Four Cool Geeks, Plus One Hot Waitress, Equals One Big Bang

Can Cal Tech geeks and a Cheesecake Factory waitress find success in life and, more importantly, in the Nielsens? They can if they’re characters in the CBS Monday night comedy, The Big Bang Theory.

The show, which depicts the misadventures of physicists Leonard (played by Johnny Galecki) and Sheldon (Jim Parsons), their aspiring-actress neighbor Penny (Kaley Cuoco) and fellow geeks Wolowitz (Simon Helberg) and Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar), is the number-one comedy in the 18-49 demographic.

Plus, Big Bang won the People’s Choice Award for favorite television comedy and was named one of the ten most outstanding television programs of 2009 by the American Film Institute.

The five cast members joined the creative team for a lively panel February 18, when the Television Academy presented “An Evening with The Big Bang Theory” at the Leonard H. Goldenson Theatre in North Hollywood.

Taking the stage alongside their cast were co-creators-executive producers Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady and executive producer Lee Aronsohn. Entertainment Weekly staff writer Adam B. Vary moderated, following an introduction by Television Academy chairman John Shaffner, who is the show’s production designer.

Now in its third season, the series was inspired in part by Prady’s unemployed status and his past years as a computer programmer:

“I was unhappy that I didn’t have a job,” Prady recalled, “so I called [Lorre] and said, ‘Would you be up for a pilot?’ We talked about the guys I knew in my 20s when I was a computer programmer in New York, who were very smart, but had challenges moving through the world. We also talked about a woman on her own for the first time.”

They created unsuccessful pilots based on those concepts, then decided to see what would happen if they merged the two. It was a chemical experiment that worked, big time.

Parsons, a 2009 Primetime Emmy nominee, insisted that his work was not influenced by anyone he knows in real life: “No, no, no. It’s the writing. The character is who he is.” With Sheldon being thoroughly devoted to science, he continued, “I love it, because it’s so odd.

"It’s very specialized," Parsons said. "But within these tight boundaries, creatively it opens up all sorts of possibilities, in the writing and certainly, in the playing. There’s something very, very peculiar going on.”

Parsons said he is "very happy" with Galecki’s character, the straight man. “It’s a specific responsibility. I think an actor is responsible for how he can best serve the show, the scene, the moment.” To which Lorre, whose tangles with several previous sitcom stars are well documented, immediately quipped, “You haven’t been on some of the shows I’ve been on.”

Similarly, for Nayyar, whose character becomes tongue-tied around women, “Whether you have a bunch of lines or none at all, it’s about being alive in the story," Parsons said. "All that matters is what’s happening around you.”

The show employs a consultant from UCLA for the scientific aspects, sometimes noting in the script, “science to come” and giving him the plotlines for which to provide an appropriate premise. The creators found one viewer favorite element, the “Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock” version of the popular game, on the Internet.

And speaking of Spock, Cuoco said a special moment on the show, which had her in tears, was the episode where she presented a Cheesecake Factory napkin autographed by Spock embodiment Leonard Nimoy to Sheldon.

She loves being the lone female in the “boy’s club,” she said – though, Helberg demurred, “The four of us barely equal one boy.” With Penny and Leonard having become romantically involved, she doesn’t know if the relationship will last.

That there is a romance at all between two series leads is somewhat of a departure from the sexual-tension days of Moonlighting and Cheers. “We talked about it,” Lorre noted. “It seemed that had sort of played out, been-there-done-that. We thought it would be more fun to have them together.”

Indeed, one of Big Bang’s strengths, Aronsohn pointed out, is “the amount of comedy teams this show has. You can pair up any two. It helps us as writers.”

The cast first realized they had become a hit when they attended their first Comic-Con, having to turn away about a thousand fans despite being scheduled at the same time as a Battlestar Galactica panel.

“We didn’t want people to think we were making fun of geeks or nerds,” Cuoco said. “These people are passionate about what they do.”

And now that they know they’re a hit? “We’re all still in shock a little bit,” Cuoco said. “And very grateful.”

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Watch: Big Bang Theory Stars Visit TV Academy (Emmys.com Flip Cam)