The Big Bang Theory is currently mid-swansong as CBS is airing its twelfth and final season. Jim Parsons, better known as Sheldon Cooper, is ready to move onto other projects, so series creators Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady are wrapping up their story and bringing their universally beloved characters’ journeys to an end.
It doesn’t feel like twelve years ago that a beautiful, starry-eyed blonde moved in across the hall from a couple of nerds and changed their lives forever, but that’s how long it’s been. That beautiful, starry-eyed blonde’s name was Penny and she has since married one of the nerds, given up her dreams of being a movie star, and become a hugely successful pharmaceutical rep. Kaley Cuoco has gone from being a vaguely recognizable TV actress to being one of the biggest stars in the world. As far as the characters’ journeys go, Penny – paired with Sheldon, who is now in a physical romantic relationship with a woman – has arguably changed the most over the years.
It could also be argued that she is the character with the most flaws in a show with a lot of flawed characters in the cast. For all the success and love that The Big Bang Theory has enjoyed worldwide, a lot of people agree that Penny is one of the worst characters. She has plenty of fans, but she’s far from perfect.
Here are 20 Things Wrong With Penny We All Choose To Ignore.
20. She doesn’t have a last name
Most of the characters in The Big Bang Theory have unique and memorable surnames: Hofstadter, Wolowitz, Koothrappali, Rostenkowski, Kripke, the list goes on. Amy even has three names. She’s Amy Farrah Fowler. Yet, Penny has no last name. She has never been given a surname in all twelve seasons of the show.
Ever since she has been married to Leonard, Penny has been referred to as Penny Hofstadter or Mrs. Hofstadter on a few occasions. But even though we’ve met almost everyone Penny is related to and she’s been a main character since the very beginning, the writers have managed to get away with leaving her without a surname for twelve years. Perhaps we’ll find out in the series finale.
19. She didn’t seem too bothered with Leonard’s mistakes
One of the most controversial plot points in The Big Bang Theory was that Leonard was not always faithful to Penny and that he once kissed another woman while he was working off-shore with some other scientists. He decided to come clean to her about it right after he proposed to her and she agreed to marry him.
For someone who has had a lot of experience in relationships and generally doesn’t allow herself to be pushed around, Penny didn’t seem all that bothered by Leonard’s infidelity. Penny has insinuated when talking about various past boyfriends that a couple of them have been unfaithful to her, so you might think that after going through it all before, she’d realize by now that it’s not a good sign for a relationship.
18. She is completely unsympathetic to Sheldon
While it has not yet been made explicit on the show, many commentators have noticed that Sheldon’s personality quirks are consistent with the symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome and OCD. Even Mayim Bialik, who plays Amy Farrah Fowler on the show and has a Ph.D. in neuroscience in real life, has said that Sheldon appears to have Asperger’s based on his behavior and mannerisms.
Amy wants nothing more than a physical relationship with Sheldon, but whenever the subject comes up, he is visibly uncomfortable. He is barely comfortable holding hands with Amy or kissing her and he definitely has no interest in anything more, and yet Penny is completely unsympathetic to that. Rather than be understanding and compassionate about his mental health issues, she just yells at him like he’s being selfish by not getting physical with Amy.
17. She’s basically a Manic Pixie Dream Girl
The “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” trope refers to a female character in a book or TV show or movie who would not exist in real life and is merely the fantasy of a male writer. The typical Zooey Deschanel character is the epitome of this trope. She is sweet and cute, funny, beautiful, and comes along to make a male character’s dreams come true. “Adorkable” is the word most commonly used to describe a Manic Pixie Dream Girl character.
While Penny is not a total Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she certainly does share some of its traits – and they’re the worst ones. She exists solely to be the unrealistically beautiful and perfect girl of Leonard’s dreams who is way out of his league and who he couldn’t hope of getting together with – and in the end, they get married and live happily ever after together. It’s disingenuous and it’s also a disservice to female viewers who want a realistic female character they can relate to.
16. She was married to Zack the whole time
In “The Thanksgiving Decoupling,” the surprising revelation came out that Penny had been married to her ex-boyfriend Zack for three years. She had been dating Leonard and they were a few episodes away from getting engaged themselves when it was revealed that she had been married to Zack the whole time and had to get it annulled three years into their union.
In fairness to Penny, she didn’t think that marriages in Vegas chapels were official, so she didn’t think it would count and thought it was all a big goof. But come on, who really thinks that? Eloping in Vegas is a plot point that has been used in pretty much every sitcom for decades. Has Penny never seen Friends? Or the movie What Happens in Vegas?
15. She spent the night with Raj
In a plot turn that wouldn’t have felt out of place in an episode of Three’s Company, Penny and Raj once woke up hungover in the same bed together without any clothes on. It was one of the most surprising moments in the history of The Big Bang Theory and it has since been swept under the rug by the writers as they’ve realized what an awful thing it was for her to do.
It is later revealed that nothing happened when Penny and Raj spent the night together and that they just got undressed, got into bed together, and fell asleep. Still, since she was the on/off girlfriend and now the wife of one of Raj’s best friends, it was a somewhat unethical thing to do.
14. how she drowns her sorrows
While Penny isn’t necessarily addicted to any substances, it is the thing she uses to make everything okay when she’s upset or angry. She uses it to drown her sorrows when there are far healthier ways to deal with it. For a few years before Amy and Bernadette showed up, Penny was the sole female role model on The Big Bang Theory and these are the values she’s teaching us.
While on some shows, doing things like that are in tone with the character and the storylines that they are a part of, on The Big Bang Theory, it seemed like a poor trait for her.
13. She doesn’t actually like any of her friends
Apart from Leonard, who is her husband, Penny doesn’t seem to actually like any of the people in her social circle. She constantly clashes with Sheldon and their relationship is marked by insulting each other. The first few years of her friendship with Howard were marred by him being a creep and she can’t speak to Raj unless he’s drunk, and then he’s obnoxious and she doesn’t like that.
She can just about tolerate Bernadette, although she can’t stand her temper or her controlling nature, which she had a good gab about at a job interview that Bernadette had arranged for her out of the kindness of her heart. She seems to have no respect for Amy and feels sorry for her that she’s such a loser, when Amy sees the pair as best friends. Penny spends all of her spare time with these people and she doesn’t like any of them.
12. She has a massive amount of debt
It’s been well established that Penny is buried under an inordinate amount of debt. She needed to borrow money from Sheldon, she tried to pay her electricity bill with a Starbucks gift card and photos of herself. Even as a pharmaceutical rep, her past financial irresponsibility has meant that although she now earns substantially more money than her husband the Ph.D. physicist, she is still in far more financial trouble than he is.
She’s a total sponge. She uses Sheldon and Leonard’s Wi-Fi with no intention of ever getting her own connection hooked up. Sheldon has changed their Wi-Fi password from “Penny is a freeloader” to “Penny, get your own Wi-Fi” to “Penny already eats our food, she can pay for Wi-Fi,” and she still hasn’t taken the hint.
11. She’s condescending
Penny constantly talks down to Sheldon, Raj, Leonard, Bernadette, and Amy and undermines their thoughts and opinions as if she knows better than all of them, but they all have PhDs. They’re scientists who spend their days forging new discoveries about the world around us and she thinks she’s in a position to speak to them in a condescending tone.
She pretty much went from being a waitress at the Cheesecake Factory with an acting career going nowhere to falling into a well-paying job that one of her friends basically handed to her, and yet she still somehow manages to remain on a high horse around her genius friends. It defies all logical sense.
10. She’s a hypocrite
Not only does Penny constantly criticize her friends for their interests, but she is also a massive hypocrite about it. She always mocks the guys for liking comic books and video games, but the second she tries those things, she becomes addicted to them.
When the guys discuss superhero mythology, she says it’s stupid to debate about things that aren’t real. Then five seconds after cracking open a comic book, she’s having a debate about Thor’s hammer with Amy and Bernadette. She says the guys are lame for always playing video games, but then when she tries playing one, she continues to play it for days on end without leaving the apartment. She becomes more addicted to that game than they are.
9. She’s a stereotype
The “dumb blonde” is a stereotype that just won’t go away. The idea that a woman’s intelligence has anything to do with the color of her hair is ridiculous, and yet the stereotype has been used in comedy for decades. One might expect that, in this progressive day and age, the “dumb blonde” stereotype would’ve died off.
Penny in The Big Bang Theory adheres pretty aggressively to this stereotype. She’s the pretty blonde airhead who hangs out with a group of scientists and everything they say goes right over her head. Most of the jokes in the show, at least in its early seasons, are about how Sheldon is smart and Penny is not.
8. Her only fan is Kevin Smith
Penny has almost undying faith in her acting abilities, and yet the only person who has actually openly said to her that they think she has talent is Kevin Smith. In a phone-in to Wil Wheaton’s podcast, on which Penny was being featured as a guest, Smith told Penny that he enjoyed her performance in Serial Ape-ist 2: Monkey See, Monkey Kill and offered her an audition to appear in Clerks III because of it – and she even blew that.
Smith didn’t even make an appearance in the show in person. He was a guest star who had a voice role in one episode out of more than two hundred, and he is the only person in the history of the show to honestly compliment Penny’s acting.
7. she was a mean girl
When she was a teenager in high school, Penny was a bully, and she didn’t just call people names and push their books out of their hands. What she and her friends did was tantamount to criminal activity. There was one girl who got better grades than Penny, and in response, she and her friends decided to gag and take the girl.
What’s worse is that as she tells this story as an adult to Bernadette and Amy, who as former victims of childhood bullying and reasonable human beings are disturbed by it, she doesn’t seem to realize that taking a girl is bad. She even seems nostalgic while she’s telling it, as she looks back on those days fondly.
6. she is not kind to the group
We’ve all seen those videos on YouTube that remove the laugh track from episodes of The Big Bang Theory and we’ve all had a big laugh at the way it recontextualizes the characters and the dialogue. Those videos are a little unfair to the show, since it’s written and acted with the laugh track format in mind. However, if they expose one thing, it’s that Penny is really mean.
Everything she says to her friends is either hateful or passive aggressive. She hardly has a line of dialogue that isn’t an insult directed at someone or a disparaging remark made behind someone’s back.
5. her relationship with howard
It’s easy to forget what Howard Wolowitz was like in the first few seasons of The Big Bang Theory, since he is now a loving husband and father. However, back in the early days of the show, Howard was a bit of a creep. He would constantly hit on Penny, and no matter how many times she shut him down (she would never even attempt to lead him on), he would never take the hint and would continue to try to woo her.
Now that he is married to Bernadette, Penny’s best friend, we have to ignore the way that Penny is completely fine with the fact that her best friend’s husband used to constantly hit on her.
4. SHE WANTS TO BE AN ACTRESS BUT DOESN’T APPRECIATE ALL FILMS
Penny wants to be a movie star, and yet she can’t appreciate some of cinema’s finest offerings. They might be genre movies, but there is some fine acting to admire in Star Trek, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Matrix, Blade Runner, and all the other nerdy movies Sheldon, Leonard, and the guys enjoy.
In fact, even as works of cinema, some of them are among the greatest ever made. There’s a lot Penny could learn from these movies if she’d just give them a chance. The cast of Star Wars was tasked with delivering George Lucas’ wooden dialogue in a believable way. Given the kind of lackluster plays and B-movies Penny ends up in, she could stand to learn a lesson or two from the work of Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher in those movies.
3. HALLEY SAYS HER FIRST WORD TO PENNY
Howard and Bernadette have become recharacterized as loving parents in the seasons since they had their first baby, Halley. One day, when Penny was watching Halley, she said her first word, “Mama,” to Penny.
Not only did Howard and Bernadette miss their daughter’s first word, but also, it was “Mama” and it was directed at someone who wasn’t her mother! Naturally, Howard and Bernadette were devastated by this, and instead of being sympathetic about it, Penny has just rubbed it in and gloated about it ever since.
2. MOST OF THE MEN HAVE SEEN HER WITHOUT CLOTHES
Penny hangs around with a group of four men and she’s married to one of them. Usually, in a scenario like that, the only man in the group who has seen her without any clothes on will be the husband, but in Penny’s case, it’s all of them except one.
She’s been in an on-and-off relationship with Leonard for years, but then she also spent the night with Raj once and they woke up next to each other without any clothes on. Plus, when she injured herself in the shower, Sheldon had to come into her apartment and help her out. So, the only one of the guys who hasn’t seen Penny without her clothes on is Howard.
1. SHE THINKS SHE IS BETTER THAN LEONARD
Penny generally sees herself as superior to most of the people she associates with, but worst of all is that she thinks that about her husband. She seems to have pitied him throughout their entire relationship. She kissed him out of pity and she agreed to go on a date with him out of pity. She feels like she’s throwing him a bone or doing him a favor just by being in a relationship with him.
It’s somewhat acceptable for Penny to look down her nose at Amy, the friend who pines after her and worships the ground she walks on, or Sheldon, who constantly undermines her, but not Leonard. For years, she was an unattainable dream girl for him and that’s the way she acts in their relationship – it’s as if he has no right to complain about anything she does in their relationship, because she knows she’s out of his league.
What other problems with Penny do fans choose to ignore in Big Bang Theory? Let us know in the comments!
