Chapter 1

WHERE IT ALL STARTED

A show like The Big Bang Theory is not supposed to be a mainstream success. Not when the two lead characters are a theoretical physicist and an experimental physicist. Or when episodes involve the Born-Oppenheimer approximation and Schrödinger’s Cat. Or when a lot of attention is paid to whiteboards and theorems. It’s just not. And it probably wouldn’t have gone further than the idea bin if it weren’t for the power and respect that creator Chuck Lorre commanded, when in 2006, he—along with Bill Prady—went to CBS with an idea for a new series built on that very concept. In almost any other setting, it wouldn’t have made it through the door, and then if it had, it would have been greeted with a “Thanks, we’ll get back to you.” But Lorre had a plan—albeit a risky one. And to understand how it came together, you have to go back to childhood obsessions, computer programming days, and a determined television executive by the name of Peter Roth.

Chuck Lorre (co-creator, The Big Bang Theory, co-creator Two and a Half Men): Growing up, I devoured all things DC Comics, and then Marvel came along and elevated the whole genre. Everything changed when I read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles as a kid. That changed my life. I became obsessed with devouring every book by every sci-fi author I stumbled upon. And that led to Robert A. Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov, and Frank Herbert’s Dune, which led to Roger Zelazny. I was an enormous fan of Star Trek in the ’60s, so much so that when it got canceled after three seasons—the same year The Smothers Brothers got canceled—I said, “That’s it for television. I’m through with television! Any medium that would cancel Star Trek and Smothers Brothers is not worth my time!” I would tell anybody that would listen that television was a stupid medium and we need not spend any time with it. And then during the next decade, I didn’t even own a TV. Unless I was dating a woman with a television, I didn’t watch it. I was also stupid poor, so any money I made certainly wasn’t going to be spent on buying a TV.

Ironically, the man who declared himself “through with television,” is now one of the most prolific and successful television producers in history, having been called “the king of comedy.” And while Lorre has proven himself to be a hitmaker again and again, he will be the first to tell you that no successful comedy is a solo effort.

Peter Roth (former chairman, Warner Bros. Television Group): In 1994, I was at 20th Network Television (now 20th Century Fox Television Productions). My boss, Peter Chernin, said to me, “Peter, you do a great job in drama, but frankly, you suck in comedy.” [Laughs] And he was right. That led to my team and I putting together a list of what we considered to be the seven greatest comedy creators and showrunners in the business. Number one on that list: Chuck Lorre. Number two on that list was Danny Jacobson, who created Mad About You, followed by five others who will remain anonymous because none of them succeeded. I brought that list to Mr. Chernin, who said, “How much do you think it’s going to cost to [get those people]?” It was going to cost an extraordinary amount of money, especially in those days. The next week we went to see [then chairman and CEO of News Corporation] Rupert Murdoch about why we should be investing this money. Rupert just looked at us and said, “Do it!” I walked out of the office, my knees buckling, thinking, Oh my God, I can’t believe this man just committed this amount of money. More importantly, I can’t believe the onus is now on me and I have to execute all of this.

Roth, who was responsible for hit dramas like The X-Files, Picket Fences, 21 Jump Street, and more, had never met Chuck Lorre, but he sure knew of his work and read his material. For that reason and more, Roth was relentless in his pursuit to sign him. And it worked. In the end, Roth made deals with all seven comedy creators on his list.

Peter Roth: But only two of those deals actually worked out well. And only one of them paid for the entire investment and literally quintupled the original amount—and that was Chuck Lorre, with one show—Dharma & Greg.

Chuck Lorre: It was a very low point in my life when Peter walked in. I created Grace Under Fire and ended up quitting the show because it was a very toxic environment. I wasn’t capable of sustaining any kind of sanity there. I went to producers Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, and wept in their office. I told them I couldn’t do this anymore. It was just an emotional battering that was involved in working with a very unhappy lead actress (Brett Butler). They said, “Well, just finish the season, and then we’ll find someone else.” And I agreed, but for reasons that should probably be kept between me and a therapist, I agreed to develop a show for Cybill Shepherd. But the gold of that was that I became friends with Christine Baranski. Cybill was a runaway hit immediately, which was exciting as hell, but going into the second season, everything changed. Cybill was no longer my biggest fan or supporter. She wanted me to rewrite a script, and I didn’t think it needed to be. As a result, I got fired. So enter Peter Roth saying, “Let’s talk.” I wasn’t feeling really good about myself. I had somehow stumbled into creating two hit shows and now I was on neither one of them.

Christine Baranski (“Maryann Thorpe,” Cybill; “Beverly Hofstadter,” The Big Bang Theory): I did Cybill because of Chuck Lorre’s writing. After winning the Emmy, I thought to myself, Damn, girl! You made the right decision, and here we are! And then the next season he was fired. I actually went to Les Moonves’s office and asked to be let out of that show. I said, “I did the show because of Chuck Lorre, and because of the writing. I don’t know what I’m in for now, but I don’t think this is good and I’m really unhappy!” And Les said to me: “I need you. Sorry, but I need you.” And I stuck it out for three and a half years. But I saw Chuck slumped in a chair the day he was fired. He was at a very, very low point. So the fact that he then went on to become one of the most successful television writers-producers of all time, to me, is just a tribute to his ability to pull himself up and say, “I’m just going to keep going.”

Chuck Lorre: I was definitely a little lost. But then Peter made me an unbelievable offer, which was overwhelming. He had more faith in me than I did. And that faith was contagious. I got a little cocky. [Laughs] I was like, Maybe they’re right! Maybe I can do this again! It was a clumsy start, but creating Dharma & Greg in 1997 was an effort on my part to create an alternative approach to a female-driven comedy. And it worked. It gave me a great deal of confidence that I didn’t necessarily have at that moment in time.

Although Peter Roth was a tremendous ally and supporter of Lorre’s, he left 20th Network Television in March 1999 to become president at Warner Bros. Television. Lorre couldn’t believe it.

Chuck Lorre: I was only a year into my deal when he left. I went, “Wait a minute, where are you going?! I came here because of you! And now you’re leaving!” But in 2000, towards the end of my four-year deal at Fox, I went to Warner Bros. Peter was confident I could make something happen again. And I certainly didn’t. I proceeded to let him down for three years.

And then, in September 2003, Lorre created Two and a Half Men with Lee Aronsohn, which not only became one of the most successful series ever produced by Warner Bros. Television, but would change Lorre’s life forever.

Wendi Trilling (executive vice president, comedy development, CBS, 2004–2015): Two and A Half Men was a perfect pilot. It felt like a hit show that would be on the air for ten years. That’s not usually the case, and it doesn’t usually feel that way. The Big Bang Theory didn’t feel that way. We had to do two pilots. It was a process.

Chuck Lorre: There’s no Big Bang without Two and a Half Men. I just didn’t have the horsepower to get CBS on board with a show about theoretical physicists without Two and a Half Men being a rip-roaring success. I truly think that gave CBS the patience and a willingness to let us grow.

Peter Roth: But it must be said that Chuck is the most brilliant comedy creator I’ve ever worked with in my forty-six and a half years. He simply is. He has an eye and ear for story, especially in half-hour form. People don’t think you can tell a good story in twenty-two minutes. The fact is, you must. And no one does that better than Chuck Lorre.

While Two and a Half Men was killing it in the ratings, producer-writer Bill Prady (who was an executive producer on Lorre’s Dharma & Greg, and had begun his career at Jim Henson Productions) was looking for his next project.

Bill Prady (The Big Bang Theory co-creator): I was doing a show on the WB called Related, from Liz Tuccillo, who co-wrote He’s Just Not That Into You, and executive-produced by Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman. It was a job that I was so ill-suited for. I was hired to be the number two person in charge, but I ultimately quit because I was so unhappy doing it. I was just simply the wrong person for it; it was a drama about four sisters.

Chuck Lorre: Bill was a dear friend—we’re still very close—so we knocked around all sorts of ideas for months. We were circling around this idea about a young woman who moved to Los Angeles trying to find her way in the world. We actually met with some actresses to play this lead role, but we never really could put that into a coherent form that we were happy with. But one weekend, Bill was telling me about his computer programming days back in the ’80s, and these wonderful characters that he worked with who were beyond brilliant, but entirely inept in the real world. They could figure out Pi to eighty decimals but couldn’t figure out a tip in a restaurant because there were too many variables. And I recall saying, “Well, that’s the show! That’s the show we should be doing! That’s fantastic! These are great characters.”

Bill Prady: That specific conversation happened in his office in Burbank, where we started talking about the guys I worked with at our software company. The specific calculations one guy could do in his head were remarkable. He was a mathematical savant. He also had selective mutism around women. We broke those two qualities off [between Sheldon and Raj], because although it was based on an actual person, it would have seemed unbelievable on a show at the time, even though this person really did suffer in that way. Now we look at these things and have a better understanding of people who are neuro-atypical and who process the world differently, but at the time, he was just that dude! And he did that stuff!

Chuck Lorre: But I didn’t want to do the computer “nerd,” the guy with the pocket protectors and the pens and the glasses with the tape in the middle. It felt like a cliché, which I was eventually wrong about because Silicon Valley did something similar [in concept] and it was a terrific show. [Laughs]

Bill Prady: Chuck also said it’s hard to show people at computers in a multicam because they’re hunched over a computer. I just remember thinking out loud, “What’s smart that you do standing up?” And then as I was writing, I said, “Oh, I’m writing on a whiteboard,” which quickly became, “Oh, scientists!” It was more shootable [to show a whiteboard versus a computer screen].

Chuck Lorre: I recall suggesting that these characters were not interested in getting rich, but unraveling the secrets of the universe. I didn’t even know what that meant. A Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe had already been out, which was a little darker than we wanted to go. We decided to go for brilliant minds without the psychosis. [Laughs] And then our abandoned idea that the young woman who comes to Los Angeles to find her way in the world suddenly made sense because if we could put her in the world of these physicists, she would be the audience. She would be us. They’d have to explain to her, thus explaining to us—the audience—what the hell is going on. And so the two elements kind of came together very quickly.

Bill Prady: Early on, I would do a draft of a scene and then send it to Chuck, and he would tell me why it was terrible. [Laughs] And then we’d work some more at his house and then go out to lunch. There was this bookstore nearby, and I really wanted Chuck to read the memoirs of the physicist Richard Feynman, so I bought him the works of Feynman.

Chuck Lorre: By the way, there was a moment where I thought perhaps the female character was an android that the guys built. We wrote a test scene and had a couple actors read the scene for us. And they were halfway through the scene when I went, “Never mind.” [Laughs] It was terrible. It was just terrible. But I needed to get it out of my system and move on. Looking back, you can’t regret any of those initial ideas because they were all necessary to get where we got.

Once Lorre and Prady abandoned the idea of a female android and settled on something a bit more realistic, they invited Peter Roth, and Warner Bros. Television’s head of comedy, Len Goldstein, to Lorre’s office for a private reading of this new show, which didn’t have a title.

Peter Roth: It was around the fall of 2005, and I remember Bill and Chuck just wanted to hear our thoughts. Mark Roberts, who went on to co-create Mike & Molly, played one of the roles in the script, along with actor J. D. Walsh, who was in a pilot of Chuck’s called Nathan’s Choice that never made it to series. And it was there that they read us two early scenes from what would be The Big Bang Theory. There were too many ‘Sheldon is a genius’ jokes, but I remember thinking, Boy, these characters are really cool