gender roles

Chuck Lorre, the creator of Two and a Half Men, has sold a pilot to CBS called The Big Bang Theory. The show will center on two theoretical physicists and a woman who proves to them they don't know everything.

I don't think it's bad to create a show where the woman is the "smart one," but it is a cliche. The rule most sitcoms adhere to is that the woman must always be grounded and intelligent while the man is pretty much a bumbling moron. When sitcoms first started to do this, it was a righteous response to the shoddy roles women had previously been given in television. Now, however, I think it's time to take the next step, to not try and make each character a representative of an entire gender and instead treat each character as an individual. Arrested Development springs to mind as one show that I think did this fairly well. Characters were driven by their own selfish desires and everyone, male and female, had plenty of shortcomings. When you try to force an absolute onto a character, it stifles that character's ability to come across as real.