Posted in: CBS, TV | Tagged: tbbt, The Big Bang Theory

The Big Bang Theory: Lorre on Not Doing Right by Kaley Cuoco's Penny

The Big Bang Theory creator Chuck Lorre and former WB TV chair Peter Roth discuss Kaley Cuoco's Penny and not doing right by her early on.

There's no denying the success of Chuck Lorre, who's not only built an empire of sitcom success but a separate one with the CBS series  The Big Bang Theory (alongside co-creator Bill Prady) with its prequel spinoffs Young Sheldon, Georgie and Mandy's First Marriage, and the upcoming true sequel series, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe. While the earlier two series expand on the world from Jim Parson's Sheldon Cooper and his family, the Max series starring Kevin Sussman, who played the lovable sad sack comic store owner the TBBT crew hung out will be set in the present. Before we go on, there's a matter of reflecting on what Lorre started with when TBBT and its genesis with its unaired pilot before the reshot version premiered in 2007. The Bookie creator appeared on The Official Big Bang Theory Podcast alongside former chairman of Warner Bros TV Peter Roth to discuss the unaired pilot that featured leads Johnny Galecki's Leonard Hofstadter and Parson's Sheldon, two female characters, and the reworked pilot that featured Galecki, Parsons, Kaley Cuoco's Penny, Simon Helberg's Howard Wolowitz, and Kunal Nayyar's Raj Koothrappali. Lorre broke down how he grew to the blue-collar Penny to evolve beyond clichés.

The Big Bang Theory Creator on Penny's Painful Early Days and the "Magic" Cuoco Brought

The Big Bang Theory premise was simple. The blue-collar Penny lives in the same complex in California alongside two younger university professors with PhDs at Cal Tech, Leonard and Sheldon, who share an apartment together. Dealing with the complexities of young adulthood, Penny hangs out with the two along with their colleagues/friends Howard, an aerospace engineer, and Raj, a particle astrophysicist. Later in the series, Melissa Rauch and Mayim Bialik would join the cast, respectively, as Bernadette Rostenkowski, who started as a graduate student in microbiology, and Amy Farrah Fowler, who possesses a PhD in neurobiology.

When it came to developing Galecki and Parson's characters, "They could be as obnoxious, or for Sheldon, as off-putting as possible, but you forgave them because there was this kind of childish naivete," Lorre told host Jessica Radloff. "The magic of Kaley was, Kaley's character — as we figured this thing out on the fly — was amused by them, was not critical. If she got angry, it wasn't harsh. The audience really responded to that." In the unaired pilot, Roth revealed the two female leads were Katie (Amanda Walsh) and Gilda (Iris Bahr), with the earlier serving as the basis for Penny. "She was never judgmental about these characters. She was bemused by them," Roth said. "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 unaired pilot. There was a sweetness, an endearment that she felt towards them that I think the audience — I think Chuck said it exactly right: The audience wanted to protect these two boys, these two men, these two innocents, and [Cuoco] honored that."

Lorre admittedly kicked himself for not realizing Penny's potential early on. "Even after the second pilot, we had so many episodes to go before we started to understand that there was a brilliance to Penny's character that we had not explored," he said, describing her as a "goofy blonde who says foolish things" in the series' earlier seasons. "It's a cliched character: the dumb blonde, and we missed it. 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."

Lorre explained that Penny "brought a humanity to them they were lacking, and that took a while to figure out." She would end up dating Leonard off and on before marrying him, growing well beyond her designs as a struggling actress-turned-server at the Cheesecake Factory to working in marketing with Bernadette in her studies. The Big Bang Theory, which ran for 12 seasons until 2019, is available to stream on Max. You can check out the full episode below.

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