As I’ve mentioned, I truly despised the pilot of CBS’s The Big Bang Theory, which aired in the fall of 2007. I found it unfunny, obnoxious, stilted, and tired. But now, having been persuaded to try it again this fall — and intrigued by the fact that its audience was steadily growing, which very rarely happened — I’ve really come to love it, and because of the oddities of DVD availability, I wound up watching it in reverse order: first this season, then last season, then the first season.
When I arrived back at the first season, I thought to myself, “Well, I bet it’s not as bad as I remember.” After all, very often, things look different with perspective. (I didn’t like the pilot of Friday Night Lights, either, but when I see it now, it holds up fine in the context of what came later.) And then an odd thing happened: it was much, much worse.
The Penny Problem and how it was solved, after the jump.
The pilot is terrible. The pilot is really, really terrible. And while there are many reasons for that — Leonard and Sheldon are too similar, their odd-couple dynamic isn’t firing yet, Sheldon’s quirks aren’t cranked up to heaven yet, and the writing feels very “pilot-y,” for lack of a more precise descriptor — the biggest problem is Penny, the only woman in the core cast, played by Kaley Cuoco. Penny lives across the hall from physicists Leonard and Sheldon, and while she’s now Leonard’s girlfriend and well-integrated with the guys and their friends, when the show started, Penny was not a person; she was a prop.
Nothing was ever seen from Penny’s point of view; she almost never had a joke that wasn’t at her own expense. Here’s all her dialogue from the first scene she ever did:
“Oh, hi.” “Hi.” “Oh, that’s nice.” “Oh, okay, well, guess I’m your new neighbor, Penny.” “Hi.” “Hi.” “Oh, thank you, maybe we can have coffee sometime.” “Great.” “Bye.” And here’s the dialogue from her second scene: “Hi.” “Hi.” “Oh, you’re inviting me over to eat?” “Oh, that’s so nice. I’d love to.” “So what do you guys do for fun around here?”
Kaley Cuoco
But perhaps nothing speaks to the Penny problem that the show had early on any more straightforwardly than the way she’s introduced. In the very first seconds of this collection of everything she did in the pilot, you’ll see the first time Penny was ever on screen: framed by her door, little shorts, belly showing, in profile, seen but unaware of being seen.
This is, in maybe the most literal form in which you’ll ever see it, the male gaze. She exists relative to Leonard and Sheldon’s arrival home (just standing there reading a magazine in profile with the door open!), relative to their door, relative to their apartment. It’s a comedy, but it’s still true. This is it; this is the thing. This is the thing people talk about where she’s not really herself, she’s just the lady standing in the doorway.
In fact, Cuoco quite literally was using a different, more cartoony voice for Penny back then. Listen to her in this clip from later in the pilot (you’ll notice her dialogue has not yet improved, but also that the one bright spot was already the spark of weirdness in Jim Parsons as Sheldon):
