I Watched TBBT’s Scrapped Pilot Episode & I Hate What They Did to Sheldon

For years that it ran on TV, The Big Bang Theory repeatedly convinced most of its viewers that Sheldon Cooper’s quirky nature had made him weird enough to become friends with, but not many may know that Sheldon’s initial image was way more different — and way worse.

Despite the character’s often annoying traits, he still found lots of love from the show’s fans, mostly due to his awkwardness and lack of experience when it came to social interactions.

However, it wasn’t even that much of a problem considering that The Big Bang Theory’s creators first saw him as a more unhinged person, but, luckily, were quick to change their mind.

The show’s first rough draft aka unaired pilot proved that Sheldon could be doing much better even considering his constant struggles with social norms. The episode features only Jim Parsons and Johnny Galecki’s characters out of all the lead cast and sees Leonard and Sheldon trying to hit on a girl they meet after both donate for a sperm bank.

The whole awkwardness of the situation is multiplied when Sheldon suddenly makes it clear that he actually had a lot of interest in dating women, also suggesting that he even saw some of them naked (still clarifying that none of them was his relative).

When Leonard invites Katie, who was initially supposed to be played by Kaley Cuoco, to spend some days in their apartment until she finds a place to live in, Sheldon doesn’t mind it at all and even is attracted to Katie as well.

There’s no need for me to remind that the original Sheldon would never allow a stranger to stay within the same space with him for several days in a row.

According to The Big Bang Theory’s co-creator Chuck Lorre, the unaired pilot was cursed in so many ways that it was decided to drop it and completely change everything. As Lorre stressed, the episode featured a wrong representation of Sheldon, another lead actress and, on top of that, never introduced Simon Helberg’s Howard and Kunal Nayyar’s Raj.

However, “there were two remarkable things that worked perfectly, and that was Johnny and Jim. We rewrote the thing entirely, and then we were blessed with Kaley, Simon, and Kunal”.

The creators’ decision to quickly create a different story until it was too late was probably what eventually let The Big Bang Theory run for so long.

With Sheldon being an unhinged womanizer and someone else replacing Kaley Cuoco as Penny, there’s no guarantee that the show wouldn’t be dead after a couple of seasons.

Source: CBR