Brought to life by the genius creators Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady, The Big Bang Theory has been a mighty favorite among fans for decades. Even with all its awkward and embarrassing segments that could either crack you up or cringe you down to the core, the show is deemed perfect by fans just the way it is. But, surprisingly enough, not all of its elements were supposed to be this way.
For instance, Mayim Bialik’s Amy Farrah Fowler’s first love in the series was never Jim Parsons’ Sheldon Cooper, even though these two characters have widely been shipped as perfect to the core. Instead, this position was held by someone else in Amy’s heart; one that could quite easily leave fans stunned. This is because, as Lorre shared, this one person was none other than Penny!
The Big Bang Theory: Amy’s First Love Was Actually Penny!
As fans already know, Mayim Bialik‘s Amy shares incredibly nerdy features just like her onscreen love interest Sheldon (which also laid the very ground allowing these two to connect). However, before Sheldon, there was someone else in the series who stole away Amy’s heart first: Kaley Cuoco’s Penelope ‘Penny’ Hofstadter.
This has been revealed by the creators of the smash-hit show themselves. Moreover, the reason behind this is rather heartwarming as well. While Amy was denied the prospect of having girlfriends and leading a social life around women as a youngster, she was able to find these very traits in Kaley Cuoco‘s character.
That being said, it becomes only understandable why she was so taken by Penelope that the creators even called her to be her “first love” before Sheldon. During an interview with Entertainment Weekly, masterminds Lorre and Prady discussed elaborately the same, emphasizing just why this take was so necessary for Amy.
Accentuating his point, Chuck Lorre said:
Originally, Amy’s first love was Penny. She wanted girlfriends and a social life with other women because she was denied that as a child. That was the first breakthrough with her character. It wasn’t with Sheldon, it was with the girls.
Thanks to Cuoco’s Penelope, not only was Amy able to do everything she wasn’t allowed to do as a kid, but she could also “go through the kind of adolescence she wished she could have gone through as a kid,” finally being allowed to experience all those “sleepovers and shopping and all those things her mother hadn’t let her do,” as Bill Prady explained.
And thanks to Penelope, Amy was also able to melt Parsons’ Sheldon.
Penny Also Helped Amy Melt Sheldon’s Awkward Personality
Because she finally got to hang around girls all she wanted and lead a life around women she had envisioned since her adolescence, Mayim Bialik’s character in TBBT was able to develop and evolve as a woman. And because of this evolution, she also managed to push such unconditional love toward Jim Parsons‘ Sheldon that it finally melted him.
As Prady explained this perspective during the same interview:
That’s part of the evolution, but she also pulled Sheldon along. He was faced with the question of: Either I have to do things this person wants or not have this person in my life. It was the first time he really confronts the idea of having to change because he doesn’t want to lose this person from his life.
Well, thanks to such “unconditional love” that was thrust at the socially awkward Sheldon, he was finally able to establish a person as one of the greatest priorities of his life, thus, melting and changing in a way no one could have ever imagined for him. (Even though it took around five years!) And the one to go home with a majority of this credit was none other than Penny.
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