It's never the shows you expect that wind up with the weirdest collection of spinoffs. The Brady Bunch was a relatively straightforward family sitcom that was a mid-level hit at best. Yet it somehow spawned a variety show, an animated series where the Brady kids had magical adventures, another sitcom about two of the now-adult Brady sisters living together with their new husbands, a dramedy where the family dealt with problems like alcoholism and physical disability, and a reality show where the actors who played the Brady kids remodeled the interior of the real Brady Bunch house to look like the sitcom's set.
Alan Sepinwall
The Big Bang Theory was much more popular (relative to its peers) than The Brady Bunch, and is probably the last time we'll ever see a sitcom of any kind be a big ratings draw. So it's not surprising that, with this week's HBO Max debut of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, we're now at three BBT spinoffs and counting. But the nature of them is odd. First, we got Young Sheldon, which traded in the original's multi-camera, punchline-driven approach for a more understated single-cam (shot on film, with no studio audience) approach. But when that show got a direct spinoff, Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage, it went back to multi-cam, bringing several of the same characters from one format to the other.
Now we have Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, which is not only single-cam, but is a comedic sci-fi adventure, as the title character — comic shop owner Stuart Bloom (Kevin Sussman), who was kind of a Fifth Beatle to the parent show's quartet of nerds — travels from one nightmarish parallel reality to the next, desperately trying to repair a timeline that was broken by an experiment of Sheldon and Leonard's.
In the new series' first episode, a friend asks Stuart how he plans to deal with a dangerous situation. "I'm kind of new to the action genre, he admits." Though Big Bang creators Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady are back with this one, they're also new to the action and sci-fi spaces, and have brought in movie genre vet Zak Penn (X-Men: The Last Stand, Ready Player One) as co-creator.