TV Watch: Professor Proton (Bob Newhart) makes a charming, wistful, and droll return to "The Big Bang Theory"

In this week's Big Band Theory, Sheldon (Jim Parsons) was stung by rejection from his hero Professor Proton (Bob Newhart), who chose to work with Leonard (Johnny Galicki). Sheldon countered with Bill "The Science Guy" Nye, and as Newhart recalls: "There's bad feeling between the two of them, and I actually, physically make a move toward him. He says, 'My show was really patterned after yours.' And I say, 'That's what I told my lawyers.'"

by Ken

There are pluses and minuses to keeping one's distance from the mindless flow of TV news. I had no idea that Bob Newhart had won an Emmy (his first ever, amazingly) for his appearance last season on The Big Bang Theory as Sheldon and Leonard's childhood hero Professor Proton -- or rather Arthur Jeffries, who once upon a time did a kiddie science show that hooked our two future physicists on science. It was a wonderful episode, with the Jeffries character only too keenly aware, in the trademark low-key Newhart way, of the toll taken by time and the memory of a man in his 80s who traded his love of science for a stint as a minor celebrity -- a onetime minor celebrity now confronting the peculiar form of worship available from Leonard and of course especially Sheldon. At the same time, our Arthur isn't so far gone as to fail to appreciate the charms of Kaley Cuoco's Penny.

Thursday night, though, I counted myself blessed to not know that Professor Proton was making a return appearance, in an episode called "The Proton Displacement." In fact, I just learned --  from an interview Newhart gave Zap2it's Jay Bobbin -- that his deal is for three appearances:

Newhart initially told executive producer and co-creator Chuck Lorre -- who confessed to sneaking onto the set of the 1980s sitcom Newhart and eating lunch there during breaks -- that he'd want more than one stint as Professor Proton. The latest episode is the second in his three-story deal, and he's not sure he'd want to continue beyond that.

"I just picked a number out of the air," Newhart says. "I said, 'I want it to be a three-shot rather than a one-shot,' and Chuck said, 'OK. You've got it.' It's such a great show, I don't want my character to be jumping the shark."

Since Amy is with Sheldon and Leonard when they encounter the professor in a supermarket, he gets to register properly Newhart-like astonishment that Sheldon has a girlfriend, but accepts stoically the news that things are fine between Leonard and his girlfriend, settling for asking Penny if she happens to have a single grandmother. Newhart seems to have enjoyed his previous encounter with Penny.

I've always said that for the [show] I got the Emmy for, Kaley [Cuoco] really threw herself on the sword. She had to act really dumb, and she's not. It was a case of everybody just wanting it to work so much, they kept throwing me hanging curveballs, and I kept swinging at them.

With two episodes under his belt now, he says of the Big Bang Theory team:

If a joke doesn't work, they'll just keep working on it until it does. As we're filming, they're rewriting, and that's a great comfort when you know you're dealing with great writers. You know they're not going to let anything go by until it's as funny as they can possibly make it, and that's a very relaxed feeling.

I'm not sure I agree with Newhart that his second episode "is so totally different from the one I was in before," but I love what he has to say about it:

"You really get insight into Sheldon and Leonard's relationship, which I felt was very tender.

"I have one scene where I ask Leonard, 'Why do you put up with Sheldon?' He says, 'Well, he's a friend of mine.' And I say, 'Why?' In other words, what does he have to offer as a friend? And Leonard says, 'I can't help it.' And that's kind of the theme of the show."

Indeed, Newhart also found that in another scene: "We're in a drugstore, and Sheldon comes up to me and says, 'Hello, I'm Sheldon. We've met before. Possibly, you don't remember me because of your advanced age.' It's not intended to be Don Rickles insulting somebody, that's just the way he is. He can't help it."

Newhart naturally isn't the whirlwind Mel Brooks was in his take-no-prisoners appearances as Paul's Uncle Phil on Mad About You, but it's been good to see him doing, you know, what he does. I also count myself lucky not to have seen the very nice Jay Bobbin interview, which was posted early afternoon Thursday, before I saw the show. A spoiler alert might have been in order.

#