Link to the audio version of this post is HERE
Every once in a while, something comes along that’s so good, it makes you stop in your tracks, put down what you’re doing, and just stare, slack-jawed in amazement. Sometimes, the opposite happens, and something is so bad that it elicits the same response. Stuart Fails to Save the Universe is the second case. So I’m going to put a momentary pause on summer fun, because there’s nothing fun about this show. Let’s get into it.
If you’ve never seen or heard of The Big Bang Theory, in many ways, I envy you. I wouldn’t lie and say that I never got a laugh out of the show, but I can honestly say that I didn’t enjoy the series. Whatever laughs it did manage to drag out of me were fleeting and cheap, and while it fit the definition of a sitcom, like a meal at a dodgy fast food joint, it left me feeling full and just a bit queasy. But now that it’s over and Young Sheldon is all grown up, Chuck Lorre and co. are returning to that once overflowing well to squeeze handfuls of mud to get the very last drops of revenue out of it. This time, Leonard and Sheldon have finally ripped a hole in the fabric of space and time and created a bunch of rifts that led to a multiversal crisis and somehow Stuart, the comic store owner, is the only one who can save the multiverse. Now, sure, in practice, all the characters in The Big Bang Theory are pretty stupid, but they at least have the trappings of being intelligent with all those degrees and superhero t-shirts. Considering that Leonard and Sheldon were the ones who created the rifts, why aren’t they the ones trying to solve it, being, you know, physicists? The answer, of course, is budget, and therefore we’re left with Stuart, the only recurring who has zero science knowledge. But I have to imagine his quote is low by comparison.
Budget is the word that comes to mind when watching this show. Clearly a large portion of it went to paying for cameos to remind you that this show is part of the TBBT universe. It doesn’t seem like they’ve been able to bring in much along the way of writing or characters, but they love a one episode feature. Kunal Nayyar returns as Raj for the pilot episode before he gets the multiverse treatment of a shock death, then Kaley Cuoco and Brian Thomas Smith return in the second as Penny and Zack for a few minutes. Christine Baranski gets a cameo that seemed like it could have been filmed on Cameo, playing herself. Third episode sees Melissa Rauch return as Bernadette and Wil Wheaton as himself. It’s usually nice to see Wheaton pop up in any sort of project and I hope to see him in the upcoming The Guild film that was funded on Kickstarter. I’m just happy he’s still going after all those years being the subject of jokes about Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: TNG. As for the rest of them, I don’t know. I suppose that if you have a great deal of affection for these characters, it might be some sort of thrill to see that no matter the universe, the brown guy still can’t find happiness before meeting his tragic demise, or that Penny has become the extremely ineffectual leader of a resistance movement in a universe where everyone has behavior-correcting implants, or maybe you just like seeing your beloved characters killed in predictable ways. But for me, all I can see in this kind of stunt casting is where all the money went.
Because it definitely didn’t go into the rest of the show. The opening sequence is trying hard to be meta and self-deprecating, but when you’re putting out a product as bad as this one is, pointing out how lazy everything you do seems doesn’t mitigate how bad it is, the way Deadpool writers hope it does. It doesn’t even do the opposite and shine a light on how shoddily made the show is either; rather, all it does is serve to annoy because it means that they know how poor of a job they’ve done with this show and and they’re taking their terrible jokes and laughing all the way to the bank. And if the first three episodes are any indication, they’ll be the only ones doing any laughing. Not to mention that there is heavy and credible suspicion that the intro sequence is AI generated, which, well, is almost comforting to think that a real human wasn’t the one coming up with something so bad, but also very annoying because certainly a real human could have been paid to come up with something much better. Or even a little better. Or even just as bad, but made by people would be an improvement. Generative AI is an ailment that humanity is inflicting on itself; burn the drinking water to save a few bucks at the top. I don’t know if you know this about me, but I am staunchly against the use of generative AI for many, many reasons. Not least the environmental impact, the intellectual property theft, the way it discourages people from thinking, the way that it’s being used to eliminate jobs so those at the top of corporations can make even more money until this ouroboros finally eats its own tail and there’s no one left with a job to spend the money on products and services that these folks made their fortune on, the abuse of gen AI to make nonconsensual explicit images, the fact that I can’t use an em dash anymore; I could go on.
Furthermore, it appears that the vast majority of the show has been made without physical sets. I have a hard time recalling a physical set until near the end of the pilot episode. Look, I’m not saying you have to film on 35mm and go analogue for me to respect the craft or anything like that; technology has come a long way in enhancing and aiding storytelling. But we’re not talking about the huge airplane hangar with a giant curved screen and video game engine like Disney uses when filming The Mandalorian; I’m talking about run of the mill, green screen technology that dates back to the 1930s (back then it was primarily blue screens until green started to become more common as filming changed over to digital). And it shows. The camera angles are strange, often utilizing tight, waist-up or even chest-up shots to try to obscure the fact that they’re standing on a soundstage. And in the wider shots, backgrounds appear flat and out of scale with the characters in shot. And for a show that loves to use special effects, they look more at home on a pre-SyFy branding Sci-Fi channel original movie than on the same network that made Doom Patrol and The Last of Us. There appears to be very little care given to how this show looks or feels. And the addition of occasional swearing does little to help the writing, which, in three episodes has failed to make me even smile. Nor is the story compelling because, well, I watched Sliders the first time around, which this show has completely cribbed its format from and I’ve listened to the excellent podcast Fullmetal Bazinga, where four video game podcasters posit their own multiversal adventure using the world of TBBT and actual human creativity to tell a surprisingly wonderful story.
None of that is here. It’s not only not funny, there are some things about this show that I find patently offensive and wildly tone deaf in this day and age. I talk about how it’s hard to go back and watch comedy from other eras sometimes because the things that aren’t acceptable now were acceptable then and if you’re a person with any level of compassion or empathy, it can become uncomfortable to see that kind of comedy from bygone eras. Stuart Fails is a show from 2026, but it feels like it relies on the same kind of comedy from TBBT, which felt stale when it was new, because it was right out of the 90s eras of “can men and women really be friends?” before emphatically saying no and pairing them all off by the end of the series. Except it was “can men and women really be friends if the men are sexless nerds who are desperate for human contact?” and the answer is still no. But when we find out that Barry Kripke, the character whose speech impediment was played for laughs at a time when only presidential candidates could get away with it, has become a Negan-like tiny despot, complete with a harem of women who have to sleep with him or die, he becomes the third protagonist in the series. That’s right. Here in 2026, the creators of The Big Bang Theory want me to root for the rapist murderer. I thought this was a TV show, not Fox News. Again, it’s thrown away for laughs. When Lauren Lapkus’s Denise refuses to sleep with him, he orders her executed. He’s the tertiary hero in this series. And it’s not like he even realizes that what he’s done is wrong; he goes along for the ride all while bemoaning the loss of his little fiefdom. Unrepentant is the word a judge would use, hopefully, at his sentencing. Now maybe he’ll have a heel turn later in the series and become a true villain, but when you’re this shit as a protagonist, how could you even tell when he’s turning into a villain?
Spin-offs aren’t all bad. There have been some great ones in the past, even from shows I didn’t like. Take Better Call Saul, for example. Spun off from show about a science teacher who makes increasingly bad decisions that are mostly all his fault that I didn’t like, Better Call Saul is a masterpiece. Frasier was smarter and better written than Cheers and funnier too. Pinky and the Brain benefitted from standing on its own away from Animaniacs and has far more creditable science behind it than Stuart Fails. And we wouldn’t have the The X-Files had Fox Mulder never found the file about a mysterious island that trapped the survivors of a three-hour tour aboard the S.S. Minnow (okay, this one is a joke, The X-Files wasn’t a Gilligan’s Island spin-off, but if Stuart Fails isn’t going to be funny, I at least had to try). But this spin-off is very, very bad. I don’t like to trash something without giving you viable alternatives because it’s cheap and hollow to just hurl insults from the sidelines. There’s the aforementioned Sliders, which may not have aged that well, but it’s aged better than this show, which is brand new. I will never stop recommending that people listen to Fullmetal Bazinga, which is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. HBO Max’s own Avenue 5 is a far superior science-fiction comedy series. I can even recommend watching The Orville over Stuart Fails because at least that show had some capacity for improvement and did something through its run. Futurama is a great alternative to this if you want wacky storytelling in a fantastical science fiction setting, but still with the ability to tug at the heartstrings (go watch S4E7 “Jurassic Bark” and come back to me if that one doesn’t get you). Resident Alien and Doom Patrol are shows that are so much better than this on every conceivable level that it feels like an insult to the amazing work done by everyone on those shows to even mention them in the same breath as Stuart Fails. Good god, even Rick and Morty is better than this and I find that show largely insufferable.
Episodes release every Thursday at 9PM on HBO Max, but don’t watch it. It’s not worth your time. This is a skip. And not in a “Well, maybe you’ll find something in it that I didn’t” kind of way. I always try to give a show three episodes before I start to pass judgment and because of a packed schedule and a severely delayed post, I was able to watch three of these. And I can now confidently say that Stuart doesn’t just fail at saving the universe. Stuart Fails at absolutely everything. Watch it run for 10 seasons. Summer fun to return shortly.
