The definitive book about The Big Bang Theory recalls how creators and cast made a hit sitcom out of stories about physicists and theorems
- Jessica Radloff has written a love letter to the sitcom about physicists that ran for 13 years. She delves into how the show evolved, and its global popularity
- Her book is based on scores of interviews with cast and crew of the TV series, and 150 of her own articles written about the show’s 279 episodes
Bazinga! Sheldon Cooper used the word when he had a victory.
Jessica Radloff could use it about her book, The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series.
All too often, definitive and inside compendiums are neither. In this case, Radloff delivers an oral history that’s an exhaustive dive into the 279 episodes (and one unaired pilot) of the beloved sitcom that ran on US network CBS from 2006 to 2019.
“A show like The Big Bang Theory is not supposed to be a mainstream success,” Radloff says. “Not when the two lead characters are a theoretical physicist and an experimental physicist. Or when episodes involved the Born-Oppenheimer approximation and Schrödinger’s cat. Or when a lot of attention is paid to whiteboards and theorems.”
Radloff wrote some 150 articles about the series. She’s Glamour’s senior west coast editor and had all of the actors and executive producers’ cooperation in this. Over two years, Radloff did scores of interviews and wove them into a hefty book.