One time, on “Happy Days,” Henry Winkler’s Arthur Fonzarelli jumped over a shark while waterskiing. During one episode of “How I Met Your Mother,” Josh Radnor and Cobie Smulders’ characters Ted Mosby and Robin Scherbatsky start flying at the end of an episode (it’s a dream sequence, but still). In “The Big Bang Theory,” Howard Wolowitz, Simon Helberg’s character (that he almost didn’t audition for), goes to space at the end of the show’s fifth season and spends a handful of episodes up there in season 6.
I should say that the situation on “The Big Bang Theory” isn’t quite as ridiculous as either of those first examples, even though it sounds just as far-fetched as leaping over a shark’s fin in midair. Also, to be absolutely fair here, the production staff of “The Big Bang Theory” went to extreme lengths to make Howard’s journey to the International Space Station look legitimate. In a 2022 article on Space.com, production designer John Shaffner spoke to the outlet about using a Warner Bros. sound stage — that previously served as a fake spaceship for a Super Bowl commercial for Energizer as well as in the apocalypse film “The Day After Tomorrow” — and how he and real astronaut Mike Massimino was incredibly important to the process.
“The first thing that we always do in this business is ask, ‘Well, can we rent it? Did somebody make one first?’ And unfortunately, we discovered that there weren’t any Soyuz replicas to be found,” Shaffner said of Howard’s specific Russian Soyuz spacecraft. He didn’t find that exact thing but did find the aforementioned space station set for rental and booked it, immediately working alongside his team to make the interior look as authentic as possible. “I collected things that looked like what was in the actual space station,” set decorator Ann Shea, who worked closely with Shaffner, said. “I watched the video of the station probably 20 times, trying to pick out all these different things and there were so many surprises in the stuff you saw attached to the walls with velcro so they wouldn’t float around.”
The team behind The Big Bang Theory figured out how to make Howard Wolowitz weightless in space
Okay, so clearly the set decorators and production crew kitted out the space station set to create an excellent replica of, well, a real space station. What about the actors being weightless, though? According to John Shaffner, his team figured out a truly innovative way to make Simon Helberg, Dimitri Rezinov (Pasha D. Lychnikoff), and the aforementioned real astronaut Mike Massimino float. So how did it work? “It was done by supporting the people from underneath,” Shaffner told Space.com. “There was a very long, sort of skinny platform that a person could lie on and it would almost look like they were swimming through in weightlessness.”
Not only that, but the actors had to work hard to sell it, and Shaffner said they did so perfectly: “They studied and really did a remarkable job with acting the weightlessness.” Ultimately, it all worked seamlessly, and Shaffner also said that Massimino praised the production team’s efforts, which speaks to the fact that they really perfected the set design. He elaborated:
“His response was immediate and really positive. He was so blown away by [the set]. He said, ‘Wow, you guys really did an amazing job! This really feels like it. This is really how big it is, it is not very big.’ He was very, very appreciative and I think in the end that made everyone involved feel extra good about it,” said Shaffner. “We had all pulled together to make this real for him and he got a really big kick out of it.”
Chuck Lorre and Simon Helberg thought the space episodes of The Big Bang Theory went incredibly well
Now that we know about all the technical specs, what did the creative team of “The Big Bang Theory” — and Simon Helberg himself — think of the recreated International Space Station? Unsurprisingly, they loved it. In Jessica Radloff’s 2022 oral history “The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series,” creator and mega-showrunner Chuck Lorre, Lorre’s co-creator Bill Prady, Helberg, and director Mark Cendrowski discussed the making of Howard’s space episodes, sharing their own unique challenges.
As Prady put it, Lorre was all-in on the space idea, and luckily, Prady had only just recently met a high-ranking administrator at NASA named Lori Garver, who got Mike Massimino involved. (The crew also liked Massimino so much that, obviously, they wrote a part for him.) Ultimately, Prady just wanted it to look good: “My feeling was that if you were a scientist or astronaut, the standard I wanted is that they shouldn’t throw their shoes at the TV. I think we got here because people were very happy about it.” (As Lorre then pointed out, “By the time we were doing those stories, the show was successful enough to where we had the time and money to build sets and take our time and get it right.”)
Cendrowski, for his part, had to figure out how to film the “zero gravity” and make it look real: “I asked to put the cameras on a gyroscope so they floated and you had a constant feel of motion.” After figuring out they had to flip some images, it all came out smoothly. “It was a great puzzle to figure out, and once we did, it looked great,” Cendrowski said. “People thought we used the plane from ‘Apollo 13’ to film it. We were like, ‘Oh, we fooled ’em.'”
“The show worked to always be 100 percent authentic and accurate, and the space storyline was a very important piece to that,” Helberg added. “The only CGI stuff they really did was with a pen that floats away, but everything else was just practical effects.” The scenes came out very well, and you can watch them on Max now, where the entire series is streaming.
