Penny and Sheldon are my favorite platonic friends.
Penny is one of those Big Bang Theory characters that doesn’t receive enough credit. The debate about how great or terrible a character Sheldon is or whether or not the show is genuinely funny or just sad and pretending to be funny, gets much more attention. But you might think of Penny's character as being forgettable. But that’s the weird part because the show wouldn’t have made it past season two without her.
She moves in across the hall from the science nerds and we get the picture. Hot chick, nerd dudes, jokes about guys who can't get girls. A classic TV format since 1970. Except at some point it doesn't look like that anymore. Penny becomes an integral part of the show. To be honest , take her out and I'll definitely be bored with just science and nerd jokes. And it's not because she's learning physics and becoming one of the guys but because she's not and never does. On the contrary she changes them into her type somehow.
There's a pattern of the show trying to present Penny as not being as smart as Leonard and Sheldon, because the humor is set up that way. She doesn't know what a differential equation is, she doesn't understand their work chatter, she thinks that scientists are just scientists all day. That's fair enough except when you see her handling a table full of problematic customers or calming someone down from an existential panic or grasping some piece of social subtlety that it would take Sheldon three years to grasp and you begin to suspect the show of calling someone else dumb.
I'm not saying that Penny is smart, she's not at least no where close to the guys. And she doesn't care. That's the difference. All the other characters are trying so hard to be smarter than everyone else and prove themselves and win pointless arguments. Penny doesn't have to demonstrate that she's smart. And sometimes I think that makes people uncomfortable, because we've been conditioned to think that Sheldons are more valuable than Pennys.
Her acting career is probably the closest to the truth, she fails over and over again. She auditions for years and doesn't get anything. There's no work hard for a montage and she'll become a star moment. She just stops I guess. The show doesn't really commit to an answer. Later on she's dealing, prescription medication, but still and doing well, and I bet some viewers thought she was sad for giving up on her dreams. But I don't know, almost everyone I know has completely switched what they wanted to do with their lives at least twice by thirty. I think this feels more realistic than if she became a movie star in season six.
Her romance with Leonard is fraught in ways that relationships on TV aren’t typically fraught. They break up for legitimate reasons and get back together for semi legitimate reasons and eventually get married despite seemingly not being totally certain why. That doesn’t sound great when I put it like that, but it’s probably more honest than what most shows depict. Obviously Leonard isn’t her intellectual match he’s actually far more intellectually matched in terms of education but he’s not an emotional match either. She’s a better human than he is, emotional wise. That’s got to count for something.
There's an episode where it comes up that Penny never finished community college and for just a moment you see her humiliated. And I remember thinking at the time that that was the kind of thing that distinguishes a character that has actually been conceived of, rather than a character that someone has simply decided to type in as hot chick from next door. She has shame that she doesn't belong in their lives, despite the fact that half the time their lives are completely miserable without her.
I have seen the complaint that the reason for disliking Penny is that she is an old sexist cliche, a beautiful woman who is not a scientist and whose only major relationships are with men. Maybe in season one. But over the series she has a job the entire time, and is self supporting in Los Angeles, which is almost impossible and she does not need men to come along and fix her problems and she certainly calls people out when they are acting like idiots. The show does not really make an issue out of any of these things, which is probably why people don't think of her as actually being a strong female character.
