“I thought we had a unique character,” Lorre said. “Why wouldn’t you protect it?”
Big Bang Theory Creator Chuck Lorre Explains Why He Resisted Pressure to Give Jim Parsons’ Sheldon a Love Interest
“I thought we had a unique character,” Lorre said. “Why wouldn’t you protect it?”
“I was coming to understand that I wasn’t remaking some other twisted version of Caltech’s version of Two and a Half Men,” Lorre said.
“In the first pilot we discover that Sheldon has a predilection for women with big buttocks and we discover that he has had coitus. None of that exists in the second pilot,” Roth explained elsewhere in the conversation. “That shift and change into the more innocent quality of that character was extraordinarily wise, and it made a very big difference.”
But Lorre admitted that even during the show’s early run, it took him a while to understand that Parsons’ character was asexual.
“I didn’t understand that going in when we did the pilot. And what was wonderful about making that move was: here was a character whose entire love and passion was for science,” he said.
“He had no predilection towards one thing or the other. He loved and used every moment of his conscious wakening to chase the secrets of the universe,” Lorre continued. “And that made him a remarkable character, I think, to opt out. And I don’t think there’d ever been a character, certainly in a television comedy, that opted out.”
Radloff, whose book The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series was published in 2022, said that Lorre had told her previously that CBS frequently suggested that the show introduce a love interest for Sheldon, but he’d resisted.
“I thought we had a unique character in that his passion lay elsewhere,” Lorre explained. “You’ve stumbled into something unique and special, why wouldn’t you protect it?”
The show eventually did pair Sheldon off with Mayim Bialik’s Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler, and after a prolonged will-they-won’t-they, on-again-off-again courtship, the two characters did have sex. In prequel series Young Sheldon, Parsons’ older version of the character reveals in a voiceover that he and Amy end up having children, too.
