It may not necessarily get the credit it deserves, but it’s hard to find a more successful spin-off in the 2010s and beyond than that of “Young Sheldon.” Serving as a prequel centered on Sheldon Cooper from “The Big Bang Theory,” the series enjoyed a healthy seven season run on CBS before going off the air in 2024. One big difference is that the prequel is more of a single-camera sit-com format, whereas the flagship show was a multi-cam, filmed in front of a live studio audience sort of thing. That difference resulted in some long shoots.
More specifically, the staple dinner table scenes in “Young Sheldon” actually took a surprising amount of time to shoot. In a 2024 interview with Variety around the time the show was ending, series star Iain Armitage pulled the curtain back to reveal that those dinner table scenes literally took hours to film. Here’s what he had to say about it:
“Maybe five, six, seven hours. It can be a long time for a one-, two-, three- or four-minute scene. It’s hours and hours and hours of work and that’s not even counting cooking the food and dressing our sets. There’s so much work done by so many people. And I think that’s another interesting part of getting to work on a show like this, there’s so many jobs that so many people do. I feel like a lot of fans of the show don’t even get to appreciate it because you don’t get to see what they do.”
“You get to see it on screen, but we don’t get to fully give them the credit that I think they so deserve, but we have a wonderful crew,” Armitage added.
Across seven seasons of “Young Sheldon” and more than 140 episodes, they had quite a few of those dinner table scenes. But as Armitage points out, there was a surprising amount of work that went into making those scenes happen. In the realm of movies and TV, nothing is ever quite as easy as it may seem on the surface.
The group scenes in Young Sheldon were tedious but worth it
Annie Potts, who was shocked when “Young Sheldon” was canceled, played Connie “Meemaw” Tucker throughout the show’s entire run. She participated in the same interview and also touched on those dinner table scenes. In the show’s final season, there was a living room scene that mirrored the dinner table scenes. Potts explained that, during such scenes in the final season, they took time to enjoy them, even if they could usually be rather tedious. As she explained:
“When there’s that many people in a scene, it takes a long time because everybody’s got to get shot from everybody’s perspective. So, the camera goes around and around, and it can be quite tedious. And certainly, when the children were little, they like *mimics fidgety movements*. But the past few months we’ve just been relishing our time together, and especially those scenes, so there was no tedium about it.”
Time consuming though they may have been, these scenes helped make the show what it was. It found an identity beyond “Big Bang” and helped establish an entire, ever-expanding franchise. This show gave way to the spin-off “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage,” which is getting a second season. Aside from that, Chuck Lorre is also working on yet another spin-off set within this universe called “Stuart Fails To Save The Universe.” Tedious though they may have been at the time, those long hours spent around the dinner table paid off.
