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A spin-off from the long-running US sitcom The Big Bang Theory, the Stuart in Stuart Fails to Save the Universe (HBO Max) is Stuart Bloom (Kevin Sussman), a diffident comic book store owner with panic in his eyes.
There is plenty to panic about. Though we begin in his Pasadena shop familiar from the BBT, outside things are very different. Civilisation is in tatters and people are bartering for survival. There is a dimensional rift in the comic book store that Stuart uses as a rubbish bin. It transpires that all of this is the fault of Leonard and Howard, the leads from BBT. They invented a quantum entanglement machine that altered reality, which then malfunctioned. Only Stuart, the most reluctant of reluctant heroes, can fix it, and so with BBT favourites Denise (Lauren Lapkus), geologist Bert (Brian Posehn) and physicist misanthrope Krikpee (John Ross Bowie) in tow, off we go down the quantum rabbit hole.
Or rather rabbit holes plural, because each episode ends Bill and Ted-style, with the quantum machine’s big red button being pressed again and the gang beaming up to another destination in the multiverse. This functions as a trailer and lure for the next instalment, as over 10 short episodes we zoom from a pre-historic society as yet untainted by individualism (Kripkee soon sees to that) to an AI-initiated warzone to a Harry Potter-esque world where magic is real.
This is a strange fish of a show, one that you sense only an industry titan like Big Bang Theory creator Chuck Lorre (Two and a Half Men, Dharma and Greg, Young Sheldon) would be allowed to make and one that is aimed squarely at the (enormous) fanbase of that show. Each episode begins with a different title sequence that has a button which sits above the “Skip Intro” button streamers usually employ, but in this case the sequence asks you specifically not to skip the intro. It sets the tone for a meta-sitcom that is trying to yoke together some of the biggest questions – about belief and science, about narrative and delusion, about AI and individuality – with a well-worn seam of nerdist humour.
Lorre, whose sitcom back catalogue comprises huge rating, long-running but critically derided traditional shows, appears to be on a mission to smash-up the very narrative structures that have made him very rich. By the end, to borrow a favoured Lorre phrase, s--- has got very weird, with characters hallucinating laughter tracks, seeing actors performing as themselves in a strange reality inversion called a “sitcom” and wandering out on to a Burbank backlot for some light ontology.
Big Bang Theory fans will undoubtedly be delighted by the reappearance of several familiars from that show – not just characters but set-ups as well as the overall tone. But no matter how innovative it is trying to be, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe is still a comedy and it stands or falls on the jokes. Geek humour tends to be a combination of quite clever and quite irritating, generally perpetrated by characters with little depth arguing about whether the laws of physics apply to Thor’s hammer and then saying “Anyhoo”. Stuart Fails to Save the Universe is both quite clever and quite irritating, but it fails to save the sitcom because it is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Not in this reality, anyway.
Stuart Fails to Save the Universe is on HBO Max from Friday 24 July
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