You’d Be Surprised How Many ‘Young Sheldon’ Haters Have Turned into Fans
Here’s a public service announcement that’s unlikely to make it into a CBS ad-break: “Hate watching” is a gateway drug to unironically enjoying Young Sheldon.
Yesterday afternoon, CBS announced that the upcoming seventh season of Young Sheldon will be the show’s last. The Chuck Lorre production served as the prequel to the most commercially successful series on Lorre’s preposterously profitable IMDb page, the controversial single-cam sitcom The Big Bang Theory, and with more Big Bang Theory content in the oven, Young Sheldon fans are taking a moment before the finale to ponder the show’s place in the soon-to-be-sprawling franchise’s history.
In certain internet circles, Young Sheldon, just like its originator, is a bit of a punchline that represents the blandness of broad-appeal television. However, it’s unlikely that many of meme-makers who take shots at Young Sheldon on Twitter have ever actually watched an entire episode of the show they pretend to hate — because, apparently, the ones that do have all been converted.
Somehow, there is a sizable number of Young Sheldon apologists who, like most of Twitter, despised The Big Bang Theory, only to be tricked into genuinely connecting with the non-Sheldon characters of the prequel through clips shared on social media. Apparently (and unlike in the original series) there is an earnest and non-exploitative emotional core in Young Sheldon that eludes the usual trappings and tropes of a broadcast family sitcom while still organically creating comedic and relatable situations. Young Sheldon’s empathetic portrayal of a religious family a small town in Texas apparently struck a chord with sitcom fans who lived through similar experiences but still can’t stand the catchphrases and cloyingness of The Big Bang Theory.
The most hilarious part of this thread full of begrudging Young Sheldon stans is the mental image of each and every one of them recoiling in horror upon the realization that the thoughtful family show they’d been enjoying for 15 minutes was centered around the character who stole Steve Carell’s Emmys every year and inspired innumerable unsettling memes at Jim Parsons' expense.
Dare I say, bazinga?
