Sheldon (Jim Parsons), Amy (Mayim Bialik), Leonard (Johnny Galecki) and Penny (Kaley Cuoco) are not quite ready for a double date. (
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What are the chances that a half-hour series about a bunch of socially inept geeks could emerge, in its fifth season, as TV’s top-rated comedy? What are the chances that this sitcom could beat the most popular show of the past decade?
The chances are slim — unless you’ve got an ingeniously eccentric cast and a group of writers well-versed in geekdom. This is how “The Big Bang Theory” became No. 1. And beat “American Idol.”
The producers would like to say that they strategized the show’s success, but it’s a mystery to them.
“I would feel so smart if I could say ‘Yes, we sat in a room, and there was a Power Point presentation about what we were going to do and then the boys down in research and development gave us the big thumbs up,’ ” says Bill Prady, one of the show’s executive producers and a former computer programmer. He admits to having a little bit — or a lot — of Sheldon Cooper, the physicist played by Jim Parsons, in him.
“It’s more about how the show happens on a week-to-week basis. When we are making an episode, there will be a specific story that we are talking about in terms of the characters’ lives, and we’ll ask ourselves, ‘What comes with that?’”
Now in its fifth season, “The Big Bang Theory” is just hitting its stride. The show is up 16 percent in viewers, averaging nearly 16 million viewers an episode compared to 13.7 million last year.
“Big Bang” trails just behind CBS’ Monday night juggernaut, “Two and a Half Men,” but that’s largely because the “Men” season opener attracted 30 million viewers who wanted to see how Ashton Kutcher would perform as Charlie Sheen’s replacement.
If what’s happening right now is what matters, then “Big Bang” is on top. Since “Idol” returned, the show has been beating it in head-to-head competition. Today, the series has more viewers than either “Men” or ABC’s “Modern Family,” the other two top comedy contenders.
The “Big Bang” ratings surge was likely helped by its syndication last fall; it airs on TBS and in early-evening sitcom blocks on local stations. It’s no surprise that “Big Bang” also is cleaning up in syndication: In early February, the comedy tied “Judge Judy” and “Wheel of Fortune” as syndication’s top-rated show.
“It never hurts the synergy of a show to be on syndication and on the network at the same time,” says Bill Carroll, vice president and director of programming for the Katz Television Group. “The promotion of both helps the program overall.”
“Big Bang” is so popular that it might even be part of the reason the “Idol” ratings are down, says Brad Adgate, senior vice president and director of research at Horizon Media. “The same type of viewer watches ‘Big Bang’ and ‘American Idol,’” he says.
The series also seems to be hitting its creative stride, although that’s harder to measure. Its star, Jim Parsons, who plays brilliant but socially awkward physicist Sheldon Cooper, won the Emmy for outstanding actor in a comedy for the past two years. Parsons also won a Golden Globe in 2011.
Prady, along with the show’s other executive producers, Chuck Lorre and Steven Molaro, are committed to preserving the characters’ integrity, and that’s where much of the comedy comes from. In recent seasons, girlfriends have come into the guys’ lives, with “Blossom” star Mayim Bialik playing Amy Farrah Fowler, Sheldon’s “friend who is a girl but not a girlfriend.”
At first, Amy was only scheduled to appear in one episode, the Season 3 finale when the gang decides it would be funny to put Sheldon’s information on Match.com. That episode promised that the audience would see the date, so the Season 4 premiered picked up where the finale left off.
Turns out that not only Sheldon liked Amy: The audience embraced the character and the producers kept writing her in. After a while, the show was obligated to make Bialik a series regular, Prady says: “Business affairs calls and says ‘Hi, we’re from the studio. We don’t know if you know how show business works, but if you make an agreement with an actor that you are going to use them a lot, then there’s some negotiating to do.’”
“Amy is a person for whom emotions and relationships are new,” says Bialik. “She’s someone with a lot of social awkwardness who still really wants to fit in. She wants to know what’s hip and cool. We don’t see any of that in Sheldon.”
“The difference between Amy and Sheldon is that Amy is game,” says Prady. “Amy missed out on experiences growing up and now she is keen to have them.”
In 2009, Melissa Rauch made her debut as Bernadette, Howard Wolowitz’s (Simon Helberg) girlfriend; she is now his fiancée.
“We were tired of Wolowitz as a wolf,” Prady says. ”The character was getting older and it was starting to get a little creepy. The wolf behavior was really about him wanting to be in love. He’ll be the first one of the gang to be married and that feels right.”
Rauch, a self-described “TV junkie,” already was a big fan of the series. “It takes a special kind of woman to love a man with that many turtlenecks, especially when they aren’t even real,” she says.
Through it all, the show’s core couple — Penny and Leonard (Johnny Galecki) — keep breaking up and getting back together, kind of like another couple from a hit comedy that aired on another network on Thursday nights at 8 p.m.
“There is a week-to-week quality to this,” says Prady. “That’s something that Chuck has always been very strong about, and sometimes I feel like we’re working without a net. I’ve worked on shows where you plan carefully. But Chuck’s position is that if you unhook yourself from that plan, you end up with more natural movement of the characters.”
Adgate puts it another way: “It’s the nerdy ‘Friends.’ ”
THE BIG BANG THEORY
Thursday, 8 p.m., CBS