How do you milk an ageing cash cow? One way is to breed it with a pedigree bull and hope it calves an equally remunerative offspring – which, figuratively speaking, is what CBS in America has done with their increasingly elderly ratings colossus The Big Bang Theory.
Young Sheldon, the prequel that takes The Big Bang Theory’s most popular character, Sheldon Cooper, back to his boyhood in 1989 Texas, has proved an instant success. Broadcast in the States last autumn in a slot immediately following the new season of its parent show, Young Sheldon retained nearly all of TBBT’s 18 million strong audience – and has kept it every week since. It’s a trick that E4 are understandably repeating in the UK when they premiere the two sitcoms back-to-back this week.
The end of year Nielsen ratings for the most popular US TV programmes of 2017 put the Big Bang Theory at No 2 (slightly behind NBC’s Sunday night American football coverage), while Young Sheldon was at No 4 (just pipped by the Freddie Highmore drama The Good Doctor). As an experiment in extending the shelf life of a much loved franchise, Young Sheldon has been an unalloyed triumph. Or as Sheldon Cooper might say: bazinga!
The Big Bang Theory, for those who have managed to avoid the show so far (easier to do in Britain than it is in America, where it’s in inescapable syndication), is the millennial equivalent of Friends, following four socially awkward scientists working at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Sheldon Cooper (played by Jim Parsons) and Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki) share an apartment across the hall from aspiring actress (and later drugs company rep and Leonard’s wife) Penny (Kaley Cuoco), while their best friends are aerospace engineer Howard (Simon Helberg) and particle astrophysicist Rajesh (Kunal Nayyar).
The word “geeky” doesn’t really cover it. Here was a popular primetime sitcom in which five of the seven main characters were PhD students and the sixth “only” had a master’s from MIT.
As the makers of Friends discovered, however, such a set-up – feasible in the characters’ twenties and even thirties, becomes increasingly untenable as they reach middle-age and marry off – Jim Parsons, for example, is now 44. An elixir for eternal youth was required, and if that was going to be by means of a prequel, there was only one real candidate for that honour: TBBT’s resident nerdishly neurotic boy-man, Sheldon Cooper.
“We have an opportunity to look at Sheldon as an adult and think about the origins of how he came to be”, says Steven Molaro, who co-created TBBT and Young Sheldon with Chuck Lorre. “When we meet him in the pilot he doesn’t even like comic books yet. He likes to go to church with his mom even though he doesn’t share her views. So there’s a joy at discovery about Sheldon at nine that we’ve been having a lot of fun with.”
“Part of the fun of writing the series was not just to show how Sheldon develops, but to see how his family has to adapt”, adds Lorre. “Everybody in the family is affected by having a child who is remarkable, and their lives have to change to accommodate him.”
Set in 1989 Texas, the series begins with Sheldon (played by nine-year-old Iain Armitage) starting high-school where, due to his precocious intelligence, he sits in the same class as his bullying older brother George (Montana Jordan). He also has a twin sister, Missy (Raegan Revord), who’s more interested in combing hair than unlocking the secrets of the universe.
