Sometimes sitcoms lean on pregnancy storylines as a crutch when they're not quite sure where else to take characters, but to be fair to "The Big Bang Theory," the show handled two of its pregnancy storylines quite well. (One, which involved Kaley Cuoco's Penny, wasn't as successful -- and even Cuoco herself agrees.) According to the show's creative team, though, the idea that Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz, played by Melissa Rauch, would suddenly discover she and her husband Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg) are having a baby came up quite organically.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter after the episode "The Valentino Submergence" aired, showrunner and executive producer Steve Molaro spoke to the outlet about Bernadette's revelation. In the episode -- which is set during Valentine's Day -- Bernadette and Howard are about to have a romantic evening in their hot tub when they discover a baby rabbit trapped in the tub and rescue it, at which point Bernadette quietly reveals, just to the bunny, that she's pregnant. According to Molaro, he joked about doing this -- and then it ended up in the episode.
"We've touched on the idea of Bernadette and Howard and children here and there but we didn't really have plans to pull the trigger at any point," Molaro recalled. "It wasn't even part of the outline for the episode. We were writing it and getting toward the end of the story and I guess maternity was in the air because Bernadette was holding this wrapped-up bunny and they named it, and we were writing the final page of that storyline. Half-kidding, I said, 'What if Bernadette tells the rabbit, 'We'll find another time to tell him I'm pregnant.' The room had such a strong, positive reaction to it. We thought it seemed like an organic moment and we decided to put it in. Because there was no plan for it, it felt very exciting to us when we did it; like it was a thing that should happen and maybe this was the time to do it. I handed [co-creator] Chuck Lorre the draft of the script and didn't tell him it was in there. He got to the end and thought, 'Wow, OK sure, that totally makes sense. Let's do it.'"