'Young Sheldon' EP Breaks Down the Emotional 2-Part Series Finale
Mayim Bialik as Amy and Jim Parsons as Sheldon in 'Young Sheldon' Season 7.
After seven seasons and 141 episodes, Young Sheldon has come to an end. Back in 2017, The Big Bang Theory spinoff introduced us to 7-year-old boy genius Sheldon Cooper (Iain Armitage) and his family, and now the finale said goodbye to this part of Sheldon’s story, sending the now 14-year-old graduate student off to meet his destiny in California.
The two-episode finale found Sheldon and his family grieving and processing the sudden death of George Cooper Sr. (Lance Barber). The second-to-last episode, “Funeral,” covered the immediate aftermath, while the final episode, “Memoir,” wrapped up the story with help from The Big Bang Theory stars Jim Parsons and Mayim Bialik, who reprised their roles as Sheldon Cooper and Amy Farrah Fowler on-camera for the first time since 2019. (Parsons narrated every episode of Young Sheldon as the grown-up version of the character.)
It was a genuinely sad and emotionally potent conclusion that still managed to incorporate the laughter and lightness that’s Young Sheldon's signature.
Sonja Flemming/CBS
Executive producer and co-showrunner Steven Holland told Parade that finding the right balance of sad and funny was one of the producers’ biggest challenges in the last two episodes, especially in “Funeral.” The episode was originally meant to have more humor, but as they watched it during editing, some of the jokes felt tonally out of place.
“We wanted to be very respectful of George as a character and what his passing meant to this family,” Holland said. “I think we realized that we could give ourselves permission to be a little more serious and have a little more weight in this moment, which felt very real to us.” Viewers can relate to losing loved ones and not knowing how to process it, and they decided to lean into the honesty of that.
“We could treat it as realistically as we wanted to,” he said. “We didn’t feel the need to just throw jokes in because it was a comedy show.”
The episode’s emotional content was the culmination of Young Sheldon’s incorporation of more serious themes. As the young stars got older and developed into better actors, it opened up new storytelling possibilities for the show, like Georgie (Montana Jordan) becoming a teenage parent (which will form the basis of this fall’s new spinoff Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage). So by the time they got to this episode, Holland knew the kids were ready for it.
Related: Everything to Know About the 'Young Sheldon' Spinoff 'Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage'
“We knew at this point that the kids were gonna knock this out of the park,” he said. Missy (Raegan Revord) took George’s death the hardest of the kids, and Holland said that every time the camera cut to Revord in the funeral scene, she broke his heart.
He said some real feelings made their way into the performances. “I think the cast was also grieving the end of the show as these characters were grieving [George],” he said. “So there were tears readily at hand for everybody.”
“The cast has been tremendous over seven years, but I think what all of them do in these last two episodes is really something special,” he added. “We're really proud of the episodes and really proud of their performances.”
Sonja Flemming/CBS
The return of Sheldon and Amy
The series’ final episode, “Memoir,” revealed that adult Sheldon’s narration throughout the series has been the Nobel Prize-winning scientist writing his memoir. Amy interrupted Sheldon’s narration of his memories and the camera cut to them in 2024, as she read over his shoulder (and critiqued his writing). It was a clever way to bring the Big Bang Theory characters into Young Sheldon.
The writers realized that Sheldon’s narration was his memoir while they were writing the finale and had to come up with a way to tie Sheldon and Amy in the present to Sheldon’s past. “That felt like the best way to do it,” Holland said. “It felt like it sort of wrapped up the narration. It kind of explains what that is this whole time. I felt like it gave a nice closure to that piece.”
When the writers decided to make George’s funeral the second-to-last episode and leave room for more lightness in the finale, they discussed what they could do to make it special. Co-creator and executive producer Chuck Lorre had the idea to bring in Parsons and Bialik. “To bring them both back as their characters and see them in present day seemed really exciting to us. And not just make it a cameo, but give them an actual story and thread it through the episode.”
Because Parsons is currently doing a Broadway play called “Mother Play” and wasn’t available when the rest of the episode was scheduled to film, he and Bialik filmed their scenes a few weeks earlier. Holland said it was exciting and a little surreal to see Parsons on the set, walking through the Coopers’ empty house. “It was great to see them step back into those characters,” he said. “And it felt so natural, and just exactly right to watch them do it.”
Bill Inoshita/Warner Bros.
He said it was interesting to watch them make small adjustments to how they perform. They had performed these characters for so many years on The Big Bang Theory that they had no trouble getting back into them, but they had always performed in front of a studio audience. “To kind of watch them do those adjustments to make it a single-cam performance, but still be like those characters was great,” he said.
Holland said it felt natural to write for them and make slight adjustments, too. “It was a little bit different, in a good way,” he said. “We’ve been writing for the character Sheldon for 16 years, 18 years, something like that. It's been a long time. So we do have that voice pretty well in hand. So it didn't feel like we were just writing a Big Bang scene. It felt like we were writing these characters in a Young Sheldon scene. But it was really fun to write for them again.”
Holland will start work on Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage in a couple of weeks, so he won’t have a lot of time to miss Young Sheldon. But he will miss the people behind and in front of the camera. “To be a part of those kids’ lives as they grew up, you know, we've known them since they were 8 years old, and now they're 15 and 16. It feels a little bit like you're sending your kids off into the world. And Lance and Zoey [Perry] and Annie [Potts], you know, and the supporting cast with Wally [Shawn] and Ed [Begley Jr.] and Craig Nelson are all so great. I'll miss getting to see them every day, and the writing staff that we put together. That'll be what I miss the most about it.”
Young Sheldon's final season is available to stream on Paramount+. Seasons 1-6 are available on Netflix and Max.
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