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Next to the return of the doves to the backyard, nothing has made me happier recently than tumbling through the 10 episodes of the first season of “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe,” the third spin-off from “The Big Bang Theory.”
Premiering Thursday on HBO Max — the first straying of the franchise from CBS, and taking advantage of the expressive opportunities premium cable affords — violence and language mostly — which does not make it any whit less adorable. (Nobody gets naked, which would make it less adorable.)
Like “Lou Grant” extracting a newspaper drama from the remains of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” or the earlier “Big Bang” prequel “Young Sheldon,” “Stuart” takes its players — secondary characters in the original — and places them somewhere quite different: a single-camera, parallel-realities science-fiction adventure comedy. Temperamentally akin to Kevin Feige’s oddball Marvel confections for Disney+, or the metafictional DC-based “Doom Patrol” (also on HBO Max, for what it’s worth), it was created and written by Chuck Lorre with “Big Bang” co-creator Bill Prady, along with Zak Penn, whose screenwriting credits involve mostly superheroes and sci-fi, appropriately enough. (Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain — Lorre, that is — posting a message in the ever-changing credits that “comedy isn’t written by emotionally healthy people” and, in dialogue, likening a sitcom to “a meaningless void.”)
Our protagonists here are comic shop owner Stuart Bloom (Kevin Sussman), not the schlemiel he can seem; his able, practical girlfriend Denise (Lauren Lapkus); sweet geologist Bert Kibbler (Brian Posehn, exquisitely deadpan); and troublesome plasma physicist Barry Kripke (John Ross Bowie). They are not the first four actors, or characters, one might elect to carry a series, but they are the right ones, and they do.
We open in a post-apocalyptic Pasadena, following a hooded character through a dark landscape of burned out cars and mutant distractions to Stuart’s somehow still-open comic book store. This turns out to be Bert, who, pushing back the hood, asks “Got anything new?,” to which Stuart responds “Funny every time” as he tosses trash into a floating wormhole in the middle of the store. Eternal customers Kyle (Ryan Cartwright) and Trevor (Josh Brener), who will recur through the series, argue over whether Hawkeye deserves to be an Avenger — there are some debates not even the end of the world can silence.
After an interval, in which Bert barters canned food for a Batman comic, the figure of what I‘ll call “Big Bang” Stuart appears with a message — that in the primary reality, “Big Bang” characters Sheldon, Leonard and Howard (who don’t appear here) created a “vari-state quantum interference device” that malfunctioned and split reality into the television show you’ve just begun to watch. Post-apocalyptic Stuart is charged with setting things right, but the instructions are garbled (a bad cross-universe connection) and OG Stuart disappears.
Nevertheless, Stuart and Bert set off to Caltech, with a Thomas Bros. guide — a little joke for the locals. Before the episode is out, they’ll have picked up Denise, who has become a bandit (but is “still working on my screenplay”) and Kripke, a terrible person who will nevertheless have his uses. He has appointed himself the Grand Caliph of South Pasadena, Flintridge and Monrovia and Supreme Ruler of the San Gabriel Valley, but he’ll be brought down soon enough, as Stuart gets his hands on the quantum interference device and we begin a trip through successive realities on the way to who knows where. As odysseys go, it’s very much my speed.
Why it should be Stuart who’s charged with saving the universe is not explained, and meaningful only in that, comically speaking, Sussman, the actor, and Stuart, the schlub (“I’m not a quantum physicist, I went to the Rhode Island School of Design”) are right for the job, and that casting brings Lapkus, who is delightful as Denise, into the mix; their relationship is the emotional core of the show. Anything Posehn says is funny by dint of his saying it. There is some dated speech-impediment humor attached to Kripke, and some hacky sex jokes, but they come already attached to the character, so what are you going to do? And Bowie couldn’t be any better being awful.
I don’t want to say too much about what happens, because it wouldn’t be as funny on paper as it is in motion. Some of the alternate realities we’ve seen before, though not necessarily so well treated, and some are ones no one has thought of before, so off the wall are they. It’s the small details, which we could be here all day enumerating, and the delivery, rather than the big concepts, that bring the show alive. More important, no small part of the fun is in discovering each new universe alongside the travelers, and in the transformation of familiar environments. (The Warner Bros. back lot gets a workout.) If you don’t find one alternate reality funny, there’ll be another one along soon. This is not a problem I had. But here are two jokes from a place where magic is real. Kripke: “Stuart, the people here think science is evil.” Stuart: “How is that different from our world?” And Doctor Strange, the comic character, is a colorectal surgeon..
Every once in a while a character will attempt to explain things, addressing questions you might have. And while I do not doubt that there are viewers who have the time, energy and brain to chart the logic of the series in a way that might surprise even its creators, the least complicated time-reality-travel story needs to make sense only in the moment. It’s best put those questions out of your mind and enjoy the changing scenery and the funny company.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
