The Big Bang Theory Episodes That Simon Helberg Enjoyed The Most

For 12 years and the same number of seasons, Simon Helberg played Howard Wolowitz — the turtleneck-wearing, would-be lothario who’s best friends with Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki), and Raj Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar) — so you’d think it would be tough for him to really hone in on his favorite episodes. You’d be a little bit right about that, actually.

In an interview with Newsweek in April of 2022 to promote his film “As They Made Us” — directed by Mayim Bialik, who played Sheldon’s girlfriend and eventual wife Amy Farrah Fowler and worked alongside Helberg on “The Big Bang Theory” — Helberg said he couldn’t really choose a “favorite” episode of the long-running Chuck Lorre sitcom. “I don’t have a quick answer for that,” Helberg replied when asked about his all-time favorite episode. “I guess the answer is, I don’t have a favorite one. The ones that come to mind are just some special ones like when Stephen Hawking came to set.” (The late Hawking appeared on the series as a guest star across seven episodes.)

There was one common thread, though, that Helberg could point to — and that was the fact that he got to work so closely with Melissa Rauch, who played Howard’s wife and mother of their two children, Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz. “I always really had a great time working with Melissa,” Helberg said. “Whenever we had some juicy storylines, like when she finds out that she’s pregnant. I really enjoyed that. Helberg also referenced an episode where Howard serenades a quarantined Bernadette — more on that shortly — and the episode that tackled the death of Howard’s permanently off-screen mother Carol Ann Susi, another installment that prominently featured the couple.

In Jessica Radloff’s 2022 tell-all book “The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series,” Simon Helberg opened up about working with Melissa Rauch — and said that not only was she a phenomenal presence to be around on set, but she made the character of Howard much, much better. In the early seasons of the series, Howard is, and I’m being blunt here, gross. He gives Penny a teddy bear with a camera in its eye, upskirts her with a remote-controlled car (that also features a camera), and rigs a drone to spy on the house where contestants on “America’s Next Top Model” are staying (and, he hopes, sunbathing topless on the roof). Bernadette makes him into less of a caricature and more of a human, which Helberg fully recognized. As he explained:

“Howard was such a sleazy, philandering, lothario for so long, I didn’t know if that was his fate to continue that sad cycle, so when Melissa came on, I thought, Oh, this is going to be really fun. She was written differently from the other women Howard had gone out with or gone for. And when I met Melissa, I was immediately and completely won over.”

After commenting on Bernadette’s high-pitched voice — which is notably not what she sounds like in real life — Helberg also joked about their similar statures (“And I thought, Oh my god, finally, someone who is smaller than me!“) and spoke to Rauch’s qualities as a person and scene partner. “She really is the kindest, gentlest person,” Helberg mused. “I don’t know how to say it in a way that rings of clichés, but I really do mean it.” Helberg recalled how easy it was working on their very first scene together in season 3 when they go on a date, concluding, “You’re really only as good as your partner, so I was happy to be doing the show in tandem with her forever from then on out.”

In the season 7 episode “The Romance Resonance,” Howard, preparing to celebrate his anniversary with Bernadette, decides he wants to write a song for her … which ends up complicated by the fact that Bernadette, a microbiologist, is quarantined in a hospital room after potentially coming into contact with a dangerous virus. The whole gang shows up to perform Howard’s song “If I Didn’t Have You” through the glass window, which features lyrics like “I’d be Doctor Who without the TARDIS” and “I’d be an atom without a bomb, a dot without the com.” (It’s honestly very cute.)

In Jessica Radloff’s book, Melissa Rauch discussed that particular episode, citing it as one of her favorite moments … and saying that it made her truly emotional in the moment. After joking that the idea of quarantine felt “so far-fetched” during filming (again, the book came out in 2022, two years into the COVID-19 pandemic), Rauch discussed how special the episode was. “But this was one of those episodes that was sort of out-of-body in the sense of feeling a part of something so special,” she recalled. “For so much of my life, a moment like that felt out of reach. It was a dream that I hoped with all my heart would come true, so to be looking at these people who had become like my family — I’m getting choked up talking about it — there was such genuine love there.” She continued, “Those tears you saw from Bernadette while Howard was singing were really mine, recognizing what that moment meant to me. It’s so easy to be all-in when you’re opposite someone like Simon. He was just so locked in as he was singing that song, and then you look around and see the group as a whole singing with him … it’s just more than you can ever imagine.”

“The Big Bang Theory” is streaming on Max now.