Take me back to the work that you have done at Glamour as a senior editor. What was it like walking that parallel path between being an editor and “The Big Bang Theory”? What initially grabbed your attention as someone who works in the journalism industry?
I wish I could say I started watching “The Big Bang Theory” regularly from 2007 on, but that would not be the truth — so I’ll be very honest about it. I remember watching the series in 2007, the first few episodes when it came on, and this was before I started at Glamour. I remember thinking that the pilot was a funny show, but I didn’t keep up with it. I dropped off after the first few episodes. A lot of that was because at the time, you have different interests and different things, and there was only one female character, and I wasn’t super interested in what the guys were doing originally.
When I joined Glamour in 2011, I started interviewing the cast at the different award shows because they were nominated around that time. It was Season 4 — so the SAG Awards, Golden Globes, Emmys. I got to know them as people first outside of the show … Later that holiday season, I was home in St. Louis with a bad stomach flu. I remember laying on the couch, and my mom said, “Your father and I have started watching the funniest show on TV.” “Guys, what is? I’m ready to die on the couch.” They’re like, “The Big Bang Theory.” I’m like, “Fine. Put it on. I don’t care. I’ll watch whatever.” They put it on, and my mom explained these character quirks and traits and who they were.
By the time I got over that stomach flu, I was a full-on “Big Bang Theory” fan. I could not wait the next time I saw the cast to start telling them, “Guys, I actually have started watching the show now, and I love it so much.” I went back and started watching it, and at that point, we realized that our readership at Glamour was interested in the show because they had brought on Melissa [Rauch] and Mayim [Bialik], which changed the dynamic and opened up so many different stories. We realized, “There’s an interest here. This is not a show that is just for guys or just for people obsessed with comic books or science. This is universal.” That’s where we started to realize, “We might be onto something here in our coverage.”
I was watching it every week and writing about it — not just recaps, but actual think pieces where you dig into what was happening with the characters and why it was important. That’s where it started. It really began, though, knowing these actors and these producers as people first, instead of the stories, which in some way helped me because I was more interested in them than the show. Then I got it, and I was like, “Okay. I see what this is about.”
It’s such a character-driven show. I don’t think it’s the type of show you can hop into the middle of and be like, “I get it.” A lot of people do that and [are] like, “I don’t understand.” You need to see where these characters came from, and that’s the intersection of why it worked so well between the Glamour readership and what we saw on screen. It was about who these people are, why we were seeing them on TV that was different from so many other characters we’ve seen, and why they were resonating.
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