Since quietly debuting on CBS in 2007, The Big Bang Theory has gone on to become the
most popular sitcom on television.
Here's a look at some stories and scandals behind the scenes of the America's favorite
sitcom about science nerds.​​
The Big Bang that's aired for a decade-plus is very different from the pilot episode presented
to CBS in 2006.
While he's now depicted as largely asexual and mystified by romance, Jim Parsons' Sheldon
was sexually active in the pilot.
There was also no Penny; instead, the attractive neighbor role was filled by a tough, not-very-friendly
woman named Katie.
"You’re stupid choices and then blame everyone else.
“You’re calling me stupid.”
“No, I said you make stupid choices…”
"because I'm stupid."
“well…”
Even the looks were different, Johnny Galecki's Leonard mostly wore suits instead of t-shirts
and hoodies.
There was one other noticeable difference: The theme song was Thomas Dolby's 1983 hit,
"She Blinded Me With Science."
CBS passed, but asked creators Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady to rework the show and submit
another pilot.
They revised it, and added in a new theme song from Barenaked Ladies, which made it
to the network's fall schedule in 2007.
Over the years, the show has mined a lot of comedy from Bernadette's voice.
When she's just talking to Howard or her friends, she speaks in a quiet, mousy, high-pitched
way.
"Get that guy!
Get that guy!
Phew!
Phew!”
But when she gets angry, she switches to loud moments of screaming rage.
"He didn’t try them yet!”
Neither of those voices come naturally to the actress behind Bernadette, Melissa Rauch.
In fact, her regular, off-screen speaking voice is quite normal.
"Bernadette's voice is very similar to my mother's.
Except without the Jersey accent."
This means that when Bernadette would imitate Howard's late mother, who spoke with a Jersey
accent, she was likely doing a fully accurate impression of her mom.
In 2014, contract re-negotiations between the cast and Warner Bros. delayed production
on the show.
Ultimately, CBS renewed the sitcom for three additional seasons, and the show's three leads,
Jim Parsons, Johnny Galecki, and Kaley Cuoco, each secured a salary of $1 million per episode.
Meanwhile, the show's male supporting actors, who'd been with the show since day one, also
had to renegotiate their contracts.
Simon Helberg and Kunal Nayyar bargained collectively, and both wound up with salaries of around
$750,000 per episode.
That leaves the other two major, long-term Big Bang Theory cast members, Melissa Rauch
and Mayim Bialik.
They both joined the show later on in its run, and up until the 2016-17 season, both
raked in a relatively meager $200,000 per episode.
However, for the show's 11th and 12th seasons, the highest-paid cast members agreed to a
pay cut, down to $900,000 an episode each, with the intent that the extra money went
to Rauch and Bialik making $450,000 an episode.
In the early years of The Big Bang Theory, Johnny Galecki and Kaley Cuoco secretly dated
each other, concurrent with their characters' budding romantic interest.
It wasn't until 2010, well after the couple amicably split, that either said anything
publicly about their time together.
Cuoco told company magazine CBS Watch! that she had dated Galecki for almost two years.
"It was such a huge part of my life and nobody knew about it."
Three years later, Galecki gave his side of the story to CBS Watch!
"We're dear friends, still.
Kaley's not just an ex, she's a part of my life.
I just don't like to speak about it.
And not because I'm trying to be enigmatic; I just worry that it will conflict with people's
acceptance of Leonard and Penny."
Co-creator Bill Prady says he first heard "Soft Kitty," Sheldon's special calm-down
song, sung at his daughter's preschool.
Assuming it was in the public domain, he added it to the show, where it's been used multiple
times and on scores of Big Bang merchandise.
"Soft kitty, warm kitty, little ball of fur."
"Wait, wait.
Let's sing it as a round.
I'll start."
In December 2015, however, the family of a New Hampshire preschool teacher named Edith
Newlin sued CBS for copyright infringement, alleging they lifted lyrics without permission
from a song Newlin wrote in the 1930s called "Warm Kitty."
The lyrics of Newlin's song are nearly identical.
However, in March 2017, a U.S. District Judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Prady hadn't
violated any copyright laws because Newlin's descendants couldn't actually prove that they
had a copyright on "Warm Kitty."
Mayim Bialik joined the series as neuroscientist Amy Fowler in season 3 and very slowly became
a love interest for Sheldon, and a hopelessly devoted BFF to Penny.
The Big Bang Theory had been on TV for a while by then, but Bialik hadn't quite managed to
catch an episode.
Bialik went in to audition for the show without even realizing how successful the show was.
As of 2016, she claims to have not seen any Big Bang episodes produced before she joined,
not to mention most of the ones that she actually appears in.
Every episode of The Big Bang Theory ends with a "title card" from Chuck Lorre.
He writes a new one each time, and while it only appears on screen for a second or two,
he uses it as a sounding board for his thoughts.
In 2010, one such card reported on Lorre's discovery of a TV show from the Eastern European
nation of Belarus called The Theorists.
The sitcom was about four nerdy scientists who live next door to a beautiful blonde waitress.
The characters are named Sheldon, Leo, Hovard, Raj, and Natasha.
Lorre was convinced that The Theorists was majorly cribbing from The Big Bang Theory.
Lawyers at Warner Bros.
Television told Lorre there was little that could be done because the production company
responsible for The Theorists was owned by the Belarusian government, but the show was
eventually cancelled anyway.
In 2011, a photographer spotted a tiny organism in the Brunswick River in the Australian state
of New South Wales.
The photographer knew it was a jellyfish but couldn't readily identify it, so he sent his
photos to jellyfish expert Dr. Lisa-ann Gershwin.
After two years of research, Gershwin and her colleague, taxonomist Peter Davie, confirmed
that the 15-millimeter creature was a previously undiscovered jellyfish.
As one of the discoverers, Gershwin got to help name the species, and she went with Bazinga
Rieki.
The first part of the name is an obvious reference to Sheldon Cooper's catchphrase cry of triumph.
"Bazinga!
I have an override switch."
In 2013, biologists from a university in Brazil announced the discovery of a new bee: the
orchid bee.
It so closely resembles another species of bee, the Euglossa ignita, that the researchers
decided to go ahead and give the orchid bee its own official scientific name of Euglossa
bazinga.
Sheldon most often uses "Bazinga!" as a kind of "gotcha!" when he tricks someone or plays
a prank on them.
"Where did you get them?"
"What?"
"Bazinga.
I don't care."
The biologists thought the word was a perfect way to describe such a tricky bee.
That makes it one of few insects on Earth to ever be named after a sitcom catchphrase.
The Big Bang Theory's showrunner released a statement in response, on behalf of the
fictional honoree.
"Sheldon would be honored to know that Euglossa bazinga was inspired by him.
In fact, after Mothra and griffins, bees are his third-favorite flying creatures."
Jim Parsons' occasionally sputtered utterance of "Bazinga!" is a classic TV catchphrase
that ranks with the all-time great T-shirt-worthy TV expressions, such as "Cowabunga!" or "No
soup for you!"
It's Sheldon's preferred term of triumph for a well-executed prank on his scientist friends.
The phrase, and the proper time to say it, is a direct carryover from The Big Bang Theory
writers room.
Staff writer Stephen Engel, who wrote for the show in 2008 and 2009, loved to set up
fun and innocuous practical jokes to rib the other scribes.
Co-creator Bill Prady explained the origins of the catchphrase at a 2013 PaleyFest event:
"That was Stephen's word for 'gotcha.'
And he would use it in the writer's room."
When The Big Bang Theory was getting off the ground in the mid-2000s, former child superstar
Macaulay Culkin was in the midst of a comeback.
He'd ended a long hiatus with appearances in two indie films, the religious satire Saved
and the club kid murder mystery Party Monster.
Big Bang Theory producers wanted very much to be in business with the former Richie Rich
and Kevin McAllister.
Culkin guested on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast in 2018 and told Rogan
"No, I said.
It was kind of like, the way the pitch was, 'All right, these two, like, astrophysicist
nerds and a pretty girl lives with them.
Yoinks!'
And like, you know, that was the pitch."
Culkin didn't reveal which character he would've played, but he did add that he had to reject
producers' overtures two more times.
The Big Bang Theory just loves to insert musical sequences now and then to break up the setup-wisecrack-laughs
formula, and whenever possible, they let the actors perform their own musical stunts.
That works out because a number of the cast members know their way around an instrument.
In the 2013 episode "The Romance Resonance," Bernadette gets quarantined, which leads to
Howard leading the whole Big Bang group in a performance of a special song he wrote for
her.
"If I didn't have you, life would be blue, I'd be Doctor Who without the tardis."
"Is it me or does she not look so good?"
"Shh."
The actual composers of the song are Kate Micucci and Riki Lindhome, of the comedy musical
duo Garfunkel & Oates.
Helberg sang and accompanied himself on keyboards, and it only took him one take to perform the
song perfectly.
Two other Big Bang actors learned to play instruments, no small feat, just for the show.
Sheldon plays the theremin, an electronic instrument used to make those spooky, high-pitched
noises in old science-fiction and horror movies, so Jim Parsons figured out how to operate
one, too.
It's a little easier to learn than the harp, which Mayim Bialik took up when the writers
decided that her character should play the harp.
Just before CBS started airing the 12th season of The Big Bang Theory, CBS announced that
the upcoming batch of episodes would be its last.
Co-creator and executive producer Chuck Lorre had gathered the cast in his office in August
2018, where star Jim Parsons announced that he was leaving the show at season's end.
Immediately after, Lorre told the cast that everyone would be leaving at season's end,
because he'd opted to end the series rather than do it without Parsons.
According to Deadline, Parsons told Lorre of his decision a few days before that meeting,
and plenty of executives secretly tried to get Parsons to change his mind.
The four-time Emmy winner may have even turned down as much as $50 million to stay with The
Big Bang Theory for two more seasons.