pennyandsheldon.com is a fansite dedicated to the relationship between Sheldon and Penny from the tv show The big bang theory. You can read about me and the site here.
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Sorry for the delay. Things got busy and a ‘classic’ site update did not take place although you probably noticed there were many gallery updates along the way. Let’s see if I can get everything right:
Tv Guide, Apr 20 – A nice interview with Jim and set of photographs that I’m sure many of the site’s visitors will enjoy. Huge thanks to Hurley for the magazine and the scans.
Various pics from last year’s CBS comedies’ season premiere party. I’ve been (slowly) working on the Events album so expect new content soon.
Two promotional stills from today’s episode and a couple more from 2.19 because there can never be too many of them.
A lovely pic taken by Ken Hively probably around the Big bang theory set.
Screencaps of a bumper that aired last week + caps of the eTalk interview.
Also, over the weekend I finally got around to transcribing the scanned tv guide articles in the gallery, the text-only version is available in the press archive.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
BURBANK, Calif. — Back in 2003, when the lead-off sitcoms on CBS’s Monday night lineup were the inexorably awful ‘Yes, Dear’ and ‘Still Standing,’ if anyone dared predict that the sharpest traditional, multi-camera sitcom in prime-time in 2009 would be on CBS, that person would have been laughed at or ignored by serious TV observers.
Geniuses are often ridiculed, as Sheldon (Jim Parsons) on CBS’s ‘The Big Bang Theory’ (8 tonight, KDKA) knows all too well. Yet today’s best laughtrack-infused sitcom is indeed part of CBS’s Monday night lineup.
Although ‘The Big Bang Theory’ was greeted with some skepticism upon its debut in 2007 because the concept — two nerdy roommates and the hot girl next door — was reminiscent of ‘Three’s Company,’ the show has emerged as a critical and audience hit.
During a January visit to the show’s home on Stage 25 at the Warner Bros. lot, Parsons, whose literal-minded Sheldon has become the show’s breakout star, said viewers find the ‘Big Bang’ characters relatable — up to a point.
“No one ever says they are just like Sheldon,” he said. “Everyone always knows someone just like Sheldon.”
Sheldon and roommate Leonard (Johnny Galecki), Caltech post-docs studying particle physics, both have stereotypically geeky interests (video games and science fiction), but Leonard is more adjusted. Sheldon, however, lives in his own world, seemingly unaware of normal social interactions that in the hands of a less skilled actor could render the character unlikable.
“There’s an innate charm and sweetness to Jim that allows us to make him as obnoxious as we want and we can get away with it,” said Chuck Lorre (“Two and a Half Men”), who created the show with Bill Prady. “There’s an innocence to it that comes through.”
For his part, Parsons said he and the writers have learned what level of socially obtuse behavior viewers will tolerate from Sheldon.
“We have to walk up to the line. We cannot cross it,” he said. “He can be biting and he can observe something in a situation, maybe get snarky about it, but it can’t be malicious. It’s a fine line.”
As the series nears the end of its second season, “Big Bang” has evolved beyond its simple premise. Nerdling friends Howard (Simon Helberg) and Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar) have shown growth and gotten their own moments in the spotlight. Blonde neighbor Penny (Kaley Cuoco) is more than just the attractive girl next door, becoming something closer to one of the gang.
“I think she represents the audience,” Cuoco said, noting that she’s a stand-in for the way viewers at home see the guys. “They are so different from what we are all used to.”
Well, most people, maybe, but not everyone. Producers said their most prized reviews of the sitcom were positive notices in Science magazine and a particle physics journal.
“I’ve always been against the whole idea of just calling [these characters] nerds,” Lorre said. “It doesn’t define who they are. They are probably the characters who will change the world. They may blow it up. That will be the change.”
“Big Bang” didn’t have the easiest birth. The show’s first pilot — featuring just Parsons and Galecki from the current cast — was scrapped.
“The fundamental difference was the character of the woman,” Prady said. “She was very tough and very prickly, and people didn’t like her around our guys. Penny is much sweeter.”
The set has remained constant in both pilots, with the guys’ apartment decorated with an assortment of gadgets, action figures (“The female figures are very different now than when I was a child,” Galecki noted humorously) and a robot that sits atop a card catalog with drawers labeled “Luke,” “Vader” and “Solo.”
“Since Sheldon is the neatnik, I thought he was likely to store things categorically and organize things,” said set decorator Ann Shea. “Who knows what’s in there?”
When ‘Big Bang’ began, Parsons was an unknown quantity, while Galecki was familiar to viewers from his role on ‘Roseanne.’ Galecki, 33, said his performance as Leonard is inspired by actor Judd Hirsch, who in ‘Taxi’ was the most normal character compared to those around him.
“Leonard is the only character that’s in motion by his own choice,” Prady said. “He is the only one who is reaching for something. Sheldon represents an absolute stubborn happiness with where he is.”
Prior to “Big Bang,” Parsons, 36, had done stage work, appeared in the movie “Garden State” and had a recurring role on “Judging Amy.” Playing Sheldon has been a learning experience for the Texas native.
“I was geeky in a theater-type way. I don’t know about comic books, and video games have never been part of my day-to-day life,” he said. “It’s a testament to the [show’s] writing that once I say it, it makes sense.”
“Big Bang’s” writers often give Sheldon monologues that require Parsons to memorize long passages filled with technical terms.
“I don’t know if it’s gotten easier, but I’ve tried desperately to ease up on myself,” he said, “because it can make you a little bunched up.”
He’s heard and read comparisons of Sheldon’s social awkwardness to symptoms of Asperger syndrome, but the show’s writers said Sheldon is Asperger-free, which came as a relief to the actor.
“It would be a lot of responsibility and it would put up some barriers,” he said. “He is Aspergian, but that allows more freedom.”
For the ‘Big Bang’ writers and producers, success also allows more freedom and less network interference, but Lorre, a veteran of ‘Roseanne,’ ‘Cybill,’ ‘Grace Under Fire’ and ‘Dharma & Greg,’ doesn’t intend to push the form beyond its breaking point, particularly with regard to growing the characters too quickly.
“All baby steps,” he said. “If there’s any magic trick to sitcoms: Stuff happens, nothing changes.
“Can Archie Bunker get better? I don’t think so.”
Los Angeles Times
It makes absolute sense that the folks at the Apple store Genius Bar would freak out at the sight of the cast of ‘The Big Bang Theory.’ Or that thousands of fans would fill a room to spend time with them at Comic-Con last summer. But when the paparazzi of Mexico City went so berserk over the five actors during a promotional visit in December that they required an armed bodyguard, the young cast knew their little sitcom was turning into a sensation.
Statistically, ‘Big Bang’ is defying all kinds of odds, most notably in that it’s thriving at a time when the multi-camera format has been declared dead and network television as a whole is struggling. In its sophomore season, the buddy comedy has registered 20& more viewers, reaching the 10 million mark, and building enough confidence at CBS that it’s been renewed for two more years.
At its core, ‘Big Bang’ is a show about brainy best friends, genius nerds and social misfits who for the first time on TV are the source of the joke, not the butt of it. But on a deeper level, it’s also about love, loyalty, friendship and the frailties of the human spirit mixed in with quantum physics and superhero fanboydom. Think ‘Weird Science’ meets ‘Friends.’
Behind the scenes, the show is even more like ‘Friends.’ The ‘Big Bang’ cast has gelled personally in a way that is rare on television and is reminiscent of Jennifer Aniston and the gang, a group that stuck together even during contract negotiations. It may be too early for the ‘Big Bang’ actors to be landing million-dollar-per-episode deals, but their close relationships and on-camera chemistry are highly in their favor.
“You don’t have to be friends with your colleagues,” said Johnny Galecki, who plays Leonard, the heart of the show, and the most recognizable actor of the group when it premiered, primarily from his work on ‘Roseanne.’ “But it all happened very naturally. The good thing is we allow ourselves our bad moods and dark days. There’s no expectation to be buddy-buddy either. We’re all kind of bracing for the day when we disappoint each other, anger each other, or get under someone’s skin because so far we’ve just had so much fun.”
How much fun? The ‘Big Bang’ gang works Monday through Friday, has at least two dinners a week together, and has vacationed together. They meet for drinks, play Scrabble, “and we know everything about each other, and that’s good and bad,” said Kaley Cuoco, who plays Penny, the actress-waitress who lives next door to the genius physicists, Leonard and Sheldon (Jim Parsons).
“It’s one of the luckiest things,” said Simon Helberg, who plays Howard Wolowitz, an engineer who fancies himself a Casanova. “We have a shorthand with each other. There’s no tension. There’s just honesty, and it doesn’t feel competitive.”
If they were a family, Galecki and Parsons would be the parents, Helberg the protective older brother, Kunal Nayyar the picked-on middle child and Cuoco would be the smart-aleck little sister who gives them hair styling tips before a Times photo shoot.
“It was so cute,” Cuoco said. “I love these boys more than anything. This is the best environment for me: me and a bunch of men. It doesn’t get any more fun than this.”
Many of the show’s laughs revolve around obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is where Parsons comes in, playing Sheldon, a character bound to become classic. Sheldon’s obsessive-compulsive personal routine, his penchant for condescending soliloquies and meticulous takeout food ordering, combined with his hypochondria and lack of social filters, exasperates his friends daily.
“The thing about Sheldon is that he can’t exist without Leonard,” said co-creator Bill Prady (‘Dharma & Greg’). “Unless you show that somebody is capable of loving him, and Leonard clearly does, unless you show that somebody in the world is capable of putting up with him, why would you as a viewer put up with him?”
Put up with him? Fans adore the theoretical physicist/child prodigy who is completely clueless about how high-maintenance he is. That paired with Parsons’ impressive comedic delivery and ability to memorize polysyllabic jargon is the reason the character was the first to break out.
“He has long monologues of these remarkable quantum theorems that you can barely pronounce let alone get out of your mouth,” said Peter Roth, president of Warner Bros. Television, which produces the show. “I remember the first time I saw him, I thought this man is a phenomenon.”
Even when it’s not scientific, Sheldon is long-winded, which is Parsons’ favorite part of playing him, even though it can be maddening learning Sheldon’s lines.
Sheldon when receiving a holiday gift: “You bought me a present? Why would you do such a thing? I know you think you’re being generous, but the foundation of gift giving is reciprocity. You haven’t given me a gift. You’ve given me an obligation. The essence of the custom is that I now have to go out and purchase for you a gift of commensurate value and representing the same perceived level of friendship as that represented by the gift you’ve given me. Ah, it’s no wonder suicide rates skyrocket this time of year. Oh, I brought this on myself by being such an endearing and important part of your life.”
“The rhythm of the language they’ve written for Sheldon, I love that challenge,” Parsons said. “The writers are so good at using so many words and scientific jargon and being verbose in general and burying the joke in there. The challenge of threading that out, driving these speeches in a way it still hits the comic rhythm, I love it, though I want to pull my hair out sometimes.”
Parsons uses a trick he learned in a junior high speech class to help him enunciate in Sheldon’s unique way. He places a pencil in his mouth to help with the placement of his tongue and teeth.
“What you see is not the result of a casual, instinctive approach,” Prady said. “These guys work hard. From time to time, they’ll get together to prep for the table read. I’ve never heard of a cast doing that. And they always find stuff that winds up being a guide for us as we rewrite. It’s an unbelievably constructive collaboration.”
When production on the pilot wrapped, veteran writer-producer Chuck Lorre, who co-created it, said he could feel he had a hit. “Something was happening that transcends what you imagined.”
Galecki remembers how the majority of TV writers blasted the show before it launched.
“It went from being a show that was lambasted before it even aired for making fun of intelligent people to a show that intelligent people claim is uniting them, which is unexpected and touching,” he said.
“It’s a very intimate reaction that they have. I think they relate to these characters not because they want to emulate them because they think they’re cool. They relate to them because they relate to that time they put their foot in their mouth or that time they embarrassed themselves like these characters have a tendency to do.”
Nayyar, who plays Raj, an incredibly introverted astrophysicist, saw it himself at Comic-Con when a boy told the cast that he used to feel like a geek because he performs in theater and loves comic books, but the show had changed his life.
“He got very emotional and he said that he found himself and he wasn’t ashamed of who he was anymore,” Nayyar said. “That meant a lot to us. A lot of people at Comic-Con thanked us for giving ‘our people’ a voice. I definitely never expected that to happen on a sitcom. We’re here to be funny, you know what I mean?”
Jim Parsons and Johnny Galecki in the Dec 2008 issue of Emmy magazine. Enjoy!
This is by far the most expensive magazine I’ve ever bought but it was oh so worth it.
Also, since the forum didn’t take off as I thought it would, I’ve decided to nix it. There are already plenty of places out there to discuss Penny and Sheldon so definitely no need for it, besides I’m sure no one is going to miss it.
Some photos from the set, taken by David Strick. Great shots.
11 months ago
