Bill Prady, THE BIG BANG THEORY, TV sitcom co-creator: Mr. Media Interview Transcript, Pt. 1

Bill Prady is having a pretty good year, writers’ strike and all, thanks to the success of “The Big Bang Theory,” the hit CBS sitcom he co-created with Chuck Lorre.

If you haven’t seen “The Big Bang Theory,” it co-stars Johnny Galecki and Jim Parsons as a couple of super-nerds named Leonard and Sheldon, an “in” joke for those of us who remember a sitcom master of old, the late Sheldon Leonard. Leonard produced everything from “Make Room for Daddy” with Danny Thomas to “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “The Andy Griffith Show.” He was also a director, a writer, and a frequent guest star, including appearing on an episode of HBO’s “Dream On.”

More about that later.

Sheldon and Leonard, the lead characters in “The Big Bang Theory,” have absolutely nothing in common with their namesake that I can figure, except that he’d probably be proud of the tribute because they are smartly-drawn, literate, and most importantly, damn funny.

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© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.



BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: We’ve been watching this show from the first week in our house, and it’s just gotten better and better week after week.

BILL PRADY: That’s terrific. Glad you’re enjoying it.

ANDELMAN: I make a point of not having anybody on who’s doing anything I don’t enjoy, so there you go. You’re co-creator of “The Big Bang Theory,” a show about super-brainiac scientists. Can we assume that you, personally, are smarter than a fifth grader?

PRADY: Probably somewhere between fifth and sixth, I think, is where I would land.

ANDELMAN: Is that where it just sort of ended right there?

PRADY: I’m a college dropout, but my first career, I was a self-taught computer programmer, and that’s what I did in the early ‘80s, I guess. And that’s where I met a lot of the people who would become influences in the characters that we’re doing now on “The Big Bang Theory.”

ANDELMAN: It’s a tremendous concept, but I have to admit, after a couple weeks, personally, I’d become a little intimidated by writing some of the science and the technical references, or is that really not an issue?

PRADY: It actually hasn’t been. First of all, we have a marvelous technical consultant, Professor David Saltzberg, who’s an astrophysicist at UCLA, and we do have the ability if we’re pressed for time to write a lot of dialogue and write science to come and get an answer from David. We often pester him with near impossibilities: “What’s a small project Sheldon and Leonard might’ve done over a weekend a few years ago that was interesting enough that there would be a paper as a result of it that would be presented at a conference?” And he’ll say, “Let me think about that,” and he’ll get back to you. But a lot of times, we also do a little research ourselves and take a shot at it, and we get pretty close. For the pilot, we researched the science, and then we had David check it for us. And, as I’m proud to say, and as I have an official forged UCLA transcript from him, I got a B+. Chuck and I got a B+ on the pilot.

ANDELMAN: Very good, very good! You mentioned something that actually was a plot, which was that episode where we find them making a scientific presentation or, actually, I think it’s Leonard that makes the presentation, and then Sheldon shows up in disguise later to tear it apart. Something like that you always wonder, is there real science at work? I’m not smart enough to know.

PRADY: Was the science real? Every bit of the science is real. Absolutely every reference, every notation on a white board behind them, every bit of scientific dialogue is real. Some of the things are apparently inside jokes in the science world, and David will explain them to us, and we will say, “Yes, I can see how that might be an inside joke in the science world,” but everything is accurate. And David’s there when we film, and so if we’re gonna change a joke on the spot, and if that changes the science, then he’ll be right there to change the science. And actually a couple of weeks ago when we were changing jokes on the stage, he just came in and pitched a joke, and it had nothing to do with science, and it was very funny, and we put it in the show.

ANDELMAN: Oh God, the astrophysicist is writing jokes now.

PRADY: The astrophysicist wrote one, and he got a little taste of it. Now he pitches enthusiastically every week.



ANDELMAN: Tell me about the genesis of “The Big Bang Theory.” I remember reading about it, and it’s probably been about a year now and thinking, “Naah, it’ll never fly.” At the time, I thought that “Cavemen,” the exact opposite of your show, actually seemed like a better bet on paper because of the science involved.

PRADY: Oh, because our show was sciency?

ANDELMAN: Yeah, yeah.

PRADY: Fundamentally, the show isn’t about science any more than saying gee, “Why would anybody but cab drivers watch ‘Taxi’?” Our show is about the feeling of being an outsider, which is a feeling we all share. I think everyone has, at times in their life, looked at somebody else and said, “Gee, he’s got it all figured out, she’s got it all figured out, I find myself on the outside, why can’t I have it figured out?” And then the question is, what if you were the smartest guy in the world? Would it give you any leg up? And it turns out it doesn’t give you any leg up at all. So that, to us, is what the show has always been about.

The genesis of it is I had worked with Chuck for many years on “Dharma & Greg,” and I had gone off to do some other projects, and he had gone off to do “Two and a Half Men” with Lee Aronsohn. And we started talking about the notion of doing a pilot, and we kicked around a bunch of ideas, and then we did this in a very unusual way. We didn’t develop it with a network or studio. We developed it on spec. And if anyone’s interested in doing that, Step 1 is partner with a person who has an incredibly successful sitcom because it gives you a great deal of access. So we were developing two projects. We were developing one project that was about a young woman who was sort of on her own for the first time in her life, maybe she’d always been with her folks or a boyfriend, and she’d just broken up, and she was kind of on her own and a little lost. So we had that project. And then we were doing another project, and we had talked for years about these guys I knew back in the computer business and some other people from that time in my life who were a particular kind of person, and so we developed a show about two of those guys.

One day, we both had the same idea, which is, what if these guys met that woman? We actually did the pilot twice. The first time we did it we made her sort of rough on the outside and damaged on the inside, and we shot that pilot, and it really felt wrong. The show was really out of balance. She was just too rough for these guys, and you didn’t want her around them. And CBS, amazingly, said, “Let’s try it again,” and so we re-wrote it, we re-cast the part, we went with the incomparable Kaley Cuoco. She’s just unremarkable. And then that’s the show that went on the air.

ANDELMAN: It seems like, even as Johnny and Jim have really fitted themselves to their roles, that she has come probably the furthest in getting a handle on the role that she plays, and it just seems like she’s far more comfortable in her skin like a week ago than she was four or five months ago.

PRADY: I think that in the best of all possible worlds, when you’re doing weekly television, the characters become better defined as each week goes by and as the characters become better defined and the actors find themselves more comfortable in the characters, you ought to see that. You ought to see that kind of progression. And part of it is the audience. You spend more time with Penny, and you get to know her. There was an odd discussion about Penny. I remember when we first started that the notion that Penny was a dumb blonde, which was very peculiar to us because we’d never intended for her to be. In fact, we always say Penny represents the audience in the show. I’ll say, “Penny knows what we know when it comes to these guys and this stuff, and she’s the one who gets it.” When she says, “Huh?”, she’s saying “Huh?” to something pretty obscure. The other thing is that, as you spend more time with her and she spends more time around the guys, you see the difference between book smarts and street smarts. And we say that Penny is a person who knows how to rebuild a tractor engine, and these guys don’t. I think that we saw it early on when they were discussing how to put together her Ikea bookshelf, and she was putting together her Ikea bookshelf.

ANDELMAN: That’s good. I was actually going to ask you to talk a little bit about each of the characters. I think you’ve covered Penny pretty well. Let’s try Sheldon. What can you tell us about Sheldon?

PRADY: I think the easiest way to look at Sheldon and Penny both are the forces that tug on Leonard in opposite directions, and Penny tugs Leonard out into the world, and Sheldon tugs him away from the world. And Sheldon is not comfortable with people, and he’s not comfortable with conversation, and he’s not comfortable with change, and he’s not comfortable with a lot of things. He finds a particular kind of joy in the world, and it’s the joy of routine, it’s the joy of his work. Sheldon is a theoretical physicist. He works in his mind. He’s one of the people imagining how the building blocks of the universe go together, and that kind of order and perfection is a lot more appealing to Sheldon than the messy disorder of human interaction. I think if he could find a way to make it through the world without talking to people, I think it would be just fine.

ANDELMAN: Sheldon is the only one of the four men on the show who doesn’t seem to have noticed that there’s anything physically different about Penny from the rest of them.

PRADY: We don’t get the sense that Sheldon particularly looks at…He seems without any romantic desire. And, in fact, in an episode we’re working on now where we will meet his sister and we talk about the continuation of the Cooper line, Sheldon will probably talk about seeing his work as his legacy. So I don’t think Sheldon ever imagines himself in a relationship or in a family. I don’t think he’s incapable of it, but it just isn’t anywhere up there on his list of priorities.

ANDELMAN: I get the sense it’s not a matter of whether he’s straight or gay. He’s just not interested.

PRADY: I couldn’t put a name to it. There seems to be a certain asexuality to him, doesn’t there? We modeled Sheldon on some people that I knew and some other people we’ve seen, and there are some interesting folk on the Internet who have little webcasts, and they are people that are similar to Sheldon. And there seems to be that sort of characteristic theme of no need for any kind of human contact let alone romantic contact. On the other hand, there are some things that he really does seem to like doing with his friends. They’re big game players, and he likes doing that. They like going and playing paintball and other sorts of things. I wonder about Sheldon. If I knew Sheldon, I’d be curious to ask him if he’s more comfortable playing paintball or something where it has a role-playing aspect to it than being out there and being himself. I’ll bet that there’s some truth to that.

ANDELMAN: I guess a great season two or three twist for Sheldon would be if suddenly Penny took an interest in him for some strange reason, and you could probably spend weeks playing that out.

PRADY: We always talk about stories where Penny needs something from Sheldon. It’s not an antagonistic relationship, but their relationship has some friction to it and naturally so because the two of them represent, again, the sort of competing poles on Leonard.

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© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.