A portrait of Sheldon as a young genius
It doesn’t take a theoretical physicist to figure out why CBS is adding Young Sheldon to its fall schedule. It’s not unusual for successful television shows to spawn spinoff series and there’s been no network program over the past 10 years that’s been as big a hit as The Big Bang Theory.
The series goes back to when Dr. Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons on The Big Bang Theory) was a nine-year-old genius (played by Iain Armitage in Young Sheldon) growing up in East Texas. Fans of the original series will now get to see how Sheldon dealt with being the smartest kid in the room, where his fear of chickens comes from, the origin of his love for Professor Proton and other bits of history about the character sprinkled through the 10 years of The Big Bang Theory.
According to Chuck Lorre, executive producer of both shows, the series was as inevitable as the effect of gravity on a falling apple.
“The origins of Sheldon have been something we’ve been interested in writing about for a couple-hundred episodes of The Big Bang. And so last fall, when Jim [Parsons] sent me an email discussing the possibility of actually taking it a step further, it just seemed like the greatest idea in the world,” Lorre says.
Great ideas can die without the proper tools to make them work. In this case, that meant finding just the right actor to play a younger version of the quirky Sheldon who has become so well defined in The Big Bang. They found what they needed in Iain, who started acting when he was eight years old, rolling up credits that include the HBO limited series Big Little Lies. Before starting work on the CBS comedy, the Virginia native wrapped production on a feature for Netflix, Our Souls at Night, opposite Jane Fonda and Robert Redford. He’s also appeared in the films I’m Not Here and The Glass Castle.
The only downside to casting Iain was his lack of knowledge of the subject matter because he doesn’t watch a lot of television. The fix for that came through Parsons, one of the executive producers on the show, who has been coaching his younger counterpart.
Parsons says: “I was able to interact with Iain a lot and kind of discuss certain things that are peculiar to this character. And whether it was just lines or moments in general or Sheldon’s take on the world. It’s an interesting topic for us to go over together. Through that, though, I have to tell you that it was a very moving experience for me to see something that I’ve put in a decade of my life toward.”
Fans of The Big Bang Theory will recognize people, places and things mentioned over the years. What will be different is that Young Sheldon is being filmed in a completely different style than Big Bang. The original show films on a studio soundstage in front of an audience. Young Sheldon is being filmed as if it was a movie with one camera being taken to various locations.
The tone is a little different too, as the humour shifts from the comedy between the friends to more of a family setting. This is the first series from Lorre —whose hits range from Two and a Half Men to Mike & Molly — that uses narration. In design, Young Sheldon is closer to The Wonder Years than it is The Big Bang Theory.