"Oh gravity, thou art a heartless bitch."

Winding down in front of E4 yesterday evening, I caught episodes of two new (here in the UK) TV shows I’d seen trailed and been intrigued by.

Reaper is an hour-long drama-comedy-fantasy thing about a guy whose parents sold his soul to the devil in return for a favour (!). I’m hazy on the detail. As payback, he works as Satan’s hitman-type, hunting down rogue bad-guy souls who’ve escaped their due torment and are wreaking havoc in the world. It’s a nice idea, but aside from a couple of high quality comedy sidekicks, the episode I watched (about a nasty toxic-waste dumping dead businessman killing off the lawyers pestering his heir-to-the-family-ick son) didn’t really excite. Great premise, doesn’t live up to its promise.

The Big Bang Theory, on the other hand, was great fun. It’s another light-hearted sitcom in the vein of Two And A Half Men (without turning into a Charlie Sheen vehicle) or 8 Simple Rules (a favourite of mine). A pair of shy and nerdy physics PhDs share a flat. When a pretty girl moves in across the hall, hilarity ensues. The humour is of a properly geeky (even internet-y) tone:

"If you don't have any other plans, do you want to join us for Thai food and a Superman movie marathon?" "A marathon? Wow, how many Superman movies are there?" "You're kidding, right?"

Or even better:

"Now we've got an inclined plane. The force required to lift is reduced by the sine of the angle of the stairs. Call it 30°, so about half." "Exactly half."

Maybe you had to be there, but hey, I loved it.