Young Sheldon Hits Four Year Ratings High With Series Finale

After 7 seasons on CBS, Young Sheldon has officially come to an end. It was announced last November that the show, led by Iain Armitage, would wrap up this spring. The finale of the hit Big Bang Theory spin-off aired this week and its final curtain call drew a huge crowd for CBS. The episode captured over 9.32 million according to Nielsen’s same-day ratings. Though this number doesn’t include streaming, it is the largest audience the show has had since season 3.

The finale aired across two episodes on CBS with the penultimate viewing drawing 9.12 million. Not only that, the series recorded its best showing amongst the key demographic of 18-49, with a 0.71 rating (937,000 viewers) for the first episode and 0.76 (about 1.01 million viewers) during the finale.

Though the series has come to an end, it’s not over for the universe. In March, CBS greenlit a spinoff of Young Sheldon‘s two most popular characters Georgie (Montana Jordan) and Mandy (Emily Osment) — Sheldon’s brother and sister-in-law. George & Mandy’s First Marriage will follow the couple in 1990s Texas as they build their life together. The show is currently slated to premiere during CBS’ 2024-2025 fall broadcast season. The couple got together in season 5 of Young Sheldon. Mandy is twelve years Georgie’s senior but they both lied about their ages when they got together. After Mandy found out Georgie was only 17 when they slept together, she wanted nothing to do with him until she fell pregnant with their daughter, CeeCee, named after her great-grandmother Constance.

In a recent interview with Comicbook, Young Sheldon‘s executive producer Steve Holland explained the tonal differences of the final two episodes compared to the comedic energy that fans grew to love. “We knew, going into this last season especially, that we knew there were certain big events that happened when Sheldon was 14,” Holland explained.  We knew his dad was going to pass away. We knew that he was going to go to Caltech. So it was then really about figuring out when and how. And I think in our early discussions, we’d sort of thought that the death and the funeral would be the finale, with maybe a little tag of Sheldon going off to Cal Tech. I think that was always our last image. As we were breaking the episodes and talking about it, I think Chuck Lorre said, ‘The show has been such a sort of positive show and it’s a family show. Maybe we don’t want to leave the audience wallowing in grief. So maybe there’s a way to sort of do the funeral, and also move past it, and have a little bit more hope going into the finale.’ And I think that was a really smart call on his part.”