The joke was hiding in the episode title all along. Ten weeks after Stuart Fails to Save the Universe promoted a Pasadena comic-book-shop owner to the least qualified savior of reality, the Max Original ends its first season with a finale called “Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience.”
The drop hit Crave on Thursday night, with the Canadian streamer — which carries HBO and Max originals north of the border — posting a one-line nudge to subscribers: “Stream the finale of Max Original #StuartFailstoSavetheUniverse tonight on Crave.” It closes a 10-episode run that began July 23 and ran weekly on Thursdays.
HBO Max didn’t wait to find out whether Stuart Bloom (Kevin Sussman) actually pulls it off. The streamer renewed the show for a second season on Aug. 14 — after only four episodes had aired — and confirmed the freshman run as its second-biggest comedy launch ever globally.
The machinery behind that early pickup is heavy. Chuck Lorre and Big Bang Theory co-creator Bill Prady built the series with Zak Penn, the screenwriter whose sci-fi bona fides let Lorre stretch well past the multicamera apartment set. Emmy- and Grammy-winner Danny Elfman wrote the theme music. Sussman leads alongside Lauren Lapkus as girlfriend Denise, Brian Posehn as geologist Bert Kibbler and John Ross Bowie as quantum physicist Barry Kripke.
The title is doing more than teasing an audience. As one breakdown of the finale title notes, pointing a camera back at the live-audience format is a return to the form that produced Stuart in the first place — a joke only lands if you remember him as a supporting player on CBS for 12 seasons. Previews have the quartet landing back at the Comic Center of Pasadena, the store where he spent most of that run losing arguments to Sheldon and Howard.
The spinoff is the fourth show in the Big Bang television universe, after the mothership, Young Sheldon and Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage. It has earned “Certified Fresh” status on Rotten Tomatoes and guest turns from original-series regulars including Kaley Cuoco’s Penny, Kunal Nayyar’s Raj and Melissa Rauch’s Bernadette, with Wil Wheaton surfacing in pre-release footage inside the store.
Critical reception ran hotter than the premise suggested. Slate called it “the most dynamic sitcom that has ever existed,” and NPR went with “relentlessly, inventively funny.”
As the show’s own logline has warned since April, things don’t go well. HBO Max has already bought a season’s worth of watching them go badly again.
