The Big Crunch Theory

"Young Sheldon" and the incredible shrinking comedy.

Young Sheldon is a spinoff of the hit sitcom The Big Bang Theory. (CBS)

My children have recently discovered Young Sheldon.  Practically every morning before school, and every evening after school, they smash that Netflix button on our Roku remote, turn on the captions (why, for the love of God, do children want to watch everything with captions on?), and settle in for another random smattering of episodes concerning the prepubescent genius and his profoundly ordinary Texan family. 

I am on the record as being decidedly iffy on all matters Chuck Lorre.  Two and a Half Men struck me as unwatchable alpha-male-worshipping dreck, and while The Big Bang Theory was perfectly passable, it was not a series I would ever choose to watch of my own volition.  So I was pleasantly surprised to discover, during my children’s collectively imposed Young Sheldon marathons, that the show was sweet and gentle and even sometimes funny. 

Sheldon’s otherworldly wizardry with math and science did not necessarily help him manage his family or understand other children, and much of the show was about Sheldon’s workaday parents, who would squabble over issues like whether her boss at the church should move in next door, or if a preteen should be allowed to attend college thousands of miles away.  And—lucky me! —the great character actor and playwright Wallace Shawn played Sheldon’s grandmother’s boyfriend.

I found Young Sheldon to be perfectly adequate background entertainment as I was often busy doing something else: serving dinner, responding to email, emptying backpacks, doomscrolling.  And I found myself thinking about the differing but overlapping constituencies a show like Young Sheldon might serve as I pondered the contemporary television landscape, in which shows like Young Sheldon—or any gently paced, mildly entertaining, warm-hearted, middlebrow sitcom—have become increasingly rare commodities.

If there is a single thing that surprises me most about television production, it is the disjunction between the collective knowledge of which series have generated the longest-lasting, most enduring audience loyalty, and which series get made today.  We swim in a television sea in which two of the biggest streaming platforms—Max and Peacock—exist in large part because their corporate overlords wanted to retain all the profit from beloved comedy series.  If Max came about so Warner Bros. could hang on to all that Friends cheddar, and Peacock so that NBC could stop letting others ransack The Office, what possible reason do those streamers have for not playing the long game and producing a dozen new comedy series about quirky families, kooky coworkers, and zany pals, year after year? Everyone loves Abbott Elementary, so why aren’t networks doing everything they can to make the next Abbott Elementary?

I am not, nor will I ever be, a television executive.  I’m here to appreciate the artistry, not worry about the bottom line.  I love being challenged by something fresh and exciting and unexpected, and leaving others to worry about balancing the corporate checkbook. Let me note without hesitation that I do not have an advanced degree in finance, nor am I any kind of quant.  While I might go so far as to brag that I am better than average at two-digit multiplication, my math skills pretty much tapped out in 10^th grade. 

I am perpetually surprised, year after year, to see that my students at NYU continue to love The Office, a show that premiered when many of them were toddlers. (If you need to take a minute now to silently scream to yourself about the passage of time, please do.)  John Krasinski may now be an A-list director, and Steve Carell an Oscar nominee, but people still want to know whether Jim and Pam will end up together—or watch them end up together all over again.

Television comfort food, with well-crafted jokes and relatable characters, is a perpetual audience favorite, and yet, even as streamers like Netflix make explicit their interest in what they call “gourmet cheeseburgers”—series that try to make familiar artery-cloggers look classy—the drift away from comedy series and toward drama only speeds up. 

The slow death of the networks, and their steady drift away from producing new sitcoms, seems to spell the end of the sitcom.  ABC currently has no new comedy series in production, NBC has long since abandoned its role as a comedy showcase, and while CBS has followed up Young Sheldon with spinoff Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, Chuck Lorre’s network of choice will have only a tiny handful of sitcoms on its fall schedule.  And the streaming platforms, with their interest in shorter and fewer seasons of their series, appear constitutionally ill-inclined to produce the kinds of long-running series that generate this kind of slow-burn loyalty. Audiences can embrace a certain kind of warm-hearted comedy in a fashion that no drama could ever compete with.  (How many people do you know who have watched The Wire 10 times through, or turn on Breaking Bad while they fold their laundry?)

Television is perhaps only now coming to the tail end of what has been a remarkable quarter-century of growth and intense creativity, from the era of The Sopranos and Freaks and Geeks to today.  We have grown accustomed to expecting more from television than mere comfort.  Whether it is The Bear or Curb Your Enthusiasm or Succession or Reservation Dogs, we look to TV to challenge us, to unsettle us, to expand the possibilities of what television can do.  Television has gone from an afterthought to the white-hot center of American popular culture. But in the same way that a stalwart reader of literary fiction can also enjoy the occasional whodunit, the overall high quality of contemporary television sometimes produces a profound yearning for something more soothing and familiar.

No one with the most elemental grasp of the form would likely argue that Young Sheldon is a landmark in television history.  But when 7:00 pm rolls around, and homework is done, and everyone wants to decompress for a little while before bedtime and the start of another day, there are far worse ways to spend your time than with the Coopers. 

Television began as a domestic medium, inviting families to gather in their living rooms to watch other families stage their own carefully polished versions of our lives.  Television has radically expanded its capabilities, but even now, 25 years into our golden era of TV, there should still be room for series that seek to make us feel good for approximately 22 minutes.  My students’ love of The Office, and my children’s passion for Young Sheldon, indicates that audiences still want TV that can serve as a surrogate family, an easy laugh, soothing background noise, or some combination of all of the above.

I wrote a book about Friends a few years ago, and one of my favorite bits of the reporting for the book was talking to all the people who fell asleep watching the show, or used it to learn English, or to comfort themselves in the aftermath of unimaginable grief, or met their real-world friends or romantic partners through a shared love of the show.  Audiences have embraced sitcoms for their assured intertwining of the surprising and the familiar for three quarters of a century.  But watching my children watch Young Sheldon reminds me that contemporary audiences might especially hunger for a soothing reminder that, no matter what might happen, Sheldon and his family will be sitting around the dinner table once more.  Uncomplicated laughter is never out of fashion.

And perhaps we do not just want these shows; we need these shows. The past half-decade, from Trump to COVID to climate change, has been absolutely devastating to the mental health of so many people, and I always wonder whether part of the continuing appeal of series like Friends and The Office is their provision of instant-heat surrogate families for those of us feeling the sting of loneliness and the tart onrush of despair.  Whether it’s Jim and Dwight or Rachel and Monica or Sheldon and Missy, perhaps these series give audiences sitting in too-quiet rooms a sense of liveliness, of community, they crave.  We want to laugh with our friends.  We want to be amused by our family.  Why won’t TV give us more of what we want?

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Ministry Book Corner 📚

Here at MOPC, not only are we pop culture writers, we’re also authors! Every Monday, we’re going to recommend each other’s work. And if you’d like to check out all of our books, visit our bookstore at Bookshop.org.

Jennifer Recommends … Erin’s No Crying in Baseball: The Inside Story of a League of Their Own 

A League of Their Own was always great, but Erin makes it better. There’s no doubt that this movie inspired generations of women at a time when we had few sports movies to call their own. (In fact, we still don’t have enough, but I’m ready for movies about women’s soccer and basketball ASAP.)

Erin goes deep—subterranean, really—on how this very female, very badass, very unlike-any-other film came to be, from director Penny Marshall’s nervous (and relatable) assertions of control to Madonna’s peak-Madonna wild-child ways to the heartwarming friendship between Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell. Erin even talks about things that don’t have to do with Madonna, though I’ll always be distracted by the queen of pop stars.

My favorite parts, aside from the tidbit that costar Tom Hanks wrote an anonymous gossipy newsletter on set like a ‘90s Lady Whistledown, have to do with the real-life women who played baseball like champs while the men were off in World War II—and the Black women who were still marginalized, even in wartime.