The Big Bang Theory may have run for 12 seasons, but the sitcom wasn’t always perfect. And creator Chuck Lorre is owning up to a big problem early on in the series.
Lorre was on the first episode of The Official Big Bang Theory Podcast, where he discussed the failed unaired pilot of the CBS series. And the reason it failed was because it had to be given a “do-over” as two characters never made it past the pilot stages, but that was only just the beginning.
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The original pilot had two female main characters, Katie (Amanda Walsh) and Gilda (Iris Bahr), but after filming and feedback, it just didn’t work out. That’s where Kaley Cuoco’s Penny stepped in after a rewrite. Once a retaping followed of the second pilot, it aired a year later. Via Deadline, Lorre admitted that Cuoco brought the magic to the show as Penny, something that the other actresses were never quite able to do with their own characters.
“The magic of Kaley was, Kaley’s character – as we figured this thing out on the fly – was amused by [Jim Parsons and Johnny Galecki’s characters], was not critical,” Lorre explained. “If she got angry, it wasn’t harsh. The audience really responded to that. She was never judgmental about these characters. She was bemused by them, in fact. They brought more judgment to her than she did ever of them. And I thought that was also an important difference between the character of what Penny brought versus the character of what Katie brought in the original pilot.”
Even after bringing on Cuoco, though, there was still quite a bit of figuring out what to do with Penny. It was clear she tested well with audiences, but Lorre says it took a while to “understand that there was brilliance to Penny’s character that we had not explored.” He noted that episodes early on in the series depicted the fan-favorite character as a “goofy blonde who says foolish things.”
“It’s a cliched character: the dumb blonde, and we missed it,” Lorre said. “We didn’t have that right away that what she brought to this story, this series, to these other characters was an intelligence that they didn’t have. A kind of intelligence that was alien to them, an intelligence about people and relationships and family. She brought a humanity to them that they were lacking. And that took a while to figure out. Certainly, in the beginning, she was sadly one-dimensional in many ways, but the gift of a TV series that starts working is you get time to learn.”
Considering The Big Bang Theory went on for 12 seasons and Penny became an integral part of the show, Lorre managed to figure out the character’s brilliance pretty early. It’s hard to imagine the show without either Cuoco or Penny and luckily, fans don’t have to wonder. They can just watch the whole series on Max.