Moderator Melvin Robert, Jessie Prez, Steve Holland, Will Sasso, Steven Molaro, Rachel Bay Jones, Montana Jordan, Emily Osment, Dougie Baldwin, and Chuck Lorre attend the Warner Bros. Television Press Day on January 30, 2025 in Burbank, California for GEORGE AND MANDY’S FIRST MARRIAGE | ©2025 Warner Bros. / WBTV via Getty Iimages / Evans Vestal Ward

CBS’s comedy GEORGE & MANDY’S FIRST MARRIAGE, now on Thursday nights in its first season (with episodes then available on Paramount+ TV), is already renewed for Season 2. The show is a spinoff of CBS’s seven-season hit YOUNG SHELDON, which in turn was spun off from the twelve-season, massively successful THE BIG BANG THEORY.

We first met Sheldon Cooper, as played by Jim Parsons, in THE BIG BANG THEORY as a physicist who is as brilliant as he is nerdy. In YOUNG SHELDON, Sheldon is played as a child genius by Iain Armitage. In this series, we get to know his family as he grows up in Texas.

In YOUNG SHELDON, Sheldon’s older brother Georgie, played by Montana Jordan (Jerry O’Connell played him in THE BIG BANG THEORY), is a mostly normal Texas youth. Georgie’s life changes dramatically when he and his decade-older girlfriend Mandy, played by Emily Osment, find she is pregnant with his child.

In GEORGE & MANDY’S FIRST MARRIAGE, the new parents/newlyweds (in that order) are living with Mandy’s parents, Audrey (Rachel Bay Jones) and Jim (Will Sasso), both of whom we met on YOUNG SHELDON. We also meet Mandy’s eccentric composer brother Connor (Dougie Baldwin).

YOUNG SHELDON regulars Zoe Perry as Georgie’s mom Mary, Raegan Revord as Georgie’s sister Missy, and Annie Potts as grandmother Meemaw have all made recurring guest appearances. Even Lance Barber, as Georgie’s dad George Sr., who died at the end of YOUNG SHELDON, has turned up in a dream sequence.

Georgie, still under age twenty-one, has a job at Jim’s tire shop, where he is thoroughly resented by the longer-employed Ruben (Jesse Praz).

Steven Molaro was a writer/executive producer on THE BIG BANG THEORY, and co-created YOUNG SHELDON with BIG BANG co-creator/veteran executive producer Chuck Lorre. Molaro and fellow BIG BANG/YOUNG SHELDON writer/executive producer Steve Holland came together to pitch GEORGE & MANDY’S FIRST MARRIAGE as a spinoff to Lorre.

Molaro is on a Q&A panel for GEORGE & MANDY’S FIRST MARRIAGE when Warner Bros. TV has a set visit day for the press. Then, standing in the living room set near the bleachers where the GEORGE & MANDY live audience sits during taping, Molaro makes himself available for some follow-up conversation with three journalists.

This interview combines Molaro’s remarks from both discussions.

Molaro explains how GEORGE & MANDY’S FIRST MARRIAGE began. “We had been working with Emily and Montana on YOUNG SHELDON, and their chemistry was undeniable. Every episode we did with them, either we would think it or someone on stage was saying, ‘They feel like a show.’ So, it was pretty obvious. It was the chemistry between Montana and Emily, and the fact that we had a built-in family, and we’d already met her parents. It already felt like on YOUNG SHELDON this ensemble magically formed in front of our eyes, and it was an opportunity to just keep going and breathe new life into these characters.”

“So, I approached Chuck and said, ‘Hey, here’s my thought and it’s Georgie and Mandy have their own show with her parents. But we flip it back to multi-cam.’ Because we had done THE BIG BANG THEORY [as] a multi. Then we did YOUNG SHELDON and, to make it feel like its own thing, we did it as single-camera. We thought it might be fun to then flip it back to [a live] audience show to let it be its own thing again. [Lorre’s] response was something like, ‘You son of a bitch. You’re making me excited about multi-cam.’”

GEORGE AND MANDY’S FIRST MARRIAGE – Season 1 Key Art | ©2025 CBS

They were also excited about the cast they already had. Molaro cites Will Sasso’s Jim McAllister as an example. “We loved Will. His name came up when we were looking for a character that we also knew we wanted to hit it off with George Senior, we wanted them to be friends, and Will just had a vibe that I could believe Jim McAllister and George Cooper could be friends in real life.”

In fact, there were few casting questions for GEORGE & MANDY’S FIRST MARRIAGE. “We were fortunate that all the main players were already in place. We had Georgie, Mandy, we knew we had Zoe [Perry] and Annie Potts, we have Rachel Bay [Jones] and Will Sasso, so it was just a question of Mandy’s brother and Ruben in the tire shop, and that was fun, to find fresh new people for those parts. Pretty easy on the casting front for us on this one.”

With a combined nineteen seasons of episodes from the two previous shows, how does Molaro keep the continuity straight with what we’ve heard about what’s happened in Sheldon’s early life in THE BIG BANG THEORY and what we’ve seen in YOUNG SHELDON?

Molaro says, personally, he more or less doesn’t. “There are writers who are much better at keeping track of those things. I actively say, ‘I’m not good at that.’”

Before Internet streaming, fans weren’t able to quite so quickly pull up old episodes to fact-check.

“It’s a valid concern,” Molaro acknowledges. “It’s something that we try hard to get right.”

On the other hand, the streaming is also a boon to the writers. “Having that [streaming] at our fingertips also makes it a little easier for us to get it right. Once in a while, you’ll hit a thing where, okay, this is not exactly how it was said in the past, but we have to do what’s best for this show, so we’ll try and walk that line as best we can once in a while to still make the best show that we’re making.

“There’s a faction that can be sticklers for getting that stuff correct. And we really do try our best. And we are often aware when we’re in a gray area where somebody’s going to say, ‘This isn’t right, but we know we’re going to go with this.’”

However, Molaro relates that he and the writing staff are all attuned to their show’s 1995 era and Texas setting.

“We’re always up for keeping the show’s Texas authenticity in place. One of our writers, Connor Kilpatrick, is very much from Texas, and Montana couldn’t be more from Texas. So, any time we can, we get it in there.”

There’s a lot of specificity about dialogue, Molaro adds. “There’s a lot of us being told after the fact when somebody says, ‘You guys, we need to change it to “y’all.”’ Connor is always on ‘y’all’ patrol in scripts, she is our ‘y’all’ consultant. We should pay her for each time she catches one and corrects it. Also, she’s very good at making sure, whenever there’s a Texas flag on the set, that it’s not upside-down or backwards, which is a thing that could easily happen. I from Queens, so I had to learn that the red stripe is either on the right or on the bottom, otherwise it’s wrong, if it’s over on the left.”

As for 1995, Molaro observes that whether something was current in that year is a subject of continuous discussion for the writers, “all the time. Or sometimes, a more common phrase or turn of language will go into the script, and we’re like, ‘Were people saying that in ’95? I think that was more of a 2003 thing.’ So, we’re always looking things up to try and keep that sort of thing accurate.”

One big advantage in 1995: “No cellphones. So, there were a lot more people showing up and talking to each other face to face. It’s pleasant. It’s nice. There’s no iPhones, there’s no scrolling, there’s no Facetime.”

Right now, all of the main characters (except Ruben) are living in the same household. Might that change?

“We haven’t talked about it that much into the future. Right now, having them under the same roof is helpful and fun. Mandy is carrying an enormous amount of credit card debt, so that has bought us some time, and we’ll feel it out as we go. Even through BIG BANG, which was twelve seasons, we were never huge fans of planning things out too far in advance, because we like to let things grow organically. It’s the same here. Without a plan, we may just make a choice. ‘You know what? It just feels right, let’s move them out.’ There’s no plan, but we just like to let things happen and feel natural.”

Often, broadcast networks insist that producers of new series provide an outline for the first five seasons, but this wasn’t the case for GEORGE & MANDY’S FIRST MARRIAGE, Molaro relates, partly due to Lorre’s extraordinary track record. “We have the good fortune of working with Chuck, and we have a longstanding relationship, obviously, with Warner Brothers and with CBS. YOUNG SHELDON was already doing incredibly well, so when they realized it was essentially SHELDON 2.0, a new version of it, a way to breathe new life into it, I think everybody was on board. “

Given that GEORGE & MANDY is based on the chemistry of Jordan and Osment but that in BIG BANG, George Jr. is depicted as having at least two ex-wives, what are the writers going to do about this first marriage if the new series turns out to have a run of many seasons?

Molaro doesn’t want to get too specific. “I think it’s okay that they have real-life troubles and try to work it out. I think that’s real.”

Also, sometimes people marry each other multiple times. “That is a thing that might happen.”

Molaro’s fellow co-creator/executive producer Lorre is famous for having many shows on the air at the same time. How many plates would Molaro like to be spinning at once?

“Who, me? I’m happy with this plate. This is a Season 1 show, so I would like to focus on this and make it as good as it possibly can be. So, for now, I’m a one-plate kind of guy.”

Does Molaro think there could ever be a spin-off of GEORGE & MANDY’S FIRST MARRIAGE?

And what would Molaro most like people to know about GEORGE & MANDY’S FIRST MARRIAGE’s first season?

Even if they didn’t watch YOUNG SHELDON, I think this is a show that [viewers] can jump in and enjoy out of the gate, and whether you were a BIG BANG or a YOUNG SHELDON fan, I think we’re having a good time here. Come join us for the ride.”

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Article: Interview: Co-Creator and executive producer Steven Molaro on Season 1 of the YOUNG SHELDON spin-off GEORGE AND MANDY’S FIRST MARRIAGE

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