As his megahit CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” prepared to end its run, Chuck Lorre came up with a wild pitch for a spinoff. Not “Young Sheldon” — that prequel was already, on the air and doing gangbusters. No, Lorre had something even more fantastical in mind.
“I had a strange idea that there was a portal in the back of the comic book store that led to other dimensions, and that Stuart, played by Kevin Sussman, could lead us on an action adventure-comedy-science-fiction mashup,” he tells Variety.
But here’s the rub: “No one really liked the idea,” he admits. Hard to believe, especially coming right off one of the most successful TV comedies of all time, that someone like Lorre would face a network and studio rejection. But Lorre says those programming execs were looking for something a bit more conventional and a little less — well, whatever it was that Lorre had conjured.
“Everybody wanted a spinoff of ‘The Big Bang Theory,’” he says. “They wanted it with the principal players, which is understandable. I didn’t want to do a spinoff with the principal players. I wanted to do something entirely different, and challenging — something I’d never done before. Which is certainly what we have now.”
