I know what you’re thinking — some major shows do continue on without their leads. “The Office” famously continued after Steve Carell stopped playing Michael Scott in the show’s seventh season (though some would probably argue that it should have ended when he left). However, this was not the case with “The Big Bang Theory,” although Jim Parsons said he would have been totally cool with it if it did go on without him.
“There was no pressure from them, and they were very sweet and kind,” Parsons recalled regarding his decision to leave. “But I had a part of me that was hopeful that if other people wanted to keep doing it, that they would find a way to do that. I didn’t feel possessive about it, in that, just because I didn’t want to continue, I didn’t want anyone else to, either. I didn’t feel that at all.”
Writer and producer Lee Arohnson vehemently disagreed with Parsons’ take, though, in the most flattering way possible. “I’ll tell you, without Jim Parsons, there is no 12 years of ‘Big Bang Theory,’” Arohnson told Radloff. “Not to take anything away from the rest of the cast, but […] the show couldn’t have lasted as long as it did without him. The ensemble together was a ’61 Yankees of comedy. Losing any one of them would have been an incredible loss, but Sheldon was irreplaceable — that character and the actor.”
Chuck Lorre had to tell the cast of The Big Bang Theory the show was ending — and it didn’t go well
After the creative team of “The Big Bang Theory” concluded that they could not and would not continue the show without Jim Parsons, they had to sit the entire cast down and tell them. As Jessica Radloff noted in her book, nobody but Simon Helberg even knew it was possible that the show might end; people like Chuck Lorre and Steve Molaro had to wait to see what the studio and CBS thought of the decision to bring the series to a close before they could have any official discussions. As Lorre recalled to Radloff, he’s worried he may not have handled it perfectly, in that he basically made Parsons shoulder the weight of the announcement.
“I’ve often wondered if I misstepped, because I said, ‘You probably wondered why we all called you here,’ and I think I started off by saying, ‘OK, well, Jim … you have the floor,’” Lorre said. “I got the feeling he was upset with me because maybe he thought I was going to lay out the future, but I didn’t think it was my place to do that. So he explained to them that he was ready to say goodbye at the end of season 12. And then I said I didn’t see a path forward without Sheldon, and frankly I didn’t want to see a path forward with anybody leaving the show. I said, ‘Let’s go out on top as the wonderful show that we’ve been blessed to do for 12 years.’ But there was a lot of crying in the room. Kaley, in particular. It was a blow. And there was no way to soften it by giving them a heads-up. I didn’t know any other way to do it.”
Unfortunately, Jim Parsons and Simon Helberg still have misgivings about the way Chuck Lorre broke the news
While the rest of the cast was taken aback by the news that season 12 of “The Big Bang Theory” would be its last, Jim Parsons and Simon Helberg told Jessica Radloff that they were just really not happy with how Chuck Lorre made the announcement — in that they both felt it was unfair to put it all on Parsons. “In terms of the actual, I guess what you could call the cancellation of the show, that occurred in [that] meeting, where we were informed by Chuck that the show was done. That’s what I found to be the most upsetting,” Helberg recalled. “Jim didn’t cancel our show. Jim just finished the run of our show as we all did, contractually, and no one ever asked us to continue doing the show. That is not an exaggeration […] Jim was not in charge of canceling our show or renewing contracts or discussing the future, and I felt that was an unfair burden on him. But that’s my two cents.”
