I’m going to take a moment to link to a fun little interview with Johnny “Leonard” Galecki and Jim “Sheldon” Parsons of NBC’s The Big Bang Theory, a show I avoided when it first came out. Four nerds with a hot blonde next door? Just wait for the hijinxs to ensue! Feh. (Sorry, Joel)

But I caught a few from laziness at changing the channel after How I Met Your Mother and started to really like it, mostly because… they played it straight. The characters don’t come off as nerdy because they’re socially crippled (although that’s certainly present), they come off as nerdy because they so clearly had different priorities than their peers growing up and that remains the case, even if they wistfully look at people who are actually comfortable talking to each other at parties. Yeah, it’s a sitcom with mistaken-identity types of plots, but they still manage to stay unpredictable and reasonably authentic. I can identify with these guys. I am these guys. And, according to Johnny, so is everyone else:

That’s what I learned when being asked about geeks and nerds, and having to define that for the first time in my life, what that meant. I found that it’s all about anyone who’s passionate about anything, and anyone who loves immersing themselves in anything. A lot of rock musicians are nerds, you know? The big, brawny jocks who paint themselves in team colors on their chests and show up shirtless in 20-degree weather for a football game are just as big a nerd as these characters are.

The first season DVD of The Big Bang Theory went on sale yesterday; the new season starts September 22, 8 p.m.