Whee! Larry meta!!!! (Larry would approve of Larry meta, I think).
I want to go a level up on your meta here and say that I think that this season's turn toward comparing Charlie and Larry (with Larry placed in the "That could be you if you don't wise up" position) has a lot to do with TPTB's insecurity about setting up the protagonist as a professor of mathematics and, more than that, a genius.
There's a major suspicion of intellectuals in this country, and a valuing of people who declaim "down home, common sense, family values." Charlie, clearly, is a problem in terms of drawing a mass audience of those who may have problems with intellectualism while being drawn to and valuing the latter.
So having set up a geek as protagonist, TPTB are hard pressed to at once show him doing his math thing (part of the point of the show) while scrambling madly to make him seem more "normal" (and beyond normal, more cool). And, as we know that they are making it up as they go along, you can see canon as a series of moves they're making to balance earlier decisions.
Charlie's not getting it on with Amita for too long started to make him seem inept to the point that numerous fans have noted by now that, if they knew him in RL, they'd recommend against him to friends. "Sill living with Dad? Can't figure out if a girl likes him? Can't figure out what to do with a girl who likes him? Maybe he's gay. Certainly, he's self-involved. At any rate, he's not a good investment, cute as he might be." And what started out as a "family values" thing with his living at home, turns into a problem as he seems unable to leave the nest (and he can't for reasons of plotting and the need to keep him "open" as a romantic figure). So we get a retconned, British, older hottie girlfriend with whom he lived for awhile. Not so believable given everything else we knew, and a lot of us were going WTF? But suddenly, we see Charlie has had a successful het relationship with a cute chick. So he's alright. No worries. Except...
Second season, he also starts to wear cooler clothing, grow his hair out, show up with hollow cheeks, etc--all moves that make him more ordinary, less geeky. Fans complain that the math seems incidental, that there's too much Charlie/Amita and not enough family scenes, and yet Charlie's pretty hot.
So now we get him back at third season and Charlie's (DK's) put on weight, and still lives with Dad and still can't figure out Amita. (Over)compensation is required, so now the emphasis is on comparing him to Larry, who is by turns made both more geeky and odd (to the point where, again, the move out of the house may well prompt a WTF? Where did that come from?) as well as potentially more successful with women, in that Larry is both seeing Megan without incident and offering meta on Charlie's having "chased the girl until she caught" him.
I think part of the problem here is that lots of things don't make sense in a coherent, characterological way because all the other characters (Larry, Amita, etc.) exist and are made to do and say things to define Charlie--a character who's an oddity on TV and who has to be normalized even as they retain some sense of his specialness.
no subject
I want to go a level up on your meta here and say that I think that this season's turn toward comparing Charlie and Larry (with Larry placed in the "That could be you if you don't wise up" position) has a lot to do with TPTB's insecurity about setting up the protagonist as a professor of mathematics and, more than that, a genius.
There's a major suspicion of intellectuals in this country, and a valuing of people who declaim "down home, common sense, family values." Charlie, clearly, is a problem in terms of drawing a mass audience of those who may have problems with intellectualism while being drawn to and valuing the latter.
So having set up a geek as protagonist, TPTB are hard pressed to at once show him doing his math thing (part of the point of the show) while scrambling madly to make him seem more "normal" (and beyond normal, more cool). And, as we know that they are making it up as they go along, you can see canon as a series of moves they're making to balance earlier decisions.
Charlie's not getting it on with Amita for too long started to make him seem inept to the point that numerous fans have noted by now that, if they knew him in RL, they'd recommend against him to friends. "Sill living with Dad? Can't figure out if a girl likes him? Can't figure out what to do with a girl who likes him? Maybe he's gay. Certainly, he's self-involved. At any rate, he's not a good investment, cute as he might be." And what started out as a "family values" thing with his living at home, turns into a problem as he seems unable to leave the nest (and he can't for reasons of plotting and the need to keep him "open" as a romantic figure). So we get a retconned, British, older hottie girlfriend with whom he lived for awhile. Not so believable given everything else we knew, and a lot of us were going WTF? But suddenly, we see Charlie has had a successful het relationship with a cute chick. So he's alright. No worries. Except...
Second season, he also starts to wear cooler clothing, grow his hair out, show up with hollow cheeks, etc--all moves that make him more ordinary, less geeky. Fans complain that the math seems incidental, that there's too much Charlie/Amita and not enough family scenes, and yet Charlie's pretty hot.
So now we get him back at third season and Charlie's (DK's) put on weight, and still lives with Dad and still can't figure out Amita. (Over)compensation is required, so now the emphasis is on comparing him to Larry, who is by turns made both more geeky and odd (to the point where, again, the move out of the house may well prompt a WTF? Where did that come from?) as well as potentially more successful with women, in that Larry is both seeing Megan without incident and offering meta on Charlie's having "chased the girl until she caught" him.
I think part of the problem here is that lots of things don't make sense in a coherent, characterological way because all the other characters (Larry, Amita, etc.) exist and are made to do and say things to define Charlie--a character who's an oddity on TV and who has to be normalized even as they retain some sense of his specialness.