Kaley Cuoco broke her teeth on comedy starting on 8 Simple Rules before shifting into the ever popular The Big Bang Theory. That gave her more than a decade of experience with laugh tracks, but in the time since, there’s been less to laugh about. In fact, she’s strung together a slew of thrillers since her Chuck Lorre series ended, and only one of them, Based on a True Story, really had a comedic bent.
I thought it was a really cool move when Cuoco shifted to HBO’s The Flight Attendant as her follow-up to The Big Bang Theory. The show proved she had the chops to take on more dramatic roles, and it was a great, critically-acclaimed role for the actress where she was No. 1 on the call sheet. However, it’s been well over five years since TFA originally hit the schedule, and she’s really done no half-hour sitcom work since then.
Was this by chance or something else? Dax Shepard finally flat out asked the actress during her recent appearance on Armchair Expert. She said it’s more by industry design than her own cognizant choice.
This business has gotten so fucking weird. And difficult and hard. There’s not a lot of great stuff. It’s harder now. It’s harder to make things. There’s so much television, yet at the same time it’s so complicated.
Lots of changes have been coming down the pipeline in Hollywood in recent years, accelerated by the pandemic, but certainly not slowing down in the time since. Linear TV is shifting to streaming, even when it comes to live TV events. On the big screen, more and more space continues to be dedicated to tentpole movies instead of indies. In short, there’s been a lot of change, and Kaley Cuoco has been an actress with major name recognition during that period of change.
The good news? This means she’s still landing plenty of roles. The Big Bang Theory also gave her an insane salary to allow her more creative freedom, and she's still making money in reruns. The bad news? She hasn’t had another successful network tentpole to latch onto, and she recently opened up about not having that Big Bang salary to boot.
Lately, she's been doing a lot of stuff you can catch with a Peacock subscription, though her latest series Vanished will be available for those with an Amazon Prime subscription when it hits the 2026 TV schedule at the end of the month. (It's currently available with MGM+.) So far, there's been a lot of streaming content, but I can't wait to see where she goes next, and whether she'll dust off her comedic skills in the near future.
