It’s not easy being a boy genius in a small East Texas town, and especially so for Sheldon Lee Cooper (Iain Armitage), the quirkily observant and socially awkward protagonist of Young Sheldon, the spin-off prequel to The Big Bang Theory.
“I’m having a hard time adjusting to Earth,” Sheldon matter-of-factly tells the librarian at the local high school where he’s just started classes at the ripe age of 9. He may be a prodigy in science and math, but he’s got an equally remarkable talent for saying and doing exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time (loudly discussing his puberty during the Sunday sermon, attempting to wear a bow tie and carry a briefcase in a sea of rock ’n’ roll shirts and football uniforms). Sheldon’s interior life, rendered in a reflective adult voice-over (à la The Wonder Years and Stand By Me) by Jim Parsons, is just as witty and dry.
Created by Chuck Lorre and Steven Molaro, the Emmy-winning team behind The Big Bang Theory, the hit series Young Sheldon tells the origin story of that show’s adult theoretical physicist character, making it an essential companion piece. But Young Sheldon is worthy stand-alone viewing — and its first six seasons are ripe for streaming if you’re ready to sink into a delightfully droll late ’80s/early ’90s coming-of-age series of suburban dysfunction. (Season 7, which begins airing in February, is due to be the show’s last.)
Season 7 has now joined the first six seasons on Netflix. Stream ’em all now.
When Season 1 of Young Sheldon begins, precocious, clean-cut, and socially oblivious 9-year-old Sheldon (Armitage) is about to begin life in public high school — and by 11, his PhD studies. We know that he’ll eventually become the theoretical physicist played by Parsons in The Big Bang Theory, but for now, Sheldon’s got plenty of local personas and small-town dramas to navigate.
There’s his football coach dad (Barber); his football-playing brother (Jordan); his devout and overprotective mom (Perry); his sarcastic younger twin sister (Revord); and his wise-cracking, fun-loving grandma (Potts), who goes by Meemaw and refers to her hyper-brilliant grandson as Moonpie — despite his best efforts to eradicate his East Texas accent in favor of a neutral mid-Atlantic one. Anchored in late-’80s and early-’90s pop culture, Young Sheldon follows the daily dramas that emerge in insatiably curious Sheldon’s oddball encounters with teachers, preachers, and fellow students as he heads into the most bewildering and intellect-defying territory yet: becoming a teenager.
Sheldon also encounters plenty of famous personalities (in the guise of guest star characters) over the course of Young Sheldon. The show’s memorable cameos include: Penn and Teller, Reba McEntire, Bob Newhart, Diane Ladd, Ray Liotta, Cyndi Lauper, David Hasselhoff, Mayim Bialik, Jason Alexander, Marla Gibbs, Stephen Hawking (vocals only), Craig T. Nelson, Ming-Na Wen, and Wallace Shawn, among many others.
Yes, it’s a spin-off prequel to The Big Bang Theory, the Emmy-winning sitcom about a group of genius and socially inept Caltech physicists.
Young Sheldon is set in Medford, a fictional East Texas town, in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
