Why The Big Bang Theory Pilot Didn't Do Right By Kaley Cuoco's Penny

It's fair to say that on the Chuck Lorre sitcom "The Big Bang Theory," the female characters don't always get a fair shake. At first, the only girl in the main cast is Penny, played by Kaley Cuoco, and she doesn't even get a last name until she marries Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki) in season 9 (thankfully, in the show's third season, she's joined by Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch as Amy Farrah Fowler and Melissa Rostenkowski, respectively). Still, even after the character of Penny was fully reworked for a second attempt at a pilot — she was originally played by Amanda Walsh and named Katie — the show's creative team still thinks the pilot did Penny dirty.

In Jessica Radloff's 2022 book "The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series," both Lorre and his fellow showrunner (and executive producer) Steve Molaro said they don't feel great about how they depict Penny early in the series. "She was the ditzy blonde girl in the pilot, which is one of the things that is not great about that pilot," Molaro said of Cuoco's character. "It took a long time for her to become a person. There's an unfortunate joke about how she's a vegetarian but she loves steak. I didn't write the pilot, but those are moments where you wish you could undo a little bit of. Or you wish you had a little bit clearer picture of where we ended up going. But that's how pilots work. It's tough."

Lorre agreed but did say that they eventually figured out Penny's strength: her social smarts. "One of the most underwritten characters in the show early on was Penny," Lorre recalled. "It was really obvious immediately that we hadn't developed the character beyond the pretty girl next door, and Kaley was certainly capable of doing a great deal more than what was asked of her." He continued, "We had to make the character more fully realized. Not just for an episode, but always. [Over time] Penny had an intelligence about people, about relationships, and about sussing out a situation and understanding the dynamics of what's going on in a room."

Throughout "The Big Bang Theory" — even in some of its earliest episodes — Penny's character falls into place pretty easily, particularly because of how she interacts with Leonard and his ... difficult roommate, the brilliant but temperamental theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons). Though Sheldon looks down on Penny — and Leonard immediately develops a crush on her — Penny seems amused by the boys, but most importantly, she's not mean to them without cause, as Kaley Cuoco told Jessica Radloff in the book.

"There's zero judgment from the minute she meets them," Cuoco said. "What was interesting was they were judging her. I felt like they were judging her for a long time, and I actually loved that. She just wanted to hang out with them. She immediately included them. But it took them longer to include her."

Not only did this help develop Penny's personality, but it softened Sheldon and Leonard and made them more accessible as characters. As a sort of audience surrogate, Penny helps viewers figure out what makes Sheldon and Leonard tick as she learns more about the duo ... and honestly, Penny's eventual close friendship with Sheldon is actually more narratively satisfying than her marriage to Leonard. "Penny found the guys hysterical and cute, but she didn't make fun of them," former Warner Bros. executive Peter Roth said of Penny. "She thought they were endearing, but never to the point of you feeling like she was secretly mocking them behind their backs. That's why one of the most brilliant relationships was Penny and Sheldon. That was very special."

The truth is that Kaley Cuoco almost passed on the role of Penny after it was reworked in the wake of that first, unaired pilot — and in Jessica Radloff's book, casting directors Ken Miller and Nikki Valko say they were basically desperate to get Cuoco on board. Unfortunately, as Miller put it, Cuoco preferred the darker, edgier version of Penny (or Katie, as she was named at that point) and said no. "We begged and we pleaded and we groveled," Valko said. "I mean, I was groveling. Ken, too." 

Miller, who also noted that his team had known Cuoco for years, did admit that Katie, the original role, was a little too "old" for Cuoco, but that Penny was perfect: In hindsight, the role of Katie was an [age] inappropriate role for her in the first pilot. But we really believed that she was the one for the second go-around. It was obvious it was her." Thankfully, the stars aligned and Cuoco said yes after Valko and Miller urged her to reconsider, and the rest is history. "My team just wanted to make sure I wouldn't be stuck in anything that wasn't an exciting role since it seemed like a secondary character at first, but Nikki and Ken kept saying, 'No, no, it's going to grow! The guys and this new girl are really going to blow each other's worlds up,'" Cuoco said in the book. "And I knew when Chuck [Lorre]'s name is next to something, you really don't question it." 

The memory is understandably pretty funny for Cuoco, and as for Valko and Miller, she made sure they always knew just how grateful she was that they pushed to cast her. "I laugh thinking about it now," Cuoco continued. "And then, at every table read on Wednesdays, we always sat in the same place, and Ken and Nikki always sat behind me. And I would always yell out, 'Thank you for hiring me!'"

The fact is that, across the entirety of "The Big Bang Theory," Penny does develop quite a bit — and I would argue that she actually has the most drastic and important evolution of any of the show's main characters. Even though Sheldon eventually lets his guard down and gets married to Amy and Howard gives up his dream of being a creepy womanizer to settle down with Bernadette and have two kids, Penny, amidst her relationship with Leonard, makes enormous personal strides. After years of trying to become an actress and striking out, Penny decides that she wants to find a lucrative career and starts working with Bernadette at ZenGen, a fictional pharmaceutical company. As it turns out, Penny is a great saleswoman, and by the end of the show, it's entirely possible that she's the breadwinner in her life with Leonard.

Let's go back to her friendship with Sheldon for a moment, which is where I think Penny really shines. In the season 9 episode "The Celebration Experimentation," Sheldon freaks out when Amy throws him a surprise party, and in a moment of crisis, Penny is the only person who can truly help. While Sheldon hides in the bathroom, Penny comforts him and tells him that she's happy to stay in the room with him for as long as he needs — and it turns out that her support is all Sheldon actually needs. Penny's growth is most obvious in her friendship with Sheldon, and it's safe to say that, after the pilot, the show gave her a pretty great arc.

"The Big Bang Theory" is streaming on Max now.