TV sitcoms make me cry more than is reasonable

Young Sheldon, Star Trek, Joan Didion, & Sally Rooney

The moment of (fictional) TV that had me sobbing hysterically most recently: the penultimate episode of Young Sheldon, ‘Funeral’, which is in so many ways what the seven seasons of the prequel spinoff have been leading to. We learn in The Big Bang Theory, quite early on, that eccentric-genius Sheldon lost his father in his teens, and so that impending death has hovered over the whole show, imbuing it with that anticipatory grief that you get in classical tragedy (she said, mostly thinking about the prologue to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History).

George Cooper Sr comes off a lot better in the prequel than its parent series, in part because we get to see him in action rather than having other characters report on him - Sheldon, in particular, is critical of his father in his 20s and 30s (TBBT-era), before he has children of his own and softens a little (other TV moments that broke me: Sheldon thanking his friends in his story-perfect, award-logistics-defying Nobel Prize acceptance speech in that finale, especially Astronaut Howard Wolowitz). (I have not given a spoiler warning for this on account of, well, popular sitcom endings being difficult to avoid once a few years have gone by. Rachel gets off the plane! The chicken is really - nope, still can't with that one.)

YS-era George is a decent guy, if frequently bewildered by his religious wife (her faith, we discover, has not always had such significance for her) and his brilliant, quirky son (Sheldon does not have an official diagnosis but is frequently read as autistic). Even his "regular" kids frustrate him sometimes, though we see him have wonderful supportive moments with both Georgie (who we know from the parent series will end up doing a lot of the heavy lifting, the "man of the house" stuff, after his father's death) and Missy, Sheldon's twin sister. He almost has an affair with the neighbour, but doesn't (and his wife is similarly almost-ing with a young pastor). There's a "retcon" of a detail from TBBT in this final season, where an encounter believed to be with another woman is really with his wife, in a silly wig (there is context, sort of). At the time of his death, everything's going well for George - there is, in fact, a hopeful thing about a possible new job coaching college football, which is the heads-up for the astute viewer that this is clearly The Death Episode. (We can't have nice things.)

So we get The Death Episode, then The Funeral Episode, and then The Finale - deliberately ending on a new start for Sheldon, arriving at Caltech, rather than the grief. But, damn, the grief. 'Funeral' does a brilliant job at showing the family's different reactions to George's death. His work pal, in a way mostly played for (necessary) comedy, is incoherent. His wife prays (and breaks down). His mother-in-law tries to get through it in whatever way she can - sometimes that's by drinking on the couch, and sometimes it's stepping up at the funeral when her own daughter can't. Georgie goes into ‘manning up’ mode, reassuring his dad, lying in his coffin, that he'll take care of everyone. (The impact of this on a boy not yet 20, and particularly on his mental health, is something that looks like it’ll be explored on the next spin-off series, George & Mandy’s First Marriage. Here for it.) Missy is furious and bewildered and basically a brilliant example of a complex but well-intentioned teenage girl. And then there is Sheldon.

Sheldon doesn't react "typically" to this loss, or at least he doesn't respond in the way Missy would like - he's not crying, he doesn't quite seem to "get" the important things, etc. For some corners of the internet this is further evidence of his neurodivergent brain, and while I am sure this is a useful framework for many people, seeing the workings of his brain in these moments of anguish felt… universal.

Sheldon draws on two of his lifelong passions when he's dealing with this immediate grief: science fiction and physics. The specific work he thinks about is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and within the episode we get that iconic clip: Spock on one side of the glass, Kirk on the other. Declaring their friendship, their love - the greatest intergalactic bromance there ever was. Almost immediately (is this not how we all watch TV, giving ourselves homework reading assignments?) I thought of Kevin Power's essay about this movie, and about fatherhood, and grief. I thought: yes, this is exactly the right reference here.

 And then there are alternate timelines or quantum universes or whatever they are - this is the physics-y bit, and over the 7 seasons of YS and the 12 seasons of TBBT there have been occasional nods to such things that have led to fun formats for episodes. The first sober kiss between Leonard and Penny comes after a whole lot of Schrodinger's Cat stuff, for example. Almost always the point is not to show off the science knowledge - it's to get closer to the characters. In 'Funeral' this is done brilliantly, devastatingly. Sheldon keeps revisiting his final moments with his father - an ordinary morning - and imagining alternatives.

In one of them, he tells his dad he loves him. In another, that Spock line: "I have been, and always shall be, your friend." (Both of these mean the same thing, and while I am glad we see the imagined direct I-love-you moment, it's the latter that gets me right in the feels. For Sheldon - who throughout both series makes his adoration of and identification with half-human, half-Vulcan Spock very clear - to put his dad in the Kirk role? It's huge.) He imagines a series of them, positing it as a kind of physics-y/timeline thing, but what it is, really, is magical thinking.

"This is magical thinking!" says I. "Like in that Joan Didion book! With 'magical thinking' in the title!" The Year of Magical Thinking (I type, knowing most readers will be well aware of it) is an account of the author's life following her husband’s death, while also coping with her daughter's sudden illness, and the strange ways grief and denial pop up in our lives. It is a very sane account of insanity, is perhaps one way of putting it. (I do feel the title makes it feel cutesier than it is - even if we are aware of what "magical thinking" is in its anthropological or psychological sense, things look and sound different on mainstream book covers.)

"What do we do with grief/pain?" is a big, haunting question and I have no answers here, but I am always drawn to when comedic narratives take a look at the sads, the horrors of life (see also: various episodes of Scrubs or Frasier; the novels of Marian Keyes; moments in another of Chuck Lorre's sitcoms, Mom; the ending of Blackadder Goes Forth; that Mitchell & Webb sketch with an elderly Sherlock Holmes; BoJack Horseman). There's that famous definition, "comedy is tragedy plus time" (the situation's more nuanced than that) and I am not sure I entirely agree with it but I do think that sad moments in comedy can, if done well, be infinitely more crushing than their dramatic counterparts. (Is it just the more extreme juxtaposition? Perhaps, but the whiplash needs to be handled so skilfully for it to actually work…)

Sheldon gives us another what-if moment where he imagines - for a second we think it's real - going up and delivering a speech at his father's funeral. But he doesn't, and of course he doesn't - it would be schmaltzy and out-of-character. Part of the sadness comes from seeing this character, who we've witnessed over a cumulative 19 seasons of TV, be subject to his own limitations even at a moment that feels worth rising to. He doesn't speak at his father's funeral. He won't ever get to.

(It's only as I type this I realise that this also resonates with Ivan and Peter in Sally Rooney's Intermezzo, which I'd finished reading, but not finished thinking about, a few weeks before watching this. Ivan - child prodigy! - not delivering a eulogy, while older brother Peter steps up but is also more than a little resentful. Georgie is far better-adjusted than Peter, though - like Ivan - has a relationship with an older woman. Oh, god, has someone done a comparative analysis of the Lorre-verse and the Rooney-verse? The links you could make!)

Anyway, I loved it and had a lot of feelings about it, so what else is a human to do but share them to the interwebs. (Keep them to yourself? Please.)