Portrait of the Autist as a Young Man

In 2007 a network ensemble comedy about four scientists working at the California Institute of Technology premiered on CBS. Over the course of the next decade, The Big Bang Theory became one of the most watched shows worldwide, a landmark pop-culture product with a dedicated fan base that heralded the age of "geek" or "nerd" culture. For Vlad Dima, writing in the Bright Lights Film Journal in 2012 during the show's fifth season, the series was "a paradigm shift of big-bang proportions": "The show's main achievement . . . is to create an [sic] universe in which the outcast scientists, the nerds, function as the leading men" (original emphasis).