“Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” saved its biggest mind-bender for last.
The Season 1 finale sees Stuart, Denise, Bert, and Kripke escape the DC Comics-inspired universe they entered in Episode 9, only to find themselves stranded in a vast, empty void. There, they learn of a menacing, otherworldly entity that is none too pleased with the foursome for repeatedly altering the course of human history.
But things get even stranger from there.
Stuart and Co. ultimately wind up in what appears to be the real world, where they stumble onto the set of the multi-camera sitcom “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” — which essentially serves as a placeholder for “The Big Bang Theory” — and discover that not only are they fictional characters, but there are actors who look exactly like them playing those characters on television.
When TVLine first spoke with series stars Kevin Sussman and Lauren Lapkus at a pre-season junket in July (see above), both recalled just how surreal it was to film the meta twist on a recreation of the old “Big Bang” comic book store set.
“It’s bizarre. It’s like being back in time,” Lapkus said of seeing the set transformed back into a multi-camera stage, complete with a live studio audience.
For Sussman, returning to that version of the comic book store was somehow even stranger than walking onto the reimagined “Stuart” set at the start of production. “That was something that we actually had experienced eight years ago,” he explained.
Then there’s the existential crisis the finale leaves dangling: How do Stuart, Denise, Bert, and Kripke move forward after learning that they’re fictional characters? Lapkus suggested there may be some wiggle room. Perhaps they simply visited another universe — one where they happen to be characters on a TV show. Still, “you saw another person playing you,” she reasoned. “That feels like that’d be hard to let go of.”
Sussman, meanwhile, went full “Inception,” questioning whether the actors playing those fictional characters might themselves be fictional characters, and whether Season 2 could pick up with those versions of Stuart and Denise instead.
But that’s not the finale’s only lingering mystery: Throughout Season 1, someone — or something — had been attempting to communicate with Stuart across every universe he visited. Then came the revelation of the otherworldly entity that had Kyle and Trevor doing its bidding.
When TVLine asked co-creators Chuck Lorre, Bill Prady, and Zak Penn in July whether they knew the answer to that mystery — and whether Season 2 would provide one — their answers were considerably less forthcoming.
“Say yes,” Penn instructed.
“Say yes and see if he believes it,” Lorre joked.
Prady offered another possibility: “Each of the three of us know, we’re each holding a different idea in our head, and none of us has told the other — which I think is probably true.”
“It’s a great question that we can’t answer,” Lorre concluded.
More recently, TVLine reconvened with Lorre, Prady, and Penn — who joinedSeptember 14 ahead of an anticipated January or February production start and a 2027 premiere — to go deeper on the finale
Timetable for Season 2
TVLINE | You got the Season 2 pickup relatively early in the run, and I see you’re already back in the writers’ room. How long have you been back, and are you working toward another 10-episode season?
CHUCK LORRE | Ten episodes, and we just came back on Monday. It’s Day 3 of “be careful what you wish for.”
TVLINE | Do you have a tentative start date for production yet?
LORRE | January or February, something like that. We’re giving ourselves an opportunity to do what we did in Season 1, which is write all 10 episodes before production starts. It gives all the departments a head start. They’re not scrambling at the last minute to construct sets and designs and costumes and whatnot. So, we want to write as many as — at least half of the season, if not more — before production actually starts.
TVLINE | Is there pressure to get the show out on an annual cadence?
LORRE | I think there’s some hope to get it out around the same time next year that we did this year. All things going well, hopefully we go back to Comic-Con, which was a blast.
How the Finale Recreated the Multi-Cam Experience
TVLINE | Let’s talk about the live studio audience that infiltrates this episode. Was that scene actually performed in front of an audience, or did you film an audience separately and integrate them into the episode?
BILL PRADY | Our production team is astonishing, and that sentence goes into every interview forever. In order to do this, the only way to do it was to build the set two times. So, we had our standing single-camera set with its ceiling and fourth wall, and on the next soundstage over at Universal, they built the multi-cam version of the comic book store and the stockroom.
So, you had to duplicate everything, and then they also had to build the inside of a multi-cam soundstage — the audience risers, the audio and lighting booths that are behind the audience, all these things that don’t exist in single-cam. And then our DP and camera crew had to shoot multi-cam style, with cameras on dollies and doing moves that don’t exist in single-cam.
“Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage” was in production, so our team went over and did research to make sure they got multi-cam right. When you’re watching and it switches to multi-cam, it’s because we filmed it on the other set and we cut between the two sets.
TVLINE | Presumably, that audience hadn’t seen a frame of “Stuart” before watching you shoot those scenes. Did you have to give them any context or screen anything beforehand?
ZAK PENN | The only scene that the audience actually watched was the scene where they see all the actors come out. Because if you think about it, they’d be watching parts of scenes totally out of context. There’s no point, and also, you’re not supposed to know the audience is there. Bill will tell you where the actual laughs [came from].
PRADY | “The Big Bang Theory” did not have a laugh track. It was a live studio audience. But this is a laugh track. It is recordings of the old “Big Bang” audience taken from “Big Bang” episodes. That’s where those laughs come from.
TVLINE | That perfectly dovetails into what I wanted to ask next. Chuck and Bill, how important was it to specifically show a real studio audience here, given that you both come from the multi-cam world — and there’s this persistent misconception that all these shows use canned laughter?
LORRE | That’s the easiest way for, I guess, TV journalists to write about the four-camera sitcom thing, is by condemning it with the words “laugh track.” I can remember — I forget what show it was on, but I had a TV journalist, writer, critic who came to a taping. It might have been “The Big Bang Theory,” and he sat in the audience for the whole episode and listened to them laugh, and then he wrote about a laugh track.
PRADY | Yeah, I remember that.
LORRE | It was astonishing. He was sitting in an audience with 200 people who were enjoying the heck out of Sheldon and Leonard and Penny, and then in his article about the show, he took the shot at us for using a laugh track.
PRADY | For years, shows that had a live audience literally said it: “‘Cheers’ is filmed before a live studio audience.” “‘All in the Family’ is filmed before a live studio audience.” To distinguish it from “Gilligan’s Island” and “Bewitched,” which used laugh tracks. And I think — didn’t we title the episode…?
TVLINE | “Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience.”
LORRE | Yeah.
PENN | Which, ironically, it is not.
Deconstructing the Big Bang Formula
TVLINE | Chuck, I recently finished reading your memoir, “Sitcom” (out Monday, October 26), and you talk about what a joy “Georgie & Mandy” has been to make. How surreal was it spending your time on the “Stuart” finale dissecting and deconstructing the multi-cam, knowing you’d then go back to “Georgie & Mandy” and continue working within that format?
PENN | I can tell you, having witnessed it, it was really interesting to watch because these guys were really drilling down into what makes a four-camera different. From my point of view, they looked like they were having the time of their lives.
LORRE | Did we have fun?
PRADY | We were genuinely having fun.
PENN | You were totally engaged, that I will say.
PRADY | The discussion of giving Denise a very sitcom B-story — that was a very sort of TGIF, Miller-Boyett kind of story.
PENN | That was funny to watch, as these two guys tried to write a joke that’s slightly worse than the other jokes because it’s supposed to be. The calibration of the jokes…
LORRE | That was difficult because, yes, the four-camera jokes were purposely insipid, but often legitimate. They moved the story forward. And if you had put that dialogue in front of a live studio audience, there is the potential that they might laugh. But it was surreal. And as the laughter creeps into that episode — Kripke is the first one who hears it, and then they all start hearing it — they’re hearing the “oohs,” which we deal with with a live studio audience. Two characters kiss in a sitcom and 200 people go, “Ooh!”
PRADY | We were talking about [former “Big Bang” showrunner, and “Young Sheldon” and “Georgie & Mandy” co-creator] Steve Molaro.
LORRE | Blood would come out of Steve’s ears.
PRADY | Steve Molaro hates when the audience “oohs,” and so we wrote an “ooh” moment.
LORRE | Working on “Big Bang,” we would have Mark Sweet, our warm-up guy, tell the audience, “Take two: Don’t ‘ooh.'”
TVLINE | Chuck, as we pan out on the studio lot, we see posters for “Young Leonard” and “Two and a Half Women.” In our current IP-driven landscape, has anyone ever actually pitched either that prequel or that gender-swapped reboot to you?
LORRE | No, no, no.
PRADY | No one ever asked you to do “Young Leonard”?
LORRE | Well, Johnny [Galecki] did. Johnny was pretty upset that we didn’t have a “Young Leonard,” but he wouldn’t be in it. Maybe he’s the narrator. [Laughs] No, we haven’t pursued that. These offshoots, these prequels and spin-offs or whatnot, they’re only justified by the idea that there are good stories to tell, really interesting characters and relationships to delve into, and finally — and most importantly — there’s the potential for it to be funny, because it’s a comedy. I am unabashedly old-school that comedy requires laughter, or should provoke laughter. So, that’s the reason to do these. There’s no other reason to do prequels or spin-offs other than these are great characters, great relationships, and it’s funny.
Where Does Stuart Go From Here?
TVLINE | How much do you intend to explore the existential crisis you’ve created here, now that these characters have learned that they are, in fact, works of fiction and not real people? Is that something they’ll continue to grapple with in Season 2?
LORRE | Some. We will definitely say some. We just got started again on Monday.
PRADY | Monday was very busy. We had to find our lockers and look at our schedule and get a new Trapper Keeper.
LORRE | We will figure it out because we have to.
PENN | We wrote ourselves into a corner. We will write ourselves out of that corner somehow. There will be a Season 2.
TVLINE | I asked you this at the junket, but I’m curious if the answer has changed now that you’ve begun working on Season 2. You’ve introduced this “swirling ball of cosmic s–t,” and we also have this mysterious person or entity that has been trying to communicate with Stuart across every universe. Are those entities one and the same? And do you consider both to be series-spanning mysteries, or might we get answers in Season 2?
PENN | Well, the answer to one of them is that it’s Stuart Prime. The Stuart that comes in — now, who he’s working with and how they’re getting those messages to them, we haven’t explained yet, and we’re not going to drop that. But there are two different [sides]. There’s the adversary, we call him, who’s the swirling ball of cosmic s–t. So there are two sides already, but we will be exploring that more.
PRADY | I think it’s OK to say that they’re not the same.
LORRE | And when we figure it out, we’ll let you know.
TVLINE | Well, that answers whether there’s already an answer you guys have in mind.
PENN | Watching the season, you should be able to piece together that the people sending them the messages are the people trying to keep them on track. Stuart Prime is the guy who shows up to tell them what to do.
PRADY | But we are very curious about how that is happening. We are intrigued.
LORRE | You’re asking, “Do we have the answers for the questions that we’ve raised in Season 1?” The answer is no. But we will find them.
PRADY | We’re very curious.
LORRE | We’re very curious and determined. And there will be a Season 2 with answers that everyone will be so happy with.
PRADY | But we will raise more questions.
LORRE | We will raise more questions as we beg for Season 3.
TVLINE | In Season 1, each episode is, for the most part, self-contained within a single universe. Do you consider this finale the one episode we’re spending in the “real world,” or do you expect Season 2 to remain in this universe before jumping elsewhere?
LORRE | We have to pick up where we left off. The tag of Season 1, of them walking off the lot into Burbank or Studio City — you have to follow up on that, right?
PENN | We haven’t decided yet, but there’s certainly no rule that every episode has to be a different universe. And technically, in Season 1, there are a couple of episodes that are [set in the same world]. The comic book world — those two episodes are kind of in the same world, if you think about it. And Episode 4 also is…
LORRE | I think what you should encourage our fans to do is: Don’t take this too seriously.
What did you think of the “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” finale — and of Season 1 overall? Grade bothiew
