The universe of The Big Bang Theory will not disappear from television anytime soon. The American channel CBS has already commissioned a series about Georgie and Mandy for next season. But this fictional world will no longer revolve around Sheldon Cooper: Young Sheldon, the prequel focused on the character’s childhood, will end this spring. And who will return to say goodbye? Jim Parsons and Mayim Bialik.
The actors known for playing the adult (and original) version of Sheldon Cooper and Amy Farrah Fowler, who ends up being his partner in the present, will appear in the final episode scheduled for May 16, when the prequel will say goodbye to American primetime .
It is unknown how the characters will be introduced, taking into account that they are in a time plane different from that of Young Sheldon, but at least Parsons’ participation was predictable: he has always participated in the series as a narrator and, what is more, Importantly, he has the title of executive producer.
The ending has its sweet spot for Chuck Lorre and Steven Molaro, the creators. Young Sheldon did not fall into the trap of Joey, who left Friends, and did enter the club of successful comedy spin-offs such as Frasier, the sitcom derived from Cheers.
When it premiered in 2017, after The Big Bang Theory ended, it became the most watched new comedy on television and, now that it is about to say goodbye in 2024, it remains the most watched comedy on American television.
The CBS channel, however, announced that the seventh season, produced after the writers’ and actors’ strike, will be the last. The media attributed the cancellation to the increase in costs caused by seniority: when you have been on the air for seven seasons, both the actors and the entire creative and technical team receive better salaries, which increases the price of each episode.
The creators, despite these assumptions, indicated that this was a creative decision. “We felt it was the right time to close out the series while it was still at the top,” explained Steve Holland, showrunner of the series.
The character played by Iain Armitage in the prequel was approaching 14 years old, the time when Sheldon went to Cal Tech University in California or George, his father, died. If they wanted to continue forward, they had to face the loss of the Cooper patriarch and a fundamental change: either continue writing Young Sheldon as a college comedy or continue the Cooper family without Sheldon.
Instead, Lorre, Holland and Molaro have developed a family sitcom with a live audience, in the style of The Big Bang Theory, to narrate the day-to-day life of the family created by Georgie and Mandi, the characters played by Montana Jordan. and Emily Osment and featured in Young Sheldon.
