Annie Potts calls out canceling Young Sheldon as a "stupid business move"
Very polite child Iain Armitage was moved to note that he also thought "We could have done a lot more"
Annie Potts, for one, doesn’t understand what the hell CBS is thinking, canceling that sweet young Young Sheldon. In a recent interview with Variety, the TV and Ghostbusters vet called out CBS for a “stupid business move,” forcing her very polite co-star on the series, Iain Armitage (host to the Young Sheldon entity), to politely admit that he kind of agreed.
Here’s Potts, noting that she’s been through plenty of canceled TV shows in her day. But:
This one was especially hard because I was completely unprepared. I was shocked. I mean, the No. 1 show on network TV, No. 1 on Netflix. We’re, I think, all that people watch on TikTok besides a couple of recipes for pasta. It just seemed like such a stupid business move. Forgive me, but I don’t know. If a show is starting to drag or lag or have a lack of stories or whatever, then you kind of see it coming. We were totally ambushed by this. I was, anyway.
Armitage, meanwhile, notes that he’s mostly just sad he won’t get to work with the co-workers who’ve been part of his life for fully half of it at this point (Jesus!), before admitting that, yeah, “I definitely think we could have done a lot more.”
CBS has never given a concrete reason for why it’s ending Young Sheldon; as Potts notes, the Big Bang Theory spin-off still does great numbers, and while Armitage is now 15, he’s still loosely in the “Youngish Sheldon” demographic of performers. The fact that the canceled show is being functionally replaced with a spin-off of its own, focused on Sheldon’s brother George and his wife Mandy, makes it clear that CBS is still interested in this universe; we suspect this is mostly about cost-cutting, since a 7-season show with a large ensemble cast has a much higher budget footprint than a new spin-off about a pair of newlyweds.
Anyway: Now that we have covered the, whatever, “news” part of this article, we do feel moved to spend a little time on the part of the Variety interview that had us literally shaking as we were reading it, i.e., the ways Iain Armitage talks about his co-workers like the politest little lad in the land. We can’t include all the notable bits, because at some point we’re just bullying a child, but here he is, at sort of the apex of preciousness, when asked about his favorite memories from the show. (Which airs its final episode on May 16.)
Mine’s another one with Miss Annie. I love getting to play video games with her so much. I think it was ‘Quest of Adeera.’ They made up an entire fake video game that we got to play together, and it was just such a fun scene to film with Miss Annie. And then also, my grandmother — I hesitate even to say ‘real grandmother’ because Miss Annie Potts feels like a real grandmother to me — but my biological grandmother was there on set that day and she loved getting to see me and Annie do our thing. It was a lot of fun. I’ll always have fun memories of that, but honestly, I’ve had so much fun throughout the whole thing.
(He also refers to Jim Parsons and Mayim Bialik, set to return to the franchise for the finale, as “Mister Jim and Miss Mayim.” We don’t know why this is screwing with us, but it really, genuinely is. History will answer for what it’s done to Young Sheldon.)