It’s not often that failed pilots get a second chance, and even if they do, you don’t tend to hear about it. With the former, it’s because it’s difficult for creators to challenge a networks first impressions, and with the latter, those involved with a reworked pilot are generally ashamed of the original product, and they attempt to bury. There are obviously exceptions to this rule – Joss Whedon may have disowned the Buffy pilot, but he made sure to include the Dollhouse pilot on the DVD set. For Chuck Lorre, it seems he was able to get a second chance to redo the original The Big Bang Theory pilot mostly due to his positive relationship with CBS. Two and a Half Men had given large returns for CBS since its premiere in 2003, so even though the network passed on the original pilot in 2006, they were willing to give the show a second shot, and a year later they picked up the show after the pilot was reworked into the format with which we are all so familiar.
Lorre, for what it’s worth, absolutely deplores the original pilot, saying that it “sucked” and compared releasing the pilot on DVD as akin to “show[ing] your failures.” So, unless you spend a little time snooping around Wikipedia, and then a bit more time Googling “unaired big bang theory pilot”, you’d be hard pressed to know that there even was an unseen pilot for the show. If, however, you were to go through the trouble of looking it up, you would end up watching this:
In all honesty, I’m not sure if this pilot deserves the derision that Lorre places on it, since I enjoyed it about as much as I enjoyed the second pilot – which is to say that it was okay, but it would be a stretch to call it ‘good’. The Big Bang Theory is a solid, funny show, but it had to overcome a lot of hurdles in its first season – the show’s tendency to laugh with the nerds as opposed to with them, poor integration of nerd humor, the forced romantic subplots, the show’s poor depiction of Penny as an overly dumb pretty girl – so it’s best to view this pilot in context. Of course it’s not that good; most pilots, regardless of how good of an individual episode it is, tend to be among the worst episodes that a show ever produces. This is because it takes shows – especially comedies – to find the rhythms of it actors, characters, and jokes, all of which are key in delivering top-notch episodes.
So let’s not focus on the quality of the episode, what did or didn’t work, so much as what’s different. As this pilot stands, it seems as if Big Bang would have evolved into a different show, one that would have inadvertently answered some of the criticisms that are lobbed against the current iteration of the show, while also creating a whole new dearth of problems. Let’s go through each of these differences in turn.
The united nerd front. Perhaps the most obvious difference here, the one that will have most fans crying foul, is the fact that Sheldon not only seems to possess an active sexual drive, but has actually had sex – multiple times and with multiple woman. While I feel first and foremost to remind those decrying masses is that the second pilot also opened up with a visit to the sperm bank, albeit one that ended before he was able to make a deposit. While both pilots technically assert that Sheldon is sexually active, the second one avoids having Sheldon actually go through with the act, thus freeing him up to be essentially asexual later on.
But let’s go back to that Sheldon of the first pilot, the one that is sexually active, and that would have been much more problematic to the show because of it. It’s not just that his sexual activity destroys what we currently know about the character, but that it indicates that his character was much closer personality-wise to Leonard. While this does help the audience to understand why Leonard is able to remain friends with Sheldon – something that would grow increasingly nonsensical as the series wore on – it makes for a fairly boring dynamic between the two leads. For everything that Leonard is – sad, lonely, pathetic, awkward – Sheldon is as well, even if he presents it in a slightly different way.
Most of this comes from the fact that Sheldon’s personality quirks, such as is inability to detect sarcasm or his pickiness when it comes to seating, are still present in the character, but they aren’t really couched in anything. Whereas the current iteration of the show presents Sheldon as having something close to high-functioning Asperger’s (without of course saying so), which allows us to understand why he acts the way he does, here his quirks are more for the sake of showing that he’s awkward, and not for any sort of characterization. Here he just another awkward, horny nerd, just like Leonard, even if he presents his awkwardness differently. Such similar characterization between the two leads would have led to tit-for-tat conversations where both sides would have sounded all too similar to one another, something that would have been a big blow to the show’s laugh factor.
Loss of a romantic lead. That’s right, that’s not Penny. That’s Katie, the “tough” and “street-smart” girl who moves in with them, and for the most part, I think I might have preferred her to Penny as the show’s female lead – at least at first. While Penny has grown over the show’s run, and Kaley Cuoco has become better at finding the nuance of the character, let us not forget that at the outset, Penny was a very broadly drawn character – as was most of the cast – and she really had only one role: to look hot so as to be a viable love interest for Leonard, and the show suffered from having here only play out one role.
Katie, by contrast, is still asked to look hot, and yes, Leonard is clearly attracted to her, but the show seems to shy away from making her a straight up romantic interest. Instead, it would appear from this pilot that Katie is meant to serve as a guide to the real world for Sheldon and Leonard (at least based on the last couple of minutes), and that might eventually bud into a real friendship. This is not to say that the show would never have done a romantic storyline – it’s pretty much inevitable that they would – but that they would probably put it off to a later date. It also helps that Katie moves in with the guys, thus meaning that her presence wouldn’t feel as shoehorned, and that whatever relationship the three of the them manage to strike up would hopefully come about more naturally.
While I applaud the show for avoiding the overly easy “will they or won’t they” hook, I’m not sure that this would have worked as an ongoing plot, and not only because Lorre tends to avoid any sort of serialization with his comedies. Katie trying to bring the nerds into the real world doesn’t have any sort of longevity, and the show soon would be scrambling for new plotlines. I think the pilot attempts to balance this out with Gilda (who also happens to be the only nerd with any sort of individuality) and her apparent crush on Leonard, but this is unfortunately treated as mostly a joke, so again, I can’t see this plot lasting long enough to justify its appearance here.
All that melodrama. As a sitcom producer, Chuck Lorre straddles two approaches to the traditional sitcom. The first, as exemplified by Dharma & Greg, insists on the nice, treacly ending, and the second, as exemplified by Two and a Half Men, maintains keeping that cynical edge at all times. Though there is not the slightest bit of pathos to be found in Men, I can’t help but feeling as if Lorre has a hard time letting go of the emotional moments he was used to writing into his comedies, and that he was trying to help bring it back with this pilot.
The problem is that it doesn’t really seem to work here, for a variety of reasons. For starters, the emotions are laid on way too thick and way too bare to be believable, especially considering that these scenes follow what had up until that point been some very cynical comedy. (Also not helpful: They cram all of the emotional moments into the last 5-6 minutes, leaving very little breathing room for jokes.) TBBT as it is now is a very cynical show, and though it sometimes reaches for those emotional moments, it’s quite clear why the show is that way – it’s very hard to mix cynical humor and pathos, and Lorre clearly doesn’t have the talents to do so effectively.
Some of the problems with this pilot – the show laughing with the nerds as opposed to with them and the poor integration of nerd humor especially – did carry over unto the second pilot (as did a lot of exchanges that were lifted word-for-word), and to look at both pilots equally, one needs to consider the flaws in both . And while I said that I like both pilots equally, I think the second one serves as the better jumping off point. By pitting Leonard’s personality against Sheldon’s, the show made sure to have a powerful dynamic at its center. By buying into the hokey forced romance of Leonard and Penny, the show bought itself the longevity it needed to figure out its characters, so that it could go beyond that simple story hook. By replacing Gilda with Raj and Howard, it opened up the show to a wider variety of character interactions, and eventually paved the way to add a new stable of female cast mates for Penny to interact with. And by avoiding the melodrama that dragged the original pilot down, the show was able to make sure that it focused on the comedy, and thus became the (mostly) hilarious show that it is today.
All of this goes to show that sometimes creators need a second chance to get their pilots just right, to see what does and doesn’t work on the screen, and what needs to be reworked to make the show better. Usually this takes place in the form of reshoots and casting changes, things that happen in between a pilot getting picked up and airing on TV. But often times the pilot is so bad that it doesn’t warrant a pick-up, and few are so lucky as to get a second chance. So maybe networks should take a lesson from The Big Bang Theory and learn that it’s okay to send a pilot back and ask for a second run through; it just might result in a hit.
Next Week: The many complicated steps to the creation of Family Guy.
No comments:
Post a Comment