Why Young Sheldon's Season 7 Finale Didn't End With George's Funeral
Contains spoilers for "Young Sheldon" Season 7, Episode 12 and Episode 13 — "Funeral" and "Memoir"
Fans have been dreading it for seven seasons, but when George Cooper Sr. (Lance Barber) passes away in Episode 11 of "Young Sheldon," life for the family continues on — and even includes a few laughs. But the series doesn't end at George's funeral, instead showing us what life is like for the Coopers a month later, then plunging forward in time by decades so we can catch up with an adult Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) and his family.
This was done by design, according to series showrunner Steve Holland, who told Entertainment Weekly that series creator and vanity card enthusiast Chuck Lorre was the one who encouraged the show to go beyond George's funeral and mix up humor with drama. "As we were talking about it, it was Chuck who said, 'This show has been such a positive family show. 'Let's not leave the audience wallowing in grief. Let's give them a little bit of ramp out of it, not do that in the finale, and give the finale room to have a little bit more hope to it.' That's how those last two episodes shifted out."
It turns out deciding to move George's funeral to the second-to-last episode opened up multiple possibilities for the character's actual death.
The show's producers considered multiple ways to kill George
Steve Holland admitted that the show spent quite a lot of time trying to decide when and where to deploy its big death. Since everyone knew George Sr. was going to die at some point during Season 7, the question became how this would play out. "We thought, 'If we do it earlier than they're thinking, maybe we can catch people off guard,'" Holland says.
Once they decided to kill off George at the end of the season, it was all about choosing a manner of death (offscreen) and the right episode (one that's just far enough away from the series finale to have an impact but not so close as to completely obscure any joy that might be. "We always knew that George Sr.'s death was important for us to deal with, not just because it was 'Big Bang' canon, but because it's such an important piece of these characters and also how it impacts their lives moving forward and how it changes Sheldon and Mary. That was definitely a thing that we wanted to deal with this season, and then it was just figuring out when that will happen."
Holland reports that the shoot was emotionally hard on the actors — as devastating for them as it was for viewers at home. Nevertheless, the show does manage to eke out both hope, in the form of Sheldon finding a new place for himself at CalTech, and humor, as we watch a diving suit-clad Sheldon (Iain Armitage) preparing to be baptized. On "Young Sheldon," as in life, it seems the bitter must be taken with the sweet.