The Big Bang Theory Is The Single Worst Example Of Fake Eating In Television History

Acting is hard. There's no getting around that. Most people probably think they could easily do what their favorite stars do — walk around a set, hit their marks, and say funny things that elicit canned laughter over and over again — and those people would be wrong. Dead wrong, in fact. None of that stuff is easy, and that's why actors, especially ones in popular sitcoms, make way more than, say, our nation's teachers.

Salaries aside, acting can definitely be tricky, and one of the trickiest aspects of it is probably working with props and other objects. Whether you're treading the boards on Broadway or doing all that stuff mentioned earlier that makes the canned laughter happen, props can make an actor's job just a little bit harder. That said, if you've got years of experience under your belt, you should be able to mime your way through most situations.

Apparently, that's not true; even veterans of the craft seem to struggle with pretending to do everyday tasks if there's a camera pointed in their direction. Think, for a second, about every time you've watched an actor wave a coffee cup around without a single drop of hot liquid flying everywhere. More egregious than that, however, is eating — and this wildly popular sitcom is the worst offender when it comes to fake eating.

In case you're somehow unfamiliar with one of the most widely watched sitcoms in recent memory that's likely playing on TBS in syndication as you read this sentence, "The Big Bang Theory" is focused on a group of "lovable" nerds living, loving, and working in California and their hot neighbor Penny (Kaley Cuoco), who never gets her own last name. The gang — made up of Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg), Raj Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar), and Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki) — spends their time shopping for comic books, talking superhero lore, and generally just making a lot of references that even the least nerdy person can probably understand. Shot in front of a live audience throughout its run, the sitcom had a limited number of sets, as multi-camera projects typically do — and most of them involved eating.

Why the powers that be would constantly put food in front of this particular group of actors when none of them appear to have ever seen food before is, in this writer's estimation, baffling at best. To give credit where credit's due, one member of the main ensemble knows what she's doing: Kaley Cuoco makes ingesting food look decently believable. Not the case for those scrawny nerd dudes, though. None of them ever look like they've touched grass before, let alone food. Time after time, whether they're pretending to eat Chinese food in Sheldon and Leonard's apartment or "dining" at the cafeteria at their shared workplace of CalTech, these guys provide the least convincing fake eating in sitcom history. One, though, stands out from the pack. In a bad way, obviously.

Watching Leonard pretend to eat on "The Big Bang Theory" could probably convince any layperson that Johnny Galecki has never let a single calorie cross his lips. No matter where Leonard is pretending to eat, the way that Galecki fakes his meals is, objectively, f***ing insane. Instead of ever, let's say, spearing a piece of food before the camera cuts away from him, Galecki makes the utterly bizarre choice to just keep moving his food around the plate like a little kid trying to hide the fact that he doesn't want to eat that big pile of broccoli.

Even the way Galecki holds a fork — as if he's an alien visiting the Earth and inspecting this foreign object to learn its true nature — makes absolutely zero sense, in that the way he does it isn't conducive to eating in any way, shape, or form. If he's not lightly stabbing his food like it's recently wronged him, he's holding the fork facing slightly down in a way that would prevent it from ever delivering a bite into a mouth.

Does it matter that the vast majority of the actors on "The Big Bang Theory" can't pretend to eat convincingly? In the grander scheme of things, no, not really. Does it make any sense that most of the scenes in the show focus on eating when all the actors suck this hard at pantomining? No! Not really! Real life nerds likely have their quibbles with "The Big Bang Theory," but anyone who's eaten food in their life should probably have some frustrations with it too.