Big Bang Theory Creator Chuck Lorre Says Kaley Cuoco’s Penny Was ‘Cliché,’ ‘Sadly One-Dimensional’ Early in the Series

The Big Bang Theory creator Chuck Lorre is looking back on the evolution of Kaley Cuoco’s character in the beloved sitcom’s early days.

Lorre and former Warner Bros. Television Group chairman Peter Roth joined host Jessica Radloff on the very first episode of The Official Big Bang Theory Podcast to discuss the genesis of the show, from its original unaired pilot to the Emmy-nominated hit it became.

While Cuoco didn’t appear in the original pilot, both Lorre and Roth agreed that her character, Penny, vastly improved the episode that ultimately made it to the air on CBS in September 2007, and became something of an on-screen avatar for the way they hoped audiences would feel about socially awkward scientists Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki) and Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons).

“They could be as obnoxious, or for Sheldon, as off-putting as possible, but you forgave them, because there was this kind of childish naivete,” Lorre said of Galecki and Parsons’ characters. “The magic of Kaley was, Kaley’s character — as we figured this thing out on the fly — was amused by them, was not critical. If she got angry, it wasn’t harsh. The audience really responded to that.”

Roth, meanwhile contrasted Cuoco’s character with that of Katie, one of two female leads in the unaired pilot played by Amanda Walsh and Iris Bahr (who was Gilda).

“She was never judgmental about these characters. She was bemused by them,” Roth said of Penny. “In fact, they brought more judgement to her than she did ever of them. And I thought that was also an important difference between the character of what Penny brought versus the character of what Katie brought in the original unaired pilot.”

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“There was a sweetness, an endearment that she felt towards them that I think the audience — I think Chuck said it exactly right: The audience wanted to protect these two boys, these two men, these two innocents, and [Cuoco] honored that,” Roth added.

Despite significant changes, Lorre said he still feels the version of the pilot episode that ultimately aired was “deeply flawed,” particularly when it came to Penny. He admitted that it took The Big Bang Theory a while to get the character right.

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“Even after the second pilot, we had so many episodes to go before we started to understand that there was a brilliance to Penny’s character that we had not explored,” he said. He described her in early episodes as a “goofy blonde who says foolish things.”

“It’s a cliched character: the dumb blonde,” Lorre explained. “And we missed it. We didn’t have that right away that what she brought to this story, this series, to these other characters was an intelligence that they didn’t have. A kind of intelligence that was alien to them, an intelligence about people and relationships and family.”

Built into the show’s premise, he said, was the idea that while extremely intelligent, Sheldon, Leonard and their scientist friends didn’t understand how to interact with other people. But Penny did.

“She brought a humanity to them that they were lacking. And that took a while to figure out,” Lorre said. “In the beginning she was sadly one-dimensional in many ways, but the gift of a TV series that starts working is you get time to learn.”