrack makes me want to stab puppies.
Don't believe me? Here's a clip:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOan_0acqE8
Vapid, banal, cliched and worst of all: not funny.
