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From playful opening credits to uncensored vanity cards at each episode’s end, you can’t take your eyes off of the latest spinoff of The Big Bang Theory, which thankfully and happily is unlike anything that’s come before.
As Bill Prady, co-creator with Chuck Lorre, and Zak Penn, noted during a making-of feature on the most recent edition of CBS Sunday Morning, HBO Max’s Stuart Fails to Save the Universe is the sort of show that might actually appeal to Sheldon and Leonard, Big Bang’s genius nerds and fantasy/sci-fi buffs so memorably played by Jim Parsons and Johnny Galecki. It’s a fractured comic book fantasyland come to hilariously twisted life.
This is also a huge leap and stylistic departure for sitcom veteran Lorre, who declares in one of his signature vanity cards (a sentiment he repeated to Sunday Morning), “I just couldn’t do the couch thing anymore.” And yet this feels the closest in tone to the original series’ biting wit.
Couch aside, Big Bang is the gift that keeps on giving. Not just in the syndicated and streaming repeats that still hold up seven years after its finale — I try not to dwell on the fact that next year will mark two decades since the show’s premiere — but also in its previous two successful network spinoffs. Like Young Sheldon, which ran for seven seasons, Stuart is filmed, not shot in front of a studio audience, but this is no sentimental memory piece. It’s also literally a world removed from the old-school domestic sitcom style featured in Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, entering its third season on CBS this fall.
The most direct offshoot from the peerless original ensemble, Stuart echoes Big Bang most acutely with its high concept and reliance on hard jokes that are specific to each wacky character. The biggest joke is that Stuart Bloom (lovably mousy Kevin Sussman), the sad-sack proprietor of a struggling comic-book store, knows that he was always meant to be a peripheral character, never the leading milquetoast. (Sussman wasn’t added to the regular main cast until Big Bang’s later seasons.)
But as fate would have it, Stuart is forced to step bravely if clumsily into the hero role in a far-out scenario of his own hapless making. The series opens (following spoiler-heavy credits that demand to be read and savored each week) in a post-apocalyptic Pasadena beset by giant moths and dimensional rifts. In this dark world, where everything abnormal is normal, Stuart is informed by a double from an alternate reality that he alone is responsible for resetting a broken and disintegrating universe that he altered by accidentally dropping a quantum entanglement device built by Sheldon and Leonard. Oops.
His traveling companions through a dystopian multiverse, as Stuart jumps from one bizarro world to another, include his loyal girlfriend Denise (pert Lauren Lapkus), droll bearlike geologist Bert (Brian Posehn of the killer deadpan), and the eternally irritating and speech-impaired physicist Barry Kripke (John Ross Bowie relishing every selfish, smarmy moment). Each landing brings its own warped society’s challenges and dangers as they encounter outrageous alt-versions of beloved characters and actors from the Big Bang-verse.
The meta fun doesn’t stop there. Amid the Mel Brooks-like sight-gag mayhem, Stuart and gang begin to use their pop culture-weaned knowledge to their advantage. Encountering one recurring character after several quantum leaps, Stuart observes, “You’re like a running joke in all this, aren’t you?” Takes one to know one.
By the time they find themselves trapped within the confines of an actual Stuart Fails to Save the Universe comic book, the opening credits freely bring up the dreaded “jump the shark” idiom. Not to fear. Though a classic superhero figure tells them, “This is the most ridiculous story I’ve ever heard,” this inventive comedy is just getting started when its brisk 10-episode season ends with its most surreal, self-reflective twist yet. And even then, these dweebs can’t stop dwelling about fiber and bathroom habits.
That big bang you’re about to hear is the boom of sustained laughter.
Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, Series Premiere, Thursday, July 23, 9/8c, HBO Max
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