We never have to worry about Kaley Cuoco being gone from our TV screens for long. In the 2020s alone, she’s starred in HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant and Peacock’s Based on a True Story, as well as voiced Harley Quinn’s titular antihero. Now we’re about to reunite with Cuoco on the 2026 TV schedule for Vanished, her mystery drama that will stream on MGM+ (which can be added onto your Prime Video subscription). While Vanished will obviously be tonally different compared to the work the actress did on The Big Bang Theory, she gave another interesting reason why this show is different from her “indoor cat” years on the popular CBS sitcom.
Kaley Cuoco starred as Penny for the entirety of The Big Bang Theory’s 12-season run, and before that, she cut her teeth in the multi-camera sitcom world with John Ritter on 8 Simple Rules. Now while those kinds of comedy show jobs come with their own perks, as the actress told TVLine, they don’t allow for traveling, like she got to do on Vanished:
You're on a sitcom, you're an indoor cat. You never go on location. If you go outside, it's like a field trip when you're in the fifth grade. 'Oh, my god! We're outside!'
This shouldn’t come as much of a shock to anyone who watches multi-camera sitcoms. They’re designed to primarily be performed on sets and in front of a live studio audience. So it has to be a special occasion to warrant traveling to another location, which also means a laugh track will need to be added in later since you can’t exactly drag an audience along for the ride. So Kaley Cuoco joking about being an “indoor cat” during that period of her career is pretty on-point.
Vanished, on the other hand, allowed the actress and her costars to shoot in France, specifically Paris and Marseille. That said, Cuoco also acknowledged that working on this, The Flight Attendant and Based on a True Story also forced her to do a mental reset and account for not getting the kind of instant feedback she would have on The Big Bang Theory:
The biggest fuck up in my brain was when people were not clapping and laughing loudly. If I did something funny, I'm literally holding for laughs, and finally I was like, 'Oh, no one's laughing.' And they're like, 'We're laughing, but we can't mess you up.' I was so used to loud, instant gratification no matter what," she adds. "Even if I gave some sort of look, someone was catching it.
Kaley Cuoco stars in Vanished as Alice, a woman visiting Paris with her boyfriend, Sam Clafin’s Tom. When Tom suddenly disappears on a train in the south of France’s capital city, Alice finds herself enveloped in a “web of intrigue and danger” and learning dark secrets about this man she thought she knew. Cuoco and Clafin are joined in the four-part series by Karin Viard, Matthias Schweighöfer, Simon Abkarian and Dar Zuzovsky.
Hailing from the minds of David Hilton and Preston Thompson, Vanished premiere this Sunday, February 1. However, if you’re looking to enjoy some lighter programming, you’re always welcome to revisit The Big Bang Theory with your HBO Max subscription.
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