It’s hard being the middle child, even if you’re technically the youngest. Missy (Raegan Revord) may be younger than Sheldon by a grand two minutes, but given Sheldon’s general emotional immaturity taking up so much of the family’s attention, it’s always felt like Missy was the middle child. While her older brother was off getting a 29-year-old woman pregnant while he was only 17 and her younger brother was heading off to college at 11 years old, the normal and unexciting Missy has often been forgotten by both her mother and father.
Sure, this is perhaps the most understandable case of middle-child neglect we’ve ever seen, but it’s still gotta sting for Missy, who was even ignored a little in the series finale. With her father dead, her mother deep in grief, and her brothers moving away, Missy doesn’t seem to have many people in her life she can talk to about her problems.
Lance Barber, who plays the Cooper patriarch George Sr., spoke in a 2024 interview about the treatment of Missy in the show’s final episodes. “I don’t know if she was overlooked … I think that plays out well for cultural expectations of the girl for the ‘overlooked’ girl,” he said. “It was intentional that her journey was as it was, and it’s nice to see that it’s going to continue for Raegan on ‘Georgie & Mandy’ and just grow deeper. We also know Missy’s history, and this just gives it more gravitas, more depth, and layers to who she becomes and why.” As painful as it may have been for viewers, it was par for the course for Missy.
The neglect of Missy: part of a long-term arc for the series
Part of why “Young Sheldon” seemed to feel so comfortable with overlooking Missy is because they knew that, unlike Sheldon himself, Missy would still appear regularly on the upcoming spinoff series, “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage.” She’s already stopped by twice in the first season alone, and she still seems to be struggling somewhat with a lack of attention from her mother, Mary (Zoe Perry), who’s still grieving the recent death of her husband.
The new spinoff show is still young, but there should be plenty of opportunities for it to keep checking in on Missy and exploring how she becomes the person she is in the original series, “The Big Bang Theory.” There, adult Missy is still cool, but she’s definitely been burned by life too many times. It seems like she can’t hold down a job or a marriage, and she’s often dismissed by her family members as being the family’s disappointment if not a total failure. Adult Missy’s life isn’t all bad of course, but it’s a lot darker than what the typical ending a sitcom would give one of its main child characters.
But then again, that’s part of what made “Young Sheldon” so interesting. It was an otherwise conventional sitcom that was forced, thanks to some throwaway jokes made by another show, to write these characters with the full knowledge that they’ll never get a typical sitcom happy ending. Georgie and Mandy will get divorced, Mary will become an increasingly neurotic religious fundamentalist, and Missy will always be a bit of a mess. They might not get to live the life we’d hope for them, but at least the “Georgie & Mandy” spinoff will keep fleshing out Missy’s life story, to a much larger extent than “The Big Bang Theory” fans in the 2000s ever could’ve guessed.
