After years in the spotlight, Chuck Lorre has the freedom to take on nearly whatever he wants, from creative projects to philanthropy. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for a reason, after all.
So, it’s perhaps no surprise that the legendary television producer’s Fall 2024 visit to SUNY Potsdam was entirely on his own terms—and entirely honest.
“I remember, I came up for freshman orientation, and it really was free parking on the Monopoly board. It was a safe space to be a foolish young man,” he said. “I wish I had been self-reflective and self-aware enough to have learned anything. I mean, we came all this way… might as well tell the truth, right?”
It wasn’t the first time that the hitmaking television producer had returned to SUNY Potsdam since his days as an undergraduate, but his return visit to campus in September 2024 felt different. In a wide-ranging public discussion and in classroom discussions with students, Lorre was reflective and raw. Ever self-deprecating, he laid out the lessons that seem so clear now—lessons he wished to impart to anyone fool-hardy enough to follow in his footsteps.
“There's great strength in being naive… If I had a more objective view of what I was up against, I probably wouldn't have proceeded, but I was a fairly selfish, self-obsessed young man, and … you know, I just refused to believe it couldn't be done,” he said.
Looking back, the magic key to Lorre’s hit shows seems to be his keen eye for unspoken truths and a willingness to point out exactly what is, in life, in society, in relationships—with all their complexities and hilarities.
“For 35 years, I’ve been writing about people sitting on a couch and talking. And sometimes, they sit in the kitchen and talk. It’s very rewarding when you get it right… I like making people laugh. In my more cognitively appropriate moments, I recognize that my job is simply that. When the lights go out for me, what did I do with my life? I made people laugh. That’s not bad.”
Speaking to a packed house in the Helen M. Hosmer Concert Hall at The Crane School of Music, Lorre shared that he’d been asked many times to return and speak at his alma mater, after being awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree in 2009—but it just never felt like the right time, until now.
“I always felt odd about it. I didn’t graduate. I’m a drop out. You know, you gave me an honorary degree, but no one calls me ‘Doctor’!” he said. “Coming back, it was a chance for me to… I don’t know if I want to say make amends to Potsdam, but a ‘thank you.’ Part of coming back today was to have a chance to say, especially to the students sitting here, there’s a great educational opportunity here, and although I didn’t take it, I hope you all take it. There’s still plenty of time afterwards to go out and make a mess of it all! But take this opportunity that Potsdam offers, to learn in a safe environment.”
Lorre shared that he “crawled through” his two years at Potsdam, and “didn’t set any records, academically,” spending most of his time focused on playing music. From 1970 to 1972, his studies mainly consisted of jamming with local bands—including with Todd Hobin ’72, who was in the audience.
“We’d play the [Rolling] Stones, the Allman Brothers. We’d play frat parties at the Arlington Hotel, in the big ballroom. They’d charge 25 cents at the door and pack 400 kids in there, and we’d play until they threw us out,” Lorre said. “The goal was to make people dance—that was it, truly… Unless we were so full of ourselves that we started playing Jethro Tull songs!”
Lorre was so focused on becoming a musician that he decided to drop out and drive to Los Angeles to pursue his rock career.
“One of the few lucid thoughts I had at that age was if I have a fallback position, it's likely I'll fall back,” he said. “If the compulsion or the obsession or the insanity to go forward will be removed, I will fall back.”
Lorre spent the next 15 years playing gigs, touring the country as a guitarist and writing songs in between. His most prominent claim to fame from his nascent music career was penning the song “French Kissin’” for Deborah Harry, the lead vocalist of Blondie.
“I didn’t know what I was up against. Because if I had, I might not have driven across the country. I was going without food, sleeping on people’s floors, getting really sick, with no health insurance,” he said. “And then I found myself, you know, scrambling into a second career in my mid-30s, because I really thought it would be a good idea to feed my children.”
He said this last line as an aside, with a little ironic smile, but it’s clear that Lorre never forgot those struggles he endured earlier in life. Later, he told students about his determination to get a friend a needed gig in order to qualify for health insurance.
When he tried his hand at writing in Hollywood, Lorre started penning scripts, first for animated shows and then later for sitcoms, starting with “Roseanne.” That run ended with him getting fired, but he still impressed producers enough to create his first show, “Frannie’s Turn,” which was canceled after five weeks. Still, he was tenacious enough to keep pitching new ideas.
“I have a constant fear of failure… Past success doesn’t obviate that fear,” Lorre told students. “I have failed a lot. I had projects that were killed long before people got to see them. But sometimes you learn powerful lessons from the failures.”
Finding his footing again, Lorre successfully created “Grace Under Fire,” “Cybill” and “Dharma & Greg,” moving on to launch some of the biggest sitcoms of the modern era on CBS, with “Two and a Half Men,” “The Big Bang Theory,” “Mike & Molly,” and “Mom.” “The Big Bang Theory” was such a hit that it later led to two spin-offs, “Young Sheldon” and “George & Mandy’s First Marriage.” All of the shows followed the classic sitcom model of filming with multiple cameras and being taped before a live studio audience on a stage set.
“It made it harder to tell a story, but it was like running with weights on—I’m glad I did it,” he said. “One of the things I learned early on is the relationship with the audience and the television show is so fragile. A flick of your thumb on your remote, and you’ve left. We know that at certain instances, CBS or ABC are going to cut to a commercial. Before that happens, you must put on something that is so funny, so riveting, so wonderful… that the audience will sit through a stool softener commercial.”
At various points, Lorre had multiple top comedies on the airwaves all at once, leaving him to juggle multiple sets, storylines and casts at the same time. He remembered asking the prolific TV producer Norman Lear (the legend behind “All in the Family,” “Maud,” “The Jeffersons,” “Sanford and Sons,” and more) for advice about how to handle it all.
“He said, ‘Oh, you’re not going to like the answer… You go where the fire is burning the brightest, and you try to put it out.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t like that answer,’” Lorre said. “But that’s what you do. You go to where the trouble is, and you try and fix the trouble. And if something’s working, you leave it alone. You learn to do something that you don’t learn as a guitar player—you to learn to delegate.”
Keeping the cast and crews of major shows all satisfied and moving in the same direction is no small feat, either.
“In television, if you’re lucky enough to succeed, you spend years together. Babies are born, there’s weddings, there’s divorces, people die—life happens. And the cast and crew become a family, with all the dysfunction of a family,” he said.
During his on-stage discussion, Lorre described at length about the process that led to the launch of “The Big Bang Theory,” from its initial failed pilot to the alchemy that made it such an award-winning hit for 12 seasons. He remembered being on the set as they filmed the second pilot—a fabled “do-over” that Lorre and his producing partner, Bill Prady, had been granted. In the new version, a few additional scientist characters had been added, along with adjustments to the character of Penny, the aspiring actress from across the hall.
“We were shooting that scene with Jim Parsons where he explained to Penny the mathematics of why he sits where he sits. The director of the pilot, a very famous acclaimed TV director, Jimmy Burroughs, he just looked at me and he smiled. … Something special was happening, something we didn’t anticipate,” Lorre said.
“The Big Bang Theory” soon gained a mass following, taking off in syndication in particular, and garnering numerous award nominations—and four Emmy wins for Parsons himself.
“These were extraordinarily intelligent people who felt outside of the culture and of society and they created their own family, their own little network of people supporting one another, and I think that gave people hope,” Lorre said. “One of the things that we did by accident because we had a very limited budget was that we would have them eat [together] almost every episode. They would sit and have Chinese food in the living room, because we could afford to do that. I mean, but eating together was what families used to do… so this was a surrogate family.”
It finally dawned on Lorre that the show would be such a phenomenon when he attended his first ComiCon along with the cast of “The Big Bang Theory.”
“I was so sure that 11 people were going to show up,” he said. “It was standing room only. … People treated them like The Beatles. They made an incredible visceral connection to the audience.”
With his shows topping the ratings charts, Lorre was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and with induction into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. Even as he saw his sitcoms all the way through to the end, he also started to toy with new formats and subject matter, starting with “The Kominsky Method” on Netflix and “Bookie” on Max.
“When I started writing television comedies, there might have been 40 sitcoms on the air every week. Now, there may be four,” he said.
Working with streaming services and cable television has allowed Lorre to play around with darker storylines and adjust his writing to an audience that he’s pretty certain has seen the last episode (and may even be binge-watching).
“It’s fun to have that freedom after all those years of the constrictions of network television,” he said.
No matter the show, Lorre has some practices that have remained with him all this time. Famously, for many years, he posted lengthy messages on the vanity cards at the end of his shows—on topics ranging from politics to technology, and even, a couple of times, references to his time at SUNY Potsdam. In the early days, viewers would have had to have a sophisticated VCR machine to be able to pause and read his notes, but eventually, enough people caught on that Lorre was exhorted by network higher-ups to avoid writing anything on the vanity cards that would result in litigation.
He also has his superstitions, to avoid bad luck… one of which focuses on his director’s chairs, 11 of which now line the hall at his office in Los Angeles.
“Just in case you think I have a grasp on reality, at some point years ago, I decided that those director’s chairs, that it was bad luck to sit in one with my name on it—so I would never sit in my chair on the stage. It’s a contagion of lunacy. Now, the guys on ‘Young Sheldon’ do the same thing. I did keep the chairs, though. Once a show stopped being on TV, I am allowed to sit in it, according to my neurosis,” Lorre said.
Looking back, writing and producing television has satisfied the creative drive that he had as a young musician, with aspirations to become the next Randy Newman, he said.
“A great song stays with us. It travels through time. The closest I came was the theme to ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,’” he said, chuckling. “I’ve come to realize now looking backwards that the songs I wrote—they weren’t songs, they were shows—but they’re surviving. The TV shows that have held on, people still watch them. And that’s the gratification I was looking for.”
Alongside his success, Lorre also found meaning in giving back. He began with the Dharma Grace Foundation, which he established in the ’90s. In 2013, he expanded his philanthropic endeavors with The Chuck Lorre Family Foundation, which is dedicated to funding innovative and compassionate organizations in the areas of education, health and the arts. Reflecting the values and unique experiences of the Lorre family, the foundation supports programs, services and opportunities for those struggling with less and striving for more.
As he wrapped up his public talk with SUNY Potsdam President Dr. Suzanne Smith, Lorre had one last surprise up his sleeve. Lorre ended his visit by presenting a $1 million donation from his foundation to the College, a gesture of gratitude that brought tears and applause from the crowd. The gift will support the SUNY Potsdam Student Success Initiative, which is designed to improve retention, enhance career prospects and increase social mobility, to build a brighter future for current and future students.
“The simple act of giving without expecting anything in return is powerful,” he said, expressing deep appreciation for the opportunities Potsdam had given him. “I’m just grateful for today.”
Article by Alexandra Jacobs Wilke, Photos by Jesstine Avadikian