The “Big Bang Theory” spinoff aired its last episodes Thursday night, but the franchise will continue on CBS this fall.
This article includes spoilers for the “Young Sheldon” series finale.
In last week’s episode of the CBS sitcom “Young Sheldon,” a laid-back, beer-drinking Texas high school football coach named George Cooper (Lance Barber) says goodbye to his family and goes to work. He never comes home: George dies of a heart attack later that day. The tragedy sets up the series’ last two episodes, which premiered Thursday night on CBS: They are about what happens when someone so steady, so reliable and so unassuming is just … gone.
A spinoff of “The Big Bang Theory,” the long-running CBS hit, “Young Sheldon” has been steady, reliable and unassuming over its seven seasons. This warm family sitcom, which fills in the back story of the “Big Bang Theory” breakout character Sheldon Cooper — played by Jim Parsons in the original and Iain Armitage in the prequel — has quietly been one of TV’s most-watched shows since it debuted in 2017.
And now it, too, is gone. The series finale takes Sheldon from the small town of Medford, Texas, where he attended high school at 9 and college at 11 as his family tried to understand and accommodate his genius, to the California Institute of Technology, where “The Big Bang Theory” is set. The episode included appearances by Parsons and Mayim Bialik, whose character, Amy, marries Sheldon in the original show.
The franchise will continue this fall with another spinoff: “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage.” It will follow Sheldon’s good ol’ boy older brother George Jr. (Montana Jordan) and his wife, Mandy (Emily Osment), as they raise their baby daughter.
“Young Sheldon” was a smash from the start, and while its network TV audience has shrunk (just like most every other show’s), its episodes elsewhere have drawn newer, younger viewers. Reruns air on the cable network TBS almost daily. Netflix licensed the show late last year, and it has since appeared regularly on that service’s self-reported Top 10 most-streamed TV series.
Yet despite its pervasiveness in TikTok memes, “Young Sheldon” has never been much of a cultural phenomenon. Television critics rarely write about it, and the Emmys have ignored it entirely — it has yet to get a single nomination. “The Big Bang Theory,” one of TV’s most-watched shows for much of its 12-season run, which ended in 2019, had a mixed critical reputation. But it did get press coverage, and was a legitimate Emmy contender, earning four nominations for best comedy series and picking up four wins for Parsons.
The “Young Sheldon” finale, meanwhile, came and went on Thursday night without much advance hype. Unless you regularly watch shows on CBS, you may not have known it was ending.
You may also be wondering: If it’s so popular, why is it ending?
In a phone interview, Steven Molaro, who created “Young Sheldon” with Chuck Lorre, and Steve Holland, an executive producer who has been a writer on the show since Season 2, explained that the series has always had an expiration date. This is because the story they inherited from “The Big Bang Theory” established that Sheldon began attending graduate school at Caltech at 14, the same year his father died.
The “Young Sheldon” team delayed the inevitable once, by holding the characters of Sheldon and his twin sister, Missy (Raegan Revord), at the same age for two seasons. But that trick could not be repeated indefinitely.
“The premise of the show is that an exceptional young kid is thrust into a world where everyone is older than him,” Holland said. “But as soon as Iain aged and Sheldon aged, he didn’t look that out of place anymore, even in college.”
So when Holland and Molaro sat down with Lorre to plot out Season 7 after the writers’ strike was settled, they decided their prequel had reached its natural conclusion. The tight post-strike production timeline meant they had to inform the cast about the decision on a group Zoom call, which surprised some of them. (In a Variety interview, Annie Potts, who plays Sheldon’s “Meemaw,” described her initial reaction as “shocked” and “ambushed.”) But whatever mixed feelings the cast may have had about the series coming to an end, it doesn’t show in their performances in the final two episodes, which strike the usual “Young Sheldon” balance of gentle good humor and soft sentimental pangs.
In the penultimate episode, “Funeral” (which aired Thursday night right before the finale), the Cooper family struggles with saying goodbye to George, with Sheldon revisiting his last moments with his father and thinking of all of things he could have said to him but didn’t.
The episode ends on a poignant note, as Sheldon’s devoutly religious mother, Mary (Zoe Perry), rages at God at the memorial service before Meemaw steps in to lighten the mood. (She jokes that no one is sadder about George dying than the Lone Star beer company.) Sheldon, still lost in his own head, imagines the heartfelt eulogy he is too numb to give.
The finale, “Memoir,” tells a more typical “Young Sheldon” story, about Mary trying to get Sheldon baptized before he leaves for college. In framing scenes, the older Sheldon and Amy argue about his parenting of their own children, underlining one of the show’s main themes: that Sheldon’s parents, while dealing with all the usual messes of everyday life, did the best they could to take care of him. The episode closes with a shot of the 14-year-old Sheldon at Caltech, connecting everything back to “The Big Bang Theory”; the adult Sheldon is working as a Caltech physicist when that series begins.
Holland said Lorre pitched the idea of having Parsons and Bialik appear in the finale to make the episode feel a bit more “significant.” (Parsons, who is also an executive producer of “Young Sheldon,” has been the show’s narrator from the beginning, but this is his first on-camera appearance.) As for the differences between the last two episodes — one heavy, one lighter — Molaro said they wanted something “a little more positive and upbeat” for their ending.
“Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage,” which was created by Lorre, Molaro and Holland, will be a multicamera sitcom shot with a live audience, like “The Big Bang Theory.” (“Young Sheldon” is a single-camera series with no audience, a choice Molaro said was made to “let the show feel like its own thing.”) They hope to have some “Young Sheldon” regulars appear as guest stars, if they figure out how to do that without turning the new show into what Holland called “Older Young Sheldon.”
As for the legacy of “Young Sheldon,” that will now depend largely on whether it remains as popular as it has been on Netflix, where Molaro said the show is being discovered by kids who have never been in the habit of watching prime-time network TV. Despite the lack of critical buzz, “Young Sheldon” has always been good family television, with a likable cast of youngsters and showbiz veterans helping to tell slice-of-life stories that push deeper than some viewers may expect into topics like religious hypocrisy, marital strife and how it feels to share a household with someone both irritatingly eccentric and astonishingly brilliant.
The final episodes of “Young Sheldon” were designed to hit many of the notes that the show had played so well during its run, ending with a finale that Holland wanted to have “a little bit of humor and a little bit of hope.” The series finishes in an understated and touching way — going out just as it came in.
