a finale tinged with melancholy

En 2007, a pretty waitress named Penny (Kaley Cuoco) discreetly moves to the American channel CBS and, in Pasadena, on the same floor as Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) and Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecky), two roommate scientists with an oversized IQ but with underdeveloped social skills. A real sentimental big bang for one of them, who instantly falls in love, and the beginning of a small television revolution for series fans, who, against all probability, will elevate the comedy created by Chuck Lorre (My Uncle Charlie) to the rank of cult sitcom long before its triumphant finale, twelve years later.

Because the brainless apprentice actress, who distributes coffees at the Cheesecake Factory while waiting – in vain – for fame, her gifted neighbors, lovers of Thai cuisine, knowledgeable about Star Wars and compulsive gamblers Dungeons and Dragonsas well as Raj and Howard, their equally misfit friends (one is an inhibited physicist, the other an obsessed engineer), defy the laws of the then popular TV series, where the geeks are not yet on the scent of holiness. Marvel's superheroes did not explode the box office and Klingon (the language of aliens in Star Trekperfectly mastered by Sheldon & co) or the lightsabers (which they brandish throughout the episodes) still remain reserved for a few initiates.