There's a difference between made for nerds and nerdface.

You can tell BBT was not made for nerds, because all the supposed nerd in-jokes get trampled into ground in the service of explaining them to normies.

The one episode I saw had them refer to The One Ring as "a Lord of the Rings ring", and then had them quote the inscription in English rather than the original Black Speech... you can almost hear some dickhead in the writers' room saying "I don't think the audience are going to know what that is, you need to make it clear". You don't see the IT Crowd explaining to the audience why Windows Vista is bad or what any of the posters in the set mean.