Chuck Lorre is the kind of producer who happens to stumble upon gold mines: With sitcoms like Two And A Half Men and then The Big Bang Theory, he reached a status that few in the industry did. With Young Sheldon, a spinoff on Sheldon Cooper’s early years from TBBT, things were even looking brighter. But is Young Sheldon finished?
What is the status of Young Sheldon, and where is it going now? This CBS sitcom, narrated by Jim Parsons and starring Iain Armitage, Zoe Perry, and Montana Jordan, kicked things off in 2017 with great success and traction from the TBBT followers.
But after it was all said and done, six seasons in, the stories, life, and character development stories dropped into the audience’s way, some of which don’t make sense once we realize where Sheldon is going and what is going to happen to him. As such, we need to explore what is going to happen with this TBBT spinoff sitcom.
Is Young Sheldon Finished?
The Big Bang Theory finished its long run thanks to Jim Parsons being fed up with doing the same thing over and over again.
Then came Young Sheldon, which kicked off in 2017 under the production of Chuck Lorre and Jim Parsons, and it tells us the life of Sheldon Cooper before he moves to California with Leonard in The Big Bang Theory across 127 episodes, six seasons, and a bunch of characters that seldom made their way into TBBT and were introduced to the show for content.
CBS confirmed that season seven of this spinoff will be the final one. But there are a lot of things that stand in the way of this beloved show’s finale. For starters, there’s a big writer’s guild strike, and that means that scriptwriters aren’t doing their job.
Secondly, CBS postponed taping the show as the strike unfolded. But that takes time, and if you recall past SAG-AFTRA (the writer’s guild) strikes, those events put dents into filming schedules, season lengths, and other kinds of elements that make a season possible.
There’s a third aspect of Young Sheldon that we need to cover: Every cast member wants to keep doing the show. It’s not like when TBBT had Jim Parsons decide he wanted to play Sheldon Cooper no more.
Still, there’s a caveat to this aspect: No matter how decided CBS is to keep the show running (despite saying that season 7 is the final one), it is up to the scriptwriters to keep the show alive. Without a story, there’s nothing that the cast can do to keep the show going. So, by the time of print, Young Sheldon is —indeed— finished.
Why Is Young Sheldon Finished?
Unlike other shows where timelines don’t matter, take, for example, The Simpsons, where after 3 decades, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie are the same age, in Young Sheldon, we see him going through college and preparing his way to move from Texas to California, where he will eventually meet Leonard, Rajesh, Penny, and Howard.
Bear in mind that this show is a prequel, and it cannot go on per sæcula sæculorum (forever, for non-Latin speakers). Sheldon is finishing his studies, he’s going to Pasadena, and he is going to California’s Technological Institute to become the smug doctorate and professor-student that Jim Parson portrays in The Big Bang Theory.
All things considered, it is better to finish things with a Big Bang —pun intended— rather than to stretch the stuff indefinitely and make it a tiresome kind of sitcom that keeps feeding on pop culture tropes from the 1980s and 1990s that get washed up and draw the audience away.
In other words, and to quote Green Day’s Billy Joe Armstrong in “When I Come Around”: “You may find out that your self-doubt means nothing was ever there. You can’t go forcing something if it’s just not right.”
The self-doubt part goes to the scriptwriters, and forcing something when it’s just not right goes for stretching a prequel whose characters were written up to a logical conclusion. As such, all we can say is good riddance to Young Sheldon and see if there’s another character spinoff that’s just as successful.
