“Young Sheldon” to close up shop after seven seasons
CBS comedy calls it a career
In news that could trigger celebrations across this great Earth of ours, top-rated CBS sitcom Young Sheldon is ending after seven seasons and 100+ episodes.
“As a prequel to one of the biggest comedies, Young Sheldon proved lightning can strike twice,” said Amy Reisenbach, president of CBS Entertainment. “It set itself apart with a remarkable cast that felt like a family from the first moment we saw them on screen and brought characters to life with unique heartfelt stories that drew audiences in from the start.”
Delayed by this summer’s work stoppages, Young Sheldon‘s seventh and final season starts February 15 and ends with a one-hour finale on May 16. A fourteen-episode season is on tap as the show’s three-year renewal deal with CBS expires at season’s end.
“Being able to tell the origin of Sheldon Cooper, and expanding the story to include the entire Cooper family has been a wonderful experience,” said executive producers Steve Holland, Steven Molaro, and Chuck Lorre in a statement. “We are grateful to our fans for embracing this chapter of the Coopers these past six seasons, and on behalf of the entire Young Sheldon family, we’re excited to share this final season with you.”
Young Sheldon launched on September 25, 2017 with the premiere episode drawing 16.57 million viewers. It became the first single-cam spinoff of a multi-cam sitcom (The Big Bang Theory), focusing on the childhood of Sheldon Cooper played by Iain Armitage – a character Jim Parsons played as an adult on Big Bang and does voiceover similar to what the original version of The Wonder Years did, which aired on ABC during Sheldon’s timeline (1989-93). Unlike Wonder Years, Sheldon wasn’t exactly a critical smash.
But despite ranking as a top-rated sitcom for the last few years, Sheldon illustrated what was wrong with the sitcom as the sheer arrogance of the main character made it a tough watch, and was often the butt of jokes – from SEC fans as endless promos ran during CBS’ college football coverage to serious TV fans – not to mention this space and its Twitter feed.
Young Sheldon was so odious, this website coined a new phrase about viewers who would hopelessly sit and watch the show endlessly – The Hapless Home Viewer.
Another point of contrition with the show was Sheldon’s older teenage brother getting a woman pregnant ten years older than him late in season five, exposing the family’s hypocrisy when it came to religion (sans Sheldon as he is an atheist, which goes over as well in Texas as someone wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers shirt.)
After four seasons, producer Warner Bros. sold Sheldon into off-network with deals from TBS, Nick, Max, and local outlets including several big market Nexstar stations. In the top three, Sheldon airs on WGN-TV Chicago and WPIX New York (each also obtained rights to Big Bang this fall), and KNBC Los Angeles.
Oddly enough, the TV Sheldon Cooper shares the same name with the real-life legendary WGN television exec and the first Silver Circle inductee of the Chicago/Midwest chapter of NATAS. Cooper worked for the station in a variety of positions from 1950 to 1982, when he was named president of Tribune Entertainment until his 1993 retirement from the company. He died in 2020.