The End Result of My Herculean Big Bang Theory Spec

Author’s Note: This is the first newsletter where I’m reposting a piece I wrote that’s no longer hosted on the internet. My archive is pretty solid because I always figured this would happen eventually. In the future, I’ll probably be paywalling archival stuff unless it’s insanely popular. 

This story is tough to explain if you weren’t following me ten years ago, but it basically goes like this: I went to Pepperdine, and through Pepperdine I knew a bunch of aspiring comedy writers. A hip thing to do back then was write an “edgy” spec script for whatever was popular at the time. You know, like a Seinfeld where Jerry kills his whole family. By and large, I couldn’t stand this stuff, because it never actually felt radical. Just felt like adding cuss words and murder.

So I decided to do a Big Bang Theory spec that actually felt edgy to me personally, and then bother people at CBS with it until they blocked me on social media. I picked Big Bang because I’d never seen it, wasn’t going to see it, and couldn’t stand the promos. 

Who knows what I was going for all these years later, but I know I wanted to riff on Leopold and Loeb, MKUltra and midcentury scientific hubris. Something about the actual problem of evil. There’s some Screwtape Letters in there.

I think it holds up. Sorta wish I’d written a “real” version instead of something basically meant to go viral, back when people did that, but I never aimed to use it in my packet or anything. I just wanted to bother people with it, do these little micro-blasts of insane bullshit and post them bright and early to 10,000 followers on a school day. (Me and my guitarist cousin used to call this “bringing the doom.”)

I had plans for two sequels but then I got a real job and never had time to write what was quickly becoming three pulp books.

The first, here, was gonna be about MKUltra and I kinda pictured Sheldon as a James Mason character.

The second was gonna be set in Guatemala with Sheldon as a vague stand-in for both British colonialists and Pablo Escobar. The story was going to be mostly co-opted from what I guessed the plot of the then-lost 1941 film This Man is Dangerous was. Leonard (Gene Hackman) goes looking for Sheldon, once thought to be dead but rumored to be alive, with the intent to bring him to justice. Car bombs go off, drug deals go bad, churches burn down. Eventually Leonard tracks a viciously dexedrine-addled Sheldon to a boat he’s using as a safe house. They get into a fight that graphically and specifically almost kills them. Sheldon hits his head on rusted steel and starts to bleed out, choking out the words “useless, useless,” like John Wilkes Booth said when he was killed. (I read a lot of Guatemalan history books and half-memorized The Judges of the Secret Court, because I think it’s endlessly funny to totally over-research something that clearly doesn’t matter at all.) 

The third story was kind of a Warren Beatty political thriller, something like The Parallax View plus The Manchurian Candidate: Sheldon survives, sneaks across the border into America, kills a cop when he’s busted in El Paso, and makes his way to Washington D.C. to assassinate the vice-president. Leonard, a retired and divorced detective, chases him the whole way, through seedy motels and gas stations, sleepless nights, cartons of cigarettes. Sheldon beats him though, and kills the VP at a whistle-stop in Baltimore. When Leonard finally catches up with Sheldon at a ranch in Virginia a few days later, Sheldon prepares a grand monologue about his justification for the murder, but Leonard shoots him at point blank range and burns the body. Vultures circle overhead. It would have been the least funny thing ever written and I was prepared to read tons of Robert Ludlum and John le Carre and I was going to watch Sidney Pollack and Sydney Lumet even-more-too-much than I already had. 

But I was too far from the joke by then and if I want to write stuff like that I should just write it. I still haven’t, because the joke was the engine. Recluse writes deranged 150 page Big Bang Theory spec, that kind of thing. Anyway, here it is. 

I knew I had to stop when Bill Withers called The Big Bang Theory his favorite show. Normally I don't defer to the tastes of celebrities, but this was one of about four possible exceptions. I had been listening to Bill Withers all day. I had just returned from a road trip that was largely an excuse to sing "Lean On Me" without public scrutiny. I was reading his interview like it was gospel, and I got to that aside, recoiled in my chair, took a deep breath, and said "this is over."

Right, but what was over? My days of trying to crack sitcom writing with the world's most challenging Big Bang Theory script were over. I should have known it when the work stopped being fun. I should have known it six months into the process of writing a 30-page project that I never even came close to registering with the WGA. I should have known it when I started mining archaic philosophy books for dialogue inspiration. I should have known it when the show's executive producer explicitly ordered me not to send him my rough draft. And yet I didn't know it, because I didn't want my life's work to be over.

But the show's season finale is tomorrow, and that's a good time to bring the curtain down. I'm not going to sell my Big Bang Theory spec. I'm not going to copyright it. I'm not even going to distribute it to Chuck Lorre via leaflet campaign, like I repeatedly threatened I would in moments of unchecked bravado. I'm just going to show you the script in its entirety, so that you may know what I tried and failed to do: write the world's greatest study of dictatorial thought, revolutionary priming, the moral decay and relativism of the Harvard curriculum that led to MKUltra, the philosophical motivations behind torture, and above all else, science.

A great many of you have asked me, "Kaleb Horton, did you ever watch a single episode of the damn thing?" and I always hung my head and answered no. I felt it would compromise the integrity of my vision to know more than what I already knew, which was that The Big Bang Theory was about two scientists. Two scientifically driven men of impure motive and questionable morality. I considered it my job to take this simple reality and use it to probe the nature of evil. Because the television landscape was not addressing this question. It hid away from it. I had to shine a light on the cowardice of Hollywood.

Enough rambling. Let me show you the script so you may learn by it even if the masses will never see it. Absorb it. Absorb the privileged information of its pages. And as you absorb it, permit me to note that I have condensed it somewhat. That I have taken concepts originally explored for dozens of pages and reduced them to mere sentences. That I have taken a novel, perhaps a series of novels, and reduced it in pursuit of a pure truth. So gradual reveals become sudden reveals. Major characters are reduced to single lines or eliminated entirely. None of the pages are numbered. And the first page wasn't even relevant to the rest of the story. Do not blame me, however. Blame CBS for failing, yes, me, they failed me, but you also. They failed the country.