In May 2019, the premiere of the final episode of The Big Bang Theory series took place. The project lasted twelve years, and during this time many remakes were released, a spin-off appeared, and the project itself was overgrown with a huge audience and a lot of interesting facts.
The idea and creation of the series
To create a sitcom about the adventures of a group of eccentric scientists, two American screenwriters came up with the idea: Bill Prady and Chuck Lorrie. The script for the first episode was written in 2006, in the same year the pilot episode appeared on TV screens. The debut series was very different from the beloved series, some characters were absent in it, and the actors sometimes played other roles. For example, in the first episode there was no key character of the entire series - the scientists' neighbor Penny. Katie, a rude and rather aggressive girl from the street played by actress Amanda Walsh, applied for the role of the main character.
The audience met the debut release without much enthusiasm and the scriptwriters decided to postpone the launch of the series and slightly redraw the script. This is how Penny's line, played by Kaley Cuoco, was inscribed in the plot. Perhaps the appearance of this attractive and slightly silly heroine played a major role in the success of the project. The official premiere of the first episode of The Big Bang Theory took place in September 2007 on CBS.
For 12 years, the series has more than doubled its audience. He was repeatedly nominated for various film awards. In 2009, the project won two awards from the Television Critics Association for Best Actor and Achievement in Comedy. In 2010, Parsons received an Emmy Award for Best Actor. The series also won the People's Choice Award. The following year, Jim Parsons again became the proud owner of an Emmy. He also won the Best Actor nomination two more times, in 2013 and 2014.
Surname of the main character Penny
Over the years, season after season, fans and fans of the series began to guess and fantasize - what is Penny's last name? The fact is that officially it was never mentioned anywhere, many thought that this would happen over time. However, the series ended without revealing this burning mystery.
Nevertheless, the creators of the series left a few clues. Penny's surname appears on the mailings - London, it is also known that the girl was married to Zach Johnson, which may well indicate that Penny bears his last name. One way or another, the creators did not comment on this moment in any way, which led to a whole series of fan investigations and heated debates.
Names and surnames of other characters
Without straying far from the topic of names, it is worth noting that three characters appeared in the original idea: Lenny, Kenny and Penny, but this concept was abandoned and only Penny remained in the project. The other two characters were named Sheldon and Leonard, a kind of tribute to the now deceased, famous TV producer and screenwriter - Sheldon Leonard.
The main characters of the series are physicists, and each of them dreams of winning the Nobel Prize someday. They also received their surnames for a reason, Sheldon got the surname Cooper in honor of the famous American physicist Leon Cooper. Leonard also received his surname in memory of another, no less famous physicist Robert Hofsteder. Both scientists are Nobel laureates.
Plagiarism
The series "The Big Bang Theory" quickly grew into a huge army of fans, the show's ratings were relentlessly striving upward. and over time, the creators were faced with cases of blatant plagiarism. Instead of the standard procedure for adapting a series for a specific viewer, dishonest producers and writers simply changed the name and tried to pass off the resulting result as their own product.
The most egregious case took place on the Belarusian TV channel STV. Two years after the appearance of the original series, STV launched the TV series The Theorists, a story about enthusiastic and very ambitious scientists living next door to a cute, naive and charming blonde.
Not only were the characters completely copied from the original, but some plot lines and jokes were also used in The Theorists. The project was attended by former KVN players, members of the "PE" team: Evgeny Smorigin and Dmitry Tankovich. But despite the stellar line-up, the project was doomed to failure and was closed ahead of schedule, after only four issues.
The creators of the original "The Big Bang Theory" tried to contact the creators of "Theorists", but they in every possible way ignored attempts to enter into dialogue, besides, the "STV" channel is state-owned, which negates attempts to bring them to justice. Ultimately, Chuck Lorry just joked, walking through the well-known stereotypes about Belarus, and in a joking manner, he also demanded a batch of felt hats as compensation, which, of course, he did not receive.
Rock Paper Scissors
In the series "The Big Bang Theory" a lot of time is devoted to this popular game all over the world, but with minor changes in the rules. The new version of entertainment "Rock, Paper, Lizard, Spock" was invented by screenwriter Sam Kass and fits perfectly into the universe of the project, since the main characters are fans of the science fiction series "Star Trek".
In the new version, the stone hits the lizard, which poisons Spock, he, in turn, breaks the scissors, and they cut off the head of the unfortunate lizard, she eats the paper, the paper refutes Spock, and Spock turns the stone into steam. With the release of the series and the first mentions of the updated game, it quickly gained popularity. By the way, the creator of the game, Sam Cass, has repeatedly stated that the game he invented was included in the series without his consent.
Johnny Galecki and Kaley Cuoco
The scene where the characters Penny and Leonard first kissed was filmed from the first take, possibly due to the romantic relationship of the actors outside the set. They met for two years, carefully hiding this fact, and all this was revealed only when they broke up.
In 2016, rumors began circulating among fans that the couple were back together. The reason for the rumors was the behavior of the actors at one of the ceremonies, Kayleigh and Johnny behaved like a real couple. But after the appearance and spread of this gossip, both actors, to the chagrin of many fans, hastened to refute the information about a happy reunion.
Spin-off
Two years ago, when "The Big Bang Theory" was still on the screen, in parallel with it, a new project related to the series was launched. "Sheldon's Childhood" tells about little Sheldon and his relationship with relatives and peers. In the series there are a lot of references to the original, the protagonist's memories of school, neighbors, relatives and teachers turned out to be so cool that the series about the childhood of an eccentric physicist quite successfully replaced Theory.
Sheldon's Childhood has a format of 20-minute episodes that are released once a month, in the Russian segment the series is dubbed by the same studio that dubbed The Big Bang Theory. In the spin-off there are not and cannot be characters from the original series, since the action takes place long before the events of "Theory".
In the center of the plot is a gifted boy Sheldon, his coach father and a kindly religious mother, Missy's clever and slightly cynical sister, Georgie's older brother, a romantic and a bully, a beloved granny that Missy looks like - they are both sarcastic, mocking, but very kind. Jim Parsons, who played the adult Sheldon in the original show, also takes part in the project - he acts as the narrator.
To date, two seasons have been filmed, in which there are references to how Sheldon tried to assemble a nuclear reactor and thereby attracted the attention of American special services. And the project quite wittily reveals the theme of Sheldon's endless phobias, including the fear of chickens, shaking hands, and so on.
