10 Cringiest Moments From TBBT Unaired Pilot We Wish We Could Unsee

When you look back at the original pilot for any great show, you typically find that it doesn’t do justice to the thing we’ve grown to know and love. But sometimes you can see the kernel of the successful production and understand how it came to be what it did.

This is not the case with the unaired pilot for The Big Bang Theory. In fact, when you watch the pilot back, you wonder how the idea ever made it to our screens. But maybe that’s the point. The idea showed promise. It was the execution that was appalling.

Here are the 10 cringiest things about the TBBT unaired pilot:

1. The music

Ok, a full-on theme tune is never really necessary at this stage of a show’s evolution. But a tacky jingle followed by someone shouting ‘Science!’ is in many ways worse than having no opening music at all. It was dreadful – and it kinda set the scene for what was to come.

2. Masturbation overkill

The idea of a couple of geeks making money in this way is actually funny. Some of the dialogue between Leonard and Sheldon is also funny. As is the fact that it gets brought up at other moments in a sort of awkward way. But, boy, did they flog that horse! It was as if the writers thought that frequently mentioning masturbation would make up for the lack of real humour in the episode. It didn’t.

3. Katie

You can see how Penny emerged from the Katie character. But at this point, the female lead was woefully underwhelming. Indeed, Katie was a walking, talking stereotype of a good-looking girl. Everything was based around her having sex or not and the old trope of a bed-hopping girl who gets drunk and works in a beauty salon was one that had already had its day by this time.

4. Sheldon’s sudden interest in Katie

From the moment they first saw her crying in the street to when the boys followed Katie into their flat, Sheldon was against the idea of engaging with her in any way. This fits the character we eventually grew to like.

But for him to suddenly change tack the minute he entered the room and saw that she was impressed by his board was ridiculous. Her interest in what he was doing may have piqued his interest in her, but the speed of the change made no sense.

5. Sheldon’s sudden lack of interest in Katie

When Katie left, Sheldon went right back to not caring about her. He even indicated that he had made no attempt to encourage her to stay. Again, there was no real explanation for this rapid change of opinion. At least when Katie gave her explanation to Leonard about how it was fine for her to go out drinking so soon after crying over her breakup, it fit her one-dimensional character. Clearly, at this point in the development, Sheldon’s character hadn’t yet been fully formed.

6. Sheldon had had sex!

What? Sheldon’s lack of sexual experience was a major part of his character in TBBT. To introduce this revelation in the pilot would have undermined so much of the full series and may well have been a deal-breaker in terms of determining whether fans could get on board with the show.

7. That dance

If they were going to dance, it had to be reluctantly and awkwardly. But it could (and should) have been memorable for the right reasons. Think back to David Brent dancing in The Office. We were laughing at the character but with the show. What we got from Sheldon, Leonard and Gilda was a piece of ‘choreography’ that was reminiscent of Boyzone on The Late Late Show.

8. The apartment paradox

In the restaurant, we had just learned that Sheldon was very particular about which was his table. This facet of his character was explored in some detail and was a key part of the Sheldon we came to know in TBBT. But his apartment is a mess. This was jarring and at odds with what we’d just found out about him. If the apartment was to be messy, it should have been a point of contention between Leonard and Sheldon.

9. Almost everything about Gilda

This character didn’t work. But that’s forgivable in a pilot. She sort of represented everybody else that needed to be brought in if the show got the greenlight – and she certainly demonstrated that the main cast needed to be male-heavy from the start. But she still felt shoehorned in and added nothing to the episode.

10. It was too crude

The unaired pilot’s focus on…well the things mentioned above may be indicative of what producers were looking for at the time. But it’s also a bit sad to think the writers had so little faith in their true concept that they basically churned out something that may well have run a few seasons but would never have enjoyed any long-term success. Thankfully, somebody somewhere saw through the dirt and identified the gem.

You can watch the unreleased TBBT pilot here.