The Big Surprise of ‘Big Bang’: The Bigger Audience
By EDWARD WYATT
NY Times
BURBANK, Calif. — The most vibrant buzz this summer around the Warner Brothers lot here and CBS Entertainment headquarters in nearby Studio City was not being generated by the slate of new shows on the CBS fall schedule. Rather, it focused on the sudden emergence — during summer repeats, no less — of a series that had been on the air for two seasons.
“The Big Bang Theory,” the CBS comedy about two brilliant physicists and their attempts to relate to the world around them — and to the cute blond woman next door — began drawing surprisingly strong ratings this summer after it moved to a later time slot on Monday, at 9:30 p.m., immediately following that network’s highest-rated comedy, “Two and a Half Men.”
In some weeks of the summer “Big Bang” repeats drew bigger audiences among certain important demographic groups than when the same episodes were first broadcast. So far this fall “Big Bang” has further expanded its audience, becoming the highest-rated live-action comedy among the sought-after young-adult demographic group.
If current trends prevail, its total viewership could soon surpass that of “Two and a Half Men,” long the most-watched comedy on television. Last Monday’s “Big Bang” drew 12.96 million viewers, according to Nielsen, only 5 percent fewer than the 13.63 million for “Men.”
Already “Big Bang” has beaten “Men” among viewers age 18 t0 49, the demographic category most valued by advertisers.
The comedies have more in common than their popularity. They were co-created by Chuck Lorre, they tape on adjacent stages on the Warner Brothers lot, and they share several writers and much of their technical crews. And with the upstart closing in on the longtime ratings champion, Mr. Lorre said, he sometimes isn’t sure how to react when the ratings come in.
“There’s a lot of ambivalence,” he said on Tuesday night, during a break in the taping of a “Big Bang” episode. “It’s ‘Yeah!’ then ‘Awww.’ But it’s all good. I can’t claim to understand how this works; I’m just thrilled that it’s working.”
The cast and crew of “The Big Bang Theory” are enjoying their success all the more after surviving two near-death experiences. The show’s first pilot was rejected by CBS, but the network asked Mr. Lorre and Bill Prady, his co-creator, to retool their script and try again. The first version featured the same two male lead characters — Jim Parsons as Sheldon Cooper, a theoretical physicist, and Johnny Galecki as Leonard Hofstadter, an experimental physicist — but also included a female lead character who was “very damaged and very tough,” Mr. Prady said.
“We had a really hard time casting the role, and in retrospect it was obvious that the problem was not the actresses but the conception of the character,” he said. Focus groups that watched the original pilot were left with protective feelings for the two naïve, socially awkward scientists, and they did not like the prospect of a bitter, manipulative woman taking advantage of them.
“What we all liked was the relationship between these two guys, one who wants his world to be bigger and the other who wants his world to be smaller,” Mr. Prady said. “I think that’s what everyone looked at and said, ‘This is worth trying again.’ ” The creators decided to keep the male characters and to persuade Mr. Parsons and Mr. Galecki not to take another series in the year between the two pilots.
They also called back one of the actresses who auditioned unsuccessfully for the original female role: Kaley Cuoco, a former child actor who played opposite John Ritter in the comedy “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter.” Much of the edge was taken off the character of Penny — so much that at first she looked to be little more than a jiggly blonde next door with no apparent motivation for being interested in two science geeks.
It took awhile to find the character’s voice, but now Penny “is one of the guys,” Ms. Cuoco said. “She’s not some untouchable creature.”
Over the first two seasons Penny and Leonard edged toward each other and are now in a full-fledged relationship. But theirs is not the unbelievable type of couple — a gorgeous female and a paunchy, slacker male — that has been so popular in Judd Apatow films recently.
“Penny has been in horrible relationships and picked the wrong guy constantly,” Ms. Cuoco said. “I think she has more baggage than the guys.”
As a result, Mr. Galecki said, “It went from a show that I think may have made fun of intelligent people half of the time to a show that defends intelligent people 99 percent of the time.”
The most interesting relationships are those between the two male leads and among their two boon companions: Rajesh Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar), an astrophysicist who is shy to the point of muteness around women, and Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg), an engineer who maintains an outsize confidence in his skill as a ladies’ man, despite living with his mother.
Those did not turn the series into an immediate hit, however. “When it went on the air, it was disregarded almost immediately,” Mr. Lorre said, noting the show’s respectful but not great reviews. Then, a few weeks into its first season, came the second near-death experience — the writers’ strike shut down production for three months. Once the strike ended, CBS moved the series from its 8:30 time slot to 8, leading off its Monday-night lineup — an especially tough position for a first-year comedy.
The series stayed there in its second season, performing admirably. Then in February, on a night when a presidential news conference interrupted its regular time slot, CBS scheduled an episode of “Big Bang” at 9:30, after “Two and a Half Men.” The ratings were so promising, said Kelly Kahl, a CBS senior executive vice president for prime time, that the arrangement was made permanent.
This season the series has also been enjoying the publicity around the Emmy nomination for Mr. Parsons, as best actor in a comedy.
“It’s been such a healthy climb the first two seasons,” Mr. Parsons said. He also said he thought that the show had much potential to grow. “I feel like there’s still a strong segment out there that may not be sold on the concept of four nerds and the pretty girl next door,” he said. “I get that. I think there’s a lot more going on that doesn’t really fit in that description. It really doesn’t tell you 10 percent of why you would be interested, truly.”