Welcome to a new Sitcom Tuesday! My coverage of Happy Endings will begin next week. In the meantime, I’m excited to set the figurative table by resurrecting a post from this blog’s thirteen-year run — another show, and season, that has relevance for the next sitcom coming up on the docket. You know how this works — I’ll provide a link to a piece that I first published several seasons ago, and then I’ll offer some updated commentary, relevant to today.
This week, let’s revisit… The Ten Best THE BIG BANG THEORY Episodes of Season Four: https://jacksonupperco.com/2025/10/28/the-ten-best-the-big-bang-theory-episodes-of-season-four/
To conclude this brief rerun stretch of hangout rom-coms, I thought I’d feature one of Happy Endings’ contemporaries — that is, a show that was at its prime (or near it) during the run of the series that I’m about to cover here on Sitcom Tuesdays. Just like How I Met Your Mother, which had declined by this point, or Friends, which was now a bona fide classic to which all shows in this subgenre were subject to comparison, The Big Bang Theory also had moments in its life where its group of friends had to navigate a tough breakup that temporarily threatened their status quo. Here, that occurred near the end of the third season, when Leonard and Penny launched a forced and somewhat contrived split that proved difficult for Sheldon, in particular — especially as someone who, as we’ve come to understand, has a tough time dealing with change. Leonard and Penny are then apart for the entirety of the following season (Four), during which the series smartly begins to expand its narrative horizons by exploring new relationships — such as Howard’s with Bernadette (which began in Three) and, most importantly, Sheldon’s with Amy. These new rom-com dynamics help pivot the original conception of the show, and by doing so, they open up a lot of new stories — and precisely on the relationship-based terms most conducive to exploring and evolving the characters. As such, Season Four is a smart collection for Big Bang — a transitional year that narratively endures Leonard and Penny’s split by finding outside fodder. Just as Friends would eventually do with Monica and Chandler, and How I Met Your Mother would do with Robin and Barney. Knowing all this, it’ll be fun to see how Happy Endings — even in its brief three-season run — builds upon what most of its viewers would have recognized as tropes and patterns of this specific subgenre, where it exists as another, and more specifically premised variation. How will this series capably distinguish itself? Let’s see…
Come back next week for Happy Endings! And stay tuned tomorrow for a new Wildcard!