The Big Bang Theory creator Chuck Lorre is opening up about why he resisted giving Jim Parsons’ Sheldon a love interest for so long.
On the inaugural episode of The Official Big Bang Theory Podcast, Lorre and former Warner Bros. Television Group chairman Peter Roth joined host Jessica Radloff to discuss the ways in which the beloved series evolved from its original unaired pilot to the Emmy-nominated hit it ultimately became. Lorre admitted that he was slow to understand that the show’s humor didn’t need to be as “risqué” as that of his previous hit, Two and a Half Men.
That revelation, he explained, lead to a breakthrough in how Parsons’ character was portrayed.
As Radloff noted, in the unaired pilot Parsons played a significantly different version of genius theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper who had slept with Gilda, one of the show’s two original female leads, played by Iris Bahr. Radloff asked Lorre to explain his thinking behind removing any mention of Sheldon’s romantic or sexual history from the version of the pilot that ultimately aired on CBS in September 2007.
“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.
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“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.
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