In the fifth season of Chuck Lorre’s hit CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory,” audiences are presented with a very familiar situation: Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) and his girlfriend Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik) are fighting. This time, it’s because one of Amy’s academic papers is going to be published in a scientific journal — Amy is a neuroscientist, which Sheldon often directly tells her isn’t as impressive as his work in theoretical physics — and Sheldon isn’t sufficiently excited, disappointing Amy. After getting advice from his friends Penny (Kaley Cuoco) and Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki), Sheldon, accompanied by Penny, goes to a jewelry store to pick out a gift for Amy that he hopes will smooth things over. When he presents her with a tiara, Amy is so excited and so stunned that she basically forgets about her disappointment altogether.
According to Bialik, fans love talking to her about this episode, titled “The Shiny Trinket Maneuver.” In an interview with TBS, which runs “The Big Bang Theory” in syndication, Bialik chose a handful of her favorite episodes, and when it came to “The Shiny Trinket Maneuver,” she was very direct. “Tiara. This is the episode most people talk to me about,” Bialik revealed. “Sheldon gives Amy this tiara in the middle of her being upset with him and she literally crumbles and freaks out. Fun fact: This delivery of this line is the only way I ever did it; no direction. It just felt right!”
In Jessica Radloff’s book “The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series,” Bialik echoed that, confirming that she only had one line reading prepared that would make it quite clear that Amy was overwhelmed and overjoyed. “‘It’s a tiara!’ That’s the only way I rehearsed it,” she said in the book. “I had no idea that there was a whole physical, weak-in-the-knees thing until I saw it, but that’s absolutely the number one thing people want to talk to me about. There’s a tremendous amount of joy in that interaction.”
The creative team behind The Big Bang Theory also loves the episode with Amy’s tiara
Creator Chuck Lorre and executive producer, writer, and eventual showrunner Steve Molaro also spoke to Jessica Radloff for her extensive oral history, and according to Molaro, he wrote the line that fans are always mentioning to Mayim Bialik. “We had decided that Sheldon and Amy were fighting, and Chuck thought it was funny that even though it’s not something to be proud of, Sheldon tries to smooth things over by buying her an item,” Molaro recalled. “And as much as she wants that not to work, it actually works. I don’t remember how we arrived at a tiara, but I remember writing ‘It’s a tiara, I’m a pretty princess, and this is my tiara!’ That all just flew out of me in one stream when we hit that part of the script. Maybe I always wanted a tiara.”
“It is one of my favorite highlights in the series and a genuinely wonderful, hilarious moment,” Lorre agreed. “I just heard joy coming out of Mayim’s mouth.” It is, frankly, an extremely funny bit in the episode, and even though Amy has very legitimate reasons to be upset by Sheldon, watching her melt down over a sparkly accessory is a great turn for her character. Thankfully, the tiara stuck around — for the rest of the series, actually.
The tiara became a running bit on The Big Bang Theory
The best thing about Amy’s tiara on “The Big Bang Theory” is that it sticks around. At the end of season 5, Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg) and Bernadette Rostenkowski (Melissa Rauch) get married before Howard goes on a mission into space with NASA (Amy and Penny are the only bridesmaids at the impromptu ceremony), and in season 7, she dons it in the episode “The Convention Conundrum” when she, Penny, and Bernadette decide to go to afternoon tea while all the boys are occupied with their “own” version of Comic-Con. Finally, the tiara is clearly seen on Amy’s head in the series finale “The Stockholm Syndrome” as she and Sheldon finally achieve a long-held dream and accept a joint Nobel Prize for their work in super asymmetry in Sweden.
So what of the exact tiara? How did it “join” the cast of the show? The show’s long-running costume designer, Mary T. Quigley, also spoke to Jessica Radloff for her book and revealed that picking the specific tiara was actually very time consuming … but she knows she made the right choice. “I looked at six tiaras for a long time,” Quigley said. “I ended up going with the first one I looked at, because you always come back to the first one, right? But I spent so long staring at them because it’s so important to her. It had to be over-the-top, but not; it couldn’t be the typical little princess and it couldn’t be the queen. You have to talk it through.”
