When a sitcom lasts 12 seasons, there’s a good chance it’ll undergo some nips and tucks over the years to keep it looking and feeling fresh. “Will they or won’t they” tension will eventually have to get paid off. Characters may date, get married, even divorced (see “Rhoda”); basically, unless you’re dealing with an animated sitcom like “The Simpsons” (where the characters have been the same age for 36 seasons), you’ve got to switch things up on occasion – and this doesn’t mean resorting to something cheap like casting a new family member a la Cousin Oliver on “The Brady Bunch.”
In other words, it’s vital to not paint yourself into a corner with a main character if you’re looking to keep a series going for a particularly long haul, which, no matter what you think of his myriad hit series, Chuck Lorre has been very good at doing throughout his successful sitcom writing-and-producing career. And if you’re looking for the platonic ideal of a Lorre show, you need to look no further than “The Big Bang Theory,” which ran 12 seasons without completely tiring out its fan base.
So you might be surprised to learn that Lorre almost derailed the series leaving the station with a disastrous character choice that would’ve turned one of its most beloved characters into a robot.
Domo Arigato, Mr. Lorre
According to Jessica Radloff’s “The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series,” Lorre originally conceived of Kaley Cuoco’s Penny not as a wide-eyed innocent from Omaha, Nebraska (with ultra-cliched dreams of becoming a movie star), but a robot. As Lorre told Radloff:
“There was a moment where I thought perhaps the female character was an android that the guys built. We wrote a test scene and had a couple actors read the scene for us. And they were halfway through the scene when I went, ‘Never mind.'”
Did Lorre have “Weird Science” on his brain while he developed “The Big Bang Theory,” and, if so, did he perhaps think of giving Howard an obnoxiously abusive brother instead of a lovingly obnoxious mother?
Knowing how the show’s writers and fans grew to love Penny, with the former tweaking her arc to get her off the tired wannabe star trajectory, it’s impossible to imagine “The Big Bang Theory” lasting more than maybe two seasons with a robotic Penny. Moreover, it’s impossible to imagine an established television actor like Cuoco taking a part with such obvious emotive deficiencies. So credit to Lorre for getting off that path and letting Cuoco/Penny find their own way as an actual, flesh-and-blood human being. The show was much better for it.
