Spoilers for the Season 1 finale of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, “Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience,” lie ahead.
The inaugural season of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe – the latest spinoff from the Big Bang Theory franchise – has come to a close. Luckily, fans can take comfort in the good news that Stuart will return for a second season. In the meantime, though, the meta (and somewhat confusing) season finale still leaves viewers with a lot to chew on. Series co-creators Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady recently broke down the episode and addressed one “perverse” element they added after fighting against it amid Big Bang’s run.
During the Stuart finale, the titular character and his multiverse-jumping cohorts find themselves back at a version of his comic book store that’s set in an endless void. They’re eventually informed that the all-powerful Adversary created the multiverse and wants to reverse it. While analyzing the situation, Stuart and co. began to hear laughter, which seems to mirror that of a sitcom laugh track. At the same time, viewers can see the show shift from single-camera to multi-camera angles.
Prady and Lorre – who are sitcom gurus within the TV industry – really wanted to get meta with this season capper. During a recent interview with Deadline, the two were asked about a line of dialogue from Brian Posehn’s Bert, who says the laughter he and his friends are hearing sounds fake. The two EPs confirmed that there was no live studio audience present amid filming, and that, of course, negates the title. Prady shed some light on the “perverse” decision to add that track:
It’s pretty perverse. One of the things that we battled forever on Big Bang Theory was people saying that this was a laugh track when it was a live studio audience. So here, in fact, the laughter that you’re hearing during the scene, the laugh that Kripke is hearing, those are old laughs from a The Big Bang Theory audience eight or nine years ago. Yes, all of those ironies.
Am I The Only Stuart Fails To Save The Universe Fan Weirded Out By This Detail?
Many multi-camera sitcoms don’t actually utilize live audiences and go for a laugh track (and, as a sitcom fan, I even find that annoying). However, it seems Lorre, Prady and co. sought to make those audiences a priority for The Big Bang Theory but, as mentioned, they still dealt with the laugh track allegations. I’ll say that considering all of that context, it’s admirable that the producers would get perverse by highlighting the very thing they derided during their years making Big Bang. Personally, I also found it quite trippy that the creative team called back to the franchise’s multi-cam roots at all.
Stuart Fails to Save the Universe may be set in the Big Bang continuity, but it differs from its parent show in a myriad of ways. For one thing, the show relies heavily on visual effects, which is something that Lorre had “no experience” with prior. There’s also a greater level of physicality here, and Lorre didn’t warn the cast that they’d been running more on this show. And, of course, Stuart gets even further into the pop culture themes that permeated Big Bang, as it even features a (Green Lantern-less) DC episode.
While there’s surely more multiversal madness to come in Stuart’s second season, I wouldn’t be surprised if the multi-camera gag and laugh track were to be limited to this finale. It just feels like a one-and-done sort of plot device that could get stale if used again. That aside, I’m intrigued as to what kind of “perverse” creative decisions Chuck Lorre, Bill Prady and co. will make as time goes on.
Stuart Fails to Save the Universe’s first season is now streamable in its entirety, so grab an HBO Max subscription and check it out!
