It’s one thing to play Young Sheldon’s narrator. Jim Parsons goes into the studio from time to time, gets in front of a good microphone, records lines for a few episodes, and gets back to his other projects. Another thing, however, is to play Sheldon Cooper again in front of the cameras for the final season of the prequel to The Big Bang Theory. And, as the actor confessed to the Today program, he is very grateful for the experience.
“The Big Bang Theory was always a series with a live audience and Young Sheldon was a single-camera series,” he explained during the interview about working without an audience to react to the jokes in the scripts and their interpretation. During the filming he met Mayim Bialik, who played her fictional partner Amy, and felt that the situation “was different enough so that it wasn’t strange.”
He thought he would feel out of place on the set of Young Sheldon and, instead, “it was very sweet.” “It was the icing on the cake of the whole experience and I was very grateful that they asked us to do it,” he explained about his participation in the final episode of the series that, if the broadcast plans of the CBS channel in the United States are not altered, can be seen on May 16.
As happened with The Big Bang Theory (but being a smaller phenomenon), the series says goodbye while it is still the most watched comedy on free-to-air television. But its managers, Chuck Lorre, Steve Holland and Steven Molaro, considered that it was time to close it “when it was still at the top” and for creative reasons.
“There are certain things that we know happen in Sheldon’s life at 14 years old,” they explained about the age at which the character, played in his youth by Iain Armitage, is in his last episodes. At 14, he enrolled at Cal Tech University in California, moved away from his family, and his father, George, died.
And, since they did not want to continue Sheldon’s story without the rest of the Coopers, they agreed with Warner Bros and CBS to end the series. Of course, they have a new spin-off underway: a sitcom that will return this fictional universe to the sitcom with a live audience with Georgie, Sheldon’s brother, and his wife Mandy, played by Montana Jordan and Emily Osment.
In this way, American television will not be long without Coopers on screen: Young Sheldon says goodbye in May and, in the fall, the spin-off about the peculiar family formed by Georgie and Mandy will premiere.
