Young Sheldon will end after the seventh season currently in production. The costs derived from his seniority, in addition to the fact that Sheldon Cooper is ceasing to be the young man of the title, led the CBS channel to terminate the prequel to The Big Bang Theory. This does not mean, however, that they have tired of the fictional universe: they already have a spin-off underway focused on Georgie, Sheldon’s brother, and Mandy, his fiancee.

Behind the project are Steven Molaro and Chuck Lorre, the original creators of Young Sheldon (and, in Lorre’s case, also co-creator of The Big Bang Theory with Bill Prady), and Steve Holland, who has worked as a screenwriter on both. series from this comedy universe. And, according to Deadline, it is not just a project in development from Warner Bros Television: CBS is already about to give the green light to the production of the first 13 episodes.

There will also be a format change with respect to Young Sheldon. It will follow in the footsteps of The Big Bang Theory and will be filmed in multi-camera, that is, with large sets, a live audience and the constant search for laughter, abandoning the somewhat more emotional tone of the prequel and less concerned with the sketch of the prequel starring Iain Armitage.

At the moment, there is one piece that needs to fit: the contracts of Montana Jordan and Emily Osment, who play Georgie and Mandy. Being secondary characters in a successful series is not the same as being the absolute protagonists of a spin-off. In the case of Jordan, who is 20 years old, she has been playing Georgie since the pilot episode filmed in 2017, when she was a 13-year-old boy. In Osment’s case, who became known in Hannah Montana and is 31 years old, she joined the cast in 2022 during the fifth season.

The starting point of the spin-off is good if you take into account the plot of these two characters in Young Sheldon. Georgie and Mandy met when she was 29 and he was still a year away from coming of age. But she made him believe that he was already 21, they let themselves go and the series will show what their life is like as a couple and as parents of a baby. It remains to be seen if the rest of the members of the Cooper family will have a place in the series as permanent, recurring or guest characters.

The other question is how this series plans to develop creatively for Georgie and Mandy taking into account that it is part of the Big Bang universe. Will he build the life of Sheldon’s older brother to be the jerk we saw in the sitcom with Jim Parsons, who had been married and divorced twice? Or will Molaro, Lorre and Holland take the liberty of going off the map, taking into account the lack of relevance and the fact that they cannot destroy the memory of The Big Bang Theory?

However, the decision to produce the spin-off makes commercial sense. On the one hand, Young Sheldon still has very healthy audiences on traditional television in the United States, it’s just that the costs associated with his seniority have encouraged cancellation. On the other hand, in recent weeks the title is gaining renewed interest from the public, after joining the Netflix catalog and becoming the latest fashionable series, following in the footsteps of Suits.

Will the CBS channel trust that part of this streaming audience will join the linear broadcasts of the spin-off?