Thursday’s series finale of Young Sheldon revealed that the show’s ongoing narration by Jim Parsons (a.k.a. Old Sheldon) are actually him writing his memoirs. As shocking finale reveals go, it’s no “the Mother died and Ted got with Robin” or “the island wasn’t purgatory but the flash-sideways scenes were,” but it also probably won’t piss anybody off like those finales.
But did we need to know why Old Sheldon had been narrating the exploits of Young Sheldon? Deadline asked executive producer Steve Holland why Sheldon would write a memoir anyway. “He’s a Nobel Prize winning physicist,” he said, “in the wake of him being a Nobel Prize winner and perhaps going on to even more research, the world needs to know about his childhood.”
Plenty of TV shows were narrated by the older version of the protagonist without explanation — The Wonder Years, The Goldbergs, Everybody Hates Chris, the original run of The Young Indiana Jones. It wasn’t Indy’s memoir. Other shows have explained their narrators as a dad telling a years-long story to his kids (How I Met Your Mother), a one-man show (Titus), or the fevered plot twists of a parallel universe narrator character trapped in a bunker/purgatory (Riverdale). At least Young Sheldon didn’t end with Sheldon having to isolate himself in a bunker and keep writing his memoir in order for his family to continue existing. Maybe that’s how they’ll end George & Mandy’s First Marriage.
