The Big Bang Theory Details That Will Unlock Your Inner Nerd

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"The Big Bang Theory" quietly debuted on CBS in 2007. Once reruns of the show started running around the clock on local stations and cable, the ensemble sitcom exploded in popularity. While those reruns dominate the list of most-watched cable shows, the original episodes routinely rank near the top of the weekly network TV ratings — it's been the most-watched sitcom on TV for years.

It's a low-key security blanket of a show for millions of Americans who enjoy the personal and professional adventures of the Caltech-based group of (mostly) super-genius scientists, including prickly and particular theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), friendly experimental physicist Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki), lovelorn and sensitive astrophysicist Raj (Kunal Nayyar), and socially awkward neurobiologist Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik). 

Here's a look at some stories and scandals behind the scenes of the America's favorite sitcom about science nerds and the people who love them.

Over the years, the show has mined a lot of comedy from Bernadette's voice. When she's just talking to Howard or her friends, she speaks in a quiet, mousy, high-pitched way. But when she gets angry, she switches to loud (yet still high-pitched) moments of screaming rage. Neither of those voices come naturally to the actress behind Bernadette, Melissa Rauch, who sounds nothing like Bernadette in real life. In fact, her regular, off-screen speaking voice is quite normal — it's reminiscent of co-star Kaley Cuoco's, just a bit lower.

Rauch took her inspiration for Bernadette from a source close to home: her own mother. Although the two women share vocal DNA, they have one major difference — Bernadette lacks Rauch's mother's New Jersey accent. "Tonally, it's very similar," Rauch explained at a PaleyFest event. This means that when Bernadette would imitate Howard's late mother, who spoke with a Jersey accent, she was likely doing a fully accurate impression of her mom.

In the early years of "The Big Bang Theory," Johnny Galecki dated one of the loveliest actresses in all of television, while Cuoco dated a handsome TV star herself. And both managed to keep their relationship secret. Surprise: Galecki and Cuoco dated each other, concurrent with their characters' budding romantic interest in one another... and almost nobody knew about it.

It wasn't until 2010, well after the couple amicably split, that either said anything publicly about their time together. Cuoco told company magazine CBS Watch! that she had dated Galecki "for almost two years. It was such a huge part of my life and nobody knew about it." That included never going "anywhere together." Three years later, Galecki gave his side of the story to CBS Watch! "We're dear friends, still," he said. "Kaley's not just an ex, she's a part of my life." So why were they so private about things? "I just don't like to speak about it," Galecki said. "And not because I'm trying to be enigmatic; I just worry that it will conflict with people's acceptance of Leonard and Penny."

Co-creator Bill Prady says he heard Sheldon's special calm-down song being sung at his daughter's preschool. Assuming it was in the public domain, he added it to the show, where it's been used multiple times and on scores of "The Big Bang Theory" merchandise. In December 2015, however, the family of a New Hampshire preschool teacher named Edith Newlin sued CBS and Bill Prady Productions for copyright infringement, alleging they lifted lyrics without permission from a song Newlin wrote in the 1930s called "Warm Kitty." The main difference: The Newlin piece begins, "Warm kitty, soft kitty, little ball of fur." The Big Bang version starts out, "Soft kitty, warm kitty, little ball of fur." It appeared as such in a 1937 book called "Songs for the Nursery School."

In March 2017, U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald dismissed the suit, ruling that Prady hadn't violated any copyright laws because Newlin's descendants couldn't actually prove that they had a copyright on "Warm Kitty."

Canadian pop-rock band Barenaked Ladies is responsible for "The Big Bang Theory Theme," which generates revenue for the band every time it's played on an episode of "The Big Bang Theory," which is quite often. The band has even recorded an extended version of it and included it on the band's greatest hits album. The catchy number has since made its way into the band's set list when they play live. But it's all not without controversy. Although longtime Barenaked Ladies member Steven Page left the band in 2009, he says he was promised a 20 percent cut of any profits the song generated. According to Page, he hasn't seen a dime of "The Big Bang Theory" theme song money. He filed suit, alleging that front man Ed Robertson has kept all the money for himself. According to legal documents, Page believes he's owed somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 million by the rest of the group, with whom he once, ironically, recorded the song "If I Had a Million Dollars."

Most of the cast of "The Big Bang Theory" are seasoned television veterans. Some, such as Mayim Bialik, Johnny Galecki, and Kaley Cuoco, all started acting when they were children. They've all been knocking around Hollywood for a while, and some had pre-existing relationships before "Big Bang." (Bialik, then of "Blossom," invited Galecki, then of "Roseanne," to her sixteenth birthday, but he missed it because he got in a motorcycle accident on the way. And Galecki and recurring guest star Sara Gilbert played a couple on "Roseanne" for years.) 

Jim Parsons and Kaley Cuoco didn't know each other at all before "The Big Bang Theory," and they actually met for the first time while auditioning for the show on the same day. Cuoco introduced herself, but Parsons was busy, trying to figure out how to work his new Blackberry device. Cuoco said she remembered thinking Parsons would make a "hilarious Sheldon," although it's amusingly ironic that the man who would soon play a brilliant scientist couldn't get a simple consumer gadget to function properly.

For all of Chuck Lorre's success as a TV creator and producer, Jim Parsons had never heard of him when he was about to audition for "The Big Bang Theory." Well, actually, he thought the show was created by a different, similarly-named successful show business type. Parsons said on "The Late Show with David Letterman" that when his agent called him to say he'd landed an audition for the new "Chuck Lorre show," Parsons got confused and thought the agent meant Chuck Woolery, the host of game shows like "Scrabble" and "Love Connection." That made Parsons less than enthusiastic about the audition — after all, he figured it was a sitcom written by a game show host who hadn't worked prominently in TV since the 1980s. "I thought, why are they so excited about it?" Parsons admitted. "We should see what the man has to offer before we're like, 'It's a new Chuck Woolery pilot!'"

In 2011, a photographer named Denis Riek spotted a tiny organism in the Brunswick River in the Australian state of New South Wales. Riek knew it was a jellyfish but couldn't readily identify it, so he sent his photos to jellyfish expert Dr. Lisa-ann Gershwin. After two years of research, Gershwin and her colleague, taxonomist Peter Davie, confirmed that the 15-millimeter creature was a previously undiscovered jellyfish. As one of the discoverers, Gershwin got to help name the species, and she went with Bazinga rieki. The first part of the name refers to Sheldon Cooper's catchphrase cry of triumph, "Bazinga!" — not unlike that of a scientist shouting "Eureka!" at a moment of great discovery. But Dr. Gershwin says it also refers to a musical instrument. "The name bazinga also refers to a seven-string harp, and the straight radial canals of this new species are reminiscent of such strings." (Bazinga!)

Just before CBS started airing the 12th season of "The Big Bang Theory." the show's powers that be announced that the upcoming batch of episodes would be its last. Co-creator and executive producer Chuck Lorre had gathered the cast in his office on the set on August 22, 2018, where star Jim Parsons, through tears, announced that he was leaving the show at season's end. Immediately after, Lorre told the cast that everyone would be leaving at season's end, because he'd opted to end the series rather than do it without Parsons (or Sheldon). According to Deadline, Parsons told Lorre of his decision a few days before that meeting, and plenty of executives secretly (although unsuccessfully) tried to get Parsons to change his mind. The four-time Emmy winner may have even turned down as much as $50 million to stay with "The Big Bang Theory" for two more seasons.

Jim Parsons' occasionally sputtered utterance of "Bazinga!" is a classic TV catchphrase that ranks with the all-time great T-shirt-worthy TV expressions, such as "Cowabunga!" or "No soup for you!" It's Sheldon's preferred term of triumph for a well-executed prank on his scientist friends, such as jumping out of a ball pit, or emerging from the cushions of a couch. (Plus, it's fun to say "Bazinga!" Give it a try.) 

The phrase — and the proper time to say it — is a direct carryover from the "The Big Bang Theory" writers room. Staff writer Stephen Engel, who wrote for the show in 2008 and 2009, loved to set up fun and innocuous practical jokes to rib the other scribes. One of his favorites: slicing up a grapefruit and then taping it back together. "I'd open it up and Stephen would say, 'Bazinga!'" co-creator and producer Bill Prady said at a 2013 PaleyFest event. "It was Stephen's word for 'gotcha.'"

Around 2005, Bill Prady approached Chuck Lorre, his colleague from "Dharma and Greg," looking for a new project because he was unhappy producing "Related," a WB sitcom about four sisters. According to "The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series," Prady and Lorre devised the idea of a woman who moves to Los Angeles to follow her dreams. They couldn't get anywhere, and then Prady told Lorre stories about the eccentrics he worked with when he was a computer programmer in the 1980s — very smart but lacking life skills. "And I recall saying, 'Well that's the show! That's the show we should be doing!" Lorre said.

The problem: Such a show wouldn't be visually compelling. "It's hard to show people at computers in a multi-cam because they're hunched over a computer," Prady said. "I just remember thinking out loud, 'What's smart that you do standing up?' And then as I was writing, I said, 'Oh, I'm writing on a whiteboard,' which quickly became, 'Oh, scientists!'"

They'd also incorporate their original idea of a woman discovering herself in Los Angeles — that's Penny — but Lorre and Prady briefly considered having the lead female character be a robot built by the two male scientists. "I wrote a test scene and had a couple actors read the scene for us," Lorre said. "And they were halfway through the scene when I went, 'Never mind.'"

After Macaulay Culkin turned down the role of Leonard, casting director Nikki Valko suggested Johnny Galecki. He wasn't interested. "He had gotten very fit and was doing a very sexy role on Broadway," said casting director Ken Miller in "The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series." "He just felt like he had moved on from the nerdier roles." Galecki said no on three separate occasions, but once he read a full script, he was all in. "I was drawn to the Leonard role, especially since it seemed like Leonard might have a better chance at romantic relationships on the show," Galecki said.

Another early candidate for Leonard was Kevin Sussman, whom Lorre actually thought might be a better fit elsewhere on the show. He was offered and accepted the role of Howard Wolowitz — only for rival network ABC to put the blocks on it. While Sussman had been written out of his role on "Ugly Betty" by this point, ABC wasn't about to let CBS have one of their actors, and they claimed the right to his services. During Season 2, the writers of "The Big Bang Theory" created the role of comic book store owner Stuart Bloom for Sussman.

When the role of Amy Farrah Fowler was created, producers narrowed their choice of actor down to two: Mayim Bialik and Kate Micucci. Bialik got the part, while Micucci would eventually land the role of Raj's romantic interest Lucy.

To transition between scenes and locations, every episode of "The Big Bang Theory" employs brief interstitial segments. These animated scenes feature tiny, microscopic things like atoms and molecules flying around the screen and bouncing into each other, accompanied by "whooshing" sounds. While these bumpers may seem random, and just another way for "The Big Bang Theory" to hammer home its scientific sensibility, they all mean something, and they reflect the tone of the scene that viewers just watched.

"We reached out to the guy who animated planets on '3rd Rock from the Sun,'" said editor and executive producer Peter Chakos in "The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series." "I started to match what my comedic take on the end of a scene was with what the interstitial was doing. I gave them names." According to Chakos, "Up Yours" — where an atom moves up like an arm in motion — is used after a snappy comeback. The swirly "Oogle Google" appears after silly moments, while "Coming at Ya" shows atoms heading straight for the camera. "And then if the scene was with Penny, Amy, and Bernadette, I had one with three atoms called 'Triple Threat,'" Chakos said.

"The Big Bang Theory" debuted on CBS in September 2007, and while not immediately the smash hit it would become, it earned moderate viewership numbers. The same week that the series broadcast its seventh episode, the Writer's Guild of America went on strike (per the The Hollywood Reporter), abruptly ending production on all scripted TV shows. "The Big Bang Theory" had a total of eight fully produced episodes in the can, and with little else to air in light of a dearth of scripted fare, CBS reran those eight episodes often, per "The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series."

The exposure helped build an audience, creating familiarity with viewers who'd already seen "The Big Bang Theory" and providing new entertainment options to those who hadn't. On February 14, 2008, two days after the strike was settled, CBS renewed "The Big Bang Theory," its ratings already substantially increased since the fall. By 2011, the show had been successful enough to produce four seasons worth of episodes, enough for a run of reruns syndicated to cable and local stations. After TBS and Fox stations started running those old episodes around the clock, new installments of "The Big Bang Theory" exploded in CBS primetime. At the end of the 2011-12 season, it finished at #6 in the year-end rankings. The following year, it was the most watched scripted show in the 18-49 age bracket.

Part of Sheldon Cooper's strictly regimented life meant forcing himself and his friends to eat certain things for dinner on each night of the week. On most Friday nights, Sheldon simply had to eat Chinese-American takeout, more often than not a standing order of General Tso's chicken, broccoli beef, shrimp in lobster sauce, and vegetable lo mein. And it was all real Chinese food, not prop food, although it was rustled together and carefully prepared by the show's prop master Scott London, who used to be an aspiring chef. "Scott put his heart and soul into every little takeout box that we had to eat," Johnny Galecki said (via "The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series"). "And he knew exactly what amount of spice that each cast member wanted."

London would make all the Chinese food for a dining scene on the day it was scheduled to shoot. His rice mix consisted of instant brown rice, sriracha, soy sauce, and a vegetable medley. Galecki was partial to London's vegetarian wonton soup, while Kaley Cuoco preferred wonton noodles and dumplings, which used to be obtained from a restaurant near the set, until they went out of business. "Scott started making the dumplings himself," Simon Helberg said.