Young Sheldon Producer Steve Holland Explains The Tonal Challenges of the Series’ Final Two Episodes

Tonight, Young Sheldon will wrap its seventh and final season with back-to-back episodes that will see the Cooper family reeling from the death of patriarch George Sr., as well as Sheldon’s final moments before heading out to California to begin college. Along the way, guest stars Jim Parsons and Mayim Bialik will appear, reprising their roles as “Old Sheldon” and his wife Amy, and giving a little bit of additional insight into what the couple is up go, about five years after the last time fans got to see them share the screen in the finale of The Big Bang Theory. 

George’s death, which was telegraphed in The Big Bang Theory, has been a source of speculation for fans all season long. The audience knew that his dad died when Sheldon was 14 — and since he had skipped a number of grades, that was also when Sheldon was set to start his work at Cal Tech, where he was teaching when audiences first met him. Executive producer Steve Holland broke down the pacing a little bit when we spoke to him about the finale.

“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.”

So that’s the plan for tonight: the show’s thirteenth episode, titled “Funeral,” will center on the family dealing with George’s death. After that, the show will roll right on into the series finale, which will center on Sheldon’s final days in Texas before his move to the west coast.

Holland said that he knew having the funeral episode so close to the end of the show would be a tightrope walk, but praised the cast for conveying their grief without completely losing the humor in what is, above all, a family sitcom.

“Every cut away to Raegan [Revord] breaks my heart, every one,” Holland said, praising the actress who plays Sheldon’s sister Missy. “I think that was the biggest balancing act, certainly of the funeral episode,  was figuring out how to balance that tone. I think in the original script, and what we shot, there were more jokes and more attempts at humor, but when we got into the edit, they just started to feel a little tone-deaf. It felt like this family was really grieving, and we were trying to honor George Senior’s death, and we sort of gave ourselves permission to not go for the joke all the time.”

“There’s still some moments in there of levity, there’s still some jokes,” Holland promised. “But we really wanted to treat it real, and honor this family’s grief — and I think hopefully an audience that’s lived for seven years with this character, their grief as well — and that it’s okay to have that emotion, and it’s okay to feel that grief. We didn’t feel the need to give an off ramp of humor all the time. That really came out in the edit. That was about watching it back, and seeing the tone, and just feeling there were things that felt out of place in this moment, where it felt very real and heavy.”

The final two episodes of Young Sheldon will air tonight starting at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.